2026 Sport and Exercise Science Research Grant Winners

Military training, healthy aging, brain health, concussion, blood pressure control, cancer recovery: this year's Sport and Exercise Science Research Grant winning projects cover a wide range of populations and questions. What they share is an approach. Each one relies on continuous wearable data captured during real training and recovery, rather than a snapshot from a single lab visit.

Offered in partnership with the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM), the grant is open to sports medicine researchers at every career stage whose work uses wearable technology. We set out to fund five projects this cycle, but the strength of the applications led us to select six:

• Non-functional overreaching in military-relevant training
• The legacy effects of midlife exercise on aging
• Wearable-based fitness tracking in a brain health cohort
• Health behaviors during concussion recovery
• Exercise snacks for blood pressure control
• Exercise oncology care for cancer survivors

Each team will receive three Garmin vívosmart 5 devices, a one-year Labfront Advanced account, analytics support, and full onboarding.

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Nadia Havens, University of Pittsburgh, United States

ARMOR (Adaptations and Resiliency to Multi-Stressor Operations)

Havens, a third-year PhD student in the university's Neuromuscular Research Lab, studies neuromuscular and physical performance using ultrasonography, force plates, metabolic testing, and wearables. A former collegiate athlete and marathon runner, she's tackling a notoriously hard problem to study: inducing and identifying non-functional overreaching, or NFOR.

ARMOR puts subjects through a 4-week, military-relevant exercise intervention that tracks neuromuscular, performance, endocrine, and psychological responses, aiming to induce NFOR and pinpoint the musculoskeletal, cognitive, and behavioral maladaptations that come with it. One study arm adds a pharmacological layer: some participants receive a drug that suppresses the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal (HPG) axis and lowers testosterone and estrogen production, then receive either a placebo or hormone replacement before completing the same intervention, mimicking the hormonal stress response that military operations can trigger. Labfront lets Havens's team capture heart rate, sleep, and pulse oximetry data in enough detail to see the full picture of subject adaptation, with results feeding directly into the Department of War's tactical performance optimization efforts.

Leanna Ross, Duke University, United States

Legacy in Motion: A Pilot Re-training Trial to Examine How Prior Midlife Exercise Shapes Later-life Exercise Responsiveness in Older Adults

Ross studies how the amount, intensity, and mode of exercise in midlife shapes not just immediate gains in functional capacity and cardiometabolic health, but how long those gains last as people age, what she calls "legacy health effects." She leads the STRRIDE Legacy Pilot, in which participants from the original STRRIDE-PD trial repeat the exact same 6-month aerobic exercise intervention 12 to 15 years later, testing whether prior midlife training still preserves exercise responsiveness, functional capacity, and metabolic health more than a decade on.

The pilot's participants already wear Garmin devices to track training intensity and daily steps, but exercise trials have historically lacked noninvasive, cardiac-specific biomarkers for the autonomic side of training adaptation. This grant fills that gap with continuous heart rate variability (HRV) monitoring. HRV is a noninvasive marker of vagal tone that declines with age and predicts cardiometabolic risk. The grant also adds ecological momentary assessment (EMA) data on sleep quality, perceived exertion, mood, and daily activity, along with Labfront's analytic support, to a pilot already underway (target n=20, with 8 participants completed so far). Ross's team will examine whether HRV changes during retraining track with shifts in cardiorespiratory fitness and cardiometabolic health, generating new hypotheses about how the autonomic system adapts as people age and retrain.

Rochelle Goldsmith, Columbia University Irving Medical Center, United States

Wearable Monitoring of Fitness and Training Exposure in Longitudinal Exercise and Brain Health Research

Goldsmith directs the Cardiopulmonary Exercise Testing (CPET) Laboratory at Columbia, where the lab's research over more than three decades has focused on objectively measuring exercise performance and functional capacity in health and disease. Her current work centers on the New York Fitness Cohort (NYFC), an NIH-funded longitudinal study examining how repetitive soccer heading exposure, aerobic fitness, cognition, and brain health relate to each other. CPET rigorously measures aerobic fitness at study visits, but the study currently relies on a self-report questionnaire, the International Physical Activity Questionnaire (IPAQ), to track training exposure between those visits, a gap wearable technology could fill.

Goldsmith's team will run a pilot wearable substudy within NYFC: 15 to 20 participants returning for their two-year follow-up will wear a Garmin device for 30 days immediately before their repeat CPET. Labfront will collect the resulting wearable data, including estimated VO2 max, Intensity Minutes, heart rate metrics, and participant-logged exercise events, and the team will compare it against the CPET and IPAQ measures already in use. The goal is to see whether wearable data adds meaningful information about fitness and training exposure, and to test the feasibility of folding wearable monitoring into longitudinal studies of exercise, cognition, and brain health.

Sam Walton, Virginia Commonwealth University, United States

Measuring Health Behaviors and Clinical Recovery after Concussion

Walton has spent more than a decade as a certified athletic trainer treating concussion patients, and now researches how modifiable behaviors like exercise, sleep, and diet can protect and improve brain health. Alongside his role as research faculty at VCU, he is an NIH-sponsored Building Interdisciplinary Research Careers in Women's Health (BIRCWH) Scholar and a research associate with the Department of Veterans Affairs. Millions of people worldwide sustain a concussion each year, and nearly half experience persisting symptoms that interfere with daily life. Aerobic exercise and sleep are already established intervention targets for young athletes recovering from concussion, but far less is known about how those same behaviors shape recovery in adult patients from the general public.

Walton's team will recruit adult patients from a partner concussion clinic to measure adherence to health-related behaviors and test how those behaviors relate to symptom recovery time. Participants wear a Garmin vívosmart 5 to objectively track physical activity and sleep, and use the Labfront app to submit weekly reports on exercise, sleep quality, dietary intake, and post-concussion symptoms. The resulting feasibility data will support future federal funding applications, through NIH and the VA, aimed at clinical research on concussion recovery and, eventually, on older adults with a history of one or more concussions.

Daniel Craighead, University of Minnesota, United States

The Effects of Exercise Snacks on 24-Hour Blood Pressure

Craighead directs the Integrative Cardiovascular and Exercise Physiology Laboratory at the University of Minnesota, where he studies low-barrier physical activity that can boost adherence in adults at elevated cardiovascular risk. Exercise snacks, brief bouts of high-intensity activity spread through the day, already show benefits for cardiorespiratory fitness and blood glucose control. Whether they lower ambulatory blood pressure, which is a stronger predictor of cardiovascular disease risk than a single seated reading, is still an open question.

This randomized crossover study puts 20 adults with hypertension through two 24-hour periods in random order: one with no structured exercise, one built around three 1-minute high-intensity stair climbs spaced through the day. Ambulatory monitors track blood pressure continuously, while Garmin wearables and Labfront's analytics package capture incidental physical activity and heart rate variability throughout. After controlling for incidental activity, Craighead's team expects lower systolic and diastolic blood pressure, and higher heart rate variability, on the exercise snack day. Positive results would help establish exercise snacks as a tool for blood pressure management and support future, larger-scale grant applications.

Jess Gorzelitz, University of Iowa, United States

Implementation of the Iowa Exercise Oncology Clinic

Gorzelitz, an assistant professor focused on exercise oncology, studies how physical activity can mitigate treatment-related side effects, reduce recurrence risk, and support long-term wellbeing in cancer survivors. Her research also looks for ways to keep that activity accessible, equitable, and sustainable across diverse survivor populations.

The Iowa Exercise Oncology Clinic translates that research into direct patient care: individualized exercise prescriptions paired with ongoing monitoring for people living with and beyond cancer. Garmin devices and Labfront's platform let Gorzelitz's team track heart rate, sleep, and physical activity in free-living conditions alongside ecological momentary assessments, all in one time-synced system. That data lets the clinic evaluate how well patients stick with their prescriptions, personalize plans in response, and generate insights that improve patient outcomes, helping move exercise oncology research into everyday clinical care.

What comes next

Congratulations to all six teams. Their projects show how much wearable data can reveal when it follows people through real training, recovery, and daily life, and we look forward to sharing their progress. To learn about future grant cycles, visit labfront.com/grant.