Often sports injuries occur and come with a timetable, an estimate for how many days, weeks or months for an athlete to return to play. Timothy Hewitt, an expert in ACL injuries and director of Sports Medicine Research at Ohio State, has advocated that timetables aren’t useful, and says, “Time to return to play […]
Read More →Archive for October, 2014
Failing to make it to the starting line is dumb
The NBA season is underway and already teams are missing key players because of injury. As sports science adoption continues to progress, teams that fail to manage the health and well-being of their players should not feel good about what they’re doing with regard to conditioning, overuse and recovery. Teams’ health management task only gets […]
Read More →Last Week in Applied Sports Science, 10/19-10/25
Sports Science in the U.S. is divided among different practicing groups. Universities have their way of doing things. Athletic departments, sport teams and academic departments sync up to varying degrees where teams function as living laboratories for researchers doing vital, publishable work. Professional services contractors like Exos and P3 cater mostly to individual athletes (and […]
Read More →Applied Sports Science == Practice
Applied Sports Science is a pure exercise in improvement. If the players get better and the coaching gets better and the organization gets then the team gets better, and that last step is on display for everyone and anyone to see. The thing I’m trying to understand about Applied Sports Science is how all of the different […]
Read More →How High Are the Stakes with the NBA Draft?
The NBA has been considering changes to its player draft rules. The league is leaning towards increasing the randomness of the selection order, diminishing the current dependence on losing team records for setting selection order. The concern is that bad teams have an incentive to lose games in order to improve their chance of acquiring […]
Read More →Last Week in Applied Sports Science, 10/12-10/18
The impending NBA season marks the return to play of star players Derrick Rose and Kobe Bryant from injury. We have seen both athletes get the longform journalism treatment. Chis Ballard wrote on Kobe in late-August for Sports Illustrated. Last week Wright Thompson wrote on Rose for ESPN The Magazine. I remember being blown away by […]
Read More →A Quick NBA Season Preview
The dominant factor this NBA season is the schedule, 82 games, and how teams deal with it. For some teams and players it will be 82 opportunities to improve. For the other teams it will be about survival, getting to the end of the week, the month and ultimately the full season. How teams approach […]
Read More →Productivity-enhancing technology for sports: Coming soon?
Just about everything that applies to the care, maintenence and improvement of elite athletes also applies to the people in charge of elite athletes. Organizations have habits and it is rare for a team to have good habits when coaches and front office lack them. European soccer writers have done a nice job documenting how coaching […]
Read More →Last Week in Applied Sports Science, 10/5-10/11
The Chicago Marathon was earlier today, won by Kenyan Eliud Kipchoge in 2:04:11. Leading up to it there was lots of great storytelling during the week about Steve Jones and record-breaking 1985 Chicago Marathon run. True Toughness: Steve Jones and the Chicago Marathon 30 Years Ago, Steve Jones Transformed the Marathon The Transformation of Steve […]
Read More →Athletes’ Private Health Information: Rights, Expectations and Sports Science
Going all the way back to ancient Greece, the sense of trust a caretaker gives patients is paramount. The Hippocratic Oath says to “first do no harm” and it is supposed to take precedent to any further clinical decision-making Modern sports medicine has inherent conflicts of interest: Teams hire, pay and fire caregivers based on the work […]
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