… Gurley has called Los Angeles’ 2016 season “a nightmare.” After winning Rookie of the Year in 2015, the 2015 No. 10 pick finished 40th out of 41 qualifying rushers in yards per carry. As the team keeled toward 4-12, the normally deferential back said, “We looked like a middle-school offense out there.” But now, given the chance for a fresh start under a 31-year-old offensive wunderkind, Gurley wanted his running backs coach, Skip Peete, to stay.
For his part, Peete had already been talking to friends around the league since the Rams’ regime change. He’d worked for four teams over 11 seasons and moved his twins three times. What was one more? But McVay—impressed by Peete’s knowledge and moved by Gurley’s pitch—decided to retain the running backs coach in L.A.. Peete’s 10-year-old son Reeco would get to stay at the same school and keep playing for his youth soccer team, all while his dad got to keep developing one of the NFL’s best running backs.
… High school runners can often find stardom but it’s sometimes difficult to get that to translate onto the college scene and even more so into the professional space. Hasay has been fortunate to have thrived in all of them. She rose to prominence at Mission College Preparatory High School in San Luis Obispo and then went on to earn 18 All-American honors and win two NCAA titles in indoor track at the University of Oregon, before signing a professional contract with Nike. She currently trains with the Nike Oregon Project and works with coach Alberto Salazar (who remains under investigation by USADA) and Pete Julian.
“I think it comes down to being passionate about running and not necessarily caring about the wins and losses,” Hasay says. “I haven’t always had the most successful years because in college I wanted to do a lot better than I did but consistency is important. I was looking back at my Oregon career and I never finished less than fourth at an NCAA championship except for my freshman year in cross country, which is kind of expected. I think that’s incredible consistency that shows I can make it count on the biggest stage.”
VICE Sports, Aaron Gordon and Edward Linsmier from
Nico Mejia and Emiliana Arango takes us inside Florida’s IMG Academy, where elite teenage athletes have access to high-class amenities and staffs dedicated to ensuring they’re ready for a career in pro sports.
When it comes to some of the most important decisions we make — how much to bid for a house, the right person to hire, or how to plan for the future — there is strong scientific evidence that our brains play tricks on us.
Luckily, Mahzarin Banaji has a solution: Understand how your mind works so that you can learn to outsmart it.
The Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics and chair of the Department of Psychology is launching a new project — dubbed Outsmarting Human Minds — aimed at using short videos and podcasts to expose hidden biases and explore ways to combat them.
The first thing Dave Asprey will tell you about his newly opened Bulletproof Labs in Santa Monica is that it’s not a gym. Rather, he says, it’s the world’s first “human upgrade” facility dedicated exclusively to biohacking, or tweaking your biology for better performance.
At first glance, the light-filled space adjacent to his Bulletproof Coffee café on Main Street certainly looks like a gym, with personal trainers standing by and gleaming equipment lined up.
But take a closer look, and that equipment is unlike anything you’re used to seeing in a health club, from the cockpit-style atmospheric cell trainer by the door to the rotating virtual float tank in the center of the room. These are the same machines that Asprey has in the $1-million performance lab at his house in Victoria, Canada.
AZ ALKMAAR have built a ‘Performance Playground’ to evoke the spirit of street football at their Academy.
The playground is made up of a ‘beach’, asphalt pitch with two goals and basketball hoop, and a concrete wall.
Academy Director Paul Brandenburg explained: “We want to train boys who understand the game. We do this by compelling them in a variety of ways to make their own choices and to adapt.
Remember those “Magic Eye” posters from the 1990s? You let your eyes relax, and out of the tessellating structures, a 3-D image of a dolphin or a yin yang or a shark would emerge.
Becoming skilled at seeing those 3-D images is an example of visual perceptual learning, and University of Michigan researchers have found that this type of visual learning is cemented in the brain during the deepest part of sleep, called slow-wave sleep. The work here was done in mice, and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
When we see something, our retinas transmit that image to the thalamus in the brain, where neurons send very basic visual information to the visual cortex to be processed, says study author Sara Aton, U-M assistant professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology.
Klue, a new wearable tracker, was just unveiled at this year’s Health 2.0 conference in Silicon Valley. The makers of the device claim it can detect the type of activity that you’re engaged in, with a particular focus on eating and drinking. The ultimate goal of the technology is to help users adjust their habits, whether it is drinking more water while exercising or staying off snacks between meals.
The firm says it has developed AI algorithms that convert arm movements into actionable data. This data is presented using different metrics of how often the user eats and drinks and what can be done to change the patterns. During an activity, such as having one’s morning coffee, if the Klue device thinks that’s what you’re doing, it may ask you to click on the screen to confirm. This should help it improve its accuracy and hopefully make it a little smarter in the future.
In September 2017, Orreco won ‘Best use of Data Science in an SME’ at the DatSci Awards. The annual Awards recognise and reward the individuals and organisations who are forging the future with research and products that push the boundaries of data science. Winning the SME Category was especially gratifying as the team was up against strong competition from companies with up to 250 employees and turnover of $50 million.
Our entry
Our entry centred around Orreco’s Zone service and application. This biomarker-based service shows athletes how well they are coping with their training load, provides alerts about their current illness and injury risk and offers them guidance about improving their wellness and recovery. Why is this important? Because athletes are all about winning, and winning is about being available to play and being able to maintain peak performance over time.
… “I told him, he’s not the first great running back to have an ACL, if it is one, and come back pretty good,” Zimmer said. “Dalvin will have a great career.”
To be sure, the prospects for Cook’s return are good. He has modern medicine — and the example of running backs such as Adrian Peterson — to thank for that. A Northwestern Medicine study showed that 80 percent of NFL players return to play after undergoing an orthopedic procedure like an ACL repair, and Peterson’s stirring performance — winning MVP honors and rushing for 2,097 yards after making a nine-month recovery from a torn ACL in 2012 — helped to demystify the injury to some degree.
Surgical procedures are more precise, rehab programs are more effective and players are more prepared to return in full form from an injury that might once have ended a career.
The peak of Peterson’s post-ACL career came when he was 27, while Cook will try to return at age 23. That could help in one sense, since Cook’s youth could lead to a fuller recovery.
Amsterdam Collaboration on Health & Safety in Sports from
Vincent Gouttebarge, one of our ACHSS colleagues, is an expert on Common Mental Disorders (CMD) in current and former high level athletes. This recent study, which he led, aimed to determine the prevalence and comorbidity of symptoms of common mental disorders among current and former Dutch elite athletes, and to explore the inference between potential risk indicators and the outcomes measures under investigation.
Cross-sectional analyses were conducted on baseline questionnaires from an ongoing prospective cohort study among 203 current and 282 former elite Dutch athletes (response rate: 28% among current athletes and 95% among former athletes). Based on validated scales, an electronic questionnaire was set up and distributed, asking about distress, anxiety/depression, sleep disturbance, eating disorders, adverse alcohol use. The 4-week prevalences of CMD ranged from 6% for adverse alcohol use to 45% for anxiety/depression among current elite athletes, and from 18% for distress to 29% for anxiety/depression among former elite athletes.
Eating too much of the sweet stuff can have some pretty sour consequences: High-sugar diets could be putting your heart at risk, new research published in Clinical Science suggests.
In the study, researchers recruited 25 men with high levels of liver fat—a condition called non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, or NAFLD, which can often serve as a harbinger for heart issues—and those with low levels of liver fat. Then, they put each group on two diets with the same amount of calories for 12 weeks: a high-sugar diet, containing 650 calories worth of added sugar a day, or a low-sugar diet, which contained no more than 140 calories a day from added sugar. That’s similar to the recommended guidelines for added sugar, which is no more than five percent of your total daily calories, according to the study.
Sunday night’s American League Division Series game between the New York Yankees and Cleveland Indians was a true pitchers’ duel — the kind of taut, low-scoring affair we tend to think of when we conjure up mental images of postseason baseball.
It was also completely out of place in this year’s playoffs.
Through Sunday’s games, this is the highest-scoring postseason through the Division Series1 in 15 years, with the typical score resembling the Nationals’ 6-3 win over the Cubs Saturday night (or the pair of 8-2 victories the Astros hung on the Red Sox to open their series) much more closely than the Yankees’ 1-0 Game 3 margin. Starting pitchers have borne the brunt of the damage, and — coming on the heels of the Postseason of the Reliever — managers have used this as an excuse to hook them quicker than ever. All signs point to this being a bullpen-dominated postseason like no other.
Steven Terrell suffered a concussion five seconds into the NFL’s showcase game of Week 5, felled by a form of unpredictable contact that is rarely seen outside of a kickoff. Terrell, a reserve safety for the Kansas City Chiefs, was pushed to the ground from behind and then kicked in the head by a would-be tackler who was spinning wildly after sprinting some 60 yards to the ball.
Terrell lay facedown on the turf for several minutes at Houston’s NRG Stadium before walking to the sideline and being diagnosed with a concussion. The delay was long enough for any sane observer to wonder: Is it time for the kickoff to go?
At this point, I think we can make a strong argument for eliminating the play in its present form. For starters, it remains uniquely dangerous — despite multiple rule changes designed to curb its violence. In a game where Texans superstar J.J. Watt can break his leg after taking an awkward step, the force involved in kickoff injuries is stark. And efforts to make it safer have collectively crushed its entertainment value.
… Despite the advances of women in athletics over the past half century, only 35 of the 351 NCAA Division I schools have a non-interim female AD, a 9.97 percent figure that’s nearly identical to what it was almost 20 years ago. In the power conferences of the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12, SEC and Big East, that number dips even lower, with five of the 75 departments (6.7 percent) run by a woman — Pitt, Penn State, Washington, North Carolina State and DePaul.
Among women in the profession, there’s a strong belief and ample evidence that their standing has improved from where it once was. With those accomplishments, though, comes a fear that their progress has stagnated.
“It is kind of the last bastion of male dominance when you look at it from a leadership perspective,” said Jean Lenti Ponsetto, athletic director at DePaul. “You’ve seen women grow at much greater rates, whether it’s politics, the legal profession, the medical profession, the world of communications, computer science, science and technology. Athletics is still sort of bringing up the bottom tier.”