Vinsanity comes in vintage flashes these days, as the former hurdler of 7-foot Frenchman and author of unimaginable slam dunks descends from his half-man, half-amazing heights to his half-man, half-aging twilight. On Wednesday night, the eve of his 40th birthday, Vince Carter punched in 30 minutes on the clock for a Memphis Grizzlies win over his original team, the Toronto Raptors, but his work had only begun.
As fans exited FedEx Forum, perhaps still marveling at the 360-degree layup the old guy pulled off earlier that night, Carter was resting his back on a weightlifting bench, preparing to press 225 pounds while Grizzlies strength and conditioning coach Chattin Hill held a double-wide paddle on his chest to mark the press. For 20 minutes, Carter lifted, worked on a speed bag, did core exercises with a medicine ball and used other weight-lifting machines while the music of rapper T.I. provided the background noise.
“You get older, you lose it,” Carter told The Vertical. “Don’t get me wrong, it’s tiring. But it’s about keeping my body strong, my mind strong.”
A week or so after Julio Jones—arguably the best wide receiver in the world right now, and certainly the most important skill player stepping onto the field in Sunday’s Super Bowl—committed to play football for the University of Alabama, he found himself in a high school basketball playoff game.
His Foley High School Lions were in Mobile to face the LeFlore High School Rattlers. In addition to being the greatest football player to come out of Foley since Ken Stabler, and a state champion in track, Jones was also a high-flying rebounder and shot-blocker in high school. His gifts were already well known on the Gulf Coast of Alabama: size, speed, strength, vision, a sort of preternatural calm that made even his most insane athletic feats appear as if they were happening in slow motion.
But Foley was a football school, and they were overmatched on the basketball court by LeFlore—in particular, by the Rattlers’ center, a highly recruited junior named DeMarcus Cousins. Jones, however, was not overmatched. There remains some question as to whether Cousins was standing under the basket when the dunk happened, or even whether he was on the floor at all. I heard varying accounts. But witnesses agree that in the first half of the game, Jones plucked a rebound out of the sky and tore down a vicious dunk that brought the opposing LeFlore fans out of their seats for an extended applause.
The point isn’t whether Julio Jones did or did not dunk on DeMarcus Cousins. The point is that nobody would have been surprised if he did.
Over the years, scientists have come up with a lot of ideas about why we sleep.
Some have argued that it’s a way to save energy. Others have suggested that slumber provides an opportunity to clear away the brain’s cellular waste. Still others have proposed that sleep simply forces animals to lie still, letting them hide from predators.
A pair of papers published on Thursday in the journal Science offer evidence for another notion: We sleep to forget some of the things we learn each day.
In order to learn, we have to grow connections, or synapses, between the neurons in our brains. These connections enable neurons to send signals to one another quickly and efficiently. We store new memories in these networks.
In your every waking moment, whether you mean to or not, you are absorbing new experiences, and changing your brain. Specifically, some of your neurons become more strongly connected. The sites where they meet, known as synapses, become larger and more numerous, and an electrical signal in one of the neurons more easily triggers a signal in another. This is how we learn and store memories, in the changing strengths of our synapses.
But there’s a limit to this process.
It takes a lot of energy to maintain these connections, and since we only have so much energy to spare, we can’t keep strengthening our synapses indefinitely. Nor would we want to. If our synapses kept getting stronger, our neurons would eventually become twitchy and hyperactive, leading to seizures or epilepsy. “In theory, the system could get to total saturation—all synapses would be strong and couldn’t get any stronger, and you wouldn’t be able to encode any more information” says Richard Huganir from Johns Hopkins University.
At the recent NSCAA convention in Los Angeles, top college coaches discussed the recruiting process and college soccer.
This is part 3 in our series. You can see Part 1, with the coaches’ introductions and bios here. Part 2, where the coaches discussed finding the right fit, can be seen here.
“Player development” has become the prominent buzz phrase in American soccer over the last decade. Since the inception of the US Soccer Development Academy and the ensuing recommendations from US Soccer to club coaches and directors, competitive clubs have been implementing strategies and coaching programs to foster as much “player development” as possible. Most of the coaching methods focus on individual progress over game results, with training sessions filled with top-level skills development. However, according to top college coaches, Sasho Cirovski especially, one major piece is still missing: the “INDIVIDUAL” part of “individual player development.”
Today we’re joined on the blog by Dale Forsdyke who’s kindly shared his considerable wisdom on pyschosocial factors in sport. Dale is a prominent researcher and practitioner in this field and published an excellent systematic review on the topic (Forsdyke et al. 2016). … One area where we’ve seen a great deal of progress in recent years has been an understanding of how important training load management is in injury prevention (see Windt & Gabbett, 2016). Modifying and monitoring training load can have an impact on injury occurrence and reoccurrence but there’s one understated significant barrier…advising an athlete to change their training doesn’t guarantee they actually will! This has led us to wonder, are psychosocial factors a key issue in training load error that we might be overlooking?…
Research shows that we have more positive experiences than negative ones, yet research also shows that our brain tends to focus on the negative aspects of our lives. We take the good things for granted and blow up the problems. As a consequence, we tend to fall prey to the petty concerns and annoyances in our lives, letting them determine our well-being. Veterans I’ve worked with who have returned from the hellish experiences of war call our problems “First World Problems” (e.g. the car won’t start, co-workers are annoying, or it’s raining). As a consequence, our stress levels increase and we aren’t as happy as we could be.
How can we capitalize on the gifts in our lives instead of letting negative experiences overshadow our well-being? By embracing, rather than resisting, the challenges.
In 2009, after she was diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer, Ann Ramsdell began to search the scientific literature to see if someone with her diagnosis could make a full recovery. Ramsdell, a developmental biologist at the University of South Carolina, soon found something strange: The odds of recovery differed for women who had cancer in the left breast versus the right. Even more surprisingly, she found research suggesting that women with asymmetric breast tissue are more likely to develop cancer.
Asymmetry is not readily apparent. Yet below the skin, asymmetric structures are common. Consider how our gut winds its way through the abdominal cavity, sprouting unpaired organs as it goes. Or how our heart, born from two identical structures fused together, twists itself into an asymmetrical pump that can simultaneously push oxygen-rich blood around the body and draw in a new swig from the lungs, all in a heartbeat. The body’s natural asymmetry is crucially important to our well-being. But, as Ramsdell knew, it was all too often ignored.
Poppy Crum is a neuroscientist who uses a delicate and provoking play of shifts in perception to show how human misconnection can be transformed from frustration, misunderstanding, and disagreement, to connection with empathy and tolerance. Giving credence to proverbs that tell us that to really know someone we must walk a mile in their shoes.
In this talk, Poppy shares how finding these empathetic opportunities every day can make us more human. By challenging our assumptions about why someone else might have a different world view, sensory empathy can inspire innovations and human connections we might otherwise never have found.
… In a study published in 2011, Sylvie Droit-Volet, a neuropsychologist at Université Blaise Pascal, in Clermont-Ferrand, France, and three co-authors showed images of the two ballerinas to a group of volunteers. The experiment was what’s known as a bisection task. First, on a computer screen, each subject was shown a neutral image lasting either 0.4 seconds or 1.6 seconds; through repeated showings, the subjects were trained to recognize those two intervals of time, to get a feel for what each is like. Then one or the other ballerina image appeared onscreen for some duration in between those two intervals; after each viewing, the subject pressed a key to indicate whether the duration of the ballerina felt more like the short interval or the long one. The results were consistent: the ballerina en arabesque, the more dynamic of the two figures, seemed to last longer on screen than it actually did.
That makes a certain sense. Related studies have revealed a link between time perception and motion. A circle or triangle that moves quickly across your computer monitor will seem to last longer on screen than a stationary object does; the faster the shapes move, the bigger the distortion. But the Degas sculptures aren’t moving—they merely suggest movement. Typically, duration distortions arise because of the way you perceive certain physical properties of the stimulus. If you observe a light that blinks every tenth of a second and simultaneously hear a series of beeps at a slightly slower rate—every fifteenth of a second, say—the light will seem to you to blink more slowly than it does, in time with the beep. That’s a function of the way our neurons are wired; many temporal illusions are actually audiovisual illusions.
The aim of this study was to compare perceived TL (sRPE-TL), training volume (TV) and the changes in physical fitness between professional (n=14) and semi-professional (n=18) basketball players during the preparation period. Furthermore, relationships between sRPE-TL and TV with changes in physical fitness level were investigated. The players performed the Yo-Yo Intermittent Recovery Test (Yo-Yo IR1) before and after the preparation period. In addition, physiological responses to a standardized 6-min continuous running test (Mognoni’s test) and to a standardized 5-min high-intensity intermittent running test (HIT) were measured. sRPE-TL and TV were greater for professional (5241+/-1787 AU; 914+/-122 min) compared to semi-professional players (2408+/-487 AU; 583+/-65 min). Despite these differences, Yo-Yo IR1 performance improvements (~30%) and physiological adaptations to the Mognoni’s test were similar between the two groups. Furthermore, physiological adaptations to HIT were slightly greater for professional compared to semi-professional players, however the magnitude of these effects was only small/moderate. No clear relationships were found between sRPE-TL and changes in Yo-Yo IR1 performance and Mognoni’s test (rs +/- 90%CI: Yo-Yo IR1, 0.18+/-0.30; Mognoni’s test, -0.14+/-0.29). Only moderate relationships were found between sRPE-TL and changes in HIT (rs +/- 90%CI: [La-], -0.48+/-0.23; [H+], -0.42+/-0.25). These results raise doubts on the effectiveness of using high sRPE-TL and TV during the preparation period to improve the physical fitness level of players. The Yo-Yo IR1 appears to be sensitive to monitor changes induced by the preparation period, however its use is not recommended to discriminate between adult basketball players of different competitive level.
… Since early October, Belichick has been limiting his use of his NFL-issued Microsoft Surface tablet and its related technological systems. On Oct. 2, Belichick was caught on national television tossing his tablet in frustration. The move came after his defense failed to prevent a Buffalo Bills touchdown pass. But what really sparked his ire was something much more common.
Who among us hasn’t, at some point, been so frustrated with a computer or other piece of technology that we contemplated throwing it out a window? The real driver in these situations, though, is far more complex than we might expect: A cascade of system failures comes to a head in a crucial moment.
As a systems researcher, I know that this sort of problem can be much more serious than a multimillionaire football coach expressing his disdain for nonfunctioning technological equipment on a Sunday afternoon. Similar failures underlie industrial accidents and often result in the undermining of technological innovations – eliminating the advantages of the technology because the weaknesses are so stark.
Plans for LSU’s long-anticipated athletic nutrition center could be changing again.
Athletic director Joe Alleva said Wednesday on LSU’s national signing day webcast on LSUSports.net that expansion and renovation of the school’s football complex could include a nutrition center.
Later in a text message, Alleva stressed that the athletic department is only studying the possibility of putting the nutrition center at the football complex and that nothing has been decided yet.
… “We’re talking about experimental compounds never tested in humans,” says Dr. Pieter Cohen, a Harvard professor who published a 2015 study that found two-thirds of over-the-counter supplements contained one or more pharmaceutical adulterants, making them illegal. “The more likely it helps your workout,” Cohen says, “the more likely it’s going to adversely affect your health.”
The FDA oversees the industry, but it’s woefully outmatched. For starters, it employs only around 25 people in its dietary-supplement division, which is responsible for policing thousands of companies, many of which don’t bother abiding by the few rules currently governing the market. Making matters worse is a confusing web of overlapping companies: One brand will buy its ingredients from another company, which in turn buys its raw ingredients overseas.
Manufacturers are supposed to register their ingredients with the FDA, but there’s effectively no punishment if they don’t. And the murky production chain provides a layer of deniability. The FDA sends out warning letters threatening to prosecute companies selling products with pharmaceuticals, but the agency rarely acts on them. Several companies, including Blackstone, stay ahead of the FDA simply by creating new supplements with altered formulas or even launching a new company to proffer the same old ingredients.
… Daryl Morey first met Gupta when Morey, then the Senior Vice President of Operations with the Boston Celtics, gave a guest lecture at an alumni gathering for MIT students.
Gupta, a recent computer science and electrical engineering graduate of MIT who was working as a software engineer for ESPN at the time, stuck around when the talk was over to chat with Morey one-on-one.
Morey, of course, met with many young adults looking to enter the sports world, a hypercompetitive industry with depressingly low odds to break into. But Gupta left an impression on Morey because of how proactive he was, even as a relative outsider, in pushing the boundaries of statistical analysis. The fact that Gupta had proven his coding ability as an engineer at ESPN made him even more desirable.