… Moving away from Washington, D.C., the greatest freestyler in history relocated to the Bay Area, climbed on a bike, strapped on a school-issued helmet and pedaled between classes on Stanford’s picturesque campus. She entered dorm life with three roommates who were not scholarship athletes (that’s part of the deal at Stanford, where athletes are not sequestered from the rest of the student body).
She took an array of freshman classes while weighing whether to major in psychology, international relations, political science or history (no decision yet). She took pride in her academic performance this past school year, perhaps more than her domination in the pool, attacking her studies like a distance freestyle set in practice.
All the newness actually helped make the transition from Mount Olympus to morning classes easier. There was no choice but to assimilate.
The first few weeks of July are the deadest time of the NFL dead season — OTAs are over, players are on vacation, and coaching staffs are dispersed as everyone gets their last chance to relax and spend a little time with friends and family before training camp gets underway. At this time of year, we can’t even rely on all those trusty reports of players developing chemistry or moving up and down on the offseason depth chart to satisfy our football fix. For now, the only thing that matters for teams and their fans over the next few weeks―and the only thing that should really matter from now until the season kicks off―is for their star players to get healthy and stay healthy.
That seems to be especially true this year, with a sizable list of big-name guys coming off major injuries or offseason surgeries. Right now, there’s “no reason to be sullen or morose” about the prognoses for any of them, and whether we’re talking about Andrew Luck, J.J. Watt, Cam Newton, Derek Carr, Earl Thomas, or others, the outlooks are pretty uniformly rosy: Everyone’s “on target,” “on schedule,” “progressing nicely,” or “ready to go.”
But here’s the thing about the human body — it can be fickle.
Runners have been trying to break through the 2 hour marathon mark for decades. Here’s the incredible science behind how Eliud Kipchoge came within 25 seconds in Nike’s Breaking2 project.
Most college football coaches like to keep their plans and methods close to the vest. Syracuse’s Dino Babers certainly falls into that group.
The training program he’s allowed Sean Edinger to install is key to preparing his offensive players to run his hurry-up, spread offense, Babers has said in the past. So, unsurprisingly, specific details on how the team trains come in bits and pieces.
Edinger, SU’s assistant athletic director for athletic performance, provided a glimpse into how he operates during an interview earlier this summer.
… “Apart from the games during the season, it’s the most important thing and it has a big influence on the games. You create a base for the whole year,” the Liverpool manager told the club’s official website. “This game is a players’ game and the players’ game means they need to know what the other guy is thinking.
“You learn all of this in the preseason. Of course you learn in the season — you fine-tune — but the better the basis you can create, the better the season will be, 100 percent.
“I really love the sessions. There should be a 100 percent difference between the first day of preseason and the last day. We really want to see big, big progress.”
… All players arrive with big dreams, ones [Jeff] Davis has already lived, but here’s the first truth he has learned about it all: It ends, and it usually ends quickly.
“If a football player is all you want to be,” he says, “you won’t be long. They’re chasing a dream, and once you achieve that — now what?”
That’s Davis’ job at Clemson. He’s the guy who knows what comes next.
As schools dole out millions for opulent facilities — Clemson’s includes a slide, a bowling alley and a nap room — a number of coaches are shifting their focus to a different sales pitch to lure football players. Davis is at the forefront of this new holistic approach.
Although the vast majority of hamstring injuries in male soccer are sustained during high speed running, the association between sprinting kinematics and hamstring injury vulnerability has never been investigated prospectively in a cohort at risk. Purpose
This study aimed to objectify the importance of lower limb and trunk kinematics during full sprint in hamstring injury susceptibility. Study design
Cohort study; level of evidence, 2. Methods
At the end of the 2013 soccer season, three-dimensional kinematic data of the lower limb and trunk were collected during sprinting in a cohort consisting of 30 soccer players with a recent history of hamstring injury and 30 matched controls. Subsequently, a 1.5 season follow up was conducted for (re)injury registry. Ultimately, joint and segment motion patterns were submitted to retro- and prospective statistical curve analyses for injury risk prediction. Results
Statistical analysis revealed that index injury occurrence was associated with higher levels of anterior pelvic tilting and thoracic side bending throughout the airborne (swing) phases of sprinting, whereas no kinematic differences during running were found when comparing players with a recent hamstring injury history with their matched controls. Conclusion
Deficient core stability, enabling excessive pelvis and trunk motion during swing, probably increases the primary injury risk. Although sprinting encompasses a relative risk of hamstring muscle failure in every athlete, running coordination demonstrated to be essential in hamstring injury prevention.
A new report from Stanford Medicine looking at the present and future of digital health draws some interesting conclusions on the impact virtual visits, wearables and predictive analytics will have on how healthcare is delivered in the future. Naturally, there are a good few challenges that stand in the way between the current state of healthcare innovation and the more fully evolved version that lies ahead, potentially.
1. Wearables will be provided by medical centers
Given that Stanford’s own research has quantified the merits of biosensors in wearables to detect symptoms of possible illness, such as Lyme disease, it stands to reason that it would envision medical centers playing a larger role in providing these devices, rather than technology companies.
Ask anyone what moment from the 2015 College Football Playoff national championship game sticks out to them and they would likely say the onside kick that swung the momentum in Alabama’s favor. It was surprising, gutsy and so incredibly perfect.
But present the same question to the principal figures attached to the Crimson Tide’s medical and training staffs and they’ll all give a different answer. They’ll mention the 95-yard kickoff return by Kenyan Drake that pushed Alabama’s lead into the double digits during the fourth quarter of a 45-40 victory over Clemson. To them, it was validating, gratifying and inspiring.
In a span of 14 seconds — the time it took Drake to catch the ball, begin his run, make a hard cut to his left, outrace the coverage to the far sideline, jet upfield and eventually dive across the goal line — Alabama team physician Norman Waldrop and his colleagues had witnessed technology’s impact on college football’s most prominent football program.
Estimating that 60% of player injuries are lower extremity problems, the National Football League is using laser technology in hopes of reducing the amount of cleat- and turf-related woes using custom designed footwear for players. … “We’ll bring in laser scanners into the locker room,” said Dr. Jeff Crandall, chairman of the NFL’s Head, Neck and Spine engineering sub-committee, in a spring interview. “They’ll scan the feet. They’ll look at the shoes, in terms of the type of shoes for that position, as well as the shape that fits that foot. Our hope is that we’ll get optimized performance, in terms of safety.”
This year’s Sensors Expo showed the continuing fan out of new technologies seeking real markets in sensors and the networks connecting them.
Among more than 220 exhibitors, we met Rob Frizzell (below) chief executive of OmniPresense, pioneering a market for short-range radar. “No one was looking at radar as a sensor, there is just one other radar company here as far as I can see,” said Frizzell, co-founder of the self-funded startup based here.
The company used off-the-shelf chips to design a 24 GHz radar module that can run off a smartphone’s USB jack. It draws up to 1.4W active, costs $169 and can track a person up to five meters or a car up to 10 meters.
arXiv, Computer Science > Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition; Rahul C. Deo et al. from
Background: Automated cardiac image interpretation has the potential to transform clinical practice in multiple ways including enabling low-cost assessment of cardiac function in the primary care setting. We hypothesized that advances in computer vision could enable building a fully automated, scalable analysis pipeline for echocardiogram (echo) interpretation, with a focus on evaluation of left ventricular function. Methods: Our approach entailed: 1) preprocessing, which includes auto-downloading of echo studies, metadata extraction, de-identification, and conversion of images into numerical arrays; 2) convolutional neural networks (CNN) for view identification; 3) localization of the left ventricle and delineation of cardiac boundaries using active appearance models (AAM); 4) identification of properly segmented images using gradient boosting; and 5) particle tracking to compute longitudinal strain. Results: CNNs identified views with high accuracy (e.g. 95% for apical 4-chamber) and the combination of CNN/bounding box determination/AAM effectively segmented 67-88% of videos. We analyzed 2775 apical videos from patients with heart failure and found good concordance with vendor-derived longitudinal strain measurements, both at the individual video level (r=0.77) and at the patient level (r=0.51). We also analyzed 9402 videos from breast cancer patients undergoing serial monitoring for trastuzumab cardiotoxicity to illustrate the potential for automated, quality-weighted modeling of patient trajectories. Conclusions: We demonstrate the feasibility of a fully automated echocardiography analysis pipeline for assessment of left ventricular function. Our work lays the groundwork for using automated interpretation to support point-of-care handheld cardiac ultrasound and may enable large-scale analysis of the millions of echos currently archived within healthcare systems.
… “It’s a constantly changing process,” Murray, the world No 1, tells The Telegraph when asked how his serve responsiveness has improved and evolved throughout his 12-year professional career. “A lot of it is just down to experience; as a player who has been around on the tour for a long time, you just do learn to rely on your instinct to make a split-second decision of which way to go. Having said that, I do put a lot of time and effort into studying my opponent’s serving, to see if there are any patterns or routines they have that might help me stand a better chance of hitting a strong return.”
… We ranked the NBA’s best players by calculating a three-year rolling average of each player’s key value metrics: Box Plus/Minus, Win Shares per 48 minutes and Player Efficiency Rating.4 After isolating the top 30 players (including ties) after each season, we tracked how many were in each conference just before the start of the following season.
Things haven’t always looked so dire for the East. Right after the merger and through most of the 1980s, the Eastern Conference featured the majority of the league’s top players; then the conferences were relatively even for another 10 years or so, until Michael Jordan retired after the 1997-98 season. From roughly that point on, the West has been slowly accumulating more than its share of great talent, culminating in what looks to be a historic imbalance next season.
This article examines the effects of team composition on the performance of European football (soccer) teams. The scorelines of 1,822 matches involving 98 first-tier teams were analyzed in terms of the overall ability of the teams and the spread of player abilities (heterogeneity) within them. As expected, total team ability has a beneficial effect on performance; the number of goals a team scores is positively related to its own ability and negatively related to the ability of its opponents. Team heterogeneity on the other hand has both beneficial and detrimental effects on performance. Heterogeneous teams score more goals than homogeneous teams, but they also concede more goals. As the effect of heterogeneity on goals conceded is greater than its effect on goals scored, the net effect of heterogeneity is to depress overall performance. The results are discussed in terms of Steiner’s framework of group dynamics.