If you’ve never had plantar fasciitis, I sincerely hope you never do. If you’ve had it, you know what I know from experience: It’s one of the absolute worst injuries you can get. An irritation of the tissue underneath your heel and arch, plantar fasciitis feels like your foot is being ripped in half, and frustratingly, there’s no specific remedy. You can only rest, rehab and hope it gets better at some point.
For a rookie trying to carve out a spot in the NBA, such an injury makes things that much more challenging.
When Ichiro Suzuki arrived at Miami Marlins training camp last month, he was the only player on the 40-man roster born in the 1970s. In fact, he was only two years younger than the team’s manager, Mike Redmond.
At 41, Ichiro was trying to hook on with his third major-league team, having parted ways with the Yankees after playing parts of three seasons in the Bronx. But he is no charity case. Indeed, when one of his new teammates, infielder Mike Morse, saw that Ichiro had signed with the Marlins, he sent a congratulatory text and got a quick reply: “Make sure your arm’s ready to go as my throwing partner.”
In essence, endurance performance comes down to three things: 1. How big your engine is (VO2max, peak velocity, or any other measure of maximal capacity); 2. How much of that engine you can use (i.e. the fraction of the above that can be sustained); 3. How efficient that engine is (i.e. how well you can translate metabolic energy to movement).
The interplay between the three ultimately determines performance.
What is sports science? Whilst the term itself is often mentioned in modern football there is still uncertainty of what it is all about. Indeed, the general belief is that this is merely the modern equivalent of the role that in the past used to be carried out by the club doctor.
Such lack of clarity is hardly surprising given that it wasn’t that long ago that the job of physio went to some former player as a way of rewarding him from his service.
Sports science, however, is much more than that. “Sport Science is the application of scientific principles to exercise and sport.” So says Chris Cone who covers this role within the Bristol Rovers academy.
Baseline screening for high risk movement patterns has become increasingly more common during pre-participation examination for college athletes. This week’s EXSS Impact post highlights the work of HMSC PhD student Tim Mauntel and his research team members (Rebecca Begalle, Barnett Frank, Shiho Goto, Laura Stanley, Darin Padua) in identifying common movement impairments in college athletes.
Context: Identifying neuromuscular screening factors for anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury is a critical step toward large-scale deployment of effective ACL–injury-prevention programs. The Landing Error Scoring System (LESS) is a valid and reliable clinical assessment of jump-landing biomechanics.
Objective: To investigate the ability of the LESS to identify individuals at risk for ACL injury in an elite-youth soccer population.
… Intervention(s): Baseline preseason testing for all participants consisted of a jump-landing task (3 trials). Participants were followed prospectively throughout their soccer seasons for diagnosis of ACL injuries (1217 athlete-seasons of follow-up).
Main Outcome Measure(s): Landings were scored for “errors” in technique using the LESS. We used receiver operator characteristic curves to determine a cutpoint on the LESS. Sensitivity and specificity of the LESS in predicting ACL injury were assessed.
Results: Seven participants sustained ACL injuries during the follow-up period; the mechanism of injury was noncontact or indirect contact for all injuries. Uninjured participants had lower LESS scores (4.43 ± 1.71) than injured participants (6.24 ± 1.75; t1215 = −2.784, P = .005). The receiver operator characteristic curve analyses suggested that 5 was the optimal cutpoint for the LESS, generating a sensitivity of 86% and a specificity of 64%.
Conclusions: Despite sample-size limitations, the LESS showed potential as a screening tool to determine ACL injury risk in elite-youth soccer athletes.
Redskins coach Jay Gruden shook up his defensive staff and is banking on a fresh approach by Joe Barry to push that unit toward improvements. Meanwhile, the coach also hopes that a change in leadership and approach in the weight room translates into greater results on all sides of the ball.
… In 2012 Karch and his staff were given the reigns of the USA Women’s Volleyball Program. They have implemented an unorthodox but science-based approach to development that has helped the team reach new levels.
“Science has shaped everything we do in the gym in terms of developing players. We are training to perform not to drill. All of the science tells us that we do the most learning when practice looks like an actual game – Which is really random and not just super controlled. That governs just about everything we do in the gym. We’re trying to make every second in our gym count as much as possible to make the most transfer that we can get.”
University of Toronto, Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education from
In sport, dealing with loss is inevitable. Even the most accomplished athlete will have off days. But how difficult is it for an athlete to shake off the agony of defeat? Fourth-year kinesiology student Zoe Poucher asks this question in her current research on athletic identity and contingent self-worth.
“There’s been a lot of research on how an athlete begins to define themselves by their sport, but little study on how performance is tied to self-worth,” says Poucher. “How does winning or losing affect an athlete’s overall confidence? How are their social relationships impacted? My research looks at the psychological effects of sport outside of the sport itself.”
With Apple Inc. and fellow Silicon Valley companies edging further into health care, the U.S. agency in charge of oversight says it will give the technology industry leeway to develop new products without aggressive regulation.
Bakul Patel, who oversees the new wave of consumer-focused health products at the Food and Drug Administration, said most wearable gadgets such as the soon-to-be-released Apple Watch and health-focused applications for smartphones have a way to go before warranting close scrutiny from the agency.
CoachUp, the leading private coaching company in the United States, announced on Monday morning a major new partnership with NBA superstar Stephen Curry. Already connected with NBA Rookie of the Year candidate Nerlens Noel, as well as Super Bowl champion Julian Edelman, CoachUp has continued its exponential growth since the company was founded in 2012. Adding a potential NBA MVP is yet another sign of the company’s growth, especially given that Curry will be more than merely a spokesman.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has unveiled its plan for the future, and it’s a huge shift, marked by new goals in four main areas. Arguably the biggest change is its plan to reinvent complex military systems and make them more modular, in an effort to ensure “superiority in the air, maritime, ground, space, and cyber domains.” Among the planned developments is a brand new global positioning, navigation, and timing system (GPS) that doesn’t depend on satellites and is resistant to jamming. According to a document (PDF) posted Thursday, DARPA’s new system will be much more advanced than what we have now, and will eventually trickle down to our cars and phones.
Wearable mHealth devices depend on sensors to gather physiological data. In some cases, such as smartwatches, the technology hasn’t developed enough to collect information that a healthcare provider would consider reliable. Other devices, such as body-worn sensors, are making great advances but come with limited uses. This infographic from Pathfinder Software (pathfindersoftware.com) takes a look at what will certainly be a rapidly developing mHealth technology.
A few days ago James Bunce, the head of sport science at the Premier League, asked this simple question to a roomful of coaches: what chance does an under-nine who joins a Premier League club’s academy have of graduating to its first team? No one was left shocked by the answer: just 0.5% – or one in 200. Or when Bunce admitted that “as an industry, football still doesn’t know a lot about what it takes to become a top player”.
Of course it doesn’t. Bringing through young players remains a bit like pin the tail on the donkey: clubs know what they are searching for, but success remains dizzying and often elusive. Intriguingly, though, Bunce believes that box-fresh Premier League projects, based on sports science and data, could help clubs better identify and nurture young talent – and get more players making the grade.
Your default position is probably scepticism. English football has a habit of talking the talk about player development – usually just after the national team is knocked out of a major tournament – and then the subject goes for a long walk. However Bunce has form: until last year he was at Southampton, a poster club for developing talent in professional football.