… When the match was over and Halep had lost, Cahill surprised her by informing her that just like a naughty child he was putting her in a timeout. Translation: Her bad attitude was unacceptable and he was taking a break from their coaching arrangement.
Cahill’s tough-love separation strategy worked. Halep, reeling from Cahill’s unexpected departure, came to the realization she had to reform. It would be out with the negativity and in with the positivity.
“I think it meant a lot that he took that decision,” Halep said. “Helped me. I just felt that it was like a shock, because I lost the coach. I knew I have to change to have him back. I changed pretty fast.”
… Totti has played over 600 Serie A matches, clocking up over 47,000 minutes of playing time, while scoring 250 league goals, although 71 of those have come from 12 yards and over that period, Roma has enjoyed consistent success, rarely dropping out of the top four positions.
As league careers go, Totti’s has therefore been played at a very similar level, where Roma has been regularly amongst the best club sides in Italy and he has largely avoided injury.
How to make an American prodigy who can finally (finally!) be worthy of the world’s game: start ’em early (with a side of Doritos), put ’em on the second-best team, vacation like Messi and, above all else, have fun out there. Like so.
… Whichever team selects the 18-year-old will get a goalie who’s toolbox includes much more than sartorial know-how and size. There’s also a glove hand often described as unbeatable to go with top-notch awareness and puck handling. He’s a building block in the crease who has the skill and mental makeup scouts and coaches alike fawn over.
“His mind is beyond elite,” says Dave Rogalski, a goaltending coach with Impact Hockey who has been training Oettinger since he was in eighth grade. ”The kid does not get rattled. He’s hard to defeat, he can handle the biggest or smallest of moments. He’s a wise, young kid, I’ll say that. He’s as calm as ever, so whoever gets him is going to be very lucky as part of their system.”
… in future, according to Italian football club AS Roma’s director of performance Darcy Norman, to be successful professional footballers will lead lives that are likely to be even more demanding.
From the moment they wake up to the time when they go to bed they’ll be consumed with thinking about what is needed to perform to their optimum.
Norman has put together for CNN Sport a schedule for a day in the life of a player in the future. Welcome to the world of the 24/7 athlete.
Changes to the AFL combine have meant the three-kilometre time trial and the beep test have been dumped in a bid to ensure testing represents more closely what’s required at club level.
The three-kilometre trial, traditionally the final event of the combine, has been cut to two kilometres – the distance clubs have used over the pre-season for several years. This distance is seen as a way to better test the competitiveness of potential draftees. The best athletes in the game generally log a two-kilometre time trial in under six minutes.
The beep test at the combine has been replaced by the yo-yo run, devised by Danish soccer physiologist Jens Bangsbo. Players will have to run between cones, which are 20 metres apart. They then have a 10-second recovery and must walk or jog around another cone before returning to the starting point.
At the end of this year, Bernard Lagat, one of the best American runners ever, will take a break. For 5 weeks, he’ll hang up his sneakers and complete little to no exercise. This isn’t something new or brought about by old age for this 43-year-old athlete. If anything, part of the reason Lagat, who has run in five Olympics and won two world championships, remains atop the international running scene is because of this break, which he’s been taking every year since 1999. “Rest,” Lagat says, “is a good thing.”
Lagat credits his annual respite with keeping him physically and psychologically healthy over the years. The extended shutdown period allows his body to recuperate from grinding 80-mile running weeks. Although Lagat’s year-end break might be the longest, nearly all his peers at the top of running take similar ones, ranging from 10 days to 5 weeks. Olympic 1500-meter silver medalist Leo Manzano recently told the Wall Street Journal that he, too, needs at least a month to recover from the season. His reasoning is simple: “It feels like I’ve been going nonstop since November.”
… Altitude has always been the acknowledged third wheel in the United States-Mexico rivalry — even for a Mexican national team that increasingly features players who live and work abroad. By now it is met with a mix of acknowledgment that the elevation will be a factor and a studied refusal to make it more significant than it has to be.
It’s a delicate balance, and one Arena himself prefers not to discuss. His medical team — including the fitness coach Daniel Guzman and the national team’s high-performance director, James Bunce — gave him personalized preparation plans for this week’s games starting in January, but no member of the team or the coaching staff is permitted to discuss those preparations with the news media in any detail.
The more we read and watch online, the harder it becomes to tell the difference between what’s real and what’s fake. It’s as if we know more but understand less, says philosopher Michael Patrick Lynch. In this talk, he dares us to take active steps to burst our filter bubbles and participate in the common reality that actually underpins everything.
When you need to remember a phone number, a shopping list or a set of instructions, you rely on what psychologists and neuroscientists refer to as working memory. It’s the ability to hold and manipulate information in mind, over brief intervals. It’s for things that are important to you in the present moment, but not 20 years from now.
Researchers believe working memory is central to the functioning of the mind. It correlates with many more general abilities and outcomes – things like intelligence and scholastic attainment – and is linked to basic sensory processes.
Given its central role in our mental life, and the fact that we are conscious of at least some of its contents, working memory may become important in our quest to understand consciousness itself. Psychologists and neuroscientists focus on different aspects as they investigate working memory: Psychologists try to map out the functions of the system, while neuroscientists focus more on its neural underpinnings. Here’s a snapshot of where the research stands currently.
Life is a series of choices. Every time you make a decision, there is a possibility that things won’t go as expected (risk) or that something bad will happen (loss). Aversion to risk and loss have powerful influences on how we make decisions. In a new paper in Biological Psychiatry, co-senior authors Dr. Jonathan Roiser and Dr. Oliver Robinson, both of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, and colleagues studied the influence of risk and loss aversion in people with anxiety, a disorder characterized by debilitating avoidance behavior and difficulties making daily-life decisions.
Anxious people might, for example, avoid driving over bridges because they are concerned that the bridge might collapse, explained first author Dr. Caroline Charpentier also of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience. “But is this because they overestimate the risk of this happening (i.e., a difference in risk aversion), or because the devastating consequences loom larger (i.e., a difference in loss aversion)?” The findings of the new study indicate that it may be more about risk than loss.
“This paper uses a sophisticated computational approach to shed light on why anxiety can be so disabling,” said Dr. John Krystal, Editor of Biological Psychiatry. “Nearly all life decisions involve risk. It appears that anxious people are hypersensitive to these risks, influencing their emotions, thoughts and behavior.”
New York Magazine, Science of Us blog, Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness from
… In a paradoxical twist, the research suggests that the less we think about ourselves, the better we become. Self-transcendence not only allows us to overcome our greatest fears and break through our limits, but it also improves our performance in less heroic, everyday activities. In one study, researchers from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania found that hospital janitors who cleaned bedpans and mopped floors performed better and reported higher levels of satisfaction when their job was framed as being integral to the healing of other people. The janitors were constantly reminded that by keeping the hospital clean, they were minimizing the chance of bacteria spreading and harming the already vulnerable patients. They no longer saw their job as just removing vomit from the floors; they saw it as saving lives. Some hospitals have even eliminated the job titles “janitor” and “custodian” in favor of titles like “health and safety team member” or “environmental health worker.”
… Researchers have performed throughout 500 clinical trials evaluating mesenchymal stem cells and there have been more than 180 trials evaluating platelet rich plasma, which is a testimony to the level of interest in biologics and the hope of treating or modulating various disease processes. Unfortunately, the scientific approach to studying these therapies and interventions has been quite disordered, with little standardization of the biologic preparation being studied. This lack of standardization has made it difficult to compare study outcomes and validate conclusions of disparate studies.
University of Rochester Medical Center researchers have discovered that loss of muscle stem cells is the main driving force behind muscle decline in old age in mice. Their finding challenges the current prevailing theory that age-related muscle decline is primarily caused by loss of motor neurons. Study authors hope to develop a drug or therapy that can slow muscle stem cell loss and muscle decline in the future.
As early as your mid 30s, the size and strength of your muscles begins to decline. The changes are subtle to start – activities that once came easily are not so easy now – but by your 70s or 80s, this decline can leave you frail and reliant on others even for simple daily tasks. While the speed of decline varies from person to person and may be slowed by diet and exercise, virtually no one completely escapes the decline.
“Even an elite trained athlete, who has high absolute muscle strength will still experience a decline with age,” said study author Joe Chakkalakal, Ph.D., assistant professor of Orthopaedics in the Center for Musculoskeletal Research at URMC.
… Ice hockey has missed out on the analytics revolution, largely because its speed and complexity have made a nuanced understanding of the data behind player positioning and activity all but impossible. However, Alex Martynov, CEO of ICEBERG, sees this as a golden market opportunity.
“I always felt that data was a crucial part of every industry, and I was amazed that baseball and soccer were into the data, but hockey and other sports were very far behind,” said Martynov.
In 2014, Martynov left his job as an analyst for a bank in Toronto, and began applying his analytical and statistical skills to the sport he loved so much.
With a seed investment from his father, and the help of a few hockey-crazed developer friends in Russia and Canada, Martynov set out to use a combination of computer vision and machine learning to start collecting and analyzing data from hockey games.