… According to trainer Kyle Boddy, Ottavino’s mysterious, jacked-up picture was taken at his facility in Washington, and Boddy tweeted that “Tim will throw for teams at a showcase in the near future.” Lincecum was DFA-ed by the Angels in August 2016, having entirely lost the brilliance he had throughout his late-2000s peak.
Lincecum, who’s off social media, was believed to be in the Seattle area. He hadn’t been publicly seen since January of this year, when he appeared at the Women’s March in San Francisco. When the Bay Area’s Mercury News sent reporter Daniel Brown to find him in September, he came up empty.
Tom Hackimer loves Driveline, uses a Motus Sleeve, and is one class short of earning a physics degree from St. John’s University. In other words, Minnesota’s 2016 fourth-round pick is a pitching nerd. He’s also an intriguing prospect. In 43 relief appearances this past season, the sidearming 5-foot-11 right-hander logged a 1.76 ERA and 10.4 strikeouts per nine innings between Low-A Cedar Rapids and High-A Fort Myers. He followed that up with a strong showing in the Arizona Fall League.
Hackimer discussed his scientific and methodical approach, which includes slow-motion video and the modeling of his motion after Joe Smith’s, earlier this month.
Last week, Utah Jazz’ Rudy Gobert suffered his second knee injury of the season after his teammate, Derrick Favors, rolled into his left knee. Unfortunately, for Gobert, this resulted in a sprained left posterior cruciate ligament (PCL) and a bone bruise in the tibia (leg bone). Earlier in November, a collision with Miami Heat’s Dion Waiters, resulted in a bone bruise to his right knee, which caused Gobert to miss 11 games.
The PCL is one of the two cruciate ligaments of the knee. It is located behind the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) in the center of the knee, and it is mainly responsible for preventing the tibia from being displaced behind the femur (thigh bone). There are multiple ways athletes can injure their PCL including landing with too much stress on the knee with the foot pointing downwards, being hit on the front of the knee at the top of the tibia, and/or hyperextending the knee.
… the Patriots actually bought two planes – a pair of Boeing 767 wide-body jets retrofitted with first-class amenities including extra-wide seats that completely recline.
According to Jim Nolan, the C.O.O. of the Patriots’ Gillette Stadium, the team needed larger aircraft to accommodate their staff and equipment.
‘[In the charter business] we’ve seen smaller planes being used,’ Nolan said. ‘So by getting our own plane, we can handle all the people and all the equipment on every trip.’
The team plans to off-set some of the cost of operating two planes by renting them out when they’re not in use, according ESPN. Still, a used Boeing 767 can cost anywhere from $5 million to $65 million, depending on the age and condition of the plane.
The moment that lingered in my mind after a recent triathlon-science conference came from a panel discussion with “gold-medal coaches,” including Iñaki Arenal, head of the Spanish high-performance team, and Malcolm Brown, coach of the Olympic-medal-winning Brownlee brothers. I asked the coaches to name the single biggest change in elite triathlon training in 2017 compared with a decade earlier. The answers had nothing to do with wearable tech or secret workouts. Instead both gave the same answer: strength training.
Coaches often quote the statistic that top distance runners run at around 180 steps per min. However, on its own, this information tells us nothing. After all, you could take 180 steps in 60 seconds and go nowhere! Crucially, you must move forward with each of those steps. And not just forward, but forward as much as you can, without reducing your optimal stride count.
While a number of factors such as bodyweight play a role in stride length, the ability to press a large amount of force through the floor, quickly, is key and that requires actively strong leg muscles. Running to increase stride length can help you run faster by building general calf conditioning, strength and power.
So, Boston Globe reporter Bob Hohler came out with a report confirming what I said last week on the Felger & Mazz show on 98.5 The SportsHub: Alex Guerrero, Tom Brady’s training guru, has largely been banned from the stadium and the Patriots’ sidelines by Bill Belichick.
Why did this happen? How big of a problem is it? What else have I learned?
Sure, we’ve all heard about how the pros “turn their pedals in anger” as they crush their competitors’ souls. And yes, sports psyche studies report that anger and tension (so long as they’re not part of depression) can turbo charge your performance. But that only works to a point, after which your performance starts dipping in the same direction as your mood.
“You can use anger to muster up a burst of energy, like when you see a rival ahead of you and you need to catch them and make a pass,” says sport and exercise psychologist Haley Perlus, PhD, author of The Ultimate Achievement Journal. “But you can’t stay in that zone. It eats too much energy, especially in endurance sports. So you have to use those negative emotions strategically and be able to switch back to a positive space quickly, so you can use that energy for the work you need to do.”
Your metabolism affects more than your girth, says family medicine physician Daniel Allan, MD. A basic metabolic panel (BMP) shows how well your body keeps all systems humming.
Personal technology is getting a bad rap these days. It keeps getting more addictive: Notifications keep us glued to our phones. Autoplaying episodes lure us into Netflix binges. Social awareness cues—like the “seen-by” list on Instagram Stories—enslave us to obsessive, ouroboric usage patterns. (Blink twice if you’ve ever closed Instagram, only to re-open it reflexively.) Our devices, apps, and platforms, experts increasingly warn, have been engineered to capture our attention and ingrain habits that are (it seems self evident) less than healthy.
Unless, that is, you’re talking about fitness trackers. For years, the problem with Fitbits, Garmins, Apple Watches, and their ilk has been that they aren’t addictive enough. About one third of people who buy fitness trackers stop using them within six months, and more than half eventually abandon them altogether.
As for that guy at work whose Fitbit appears to be bionically integrated with his wrist, it’s unclear whether wearing the thing actually makes him more fit. Most studies on the effectiveness of fitness trackers have produced weak or inconclusive findings (blame short investigation windows and small, homogenous sample sizes). In fact, two of the most well-designed studies to date have turned up less than stellar results.
… One of the main advantages that the technique has over alternatives, is its versatility. The majority of current wearable electronic devices are created from relatively rigid components which are then mounted on wearable materials such such as textiles, plastic or rubber. However, these are often impractical as they can be uncomfortable to wear allowing limited accommodation for the human body, they are not breathable for example. They can also be easily damaged during washing. The team’s product is both comfortable to wear and able to withstand up to 20 washing cycles in a standard machine.
According to Dr Felice Torrisi of the Cambridge Graphene Centre, the paper’s senior author, another advantage of the team’s technique is that as he told EurekAlert, ‘Other inks for printed electronics normally require toxic solvents and are not suitable to be worn, whereas our inks are both cheap, safe and environmentally-friendly, and can be combined to create electronic circuits by simply printing different two-dimensional materials on the fabric.’
The Functional Movement Screen (FMS) is a tool used to assess the quality of human movement. Previous FMS researchers reported a difference between the comprehensive and individual FMS test scores of injured and uninjured participants. OBJECTIVE:
To evaluate the accuracy of the FMS for predicting injury in National Collegiate Athletic Association Division II athletes and to evaluate how an injury definition may affect the prognostic values. DESIGN:
Cross-sectional study. SETTING:
University preparticipation examinations. PATIENTS OR OTHER PARTICIPANTS:
A total of 257 collegiate athletes (men = 176, women = 81) between the ages of 18 and 24 years. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE(S):
The athletes were prospectively screened with the FMS and monitored for subsequent injury. The ability of the FMS to accurately predict musculoskeletal injuries, overall injuries, and severe injuries was determined. RESULTS:
Receiver operating characteristic curve provided the FMS cut score of ≤15 for the study sample. The areas under the curve were 0.53, 0.56, and 0.53 for musculoskeletal injury, overall injury, and severe injury, respectively. Sensitivity was 0.63 (0.62, 0.61, 0.65), whereas specificity was below 0.50 (0.49, 0.49, 0.45) for all 3 injury definitions of musculoskeletal injury, overall injury, and severe injury, respectively. Relative risk was 1.25 for musculoskeletal injuries, 1.24 for overall injuries, and 1.45 for severe injuries. CONCLUSIONS:
The overall prognostic accuracy of the FMS offered a slightly better than 50/50 chance of correctly classifying those most at risk for injury. As such, the FMS did not provide discriminatory prediction of musculoskeletal injury, overall injury, or severe injury in National Collegiate Athletic Association Division II athletes. CLINICAL RELEVANCE:
Using the identified optimal cut score produced inadequate validity, regardless of the injury definition. We recommend using the FMS to assess movement quality rather than as a standalone injury-prediction tool until additional research suggests otherwise. Clinicians screening for injury risk should consider multiple risk factors identified in the literature.
The first step is to understand early symptoms, and be proactive. An increase in resting HR, or higher HR values relative to effort during workouts is the first signal something is brewing inside of you. Reacting to these early symptoms, by driving intensity down during prescribed workouts, or just taking a day or two completely off, can ward off a heavier onset of illness.
If the illness is a head cold, training can resume as dictated. However, once an illness seems to spread outside of the head area, care must be taken to ensure you get back to optimal health before adhering to the prescribed stresses of your training plan. This is when the “checking off the boxes” mentality of the type A athlete must be quelled.
Once an illness starts to make its way below the neckline, you can actually cause an increase in the severity of symptoms by continuing to move forward with prescribed training intensities.
Real Salt Lake brought back Brooks Lennon on a permanent transfer earlier this week, locking up the 20-year-old winger after he spent 2017 on loan to RSL from Liverpool.
The signing keeps together RSL’s exciting young core, which includes Jefferson Savarino, Justen Glad, Danilo Acosta and Sebastian Saucedo, all of whom, like Lennon, were 20 or younger during the 2017 season.
Together, that group of U-21 players played 6,819 minutes in 2017, the most of any such group of players on any team in MLS in 2017.