… we’re witnessing the beginning of a trend there, because a record four Canadians were selected in last year’s NFL Draft and a record four more participated in this year’s NFL Scouting Combine in Indianapolis.
Wedged between those two events was the Super Bowl, which featured two key Canadian-born Seattle Seahawks, tight end Luke Willson and punter Jon Ryan.
After that, in free agency, Canadian offensive lineman Orlando Franklin landed a five-year, $36.5 million contract with the San Diego Chargers. And there’s a decent chance that later this spring, Brandon Bridge from the University of South Alabama becomes only the third Canadian-born quarterback to be drafted by an NFL team.
When we took a look at Jake Arrieta‘s multi-faceted slider on Wednesday, the pitcher gave credit to ‘old-timers’ for the idea to use his legs to deaden the pitch. It turns out, there’s more old school in his mechanics than just a dragging back leg on a slow slider.
It’s not like Arrieta opened with a discussion of the way things used to be. When I first asked him about his mechanics, he felt there wasn’t one aha moment that helped him find his command and his best delivery. “I moved away from being concerned with mechanics to being more conscious of the positioning of my body and being able to put it in certain spots more consistently,” he said.
Just a natural growth, time, and a better understanding of his body had led to improvements. “Developing, maturing physically, understanding what you need to be consistent with, in order to have consistent command,” is how he put it.
He admitted himself that 2014 was not the best of years for him personally. Sure he still scored 52 goals in 62 games, reached the World Cup final and received the player of the tournament award in Brasil yet there seemed something missing from Lionel Messi last year. Something seemed lacking, whether the energy that characterises his performances, or the dynamism in his play which we have become accustomed to. Yes there were flashes, but Messi just didn’t seem happy. He has admitted that personal issues affected his form and enjoyment. And while for most players Messi’ season would have been a career best, for him it was seen as an under-performance. That has become in some ways the problem for Messi, people expect so much from him, on a regular basis, that anything below those levels are seen as under-performing, or worse still, a player on the decline. As this article will discuss, instead of a decline, we are witnessing Messi only getting better.
247Sports, CoachingSearch, YouTube, Stanford Athletics from
Stanford has developed one of the top strength and conditioning programs in the country under director of sports performance Shannon Turley, and the school has released a video detailing some of the program.
Hamstring injuries are the most common muscle injuries in soccer, and they have a high rate of recurrence. Eccentric hamstrings strength is recognized as an important modifiable risk factor. This led to the development of prevention exercises such as the nordic hamstring exercise (NHE). The effectiveness of the NHE on hamstring injury prevention has never been investigated in amateur soccer.
… RESULTS:
A total of 38 hamstring injuries were recorded, affecting 36 of 579 players (6.2%). The overall injury incidence rate was 0.7 (95% CI, 0.6-0.8) per 1000 player hours, 0.33 (95% CI, 0.25-0.46) in training, and 1.2 (95% CI, 0.82-1.94) in matches. Injury incidence rates were significantly different between the intervention (0.25; 95% CI, 0.19-0.35) and control groups (0.8; 95% CI, 0.61-1.15), χ2(1, n = 579) = 7.865; P = .005. The risk for hamstring injuries was reduced in the intervention group compared with the control group (odds ratio, 0.282; 95% CI, 0.110-0.721) and was statistically significant (P = .005). No statistically significant differences were identified between the intervention and control groups regarding injury severity. Compliance with the intervention protocol was 91%. CONCLUSION:
Incorporating the NHE protocol in regular amateur training significantly reduces hamstring injury incidence, but it does not reduce hamstring injury severity. Compliance with the intervention was excellent.
Saints goalkeeping coach Dave Watson helped Roy Hodgson deliver a pre-recorded video address to his England players during the international break.
Hodgson, a big believer in team spirit, was keen to plug the four-month gap between international fixtures by gathering his players at St George’s Park at the end of January, but Premier League clubs vetoed the idea, so the manager sought alternatives.
After consulting performance analysis manager Andy Scoulding, the 67-year-old decided to send a video to the players analysing their recent games for England.
… The preoccupation with how to cultivate wu-wei was at the center of early Chinese controversies about how to attain the good life. Characterizations of wu-wei in other early Daoist texts, such as the Laozi, take the form of concise, cryptic poems rather than stories. They often describe the “Way of Heaven” as a model for how a properly cultivated person should move through the world. In the poems, the Laozian sage attains wu-wei by not trying, by simply relaxing into some sort of preexisting harmony with nature. The Daoist poems are characterized by an effortless ease and unselfconsciousness that also plays a central role in early Confucianism. This may come as a surprise, because Confucianism is typically associated with hidebound traditionalism and stuffy ritual—both of which strike us as the opposite of wu-wei. It can’t be denied that the Confucians do a lot to earn this reputation. In the early stages of training, an aspiring Confucian gentleman needs to memorize entire shelves of archaic texts, learn the precise angle at which to bow, and learn the length of the steps with which he is to enter a room. His sitting mat must always be perfectly straight. All of this rigor and restraint, however, is ultimately aimed at producing a cultivated, but nonetheless genuine, form of spontaneity. Indeed, the process of training is not considered complete until the individual has passed completely beyond the need for thought or effort.
Repeated-sprint training appears to be an efficient and practical means for the simultaneous development of different components of fitness relevant to team sports. OBJECTIVE:
Our objective was to systematically review the literature and meta-analyse the effect of repeated-sprint training on a selection of field-based measures of athletic performance, i.e. counter-movement jump, 10 m sprint, 20 m sprint, 30 m sprint, repeated-sprint ability and high-intensity intermittent running performance.
… RESULTS:
Repeated-sprint training had a likely small beneficial effect in non-controlled counter-movement jump trials (effect size 0.33; 95 % CL ±0.30), with a possibly moderate beneficial effect in controlled trials (0.63; 95 % CL ±0.44). There was a very likely small beneficial effect on 10 m sprint time in non-controlled trials (-0.42; 95 % CL ±0.24), with a possibly moderate beneficial effect on 20 m sprint time in non-controlled (-0.49; 95 % CL ±0.46) and controlled (-0.65; 95 % CL ±0.61) trials. Repeated-sprint training had a possibly large beneficial effect on 30 m sprint performance in non-controlled trials (-1.01; 95 % CL ±0.93), with possibly moderate beneficial effects on repeated-sprint ability (-0.62; 95 % CL ±0.25) and high-intensity intermittent running performance (-0.61; 95 % CL ±0.54). CONCLUSIONS:
Repeated-sprint training can induce small to large improvements in power, speed, repeated-sprint ability and endurance, and may have relevance for training in team sports.
If Harry Kane makes his England debut next week there will be joy at Tottenham Hotspur for he is “one of their own”.
But Leyton Orient, Millwall, Norwich and Leicester can also claim some credit for Kane being Roy Hodgson’s choice.
He was on loan to these clubs and while some loans were more successful than others, Kane says he learned from the difficult times at Carrow Road as well as the good ones at The Den.
Apple, known for keeping its product developments under the strictest of lock-and-key, gave ABC News exclusive access into its top secret health and fitness lab, where only Apple employees became test subjects for the new Apple Watch.
Apple engineers, managers and developers have been secretly volunteering for the past year in this state-of-the-art lab to participate in rowing, running, yoga and many more fitness activities in order to collect data for the Apple Watch’s inner workings.
There’s a disconnect between what wearables can be and what they currently are, says Chris Ullrich, who heads up user experience at Immersion, a firm known for its haptic feedback innovations. Right now, even the most advanced smartwatch is really just a mirror of the smartwatch in your pocket. Your phone receives alerts from the world, and instead of pulling it out the screen in your pocket, you look down at the screen on your wrist.
This is absurd in Ullrich’s eyes, because wearables could really be so much more: silent universal communicators snuggled up against your skin that can let you know everything from how fast your heart is beating to what’s happening on Twitter.
… The idea behind ResearchKit was to use the iPhone’s ubiquity to give scientists unprecedented amounts of clinical data. By using the iPhone’s built-in accelerometer, microphone, camera, and pressure sensors—as well as a bevy of personal trackers that can be connected to the iPhone, like the FitBit, glucose monitors, or AliveCor’s portable electrocardiogram recorder—scientists would be able to gather activity and biometric data on people who opted in to be part of research studies. A typical clinical study might include hundreds or thousands of subjects; a ResearchKit study could easily include hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions. Plus, ResearchKit studies would have another unparalleled advantage: the cost of recruiting subjects would be basically zero.
“Not to be part of it would have been crazy,” Euan Ashley, one of the Stanford University investigators behind the myHeart app, which tracks cardiovascular health, told me. He and his colleges have been working on myHeart with Apple for more than a year.
In Pittsburgh, where an emerging reputation for technology and small business is still miles behind an entrenched reputation as an unrepentant sports town, a partnership between the University of Pittsburgh and a former Steelers stalwart aims to bridge the gap.
Charlie Batch, retired Steelers quarterback and one of Homestead’s most celebrated native sons, is shoring up an arrangement with Pitt’s Innovation Institute to develop and commercialize products for his emerging sports medicine technology startup, Impellia.
When Texas officials launched a massive public high school steroids testing program over fears of rampant doping from the football fields to the tennis courts, they promised a model program for the rest of the country to follow.
But almost no one followed. And after spending $10 million testing more than 63,000 students to catch just a handful of cheaters, Texas lawmakers appear likely to defund the program this summer. If they do, New Jersey and Illinois will have the only statewide high school steroids testing programs.