As the latest NFL combine unfolded on Speculation Island, college quarterbacks showed off their coverage skills, wide receivers ran through tight end drills and offensive linemen described themselves as “versatile” so often it seemed like they were competing to see who could play the most positions.
UEFA has issued its 2013/14 Elite Club Injury Study, and European club doctors have come together for a seminar focusing on the questions raised by this crucial information source.
Over the past 15 years, the notion of recovery has received considerable attention by both researchers, coaches, athletes and practitioners. But what, in fact, is recovery? As defined by Kellmann and Kallus1, recovery is considered as “an inter-individual and intra-individual multi-level (e.g. psychological, physiological, social) process in time for the re-establishment of performance abilities” (p. 22). With this in mind, it is clear that recovery is a multidisciplinary phenomenon that demands attention from practitioners from every discipline to contribute positively to an athlete’s successful management of stress and recovery states towards optimising positive adaptations to training and ultimately enhanced performances.
For obvious reasons, Ron Atkinson’s wisdom on football matters is not widely sought these days. It does not mean everything he said was wrong, though. In the days before disgrace, when Atkinson managed some of the leading clubs in the country, he was discussing one of English football’s frequent infatuations with a group of journalists.
Serie A was regarded as the strongest league in the world at the time, and there was widespread admiration for its ultra-professional codes. Players kept strict fitness regimes, touched little stronger than water, and ate pasta and other foods designed to promote the healthiest lifestyle.
These were the years when English players might still tuck in to steak and kidney pie after training.
Purpose: High-intensity short-duration interval training (HIT) stimulates functional and metabolic adaptation in skeletal muscle, but the influence of HIT on mitochondrial function remains poorly studied in humans. Mitochondrial metabolism as well as mitochondrial-associated protein expression were tested in untrained participants performing HIT over a 2-week period.
… Results: HIT training improved peak power and time to fatigue. Increases in absolute oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS) capacities and CS activity were observed, but not in the ratio of CCO to the electron transport system (CCO/ETS), the respiratory control ratios (RCR-1 and RCR-2) or mitochondrial-associated protein expression. Specific increases in OXPHOS flux were not apparent after normalization to CS, indicating that gross changes mainly resulted from increased mitochondrial mass.
Conclusion: Over only 2 weeks HIT significantly increased mitochondrial function in skeletal muscle independently of detectable changes in mitochondrial-associated and mitogenic protein expression.
Jordi Escura Aixàs is a professor of sports sciences at the University of Lleida in Spain. Previously he was a physical therapist for RCD Espanyol – in Spain’s top division, UE Lleida, and Buriram United in Thailand. He was responsible for players returning to play after injuries. Jordi is a UEFA A licensed coach and a UEFA Pro License Professor. As a player, he represented the country of Andorra, playing as a defender in 65 games in World Cup and Euro qualifiers against many of the largest countries in Europe. Along with Toni Dovale (formerly of Sporting Kansas City and FC Barcelona) he hosts camps and help coaches at clubs with their methodology through their company Barcelona Soccer Excellence.
How long do players really need to warm up for games?
It depends on philosophies. If you see one Barcelona warm up, it isn’t longer than 20-25 minutes and it is at a low level of intensity. Other teams though take 30-35 minutes and finish at really high intensity levels. As I see it, we have to do the least necessary that still allows a player to perform the exercise required of them at their peak during the game.
Humanyze, a unique new firm spawned in the MIT Media Lab, has developed a system that uses a smart employee badge to collect employee behavioral data, which it links to specific metrics with the goal of improving business performance. It announced $1M in seed funding today.
A new Cincinnati company that uses disposable electronic patches to find out what sweat can tell about the body has raised $1.5 million in seed funding.
CincyTech led the seed round in Eccrine Systems, which was joined by management and other sources from the CincyTech investor community.
Fear, researchers are finding, plays an enormous role in an athlete’s recovery. In fact, it can determine whether or not an athlete ever makes a full recovery—and that fact is often overlooked, says Dr. Aaron Gray, a physician for athletes at the University of Missouri. Some athletes, he says, “almost have post-traumatic stress back to” the moment they got injured.
Addressing the fear, alongside the physical injuries, is critical for recovery, a recent study published in the American Journal of Sports Medicine found.
The news that Derrick Rose needs yet another knee surgery is a gut punch to Rose, his teammates and anyone who watches the NBA. The injury is a torn medial meniscus in his right knee, the same injury he suffered in November of 2013. It’s different than the torn ACL he suffered in the 2012 playoffs, but that was the knee issue that started this depressing cycle.
What’s left unsaid in the Bulls’ brief press release is what kind of surgery Rose will have. Athletes generally have two choices when faced with a meniscus tear. They can stitch the meniscus back together, or they can chop the whole thing off and proceed without it. It’s hard to know which surgery is the right one to have until a doctor examines the knee, so it’s possible Rose himself doesn’t even know what route he’ll take.
Here are the differences between the two surgeries
After seeing the NFL combine finish with a bang—UConn cornerback’s record-setting broad jump of 12’7” is nothing short of jaw-dropping—one has to wonder what the most athletic performances in NFL Combine history are and where those players project to be.
Using the database compiled by SportsXChange and displayed on NFLDraftScout.com, we can begin the process by looking all the way back to 1999 and grabbing combine scores.
To compare recent internal training load and strain of elite Australian football players for match outcome.
… Methods
Load was quantified from session rating of perceived exertion (sRPE) for individual players from one team in 141 professional Australian football matches over six seasons, then averaged for players that competed for the team each week. Internal weekly-load and weekly-strain (load x monotony) was compared to recent-load and recent-strain (four-week rolling average) as a marker of training-stress balance for each player against the match outcome. Covariates for relative position of teams in the competition and days between matches were modelled. Differences were standardised (Effect Size; ES) and interpreted using magnitude based inferences. Results
Weekly-load was likely higher for match wins (ES ± 90% confidence limits; 0.43 ± 0.27), and when days-break was used as a covariate (0.45 ± 0.27) but only possibly higher with relative ladder position covaried (RLP, 0.29 ± 0.33). There was a possibly greater positive training–stress balance for load in wins (0.31; ±0.38) with db (0.39; ±0.39) and RLP covaried (0.27; ±0.48). There were no clear differences for strain for wins and losses or with either covariate. There was a likely greater positive training-stress balance for strain in wins (0.51; ±0.41) with days-break (0.48; ±0.41) but not RLP covaried. Conclusions
Weekly-load and a positive training-stress balance for strain were the best predictors of match success. The higher weekly-load and training-stress balance for strain highlight the conflict between maintaining the training stimulus and minimising fatigue in Australian football players between matches.
