Again some doubt for something for me normal, when an athlete of good talent has continuity, motivation, tough and correct training, living (as Kenyan) in altitude for the most part of the year (223 days from the first of January).
The big performance of Moen, but especially the WAY he did, can clearly show two things :
1) White runners, with high talent (but not exceptional like many Kenyans and Ethiopians), if chose to be ATHLETES having a main focus only for some year in running, can be like the best African, and sometimes also better.
2) Clean runners, with high talent (but non exceptional like many Kenyans and Ethiopians), if chose to be ATHLETES having a main focus only for some year in running, can be at the top of the World, not depending their performance on the fact if are African or not.
… Ekblad was infuriated about the Hendricks hit. Not just because it interrupted his season, but because Ekblad was infuriated about the player he had become because of these injuries: timid, tentative, making too many decisions that put himself in harm’s way. Not the stuff expected from a first overall pick, as Ekblad was in 2014 for the Panthers, winning the Calder Trophy as rookie of the year in 2014-15.
Ekblad didn’t want to be that player. Pronger wasn’t about to let him be that player.
Several months ago, Dr. Mullen touched on a rarely discussed, but very critical topic: neural fatigue.
“The devil, or forgotten Little Nicky, for optimal race results is neural fatigue. This forgotten and unknown variable rises higher in events with high force production. Make sure the nervous system has achieved proper time to recover. If the nervous system does not recover it will not have adequate time to react and will fail…no good! It is estimated the neural system takes seven to ten times the length of the muscular system to recover.” (See Perfect Swimming Warm Down)What is neural fatigue? Quite simply neurons get tired. It’s still not entirely clear how or why this happens, but we do know that fatigue is more than the muscular and cardiovascular systems. Some theorize neural fatigue is an evolved biological mechanism to prevent us from causing serious damage to our bodies, which is one application of Dr. Noakes’ Central Governor Hypothesis. One way to address neural fatigue is via proper warm down, as described in the earlier post. Indeed some theorize that easy, over distance training is that much like a slow warm down, as easy swims can balance the nervous system and provide ongoing neural recovery.
Many swimmers train their easy days too hard and thus detract from optimal velocity on their harder days. Trying to squeeze a few seconds faster per 100 on an easy day adds only a negligible benefit for conditioning, but may chip away at the body’s neural readiness for the next hard workout. Alternatively, even if someone can habitually “dig deep” and attain optimal velocities on harder days, short term performance comes at the price of increased neural fatigue. As Gandevia (1996) writes,
Lots of things – poor running mechanics, muscle imbalances and nagging injuries – can spring up because of a weak core.
That’s because a solid base is one of the most fundamental parts of what Dr. Jordan Metzl, a prominent running doctor, calls a strong “kinetic chain” – that interconnection of muscles and joints from your lower legs up through your core and all the way up to your shoulders. When one part of that chain is faulty or weak when you’re running, the rest will crumble.
But if you focus on keeping that foundation in your core strong, you’re setting yourself up for great benefits in your running, like staying upright when fatigue sets in (or form falters) and staying injury-free over the long haul.
You’ve heard of Horan and Pugh, but that’s only the start. How do two Denver-area clubs compete with those drawing from much larger areas? A confluence of factors, FFT found out.
Before coaching hockey was on his radar, Tampa Bay Lightning coach Jon Cooper was sniping on the lacrosse field.
The former Hofstra attackman’s lacrosse background runs deep, as it does with so many Canadian hockey players. The connection between the two sports isn’t lost on him, as Cooper has used lessons from lacrosse to up his hockey coaching approaches.
“What they [both have] is hand eye combination,” said Cooper. “You have to have it in lacrosse and you have to have it in hockey. I always look at guys who can bat pucks out of the air all the time, and I always wonder if they were lacrosse players.”
“I read a lot about it and went down to Aspire. There’s a Spanish guy there, Alberto Mendez-Villanueva, who is absolutely brilliant and helped me a lot in understanding Tactical Periodisation.” (Eddie Jones, September 2017).
TGG tracked down Mendez-Villanueva to find out more about a training methodology that is also used by Jose Mourinho, Brendan Rodgers and Marco Silva…
… Neuroscientists who study decision-making set up all kinds of different games for animals to play, for example, and we collect data on what goes on in the brain when the animal makes a move. When everyone has a different experimental setup and methodology, we can’t determine whether the results from another lab are a clue about something interesting that’s actually going on in the brain or merely a byproduct of equipment differences.
The BRAIN Initiative, which the Obama administration launched in 2013, started to encourage the kind of collaboration that neuroscience needs. I just think it hasn’t gone far enough. So I co-founded a project called the International Brain Laboratory – a virtual mega-laboratory composed of many labs at different institutions – to show that the proverb “alone we go fast, together we go far” holds true for neuroscience. The first question the collaboration is tackling focuses on decision-making by the brain.
Timing is critical for playing a musical instrument, swinging a baseball bat, and many other activities. Neuroscientists have come up with several models of how the brain achieves its exquisite control over timing, the most prominent being that there is a centralized clock, or pacemaker, somewhere in the brain that keeps time for the entire brain.
However, a new study from MIT researchers provides evidence for an alternative timekeeping system that relies on the neurons responsible for producing a specific action. Depending on the time interval required, these neurons compress or stretch out the steps they take to generate the behavior at a specific time.
“What we found is that it’s a very active process. The brain is not passively waiting for a clock to reach a particular point,” says Mehrdad Jazayeri, the Robert A. Swanson Career Development Professor of Life Sciences, a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and the senior author of the study.
British sportswear brand inov-8 has teamed up with The University of Manchester to become the first-ever company to incorporate graphene into running and fitness shoes.
Laboratory tests have shown that the rubber outsoles of these shoes, new to market in 2018, are stronger, stretchier and more resistant to wear.
Graphene is the thinnest material on earth and is 200 times stronger than steel. First isolated at The University of Manchester in 2004, it’s the world’s first two-dimensional material at just one-atom thick and has the potential to revolutionise many areas of technology.
The researchers, from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich), developed their ink using two bacteria as the active component: Pseudomonas putida, which can break down the very commonly-used but toxic chemical phenol; and Acetobacter xylinum, which secretes extremely pure nanocellulose, a promising material for dressing burns as it has analgesic and moisture-retaining properties. The ink, which has been dubbed “Flink” (functional living ink), is comprised of a viscous, biocompatible gel made from long-chain sugar molecules, silica and hyaluronic acid, and also contains the culture medium that feeds the bacteria.
The consistency of Flink is particularly crucial; it needs to be self-supporting, but must also allow the bacteria some freedom of movement. “The ink must be as viscous as toothpaste and have the consistency of Nivea hand cream,” explained Manuel Schaffner, who worked with research director Prof André Studart, head of the Laboratory for Complex Materials at ETH, which specialises in functional materials for 3D printing.
MIT engineers have devised a 3-D printing technique that uses a new kind of ink made from genetically programmed living cells.
The cells are engineered to light up in response to a variety of stimuli. When mixed with a slurry of hydrogel and nutrients, the cells can be printed, layer by layer, to form three-dimensional, interactive structures and devices.
The team has then demonstrated its technique by printing a “living tattoo” — a thin, transparent patch patterned with live bacteria cells in the shape of a tree. Each branch of the tree is lined with cells sensitive to a different chemical or molecular compound. When the patch is adhered to skin that has been exposed to the same compounds, corresponding regions of the tree light up in response.
Henkel Adhesive Technologies further strengthens its expertise for printed electronics by investing in Copprint Technologies Ltd (Copprint), Israel. The advanced materials start-up has developed a novel technology for producing conductive copper inks that can provide substantial cost benefits for a variety of printed electronics applications.
Wearable sensors have recently seen a large increase in both research and commercialization. However, success in wearable sensors has been a mix of both progress and setbacks. Most of commercial progress has been in smart adaptation of existing mechanical, electrical and optical methods of measuring the body. This adaptation has involved innovations in how to miniaturize sensing technologies, how to make them conformal and flexible, and in the development of companion software that increases the value of the measured data. However, chemical sensing modalities have experienced greater challenges in commercial adoption, especially for non-invasive chemical sensors. There have also been significant challenges in making significant fundamental improvements to existing mechanical, electrical, and optical sensing modalities, especially in improving their specificity of detection. Many of these challenges can be understood by appreciating the body’s surface (skin) as more of an information barrier than as an information source. With a deeper understanding of the fundamental challenges faced for wearable sensors and of the state-of-the-art for wearable sensor technology, the roadmap becomes clearer for creating the next generation of innovations and breakthroughs.
Billy Joel. Oprah Winfrey. Martin Luther King Jr. Elton John. Ken Griffey Jr.
Given his relative youth, Austin Cannon would not seem to have a lot in common with such a distinguished group of immensely successful people. Yet like all these celebrities, the backup right guard on Virginia Tech’s football team squared off in a battle against depression and anxiety – and attempted to take his own life to win.
Fortunately, Cannon survived, and these days, he continues to take steps toward prosperity, with trained professionals in the sports medicine and sport psychology areas of the Virginia Tech Athletics Department helping and guiding him along the way.