Carli Lloyd was once on the brink of quitting soccer.
Her whole career she’d been told, “You’re the best, you’re the best,” and had fallen into a trap where she’d become too lax. She was able to get away with giving 70 or 80 percent, which was good enough.
Fifty years ago, a contrarian-thinking generation adopted the battle cry “Never trust anyone over 30.” Around the ballparks of Major League Baseball today that warning could be updated to: Never pay anyone over 30.
After 30, the body’s flexibility starts to decrease, lean tissue can be harder to maintain, bones become more fragile, and coordination and stamina take a hit — even among highly conditioned elite athletes. Do teams want to keep paying an aging player millions of dollars to sprint after fly balls and collide with hard walls, dive headfirst into bases with fingers slamming cleats, and contort into awkward angles to hurl a ball as hard as he possibly can or swing a heavy wooden bat as fast as he can?
Overpaying for past performance rather than future greatness is another thorny issue in a sport where a player’s peak years typically come in his mid- to late 20s.
With 6 minutes 7 seconds remaining in the first quarter of the Indiana Pacers’ game against Miami on Sunday, Coach Frank Vogel looked down his bench and said only one word: “Paul.”
With that, Paul George stood up from his chair and, for the first time all season, checked himself into an N.B.A. game.
Wouldn’t it be great if we changed the terminology of ‘Recovery Strategies’ to ‘Adaptation Strategies’. Goal is to improve not maintain.
He’s right. Recovery days just don’t seem important enough to do them. Knowing instead that a recovery day is actually the day that adaptation—and therefore greater fitness—is achieved gives such days more credibility. Let’s take a brief look at the undervalued recovery day.
With the offseason program set to begin next week, the Raiders are changing up their strength and conditioning program under the leadership of Head Strength and Conditioning Coach Joe Gomes.
This review focuses on how blood flow to contracting skeletal muscles is regulated during exercise in humans. The idea is that blood flow to the contracting muscles links oxygen in the atmosphere with the contracting muscles where it is consumed. In this context, we take a top down approach and review the basics of oxygen consumption at rest and during exercise in humans, how these values change with training, and the systemic hemodynamic adaptations that support them. We highlight the very high muscle blood flow responses to exercise discovered in the 1980s. We also discuss the vasodilating factors in the contracting muscles responsible for these very high flows. Finally, the competition between demand for blood flow by contracting muscles and maximum systemic cardiac output is discussed as a potential challenge to blood pressure regulation during heavy large muscle mass or whole body exercise in humans. At this time, no one dominant dilator mechanism accounts for exercise hyperemia. Additionally, complex interactions between the sympathetic nervous system and the microcirculation facilitate high levels of systemic oxygen extraction and permit just enough sympathetic control of blood flow to contracting muscles to regulate blood pressure during large muscle mass exercise in humans.
Recently, an elite ultrarunner named Ryan Ghelfi wrote a blog post entitled Running Dumb: Letting Go of the Reins. Ryan is coached by one of my colleagues, Jason Koop, and the post is a very good description of the conflict many athletes feel as they transition from being self-coached to working with a professional. But we were struck by the phrases “running dumb” and “don’t think, just run”. The post inspired a great discussion about what we, as coaches, expect from you, the athlete.
Coaching is a two-way street. You expect your coach to be knowledgeable, communicative, professional, and responsive to your needs. There are numerous articles about what you should expect from a coach. But coaches also have expectations of you.
According to the Journal of Clinical Psychology, only 8 percent of people achieve their New Year’s resolutions. Even triathletes, who are widely perceived as strong in willpower, struggle with behavioral change. Implementing a healthy habit is not so hard, but making it stick can be very challenging. Why? Because self-control is a limited resource. Engaging in self-restraint in one domain depletes the reserve of energy available to apply self-restraint in another. Plus, relying on willpower can set us up for failure. As soon as we put too much faith in willpower, we are more likely to neglect practices that are actually useful in maintaining habits.
Google Maps makes it easy to pan, zoom and search the world—and now it can do the same for the deep recesses of the human body, too.
A new project by researchers from the University of New South Wales in Australia has been borrowing the algorithms used to assemble and run Google Maps to create large, explorable depictions of human tissue, right down to the individual cell. The first example brings together terabytes of data acquired from imaging a hipbone with a scanning electron microscope.
The result, which you can explore here, has been used to perform molecular analysis of nutrient transport that in the past would have taken 25 years—but can now be done in a few weeks, according to the researchers. It’s expected that other institutions will use the same technique in the future—including Harvard scientists who aim to do something similar with mouse brains. [UNSW via PopSci]
Physiological computing focuses on the use of biosignals for the development of interactive software and hardware systems capable of sensing, processing, reacting, and interfacing the digital and analog worlds.
However, biosignals have specific requirements for which typical physical computing platforms are not particularly tuned. Until recently, many projects ended up hindered by high costs and limited access to suitable hardware materials.
That scenario is different today, partially thanks to the following 5 DIY hardware platforms.
The [WIRED] article, “iPhone Killer: The Secret History Of The Apple Watch,” describes the long path Apple took in creating a new type of arm-based experience. The company tried various things, accepting some and rejecting others—which is normal for a tech company creating a new gadget and software. But in this case, those inadequate cast-offs happen to resemble efforts put out by Pebble and a budding crop of watch app makers.
… Your health depends on so many factors—cultural, genetic, whether your cat lets you sleep at night—that I find it really interesting our fascination with the extraordinary simplicity of the fitness tracker and food app scene. Yet, nearly half of all smartphone users indulge in some form of health app according to the American Journal of Medicine (and half of all Americans adults have a smartphone). That’s a lot of people using insufficient forms of data feedback to make big assumptions about their health.
… As soon as [Kevin Lynch] walked into the studio, he found out the project he’d been hired to run was already on deadline. In fact, it was behind schedule. There was a design review in two days, he was told, with the Apple brass. Lynch had better be ready.
There were no working prototypes; there was no software. There were just experiments—the iPod crew had made something with a click wheel—and lots of ideas. The expectations, however, were clear: Apple’s senior vice president of design, Jony Ive, had tasked them with creating a revolutionary device that could be worn on the wrist.
Injury: the greatest fear for every athlete. Across any code, at any level, injury is a part of life for sportsmen and women. A torn hamstring, a broken arm, a severe concussion; all injuries require extensive physical therapy. But what about the mental battle that needs to be waged when injured? How does the psychological process measure up to the physiological one? Doctor Charlie Weingroff and Springbok captain Jean de Villiers reveal what an athlete goes through psychologically when undergoing physical rehabilitation.