A number of factors keep running backs from seeing the field much during their rookie season, and pass protection and ball security are two of the most common.
But those haven’t been an issue for Minnesota Vikings rookie Dalvin Cook. Coaches and players have gushed about Cook’s ability to understand and execute the playbook while blocking for his quarterback since the preseason. It’s one of the reasons it didn’t take long for Cook to win the starting job.
Each summer, Celtics assistant coaches crisscross the country to spend time with the players. They work on new skills, refine old ones, and simply strengthen bonds.
This offseason, Jay Larranaga was assigned to work once again with tenacious fourth-year guard Marcus Smart. And Larranaga decided that in addition to the usual instruction he offered, it would be good to have someone to complement it.
… A trainer is a person who runs athletes through drills. Run here. Take 20 shots there. Give me wind sprints now. And, yes, Brickley works sometimes in this way with some of the most talented household names in America. But according to him, he’s not a basketball trainer, he’s a basketball influencer. “There’s a million trainers that have NBA guys,” he said. “That’s the reality of it. I don’t feel like I have competition because I don’t think I’m a trainer. These guys look at me as someone who can help them on a day-to-day, help them with basketball, help them with [life].”
NBA training camps sit on the horizon. And at Sky, NBA stars squeeze in their final workouts with basketball’s offseason MVP: Brickley, a man whose roller-coaster, almost Forrest Gumpian journey is inked onto his skin.
Runner's World, Sweat Science blog, Alex Hutchinson from
… In the day-to-day pursuit of interesting or surprising new findings, it’s easy to get lost in the weeds—to focus on the latest single study rather than the broad patterns that emerge over time. So, for my final column, I’m going to try to synthesize seven key messages that I’ve found myself returning to over and over again in this space. Here’s what writing Sweat Science has taught me:
1. Running is good for you “in moderation,” which is defined as “a lot more than you’re doing.”
… It is not, by any conventional definition, pleasurable. So, why then, are increasingly numbers of people paying good money to put themselves through it?
Fortunately, this is a question that academics at the University of Cardiff have sought to tackle. Published in the Journal of Consumer Research, their research confronts the seeming conundrum that, on one hand, consumers spend billions of dollars every year to alleviate different kinds of pain, while, on the other, millions of individuals participate in extremely painful leisure pursuits.
The paper’s title, “Selling Pain to the Saturated Self,” implies a key premise: that, unlike many sports and activities, where pain is a risk to which participants are prepared to subject themselves, in endurance sport pain is a core part of the appeal. Even a brief conversation with most ultrarunners is enough to confirm this. Races are reverentially described as “brutal” and “savage”, and suffering is discussed with gleeful awe. Similarly, the marketing of many races highlights the opportunities for pain that they are, in effect, selling.
Running into other players at top speed is hard enough without cutting recovery time in half. Thursday night NFL games – called a ‘poopfest’ by Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman—present a challenge to players and coaching staffs as they try to prepare in three days rather than the standard six.
Critics, like Sherman, claim that the quality of play suffers when teams are left with less time to prepare a game plan. And though the NFL is quick to point out that injury rates are no greater for Thursday games, players also complain that for a league ostensibly concerned with safety, playing while fatigued heightens the risk of injury.
Most teams don’t care to officially comment on the difficulties of playing on Thursday instead of the usual Sunday, but don’t confuse that silence for ignorance. It isn’t that NFL teams ignore the difficulty of playing while still bruised and tired, much of sports science in the NFL is dedicated to monitoring fatigue and optimizing recovery. In fact, the ability to bounce back after a hard practice or game has been recognized as an integral part of success, and a league wide acceptance of technology has been part of this movement.
… In pursuit of a transformed system that reflects this vision, KnowledgeWorks has conducted
multiple
studies
investigating how to successfully implement personalized learning. Through in-depth interviews with district, state, and classroom leaders, we have identified overall trends and conditions necessary to create a system of learning that benefits students through personalization. We have learned that robust personalized learning systems share the following features.
Instruction is aligned to rigorous college- and career-ready standards as well as the social and emotional skills students need to be successful in college and career.
Instruction is customized, allowing each student to design learning experiences aligned to his or her interests.
The pace of instruction is varied based on individual student needs, allowing students to accelerate or take additional time based on their level of mastery.
An undisclosed US Special Forces unit is looking to purchase prototypes of the Bodytrak soldier monitoring system, with a range of other military users expressing interest in trialling the device in recent months, Jane’s has learned.Bodytrak is an in-ear device.
Bodytrak is a small, in-ear system designed to measure multiple physiological aspects, including core body temperature, motion, and heart rate. It is non-intrusive, replacing the user’s existing earpiece communications device with a system that includes biometric monitoring technology.
The device is planned for manufacture in the second quarter of 2018, said Leon Marsh, founder and CEO of Inova Design Solutions, the UK-based developer of Bodytrak.
Chinese researchers have created a nanogenerator that can harvest power from any flowing liquid, including blood in the veins.
Hydroelectricity exploits the potential energy of flowing water (think rivers, waterfalls, marine currents, etc.). Turbines recover part of the kinetic energy of the water stream and transform into mechanical energy, then into electrical energy (hydroelectricity) by an alternator.
NimbleHeart, the Campell, California-based producer of clinical-grade mobile cardiac monitoring devices, announced that its fully reusable ECG device has received FDA clearance and will soon be brought to market.
The Physiotrace Smart wraps around a users torso, and is used without electrolytic gels or adhesives. It can be cleaned and disinfected easily by wiping with water and alcohol, thereby making it ideal for multi-patient use. These features, enabled by the device’s dry electrode technology, allow NimbleHeart’s device to avoid the more complicated cleaning requirements and discomfort of other patch- or strap-based ECG devices.
Working alongside an industrial robot can be frustrating and even downright dangerous. But a new sensing system could make human-robot collaboration a cinch.
Humatics, an MIT spinout, is developing an indoor radar system that should give robots and other industrial systems the ability to track people’s movements very precisely. This could make industrial systems significantly safer, make it possible to track worker performance in greater detail, and lead to more effective new forms of collaboration between people and machines.
“We very much see this enabling robots to live in human environments,” says David Mindell, a professor in the aeronautics and astronautics department at MIT, who is the company’s cofounder and CEO.
Stress fractures are injuries caused by cumulative, repetitive stress that leads to abnormal bone remodeling. Specific populations, including female athletes and endurance athletes, are at higher risk than the general athletic population. Whereas more than 460 000 individuals participate in collegiate athletics in the United States, no large study has been conducted to determine the incidence of stress fractures in collegiate athletes. OBJECTIVE:
To assess the incidence of stress fractures in National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) athletes and investigate rates and patterns overall and by sport. DESIGN:
Descriptive epidemiology study. SETTING:
National Collegiate Athletic Association institutions. PATIENTS OR OTHER PARTICIPANTS:
National Collegiate Athletic Association athletes. INTERVENTION(S):
Data were analyzed from the NCAA Injury Surveillance Program for the academic years 2004-2005 through 2013-2014. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE(S):
Injury rates and rate ratios (RRs) with 95% confidence intervals (CIs). RESULTS:
A total of 671 stress fractures were reported over 11 778 145 athlete-exposures (AEs) for an overall injury rate of 5.70 per 100 000 AEs. The sports with the highest rates of stress fractures were women’s cross-country (28.59/100 000 AEs), women’s gymnastics, (25.58/100 000 AEs), and women’s outdoor track (22.26/100 000 AEs). Among sex-comparable sports (baseball/softball, basketball, cross-country, ice hockey, lacrosse, soccer, swimming and diving, tennis, indoor track, and outdoor track), stress fracture rates were higher in women (9.13/100 000 AEs) than in men (4.44/100 000 AEs; RR = 2.06; 95% CI = 1.71, 2.47). Overall, stress fracture rates for these NCAA athletes were higher in the preseason (7.30/100 000 AEs) than in the regular season (5.12/100 000 AEs; RR = 1.43; 95% CI = 1.22, 1.67). The metatarsals (n = 254, 37.9%), tibia (n = 147, 21.9%), and lower back/lumbar spine/pelvis (n = 81, 12.1%) were the most common locations of injury. Overall, 21.5% (n = 144) of stress fractures were recurrent injuries, and 20.7% (n = 139) were season-ending injuries. CONCLUSIONS:
Women experienced stress fractures at higher rates than men, more often in the preseason, and predominantly in the foot and lower leg. Researchers should continue to investigate biological and biomechanical risk factors for these injuries as well as prevention interventions.
JAMA, The JAMA Network; Katherine A. Mikk, JD; Harry A. Sleeper; Eric J. Topol, MD from
… Health care, under pressure to embrace interoperability, is poised for transformation. The potential for future system improvements is vast, but depends, in part, on increased patient participation. Health care must find a way to shift from “the doctor will see you now” to “the patient will see the doctor now.” Patients need engagement beyond passively receiving services, but this will be challenging until they can easily access and use their health data. For this to proceed, control of health data must be transferred to the patient or the patient’s authorized representative.
More specifically, to obtain active patient engagement and health system improvement, 3 components are necessary: (1) common data elements that enable the sharing and merging of health data from multiple sources; (2) a patient encounter data receipt, comprised of relevant health data from each health care encounter, automatically pushed to the patient’s complete digital health record; and (3) a contract between patients and third-party health data managers (eg, health care organizations and commercial entities) that enables individuals to control their longitudinal digital health record. Most of these components already exist in some form, requiring only minor adjustments to effect health system transformation. [full text]
Nearly a month before his players would feel the fatigue stemmed from cross-country flights, sleep deprivation and a compressed schedule, Warriors coach Steve Kerr called Spurs coach Gregg Popovich.
The Warriors would play in San Antonio on March 11, marking their eighth game in 13 days and on the second night of a back-to-back after being in Minnesota. Kerr said he thought that portion of the schedule “made no sense.” So, he alerted Popovich he would rest his star players that night a month in advance.
“I learned from you,” Kerr said. “Look at this schedule.”
“Yeah, I’ll do the same thing,” Popovich answered.