… • QB Drew Brees: “He’s coming off an injury, 32-year-old running back and typically that’s over the hill, but there’s an intensity there, a presence, a work ethic. And you watch him, and you’re like, Wow, I don’t see how anybody tackles that guy. … And his size. Usually, if I close my eyes and put the ball out, this is where I’m handing it off to most running backs.” [He indicates where, then lifts his arms up.] And here’s where I’m gonna hand it off to Adrian Peterson, just because he’s that much bigger and taller.”
• CB Delvin Breaux: “The first time he was in weight room, we’re in the off-season program and he was in there, and he had the box at 42, 48 [inches] and he was single legging, jumping on the box. It was like, ‘Damn, that guy just had knee surgery?’ That was the first time I had a wow moment, and then seeing him on the field, it’s crazy. He’s still got the juice. I can’t wait to play with him.”
Eight years ago this summer, the United States men’s national team stunned top-ranked (and eventual World Cup champion Spain) en route to the Confederations Cup final. To USMNT fans of a certain vintage, it’s hard to fathom it was that long ago. Memories are vivid: the 3-0 rout of Egypt in the group stage finale to clinch an unlikely berth in the knockout rounds; the upset of an all-time great Spanish team that was unbeaten in 35 games beforehand; Landon Donovan staking the U.S. to an ultimately fleeting 2-0 lead against Brazil in the title game.
To Oguchi Onyewu, the events of that fateful June in South Africa might as well have taken place a lifetime ago.
“It does feel that long ago to me,” Onyewu said with a wry chuckle. “It feels a while back, when you look at things. But the memories feel like yesterday.” Within four months of the end of that tournament, Onyewu had both finalized a dream move to famed Italian club AC Milan and been laid low by the injury that would forever alter his career path.
… Physical therapists just don’t have the time to do that, so we need to have coaches that can understand the physical side of it. They don’t need to know it all; they just need to know enough to bridge that gap and have an immediate feedback loop. And, I’ll tell you what, the benefit to our athletes has been tremendous. That has been the biggest thing.
The second biggest thing has not yet been built. As an industry, we look retroactively at injuries. So, Shawn Brody is pitching for me, and you hurt your elbow and have a UCL tear. OK, then I have to go look back at the last 24-months to see your training logs. If I’m a good organization, be it college or pro, I have two years of your data. I know when you threw your bullpens, your velocities, weighted ball program, long-toss program, medicals, and your MOTUS sleeve data.
Almost nobody collects all this data, but we do. I mistakenly thought that this was going to be enough, but it’s not. If you think about it, all you’re doing is taking this data and retroactively looking at what happens when someone gets hurt. When someone gets hurt, we’re essentially using that person as a martyr.
… if you are worried about being hurt then you can’t pitch. You have no business competing in baseball. You need to figure out how you can get yourself physically and mentally to the point you need to be. You need to be physically confident in your stuff. When you’re physically confident, then the mental confidence comes after that. Then you can go. If you’re worried, this game has a 100 percent mortality rate. No one plays forever, and most stop because they’re hurt. Whether they go on the DL or not, most just don’t have it. They tear their UCL, they lose enough velocity, they have dead-arm. Whatever happens, that is what takes it away from them. You have to understand that is the end for everybody.
You have to be 100 percent ready to go into battle, and accept the risks. To get to that point, you have to train the right way and have the mental fortitude. For me, that all starts from that physical fortitude. That all starts from choosing a correct training program, having faith in your trainer, your doctor. To know that you are 100 percent good to go, and if bad luck occurs or it just wasn’t meant to be, then it is what it is. That’s it, you’re done. You have to be spiritually fit. If you’re thinking the other way, then you just shouldn’t pitch. That is my demotivational advice, unfortunately, for anyone who thinks that way.
Shawn Brody: Can you explain what Driveline baseball is and does, for those who might not know?
Kyle Boddy: The quick elevator pitch is that our company aims to be the sabermetrics of player development. The (slightly) longer part is that we’re trying to quantify skill acquisition. How do people get better? What is the mechanism behind it, and how can we develop that process to make our pitchers and hitters better? Whether they’re rehabbing, healthy, or developing velocity/spin; whatever it may be. We want to do it using sports science. We want to do it using a methodical, logical, data intensive way.
… Following a decade as a referee, Graver returned for one more season. But he said that incident in Vienna crystallized a creeping realization: His days in the job were numbered.
“I said, ‘I would rather spend my time on the weekends with my kids and with my wife than stand out here and be abused by these parents,’ ” said Graver, who kept good to his word and hasn’t been a referee in the past two years. “It doesn’t make sense.”
Graver’s experience — or something similar — plays out every weekend across the country.
… Target one or more physiological systems each session:
This includes, but is not limited to the cardiovascular, muscular, digestive and nervous systems. You should be able to identify which system, or systems, you are emphasizing in each session.
Impose a specific stress (or several different stresses) on the target systems:
Are you trying to develop muscular strength or endurance? Improve your VO2max or your anaerobic threshold? The stress(es) should be clear to help you measure performance and track progress.
… On top of getting enough sleep at night, you need to unplug throughout the day because the brain can only focus for 90 to 120 minutes.
It’s all thank to the ultradian rhythm, which is a cycle that is present in our sleeping and waking lives.
There’s even a well-known study of the world’s most prodigious violinists. The study that found similar characteristics to the Nedergaard mice study were present when it comes to music practice.
These violinists practiced in three sessions, each was 90 minutes, and there was a break build into each session.
High school and youth coaches are speaking out—and it’s not necessarily about their players. Syracuse.com recently published a survey asking high school coaches about their experience with the changing parental culture influencing athletes. The coaches surveyed represented five different sports, including soccer, basketball, football, baseball and softball. And their responses are pretty straightforward: Overall, parents are having a significant—and usually negative—impact on coaches in high school sports.
The data show that coaches feel more stressed and pressured by parents than ever before
The way that parents interact with coaches has changed, and not necessarily for the better. In fact, 82 percent of the coaches surveyed reported that dealing with parents has gotten worse throughout their coaching career.
It is incumbent upon FDA to ensure that we have the right policies in place to promote and encourage safe and effective innovation that can benefit consumers, and adopt regulatory approaches to enable the efficient development of these technologies. By taking an efficient, risk-based approach to our regulation, FDA can promote health through the creation of more new and beneficial medical technologies. We can also help reduce the development costs for these innovations by making sure that our own policies and tools are modern and efficient, giving entrepreneurs more opportunities to develop products that can benefit people’s lives.
To this end, FDA will soon be putting forward a broad initiative that is focused on fostering new innovation across our medical product centers. I will have more to say on many elements of this initiative soon. However, today I want to focus on one critical aspect of this innovation initiative: A new Digital Health Innovation Plan that is focused on fostering innovation at the intersection of medicine and digital health technology. This plan will include a novel, post-market approach to how we intend to regulate these digital medical devices.
This social media wake-up call comes courtesy of UConn women’s associate head basketball coach Chris Dailey.
“You have one reputation; how do you want to be perceived?” she asked. “How do you want people to view you? You get one chance for a first impression, and after that you have, I forget the number of times it takes for someone to change their view of you.
“If you tell a kid ‘hey, look, you put that stuff out there people think poorly of you.’ They don’t do it wanting people to think poorly of them; they do it to be cool or whatever, but sometimes it’s just mindless. What we ask our players to do is ‘don’t be mindless with what you choose to put out there because it is a reflection of you.'”
The NFL has become a proponent of training in virtual reality—everybody from the Dallas Cowboys, who began using the technology in 2015, to Arizona Cardinals quarterback Carson Palmer has embraced the idea of practicing in this 3D space. So have the NBA’s Washington Wizards, the NHL’s Chicago Blackhawks, and, most recently, Walmart associates.
Now STRIVR—the self-proclaimed world leader in training athletes by using virtual reality—is expanding to European soccer, and the German Football Association (DFB) is the first to take a giant step into this brave new world.
Considering Germany is the defending World Cup champion, and has a reputation for forward thinking when it comes to using technology to better the national team, it seems like the perfect match.
This Fall, Gatorade is expected to launch a major new online offering to the market. The Gatorade Gx platform, including customizable hydration pods, creates a new, direct-to-consumer business model for Gatorade and more sustainable product delivery system. Building on years of science and research at the Gatorade Sports Science Institute, Gx incorporates compelling aspects of the latest trends in personalization and customization.
The 3-year journey from idea inception to consumer product launch is one of the best examples I’ve seen of a collaboration between a design agency partner and a brand. It began when Gatorade asked longtime partner, Smart Design, to help develop a way to track hydration needs of athletes, based on innate physical differences, different sports activities, levels of exertion, duration of exercise, and weather conditions.
A very popular believe in sports is that in order to get maximum effect of caffeine in competition you need to withdraw from caffeine in the days or even weeks leading up to it. The theory is quite attractive, because it seems to make sense that some caffeine habituation will take place. It is believed that non coffee drinkers or those that drink very little coffee will benefit more from caffeine. However, a study in the Journal of Applied Physiology appeared recently that seems to dispel this myth (1).
Harvard Business Review, Nick Harrison and Deborah O'Neill from
Management teams often assume they can leapfrog best practices for basic data analytics by going directly to adopting artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies. But companies that rush into sophisticated artificial intelligence before reaching a critical mass of automated processes and structured analytics can end up paralyzed. They can become saddled with expensive start-up partnerships, impenetrable black-box systems, cumbersome cloud computational clusters, and open-source toolkits without programmers to write code for them.
By contrast, companies with strong basic analytics — such as sales data and market trends — make breakthroughs in complex and critical areas after layering in artificial intelligence. For example, one telecommunications company we worked with can now predict with 75 times more accuracy whether its customers are about to bolt using machine learning. But the company could only achieve this because it had already automated the processes that made it possible to contact customers quickly and understood their preferences by using more standard analytical techniques.
So how can companies tell if they are really ready for AI and other advanced technologies?