The former NFL wide receiver with “FEAR GOD” etched on his biceps and his mother’s name written over his heart opened the worn black composition book with a faded newspaper photograph of retired NBA player Metta World Peace taped to the cover.
Titus Young was once classified among the most dangerous inmates at the Twin Towers Correctional Facility in downtown Los Angeles and spent most of his days in lockdown. In early 2017, he started to write.
“I have made so many mistakes I have become a little ashamed of being Titus Young,” he scribbled in fast-paced printing. “A lot of the stuff I have done was out of my control during the time. … I was hearing voices.
“Hearing voices is no joke, it’s actually very scary. I feel like someone is trying to come kill me.”
The New York Times Magazine, Stephanie Pearson from
Lindsey Vonn is the most decorated World Cup ski racer in United States history, but Olympic glory has been more elusive. Her three Winter Games, going back to 2002, have yielded just one gold medal and one bronze, both in Vancouver in 2010; she missed the Sochi Games in 2014 because of injury. Now 33, following more years of wear and tear that included multiple ruptured knee ligaments, a fractured right humerus, a concussion and an acute facet spinal-joint dysfunction, Vonn will still be among the favorites in Pyeongchang, where she will race in at least the downhill, super-G and Alpine combined events. Just last month, she won her 79th World Cup race, becoming the oldest woman to win in downhill.
Success on the snow requires Vonn to spend untold hours in the gym with her fitness trainer, Alex Bunt. “She never lets a session go,” he says. “Every single set and every rep matters. There’s no fluff.” On Dec. 22, the photographer Dina Litovsky captured Vonn’s workout in her home gym in Vail, Colo. The focus was upper-body and overall strength training. “It was,” Vonn says, “kind of a light day.”
… All of the noise that surrounded Odegaard for a year has disappeared. Soccer, impatient, has moved on to other prodigies. As Odegaard — still just 19, still baby-faced — dutifully signs autographs and poses for pictures on a bitterly cold night in this city in the north of the Netherlands, it is impossible not to think that he is a long way from Real Madrid, a long way from where he was meant to be, and to wonder whether moving to the biggest team in the world was too much, too soon.
“It is impossible to answer that question,” Tore Pedersen, a former Norwegian international defender, said when asked whether Odegaard could have found a more direct route to his goals by choosing another of his suitors. Pedersen, now an agent, consulted on Odegaard’s moves to both Madrid and Heerenveen.
Of far more significance — to Odegaard and to those concerned with his career — is that he is, now, in the right place to nurture his talent. In two years at Real Madrid, he made only one start for the first team, in the Copa del Rey. Carlo Ancelotti, the club’s former manager, dismissed his signing as a “PR stunt.”
Objective: To establish whether a simple integration of selected internal and external training load (TL) metrics is useful for tracking and assessing training outcomes during team-sport training.
Methods: Internal [heart rate training impulse (HR-TRIMP), session rating of perceived exertion (sRPE-TL)] and selected external (global positioning systems; GPS) metrics were monitored over seven weeks in 38 professional male rugby league players. Relationships between internal and external measures of TL were determined, and an integrated novel training efficiency index (TEI) was established. Changes in TEI were compared to changes in both running performance (1.2 km shuttle test) and external TL completed.
Results: Moderate to almost perfect correlations (r = 0.35–0.96; ±~0.02; range ± 90% confidence limits) were observed between external TL and each measure of internal TL. The integration of HR-TRIMP and external TL measures incorporating both body mass and acceleration/deceleration were the most appropriate variables for calculating TEI, exhibiting moderate (ES= 0.87–0.89; ±~0.15) and small (ES = 0.29–0.33; ±~0.07) relationships with changes in running performance and completed external TL respectively.
Conclusions: Combination of the TEI and an athlete monitoring system should reveal useful information for continuous monitoring of team-sport athletes over several weeks.
Recently “Load Management” has emerged in the sports arena as the latest buzzwords surrounding injury prevention. Rather than being a “trend”, I see effective loading as one of the most important factors underpinning good training programs. Despite the excitement around the topic, there is plenty of misinformation and misunderstanding concerning load management. In this article I will discuss some of the common misconceptions concerning load management and explain what load management really means.
LA Galaxy will host the inaugural LA Galaxy Sports Science Symposium, a three-day conference gathering some of the most progressive minds in sports science and performance training, at StubHub Center from May 23-25.
“I am honored to lead the inaugural year of this symposium along with many of our distinguished presenters,” said LA Galaxy Director of Sports Performance Pierre Barrieu. “The LA Galaxy are known for driving innovation and the LA Galaxy Sports Science Symposium will be a great example of that.
The New York Times Magazine, Jay Caspian Kang from
We Koreans, my father once argued, have thicker legs than our Asian neighbors, a trait that comes with athletic benefits and drawbacks. Big legs are good for short bursts, but the added muscle weight leads to stamina issues. This was in 1992, and my father, a chemist who tended to see things in terms of inputs and outputs, was explaining why our home country, South Korea, which had never meaningfully competed in the Winter Olympics, had won a handful of medals in short-track speedskating. (A decade later, he would revise this theory for our run to the semifinals of the World Cup in soccer. We had finally found a manager, he said, who understood genetics.)
In the 26 years since then, Koreans have come to dominate other things, many of them unrelated to innate leg strength. We rule the world in women’s golf, e-sports, break dancing, drinking (by volume of shots per week) and archery. The specificity of these pursuits has led to wild speculation among the diaspora about why we’re so good at such random sports.
We might not actually want to know the answer. The most sensible and palatable explanation, of course, is economic.
This study aimed to assess the effects of the total quality of recovery and well-being indices (self-ratings of sleep during the preceding night, stress, fatigue and delayed onset muscle soreness) on rating of perceived exertion (RPE) and physical enjoyment (PE) during small-sided games. A total of 20 professional soccer players (25 ± 0.8 years) completed four 5-a-side game sessions of 25-min duration each (4 × 4 min work with 3-min passive recovery in-between). All variables were collected before each game session with the exception of RPE and Physical Activity Enjoyment Scale that were collected after. The results demonstrate that recovery state and pre-fatigue states were not contributing signals of affected internal intensity and enjoyment of players. The study established the objectivity and utility of RPE as a useful tool for determining internal intensity during soccer-specific training as well as PE for assessing emotional response during exercise or training session.
A study led by researchers at Keele University has shown for the first time that human muscles possess a ‘memory’ of earlier growth – at the DNA level.
Periods of skeletal muscle growth are ‘remembered’ by the genes in the muscle, helping them to grow larger later in life.
The research, published in Scientific Reports – Nature, could have far-reaching implications for athletes caught using performance-enhancing muscle building drugs – as the drugs could be creating long-lasting changes, making short-term bans inadequate.
… [Kyle] Burris, a longtime baseball and sports fan who will work for the Cleveland Indians as an analyst this summer, wrote that he has talked to many teams about the work, and they’re interested in learning more.
“Many teams are using this type of technology, but don’t quite know what to do with the information,” Burris wrote. “For the foreseeable future, teams will be using these types of tools for internal scouting, since they’re able to test their own players.”
Burris noted that the exercises could eventually become a training mechanism for plate discipline. Literature has shown that many of the skills related to on-field performance can be improved by training, he wrote. Still, he said it is unclear whether those improvements could actually materialize on the field.
Soccer 2.0: Goal-line technology as well as a video referee that is supplied with virtual offside lines are already likely to be used at the 2018 World Cup. However, the international soccer association FIFA could also imagine players using wearables in the future – provided they meet certain requirements.
Of course, Nicholas Evans was asked for tickets for the 2018 World Cup in Russia at the Wearable Technologies Conference, which was organized in cooperation with the ISPO Munich 2018. Unfortunately, the head of the international soccer association’s technology and innovation group was unable to oblige in this respect during his lecture at the ICM. However, he was able to comment on what FIFA imagines Soccer 2.0 will be like, and on the role wearables might then play. The industry came away from his lecture with quite a lot of “homework”.
Arizona State University, College of Law, Center for Law, Science & Innovation from
Faculty Fellows Diana Bowman and Andrew Maynard we just awarded funding from ASU’s Global Sports Institute (GSI) for a project on “Gene Doping” – the use of CRISPR to alter genes in humans and produce perfect athletes. The award was part of GSI’s “Sport 2036” Grant Program to explore the future of sports.
Emerging and cutting-edge technologies have long been used to gain a competitive edge in sports. These technologies have been used in both legal and illegal ways. Gene doping may be particularly controversial as it has the potential to provide an unprecedented advantage for athletes and the organizations and nations that support them.
Governing bodies across the world of sport are taking gene doping seriously. The World Anti-Doping Agency has already announced a ban on all forms of gene editing in sports beginning this year. But it is plausible that by 2036 we could see the first generation designed from gestation for enhanced athletic traits.
The New Orleans Saints were the first team to go all-in on technology that is now sweeping across the NFL.
Zebra Technologies, the real-time player tracking system the Saints have been using for years, is now in the fourth year of a five-year contract with the NFL that uses Zebra to track every single player in the NFL on game day and produce statistics like the NFL’s Next Gen Stats.
Football-wise, there are sweeping implications for teams that use the technology in practice. New Orleans was the first, and now roughly one-third of the NFL uses Zebra to collect player data during practices.
The Clippers, in the middle of an identity overhaul, have emerged as NBA’s guinea pigs for two-way contracts. The Crossover examines L.A.’s culture change and the not-so-glamorous life of a two-way player.
… Federer’s epic demonstration came at an excellent time for the ATP. Here was the beloved ambassador for the game, playing like a spry teenager as he shattered another men’s record. But his feat utterly overshadowed a different story, one that may keep tennis administrators up at night in the coming days: The unexpected collapse of the group known as the Big Four.
It’s almost certainly the end of an era, even if Federer’s continued mastery mutes the fact.
This story is a darker one, because it’s not like Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic, and Andy Murray, all of whom are over 30, are just running out of steam after enjoying great careers [you can include Stan Wawrinka in this group]. They’re grappling with the perils of growing older in a punishing sport as they try to keep up with Federer. They’ve paid a high price, and it just may be that what they’ve really done is make The Mighty Fed look that much greater. If that’s even possible.
Block Six Analytics, Adam Grossman and Ross Chumsky from
What NFL player has the most impact on his team? It is common question, and unlike baseball and basketball, football does not have a consensus, baseline advanced analytic metric to rate players. More specifically, Wins Above Replacement (WAR) is typically used in baseball and Player Efficiency Rating (PER) is typically used in basketball. The idea behind both metrics is to quantify an individual player’s impact on winning above a minimal level of performance. With WAR, for example, a player’s overall contribution is essentially based on how many runs he created and how many runs he prevented as compared to a Triple-A player in the same position.
The reason that it has been more difficult to create this type of metric for football is that the sport relies on the performance of multiple team members on every play. This complexity makes it difficult to identify an individual player’s contribution. For example, the typical successful passing play requires an offensive line to protect a quarterback from a sack, a quarterback to throw the ball, and a wide receiver to catch the pass. Who deserves the most credit if the play is executed successfully?
In the process of creating the Revenue Above Replacement (RAR) for the NFL for this season, our team at Block Six Analytics (B6A) identified the need to create a version of this on-field metric.