… on Friday at the start of a stretch of six games in nine days, Curry and Kerr were in agreement that taking the night off against the Nuggets made sense. Kerr said both All-Star guards were agreeable as well when approached with the plan for rest.
“That was when we really knew they needed it,” said Kerr, whose team despite the loss maintained a 61/2—game lead over Memphis for first place in the Western Conference.
It’s probably not good for the soul to think of life as a race to be won. But if you do accept that metaphor, you’d likely be happy to have McLaren managing your pit stops as you make your way along the course.
The engineering company is famous for building Formula One race cars featuring computerized engine control systems and dozens of sensors that transmit data to remote analytics teams. Over the last few years, McLaren first began applying lessons learned from managing race cars to managing elite athletes, and now it’s bringing its tools to health and medicine.
Today at SXSW Interactive, Geoff McGrath described the origin and evolution of McLaren Applied Technologies, the business unit he founded within the company.
From an office overlooking the fitness facility in the bowels of Scotiabank Saddledome, Calgary Flames strength and conditioning coach Ryan van Asten took a moment and paused.
Then, peering out from his desk in the direction of his other, bigger office of gym equipment, van Asten suggested he knew at least part of the reason the Flames have found success in the second season of what is supposed to be a rebuilding process.
No literature reviews have systematically identified and evaluated research on the psychological determinants of endurance performance, and sport psychology performance enhancement guidelines for endurance sports are not founded on a systematic appraisal of endurance-specific research. Objective
A systematic literature review was conducted to identify practical psychological interventions that improve endurance performance and to identify additional psychological factors that affect endurance performance. Additional objectives were to evaluate the research practices of the included studies, to suggest theoretical and applied implications, and to guide future research. Methods
Electronic databases, forward-citation searches and manual searches of reference lists were used to locate relevant studies. Peer-reviewed studies were included when they chose an experimental or quasi-experimental research design; a psychological manipulation; endurance performance as the dependent variable; and athletes or physically active, healthy adults as participants. Results
Consistent support was found for using imagery, self-talk and goal setting to improve endurance performance, but it is unclear whether learning multiple psychological skills is more beneficial than learning one psychological skill. The results also demonstrated that mental fatigue undermines endurance performance, and verbal encouragement and head-to-head competition can have a beneficial effect. Interventions that influenced perception of effort consistently affected endurance performance. Conclusions
Psychological skills training could benefit an endurance athlete. Researchers are encouraged to compare different practical psychological interventions, to examine the effects of these interventions for athletes in competition and to include a placebo control condition or an alternative control treatment. Researchers are also encouraged to explore additional psychological factors that could have a negative effect on endurance performance. Future research should include psychological mediating variables and moderating variables. Implications for theoretical explanations for endurance performance and evidence-based practice are described.
The Hawks’ practice gym has bare walls, some cardio equipment crammed behind a baseline and patchwork flooring, a result of a recent leak. Most N.B.A. teams have gleaming, multimillion-dollar facilities. The Hawks spend their time in something that looks straight out of the Cold War.
“You know, I kind of like it,” said Kenny Atkinson, an assistant coach. “It almost feels like we’re in a ‘Rocky’ movie.”
The field of sporting genetics is becoming increasingly mainstream. Researchers and coaches have long known that individuals respond to a differing extent when on the same training program. Anyone who has been in a training squad will have seen team-mates who improved greatly with training and others who didn’t improve anywhere near as much. As an increasing amount of research is carried out into performance genetics, the reasons for these differences are becoming clearer. There are now a number of genes that can partially explain the response to different types of training.
Knowing and understanding your individual genotype is useful in ensuring that the training you do will elicit the best response. The key point here is that every individual has a training type that is best suited to them, and that providing the correct training stimulus in this way allows improvements across the board.
While the preparticipation evaluation (PPE) is widely used by medical practitioners, its overall effectiveness is unknown, in part because there are no standardized or centralized mechanisms to collect and analyze medical history information. PURPOSE:
To report on the injuries and illnesses identified with the use of an electronic PPE (ePPE) completed by first-time National Collegiate Athletic Association Division 1 varsity sport participants (N = 1693; 797 women, 896 men) upon entry to a single institution between 2010 and 2013.
… RESULTS:
In total, 3126 discrete past injuries were reported (women, 1473 injuries; men, 1653 injuries). Time loss from sport participation averaged 31.4 days for each injury (women, 32.2 days; men, 30.7 days), and aggregate time loss from sport for all student-athletes before the ePPE was 256 years. Eleven percent of student-athletes had injuries that were unresolved and still symptomatic at the time of the ePPE. Thirty percent of injured student-athletes had a history of ≥1 surgeries for an injury (women, 176; men, 213), and these accounted for 57% of the time lost from sport before college participation. Head injuries accounted for 9% (110 women, 173 men), and loss of consciousness was reported in 19% of these. One in 3 student-athletes answered “yes” to ≥1 of the American Heart Association questions on cardiovascular health. While 15% of women reported a history of stress fracture, only 3% reported a diagnosed eating disorder. CONCLUSION:
While some data in this population are self-evident, we were not aware of the high frequency of past injuries, the magnitude of time lost from sport, the high frequency of past surgery, and the number of participants still symptomatic from injuries. The ePPE is a valuable tool for collecting and analyzing aggregate injury and illness data in athletes, such as the finding that 11% of injuries that were reported were unresolved and still symptomatic.
A recent study of retired NFL players by Johns Hopkins medical researchers adds to growing evidence linking football with brain damage.
The study published last month in the journal Neurobiology of Disease focused on nine retired NFL players, but the results add to a growing body of research and anecdotal accounts associating brain disease with the blows to the head that are a common part of football and other sports.
… 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 Three follows Paul through his daily life and obligations as he works his way back onto the court. This video documents candid moments and also showcases all the ups and downs of his road to recovery.
At Boston’s annual MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, the main focus is on U.S. sports. But people come from all over the sporting world, and the globe, to exchange ideas and learn about what’s happening in the major U.S. sports. This was important enough for FC Bayern Munich, one of the best practitioners of the most popular sport on the planet in the middle of its season, to have its head of match analysis, Michael Niemeyer, come to Sloan — and catch a Celtics game in between sessions.
He came by our booth at Sloan to talk to us about how Bayern and its recent coaches, especially current boss Pep Guardiola, are embracing analytics even as some U.S. coaches are free to ignore it as a sideshow.
In a world where employees were perfect, it wouldn’t be newsworthy when a professional athlete went to work in great shape. In that world, a player who bragged to reporters about his narrower waist and wider muscles would be met by blank stares. Great, guess you get to keep your roster spot, someone might say to end the awkward silence.
But we don’t live in that world. Instead, we live in a world where Bartolo Colon gets to bat, so when a baseball player bulks, cuts, spends the offseason at a fitness facility, touches his toes without bending his knees, or discovers what the calorie counts on menus mean, it’s a story.
The aim of this study was to examine the physical and tactical performances of a professional football team under congested and non-congested fixture periods. Six home matches of an English professional football team were analysed during competitive season (3 matches distancing three days from the previous fixture and 3 matches distancing six or more days from the previous fixture). Players’ physical performances were measured by the total distance covered and distance covered at different speed categories. Tactical performances were measured by the percentage of time of players’ movement synchronisation of lateral and longitudinal displacements. This variable was calculated considering all the possible pairs of outfield players, for the overall match and at different speed categories. Results showed no differences in the physical performance, although players’ spent more time synchronised during the non-congested fixtures compared to congested fixtures, both for lateral (41.26% to 38.51%, ES: −0.3, P < 0.001) and longitudinal displacements (77.22% to 74.48%, ES: −0.5, P < 0.001). These coordination differences were particularly evident at the lower speed categories and in dyads composed by positions that tend to be further apart during the match, typically central and wing positioned players. Tactical performance seems to be affected by fixtures distribution, with players’ spending more time synchronised during the non-congested fixtures. As players’ cover the same amount of distance at similar intensities in both fixtures distribution, this reduction of synchronisation may be associated with an increased perception of fatigue and consequent adaptation strategies.
arXiv > Physics > Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability from
We investigate the time evolution of lead changes within individual games of competitive team sports. Exploiting ideas from the theory of random walks, the number of lead changes within a single game follows a Gaussian distribution. We show that the probability that the last lead change and the time of the largest lead size are governed by the same arcsine law, a bimodal distribution that diverges at the start and at the end of the game. We also determine the probability that a given lead is “safe” as a function of its size L and game time t. Our predictions generally agree with comprehensive data on more than 1.25 million scoring events in roughly 40,000 games across four professional or semi-professional team sports, and are more accurate than popular heuristics currently used in sports analytics.