The opportunity to study Liverpool’s first-team players at close quarters during their mid-season training camp was something Trent Alexander-Arnold was determined not to pass up.
Alexander-Arnold was among the Reds’ party who returned to Merseyside yesterday following a four-night stay in La Manga.
Several other Academy prospects, including Ben Woodburn, Harry Wilson and Conor Masterson, also travelled to Spain as part of the 27-man group selected by Jürgen Klopp.
… Gordon moved from an impact player on playoff teams to a low-minute reserve on bad teams. After averaging over 20 points in two of his five Bulls seasons, his highest scoring average peaked at 13.8 points.
“I ended up in some very bad situations. But I don’t have any regrets. Those times happen sometimes,” Gordon said. “I look at some rookies who go into situations where their coach may have never coached before. I was fortunate. I got to play under someone (in Scott Skiles) who knew how to coach me and develop younger players. And I got playing time.
“It’s easy to look at this happened or that happened. But when I had some good coaching and solid structure, I flourished. When the situation went south, I didn’t really flourish and neither did anybody else. NBA careers can be up and down. It’s about fit and opportunity and timing.”
… The soft tissue muscle injuries point to an issue with Aguero’s diet. And lessons can be learnt from his close friend Lionel Messi in this respect Messi changed his diet drastically in his late teens and cut out red meat and ate more fish, resulting in better health, recovery and limiting muscle injuries. He suffered from consistent hamstring problems before Guardiola arrived and effectively changed his diet and micro-managed Messi’s preparation.
Ronaldo is known to be one of the most professional and dedicated athletes in terms of diet, recovery and overall fitness which has seen him continually be at his best year after year. Suarez is a little different in terms of how he plays and he appears to have the fortune of being extremely durable and resilient considering the way he plays.
Aguero has shown to be a lot more fragile. Is it because of diet? He admitted in May 2015 that he had sought to change his diet Aguero after his troubles with soft-tissue problems in his thigh, hamstrings, groin and calves. He followed guidance from Messi and started cutting out meat, pasta and sugar. As he admitted, “I needed a healthier way of life. I went to a doctor in Italy and he checked everything. I had to change quite a bit — no more pasta, no more sugar and no meat, which I used to eat quite a bit because Argentinian meat is very good.”
Among the synonyms associated with four-year institutions of higher education, “football factory” is not particularly flattering. It suggests a school where athletes are groomed more as potential National Football League players than contributors to mainstream society.
Nothing could be further from Chris Peteren’s “Built for Life” philosophy at Washington, where the Huskies head coach prioritizes the year-long process of preparing for autumn Saturdays over the actual results of those Saturdays.
And yet, three seasons into the Petersen Era, it’s obvious Washington’s talent pipeline to the pros has been restored. Seven Huskies are headed to the NFL Scouting Combine, which begins Feb. 28 in Indianapolis. Assuming something doesn’t go very wrong — and at the Combine, you never know — six of the seven profile as first-, second- or third-round draft selections.
… To better understand how the industry might improve its ability in keeping players healthy and on the field, I spoke to the athletic trainer who’s had more success than anyone in keeping players off the disabled list in the 21st century.
Last week, I talked with Herm Schneider as he made his way to O’Hare airport in Chicago to catch a flight to Arizona to begin his 38th season as the head athletic trainer of the White Sox. The 64-year-old is the sport’s longest tenured head athletic trainer. And for good reason: according to Zimmerman’s data, he’s been the most effective.
Over the last 15 years, the White Sox have lost the fewest days to the disabled list of any major-league team – and it’s not close. While DL data is hardly a perfect measure of time lost to injuries, as the disabled list is also employed by clubs as a roster-manipulation tool, the White Sox have averaged just over 500 DL days per season since 2001, according to Zimmerman’s research.
The short answer is yes: you can learn to think more rationally but only about specific subjects. Enhancing rational thinking overall is much more difficult.
Before exploring the question in more depth, we first need to define rational thinking. For this discussion, let’s stick with a relatively straightforward interpretation—rational thinking encompasses our ability to draw justifiable conclusions from data, rules and logic.
Schooling can indeed improve rational thought, research suggests. A recent analysis of many studies showed that college courses contribute to critical thinking abilities. But decades of research have also consistently found that students improve only in the type of reasoning skills emphasized in the course, not in other tasks. That is, if students work on logic puzzles, they get better at logic puzzles but not at other things, such as forming coherent arguments or winning debates.
… In a new book, The Enigma of Reason (Harvard), the cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber take a stab at answering this question. Mercier, who works at a French research institute in Lyon, and Sperber, now based at the Central European University, in Budapest, point out that reason is an evolved trait, like bipedalism or three-color vision. It emerged on the savannas of Africa, and has to be understood in that context.
Stripped of a lot of what might be called cognitive-science-ese, Mercier and Sperber’s argument runs, more or less, as follows: Humans’ biggest advantage over other species is our ability to coöperate. Coöperation is difficult to establish and almost as difficult to sustain. For any individual, freeloading is always the best course of action. Reason developed not to enable us to solve abstract, logical problems or even to help us draw conclusions from unfamiliar data; rather, it developed to resolve the problems posed by living in collaborative groups.
“Reason is an adaptation to the hypersocial niche humans have evolved for themselves,” Mercier and Sperber write. Habits of mind that seem weird or goofy or just plain dumb from an “intellectualist” point of view prove shrewd when seen from a social “interactionist” perspective.
Aspetar Sports Medicine Journal, Martin Buchheit from
On the 9 March 2013, Sir Alex Ferguson delivered in the Irish Times probably one of the most encouraging ever message for sport scientists in football: “Sports science, without question, is the biggest and most important change in my lifetime. It has moved the game onto another level that maybe we never dreamt of all those years ago. Sports Science has brought a whole new dimension to the game”. While such statements are gold for universities advertising sport sciences courses all over the world and for young students willing to embrace their carrier in elite clubs, the actual value of sport science may not always be rated as high in some elite clubs or federations1. Having an impact on the training programme, as a sport scientist, is anything but easy1. The way coaches and athletes understand, accept and use sport science is highly variable and unpredictable. The path leading to effective sport science support is a is a long and winding road, with frequent stops and constant redirections required. Historically, many mistakes have been made while we learned about the veracity and usefulness of our data and the best ways to report and implement sports science in the elite sports setting. Among the different components of effective sport science support, the three most important steps are likely the following:
1. Having an appropriate understanding and analysis of the data; i.e. using the right metrics and statistics.
Performance analysis (PA) in football is considered to be an integral component of understanding the requirements for optimal performance. Despite vast amounts of research in this area key gaps remain, including what comprises PA in football, and methods to minimise research-practitioner gaps. The aim of this study was to develop a model of the football match system in order to better describe and understand the components of football performance. Such a model could inform the design of new PA methods. Method
Eight elite level football Subject Method Experts (SME’s) participated in two workshops to develop a systems model of the football match system. The model was developed using a first-of-its-kind application of Cognitive Work Analysis (CWA) in football. CWA has been used in many other non-sporting domains to analyse and understand complex systems. Result
Using CWA, a model of the football match ‘system’ was developed. The model enabled identification of several PA measures not currently utilised, including communication between team members, adaptability of teams, playing at the appropriate tempo, as well as attacking and defending related measures. Conclusion
The results indicate that football is characteristic of a complex sociotechnical system, and revealed potential new and unique PA measures regarded as important by SME’s, yet not currently measured. Importantly, these results have identified a gap between the current PA research and the information that is meaningful to football coaches and practitioners.
Background Knee injuries are prevalent in cutting, pivoting, and jumping sports. Studies have investigated the effects of exercise-based knee injury prevention programs, however no clinical practice guidelines (CPG) exist.
Objective 1) Review the evidence for exercise-based knee injury prevention programs, 2) identify if there are exercise-based knee injury prevention programs that are effective for particular groups of athletes, 3) explore the evidence for dosage and delivery of exercise-based knee injury prevention programs, 4) provide information on how exercise-based knee injury prevention should be implemented.
Design Systematic review for CPG development.
Setting Multiple.
Patients (or Participants) Healthy, active individuals, particularly athletes participating in cutting, pivoting, and jumping sports.
Interventions (or Assessment of Risk Factors) A systematic review of literature was performed via PubMed, Scopus, SportDiscus, CINAHL, and the Cochrane databases for relevant articles addressing the effects of an exercise-based knee injury prevention program. The final search was performed in April, 2016 to identify all articles published prior to that point.
Main Outcome Measurements The effects and outcomes of exercise-based knee injury prevention programs.
Results Thirty-seven studies met the inclusion criteria for this CPG. Exercise-based knee injury prevention programs have a low implementation cost and large relative risk reductions. Clinicians should implement an exercise-based knee injury prevention program for all athletes involved in cutting and pivoting type sports to reduce the number of significant knee injuries. The program should be implemented two to three times per week in the preseason and one to three times per week in the competitive season. It should consist of a combination of plyometric training, strength and power exercises, balance and dynamic stabilization training, core strengthening, technique training, and/or sports-specific drills.
Conclusions This CPG will provide evidence based guidance for clinicians in choosing and implementing exercise-based knee injury prevention programs appropriate for the athlete(s) they work with.
The NFL Players Association, Harvard University and a new consulting company co-founded by local women’s hockey legend Angela Ruggiero are teaming up to develop new technologies aimed at tracking player performance and preventing injuries.
“It can have a profound effect on extending the careers of our members, (and) that’s one of the many, many reasons we’re interested in this technology,” said Ahmad Nassar, president of NFL Players Inc., the commercial arm of the NFL Players Association.
“In our industry if an athlete runs a tenth of a second slower, not only are they out of a job, they’re out of a career, potentially,” he said.
At a conference at the Harvard Innovation Lab Friday, union members, athletes, researchers and startups came together to talk about the future of sports technology with a focus on how best to measure athletes’ performance.
Sleep-disordered breathing is a “monster public health problem,” Peter Farrell, PhD, recently told members of the medtech community, Stanford Biodesign trainees and alumni.
Farrell, the founder of ResMed, a global company focused on treatments for sleep apnea and other chronic respiratory disorders, spoke as part of the “From The Innovator’s Workbench” series hosted by Stanford Byers Center for Biodesign, which brings health technology innovators to campus.
The conversation focused on sleep-disordered breathing (SDB), a chronic disorder that includes obstructive sleep apnea, upper airway resistance syndrome and snoring. SDB is caused by the repeated collapse of the upper airway during sleep, which results in a cycle of inadequate oxygen intake and arousal from sleep. Untreated SBD increases the risk of diabetes, hypertension, stroke, heart failure, car accidents and depression, Farrell said.
Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports from
The aim was to compare the epidemiology of injuries between elite male and female football players from the same club. Injuries and individual exposure time in a male team and a female team, both playing in the Spanish first division, were prospectively recorded by the club’s medical staff for five seasons (2010-2015) following the FIFA consensus statement. Total, training and match exposure hours per player-season were 20% higher for men compared to women (P < 0.01). Total, training and match injury incidence were 30-40% higher in men (P ≤ 0.04) mainly due to a 4.82 [95% confidence interval (CI) 2.30-10.08] times higher incidence of contusions, as there were no differences in the incidence of muscle and joint/ligament injuries (P ≥ 0.44). The total number of absence days was 21% larger in women owing to a 5.36 (95% CI 1.11-25.79) times higher incidence of severe knee and ankle ligament injuries. Hamstring strains and pubalgia cases were 1.93 (95% CI 1.16-3.20) and 11.10 (95% CI 1.48-83.44) times more frequent in men, respectively; whereas quadriceps strains, anterior cruciate ligament ruptures and ankle syndesmosis injuries were 2.25 (95% CI 1.22-4.17), 4.59 (95% CI 0.93-22.76) and 5.36 (95% CI 1.11-25.79) times more common in women, respectively. In conclusion, prevention strategies should be tailored to the needs of male and female football players, with men more predisposed to hamstring strains and hip/groin injuries, and women to quadriceps strains and severe knee and ankle ligament injuries.
Whilst generally viewed as a somewhat avoidable soft tissue injury, hamstring strain injuries continue to plague the epidemiology in team sports. There are an endless amount of statistics in the literature regarding their prevalence but perhaps most worryingly of all are the recent findings from Professor Jan Ekstrand’s European football surveillance research group that suggests hamstring injuries have increased by 4% annually since 2001 (Ekstrand et al, 2016). Dr John Orchard showed many years ago that for muscle strains the strongest risk factor is previous injury (2001) and the highest risk for injury recurrence is within the first two weeks of returning to the sport (Orchard and Best, 2002). Given these statistics though, do we need to reflect on the evidence base and current applied practice of the Return To Play (RTP) decision? Hamstring injuries cause considerable time lost from training and competition, resulting in financial loss and reduced athletic performance (Opar et al, 2012) therefore ensuring time efficient and successful RTP is a high priority of the Sports Medicine team.
I believe my role as a Sport Scientist is to add objective data to the multifactorial, multi-disciplinary decision making Return to Play process. The complexity of RTP has already been discussed at length in this previous blog (http://sportsdiscovery.net/journal/2015/07/12/can-end-stage-rehab-be-assessed-truly-scientifically/) but in this article I will discuss some of the evidence in the literature for various RTP criteria, specifically for hamstring strain injuries. It is a chance to reflect on what RTP milestones we are using and why; have they just been inherited over time, are they based on anecdotal experience and/or do they have support from the evidence base?
Remember it is important to consider the type of hamstring injury (see Carl Askling’s work (2006) and Pollock et al (2015) for some insight) – this blog is already long enough without differentiating but definitely needs considering!