… Bleacher Report has been filming George over the last few months and will be creating a multipart video series about his return to the NBA.
The Road Back: Part One is the first time George has gone in-depth about the injury, as well as his surgery and rehab. We get his perspective, along with that of his family, who was there during the distressing injury in Las Vegas. [video, pre-roll + 6:47]
Former German international Jürgen Klinsmann hasn’t always had it easy in his role as US national team coach. DW talks to the Californian resident about his life in football in the US. [video, 8:26]
Blake Griffin first met Bob Thate inside a Santa Monica gymnasium in the summer of 2010, before Griffin’s rookie season. The two men talked about Griffin’s shot. They even went through a workout. … He wanted Griffin’s feet square to basket, the ball raised to his forehead, his right elbow in, for him to jump straight up, to release the ball at the peak of his jump, for him to hold the follow through. The checklist stretched into the 20s.
In effect, yes. As you exercise, your aerobic fitness improves, allowing your body to meet the demands of increasingly difficult workouts. These same aerobic adaptations also teach your muscles to repair themselves faster; the fitter you are, the sooner you recover. Unfortunately, if you ramp up training intensity quicker than your body can adapt, you’ll override the recovery benefits, requiring a huge dose of rest. The best way to speed recovery time is to increase your training volume over a certain period, commonly three weeks, then slot in a rest week immediately after, giving your body the chance to catch up.
Carbohydrate intake also seems to play an important role. In a recent study reported by the American College of Sports Medicine, subjects were asked to run 16 to 21 kilometers every day for a week and to treat each run as a race. Test subjects experienced decreased recovery rates when they consumed only moderate carbs throughout the week. But when their carb intake increased, their recovery rates were faster and more complete.
While there’s no magic bullet for recovery, intelligent training and fueling could mean a little less rest after your next big workout or race.
Cooperation is central to human existence, forming the bedrock of everyday social relationships and larger societal structures. Thus, understanding the psychological underpinnings of cooperation is of both scientific and practical importance. Recent work using a dual-process framework suggests that intuitive processing can promote cooperation while deliberative processing can undermine it. Here we add to this line of research by more specifically identifying deliberative and intuitive processes that affect cooperation. To do so, we applied automated text analysis using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software to investigate the association between behavior in one-shot anonymous economic cooperation games and the presence inhibition (a deliberative process) and positive emotion (an intuitive process) in free-response narratives written after (Study 1, N = 4,218) or during (Study 2, N = 236) the decision-making process. Consistent with previous results, across both studies inhibition predicted reduced cooperation while positive emotion predicted increased cooperation (even when controlling for negative emotion). Importantly, there was a significant interaction between positive emotion and inhibition, such that the most cooperative individuals had high positive emotion and low inhibition. This suggests that inhibition (i.e., reflective or deliberative processing) may undermine cooperative behavior by suppressing the prosocial effects of positive emotion.
Dr. Javier Mallo is Head of Fitness at Real Madrid football academy and Fitness Coach of the Under 21 professional team.
This interview is about his journey in professional football, his internal rebellion and tactical periodization – the training methodology of Jose Mourinho.
PROathlete: What is your philosophy on football conditioning, Javier Mallo?
JAVIER MALLO: My training philosophy is based on the game with the aim of encouraging the decision taking process of the players; developing pro-active players who are able to read the game and interact independently. During many years football players have been trained following methods taken from individual sports. When I started working with professional football players, around 12 years ago, I felt that what I was taught in the University, during my Sports Science degree, did not reflect the reality of what I confronted on a day-to-day basis. The linear methods and traditional periodization models characteristic of the traditional theory and practice of training textbooks did not suit my personal reality, where the team had to compete every week at its best during a 9 month long competition period. Thus, I started to search for a different way to organize the training tasks, looking for alternative periodization methods, reading from all kind of sport coaches, watching other people train… to develop my own training strategy. This has been an open and unfinished process, as I am still changing bits and pieces of it, though the main ideological references are non-negotiable: developing the game insight and favoring the brain over the muscles.
An athlete is a study of change and adaptation through the medium of movement. Movement itself is a complex interaction of structure, function, physiology and behaviour (physical, mental and emotional). The proper manipulation of these interactions determines the integrity of the connective and soft tissue. However, what is of a greater influence is inflammation. Its presence is a double-edged sword though born of movement, it in turn determines the quality of movement.
Inflammation stimulates the neural, endocrine and hormonal systems in order to repair an injury but more importantly maintain homeostasis. These systems are in direct response of and in proportion to the wear and tear (catabolism) and recovery (anabolism) of the body. In an athlete, the magnitude of the perturbation on the body, is a determinant of the size of and perpetuation of the inflammatory response.
If you were to create a shortlist of the brightest young football managers in the game, it’s a fair bet that Roberto Martinez and Brendan Rodgers would be included. Having spent four years at Wigan Athletic, Tim Lees was fortunate enough to learn from the former and, having moved to the Liverpool Academy last summer, he is now working under the latter. Paul Grech spoke to him to discuss his book, ‘Developing an Elite Coaching Philosophy.’ … I was at Wigan for four years and, looking back, it was a learning experience that I would have paid a fortune for. The Academy was in a transition period and I was given a blank canvas to work off. I was asked to design and implement a philosophy for the Academy, with the aim of creating a specific type of player and person. I travel a lot to watch specific teams and I had been to several Swansea games to watch Roberto’s sides as I always liked the way they played.
Marquette University and the Milwaukee Bucks announced on Thursday a new partnership that will include the construction of a multipurpose center that supports college and professional athletes as well as academic research and wellness initiatives.
The new venture — along with a goal of doubling research funding over the next five years and a major gift to establish a mental health research center — topped Marquette University President Michael Lovell’s first presidential address Thursday in the Alumni Memorial Union.
The center will provide “cutting-edge faculty and student research in sports performance, medicine, nutrition and rehabilitation,” Marquette said.
A few years ago, when running coach Stephen Magness wanted to assess the biomechanics of one of his athletes, he needed a roll of scotch tape. That’s what he used to affix a very basic accelerometer to the heel of a runner’s shoe, to get a sense of metrics like impact G-force and the directional movement of the foot. It was makeshift, to be sure, but it was the best way he had to get some sense of his athletes’ biomechanics. … “We want to know how things change with fatigue, so we compare the beginning of a workout to the end, when there is a higher risk of injury occurring,” Magness says. “If an athlete’s pace is staying the same but the time their foot spends in contact with the ground is getting longer, then they’re not producing force on the ground as efficiently as they were in the beginning of the run. If we see these signs of fatigue, then we might change the workload to avoid injury.”
Raise your hand if you want to be more successful at achieving health goals, such as losing weight or lowering your cholesterol levels, and maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Perhaps it’s time to consider creating a health baseline. “A health-care baseline is essentially where you are “at” on the broad, complex spectrum of physical, mental and emotional health,” explains Mary James, MD, an internal medicine physician at Stanford. “This can be a critical starting point for achieving future health goals.”
When game time rolls around, athletes must produce the best possible performance no matter when the competition starts or when they prefer to rise and shine. But according to a new study, researchers may underestimate the importance of athletes’ body clocks to their performance levels.
It’s well known that people and animals have natural body clocks, or circadian rhythms. People’s body rhythms tend to fit into one of three general categories, called chronotypes, early, intermediate and late, said Roland Brandstaetter, a biologist at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom.
A person’s category is determined by a combination of genetic, environmental and social factors. In other words, there’s a biological reason why some people can’t sleep late and others can’t get up early.