… “I find that older athletes with this issue and surgery continue to have some pain and disability,” ESPN medical expert Dr. Mark Adickes says. “That is why my preferred treatment method is conservative (injections and therapy) unless a large tear occurs. Surgery does not SOLVE this problem.”
After the Suns press conference, and television interviews, and radio interviews…general manager Ryan McDonough was kind enough to give Bright Side a couple of minutes of his time to answer a few questions. I mainly deviated away from the same talking points that were discussed in the presser.
Bryan Gibberman: What you’ve gone through from the offseason to now, you haven’t even been on the job for two years, is there anything from that experience that you’ve learned that you want to take forward?
The Premier League doesn’t like upstarts. Whenever a club outside of English football’s elite declares itself fit to challenge the established order, they are hurriedly batted back down while their squad is picked apart. With their finest talent departed they are then left to fight, once again on the back foot. This is the traditional dance and it is as old as the Premier League itself.
Sam Allardyce was once considered to be one such upstart. As manager of Bolton Wanderers, he led the club to heights not seen since the days when Nat Lofthouse spearheaded their attack. Known colloquially as ‘Big Sam’, Allardyce and his Bolton side were the worst kind of upstarts. Their success was earned on their own terms; what they did was unique and could not be appropriated by the bigger clubs.
Regular endurance training improves performance during tasks that rely mainly on aerobic energy metabolism, in large part by increasing the body’s ability to transport and utilize oxygen, and enhancing the capacity for the oxidative metabolism of substrates by working skeletal muscle (Saltin & Gollnick, 1983). While less widely appreciated, high-intensity interval training (HIIT) is a potent stimulus to induce physiological adaptations that resemble, and indeed may be superior to, changes typically associated with traditional endurance training (Kubukeli et al., 2002; Ross & Leveritt, 2001). Indeed, highly-trained endurance athletes have long incorporated HIIT as an integral component of training programs designed to maximize performance (Laursen & Jenkins, 2002). Recently, short-term studies lasting up to several weeks in healthy persons of average fitness have established that HIIT per se is a potent stimulus to induce physiological adaptations that resemble changes typically associated with traditional endurance training, despite a lower total exercise volume and reduced training time commitment (Burgomaster et al., 2005; Gibala et al., 2006; Little et al., 2010). This brief review highlights recent work that sheds new light on the potency of low-volume HIIT to induce rapid physiological remodeling and enhance the capacity for performance during tasks that rely mainly on aerobic energy metabolism. For a more comprehensive analysis, as well as the potential application of HIIT to different populations, the reader is referred to other recent reviews by the present author (Gibala et al., 2012, 2014) and others, including work that has specifically focused on those at risk for, or afflicted by, cardiometabolic disorders (Kessler et al., 2012; Weston et al., 2014). With regard to practical applications and training prescription, two other recent reviews (Buchheit & Laursen, 2013ab) consider in detail various aspects of HIIT programming, with a particular focus on athletic performance.
What if coaches could identify individual players and even entire teams with a potential propensity toward hazing? Ohio Wesleyan University’s Jay Martin thinks the knowledge could be a game-changer – and the NCAA agrees.
Martin – the winningest collegiate men’s soccer coach in all divisions – also is a professor of health and human kinetics. And now, he is part of a research team being awarded $10,000 from the 2015 NCAA Innovations in Research and Practice Grant Program to study hazing.
I ran my first marathon two springs ago, and – like many first-time marathoners – staggered through the last 10K or so. I wasn’t bonking, and I didn’t go out too fast. My problem, as I described in the brain training article I wrote about the experience, was muscle damage in my legs. After a couple hours of pounding, my quads were simply torn to pieces.
What could I have done differently? More mileage, and in particular more long mileage on hard surfaces (I did most of my training on the beautiful dirt trails of Canberra) might have helped. A less bouncy stride might also have helped (the anecdotal experience among my friends is that former middle-distance track runners, who tend to have springy strides, are at a high risk of struggling with muscle damage when they move up to the marathon). And a new study in the European Journal of Applied Physiology, from researchers at Staffordshire and Chester universities in Britain, suggests another possible defense: the “repeated bout effect.”
When the University of Maryland’s soccer season ended this past fall, Mikey Ambrose decided to start his pro career early. Though tempted by Europe and Major League Soccer, the junior defender from El Paso, Texas, ultimately joined the Austin Aztex, an expansion team in the third-tier United Soccer League.
That an acclaimed American prospect like Ambrose, a longtime member of U.S. youth national teams, would leave college for the U.S. minor leagues might have been unthinkable not long ago.
The staffer walked around the locker room daily after practices and walkthroughs. He’d go to each player and quickly click on a sensor.
Sometimes, he’d grab the heart monitors from the shirts of Detroit Lions players.
Every scan had a purpose, information gathering used to try and help the Lions win games Sundays as they searched for some sort of edge over the rest of the teams in the league. Every team in the NFL — and every player in the league — has radio frequency technology in their shoulder pads and around stadiums on game day to measure various movements.
CSE, a talent management and marketing agency that represents major sports and media companies, such as the Atlanta Hawks, Coca-Cola, AT&T, Aflac, The Weather Channel, and NBC Sports, is launching a partnership with STE@M (Sports Technology and Education @ MIT) to make an impact in the field of sports technology.
STE@M is the sports technology and education division at MIT, which strives to build an interconnected community of students, industry partners, and athletes who aim to tackle the challenges that exist in the intersection of engineering and sports. To accomplish its goals, STE@M uses the passion of its students, the expertise of faculty, the resources of MIT facilities and the needs, experience, and insight of its partners.
Hamstring injuries constitute one of the most concerning injuries in English Premier League football, due to its high primary incidence but also its recurrence. Functional methods assessing hamstring function during high-risk performance tasks such as sprinting are vital to identify potential risk factors. The purpose of this study was to assess horizontal force deficits during maximum sprint running on a non-motorized treadmill in football players with previous history of hamstring strains as a pre-season risk-assessment in a club setting. 17 male football players from one Premier League Club were divided into 2 groups, experimental (n=6, age=24.5±2.3 years) and control (n=11, age=21.3±1.2 years), according to history of previous hamstring injury. Participants performed a protocol including a 10-s maximum sprint on a non-motorized treadmill. Force deficits during acceleration phase and steady state phases of the sprint were assessed between limbs and between groups. The main outcome measures were horizontal and vertical peak forces during the acceleration phase or steady state. There were no significant differences in peak forces between previously injured and non-injured limbs, or between groups, challenging the ideas around functional force deficits in sprint running as a diagnostic measure of hamstring re-injury risk.
Objective The 2014 FIFA World Cup Brazil included 64 matches in temperate to tropical environmental conditions. We analysed performance data in relation to the environmental conditions to identify potential association.
Methods Wet-bulb globe temperature (WBGT) parameters were obtained at the centre of the field 1 h before the start of play. Environmental stress was estimated (low, moderate and high) for each match using WBGT and relative humidity. Various physical and technical performance indices were recorded during each match (average of both teams).
Results Over the 64 matches, 28 were played under low, 20 under moderate and 16 under high environmental stress. There was no difference in actual playing time (p=0.517), total distance covered (p=0.491), number of goals scored (p=0.485) and number of cards (p=0.618) between the matches played under different environmental stress categories. The number of sprints was lower in high than in moderate or low environmental stress (−10%, p<0.05) but peak speed was unaffected. The distance covered at high intensity was also lower under high (24.8±2.8 m/min/player) than low environmental stress (26.9±2.3 m/min/player, p=0.02). Number of passes was not different but the rate of successful passes was higher under high (76.8±4.4%) than low (73.6±10.8%) environmental stress (p=0.031).
Conclusions Top-level players seem to modulate their activity pattern during matches in a hot and humid environment (ie, less high-intensity but more low-intensity running and successful passes) to preserve the global match characteristics (ie, similar actual playing time, total distance covered, peak running speed and goals scored).
YOU HEARD WHAT what Sir Charles said — that analytics don’t matter. That they don’t impact the game in any meaningful way. Well, with all due respect to Chuck, the folks at MIT disagree. Here are the eight finalists — SparkNotes-style — for the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference’s research paper of the year. And for all you teacher’s pets out there: You’ll find the unabridged versions here. The winner will be announced at this year’s conference, Feb. 27-28 in Boston. Now, get reading.
Daryl Morey loves good data, and lots of it. As general manager of the Houston Rockets, the Northwestern graduate has made a name for himself with his devotion to using data analytics to make team decisions—everything from where to shoot from on the floor to whom to acquire in a mid-season trade. Morey talks with Kellogg Insight about the importance of assembling a staff that understands analytics, how to ensure you are using the data wisely, and the need to always keep your eye on the prize when crunching the numbers.
With the current attention to analytics, it is easy to forget that business processes are the core, not the analytics about them. Analytics is about making an organization do what it usually does, only better.
Analytics amplifies. Data analysis helps organizations understand, predict and optimize by taking data — a collection of signals from underlying business processes — and magnifying it until managers can detect the business implications.