Earlier this season, Florida Panthers coach Bob Boughner ditched the murky middle ground of optional morning skates and instead began banning them outright. Heaven help any brave soul that dares defy someone nicknamed The Boogeyman, but these team-wide decrees were really directed at one player in particular. All but armed with a padlock and steel link chain for latching the rink doors shut, Boughner found that only ironclad rules could keep center Aleksander Barkov away from the ice.
“He never wants to stay off,” Boughner laments. “So I started saying nobody is allowed, just to keep him off.”
By now Boughner understands his best player lacks any such off-switch. Through Thursday, Barkov led all NHL forwards in average ice time (22:15) and could become the first to surpass 22:00 across a full schedule since Martin St. Louis six years ago. After Florida hired him last June, one of Boughner’s early tasks involved kiboshing Barkov’s periodic night-time workouts, for which the 22-year-old would slip into the Florida Panthers IceDen using his employee swipe card and train alone. “Everyone’s always on him to take some time off and rest his body a little bit,” defenseman Mike Matheson says. “But he doesn’t seem to slow down very often.”
Official Manchester United Website, Steve Bartram from
“He’s always had that twinkle in his eye, has Jesse Lingard. The impish smile, too. There’s always something going on. You’re never too far away from something happening.
“I came to Manchester United in 1990 as a part-time coach brought in by Brian Kidd. I then joined the Academy as a full-time member of staff in 1998, so I’ve seen the journeys of quite a lot of players in that time. This particular young man is a gem. Not only as a footballer, but as a human being, probably one of the best players I’ve had the privilege to coach; such a charming, mischievous young man and a joyous young player. He’s very, very likeable. He’s had a journey, as all players have, but Jesse’s journey to where he is now is unique. The fact that he is the boy he is just makes his journey even better.
He wasn’t prepared to lead the U.S. Bobsled team to Pyeongchang. But eight months after the shocking death of his mentor—and America’s greatest bobsled driver—the 30 year-old has his sights set on the podium.
Zack Wheeler’s desire to return to the Mets this season fully healthy is off the charts. Here is what you don’t know about Wheeler fighting his way back:
In an effort to overcome the stress reaction in his right arm, Wheeler did not pitch last season after July 22, but to give himself an even better chance to be healthy for 2018, the right-hander went the extra mile.
“It needed two full months of rest. I got that, and then I’ve been taking these shots every day for the past six months. The medicine is called Forteo and it is supposed to strengthen your bones, so hopefully that helps,’’ Wheeler told The Post.
… One Norwegian mother, the pulmonary powerhouse Marit Bjoergen, finds her fifth Olympics in cross-country here, having won a silver at Salt Lake City in 2002, a silver at Turin in 2006, three golds, a silver and a bronze at Vancouver in 2010 and three golds in Sochi in 2014. That made 10, the number she took to her final Olympics with her 37-year-old body that gave birth in 2015 to both a son and, presumably, the attached skis.
On Thursday here, she walked with three teammates into a school gymnasium, beneath the glass basketball backboards, as photographers followed her from one baseline to the other.
“My experience from previous championships makes me calm and reflective,” she said, “so the pressure on me is a bit lower than my first Olympics. I feel like this is just another ski run, like all the other ones. So I’ll keep calm.” And: “It is of course tougher and tougher for me to compete in the top.”
Jock Landale always knew he would spend a year at Timbertop. His father went, his grandfather went, his great-grandfather went. It’s a family tradition.
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Nestled in the foothills of the Victorian Alps in southeast Australia, Timbertop is a campus of the prestigious Geelong Grammar School. A boarding school based in Melbourne, Geelong has been sending its ninth-grade students away to Timbertop since 1953. Students live in cabins, are cut off from most modern technology and challenged in ways not possible — both physically and mentally — through more traditional schooling methods. It counts Prince Charles as an alumnus.
The curriculum includes heavy doses of backcountry hiking, cross-country skiing, canoeing and rogaining — a sport involving long-distance, cross-country navigation. It’s demanding. By the end of the year, students are expected to be able to complete what amounts to a 20.5-mile run, up and down a mountain.
With 244 athletes on the 2018 U.S. Olympic Team, each athlete’s path to South Korea has been unique. Some started competing in their sport at a young age, while others began training just a few years ago. There’s one thing more than one-third of the team has in common: collegiate athletics played a role in their journey to becoming an Olympian.
From ice hockey to bobsled to biathlon, college athletics has fully rooted itself in the makeup of the 2018 U.S. Olympic Team. Overall, 36 percent of Team USA competed collegiately at 48 institutions across all three NCAA divisions, while 76 percent attended college at 87 different schools.
“The diversity of school contributions to the 2018 U.S. Olympic Team highlights the importance of our unique intercollegiate athletics system to the U.S. Olympic Movement,” said USOC chief of sport performance Alan Ashley. “Our athletes have achieved impressive academic accolades while striving to be world-class competitors.”
It’s always fascinated me just how much athletic skillsets vary dramatically from athlete to athlete, even at the highest sports levels. An example is Paul Scholes, one of the players I admired most throughout my time at Manchester United. As the strength and conditioning coach, I can tell you his physical attributes gave him little advantage over his competitors. What he did have, however, was incredible mental abilities. This is why Sir Alex Ferguson called him: ‘One of the greatest football brains Manchester United has ever had’.
The latest sports science studies show that when elite players are compared to sub-elite players, the differences in mental performance are huge. Reading and responding to game flow, predicting opponents and ball trajectories, and responding rapidly under pressure are key areas where elite performers gain a critical edge in competitive play. These factors are typically undertrained, yet the brain’s neuroplasticity allows rapid performance gains, with long-lasting effects. The missing piece of the puzzle is utilizing the right techniques, which is where the latest training technologies like NeuroTracker come in. As the first ever coach to use this, and other cutting-edge training tools, I’ve never looked back. Here are three reasons why cognitive training tools like NeuroTracker can make a difference.
PLOS One; Daniel P. Nicolella Lorena Torres-Ronda, Kase J. Saylor, Xavi Schelling from
This study aimed to determine the intra- and inter-device accuracy and reliability of wearable athletic tracking devices, under controlled laboratory conditions. A total of nineteen portable accelerometers (Catapult OptimEye S5) were mounted to an aluminum bracket, bolted directly to an Unholtz Dickie 20K electrodynamic shaker table, and subjected to a series of oscillations in each of three orthogonal directions (front-back, side to side, and up-down), at four levels of peak acceleration (0.1g, 0.5g, 1.0g, and 3.0g), each repeated five times resulting in a total of 60 tests per unit, for a total of 1140 records. Data from each accelerometer was recorded at a sampling frequency of 100Hz. Peak accelerations recorded by the devices, Catapult PlayerLoad™, and calculated player load (using Catapult’s Cartesian formula) were used for the analysis. The devices demonstrated excellent intradevice reliability and mixed interdevice reliability. Differences were found between devices for mean peak accelerations and PlayerLoad™ for each direction and level of acceleration. Interdevice effect sizes ranged from a mean of 0.54 (95% CI: 0.34–0.74) (small) to 1.20 (95% CI: 1.08–1.30) (large) and ICCs ranged from 0.77 (95% CI: 0.62–0.89) (very large) to 1.0 (95% CI: 0.99–1.0) (nearly perfect) depending upon the magnitude and direction of the applied motion. When compared to the player load determined using the Cartesian formula, the Catapult reported PlayerLoad™ was consistently lower by approximately 15%. These results emphasize the need for industry wide standards in reporting validity, reliability and the magnitude of measurement errors. It is recommended that device reliability and accuracy are periodically quantified.
Lindsey Vonn remains one of the most gifted and decorated downhill skiers ever, and at age 33 she’s poised to expand upon her greatness at the XXIII Winter Olympic Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea. Yet her snowy paths to glory have been cratered with spectacular crashes and horrible injuries — broken bones, torn ligaments, concussions — that would have ended a less stalwart athlete’s career.
Each time, though, Vonn’s recovered, thanks in large part to the advanced sports medicine provided at the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association’s Center of Excellence in Park City, Utah. Along with availing herself of the latest and greatest gym equipment and machines at the COE, as it’s known, Vonn has access to virtual reality setups to simulate racing down a slalom course, computers crunching big data to enhance performance (legally) and strobe glasses to help retrain the brain after knee injuries.
The 85,000-square-foot state-of-the-art facility sits on five verdant acres in the Wasatch Mountains, just outside of Park City, home of USSA, the governing body of snow sports in the United States. It opened in 2009, paid for with $22 million in private donations — another reminder that the United States remains one of the only nations that doesn’t fund its Olympic athletes. Besides training and education for Team USA skiers and snowboarders, the COE is a rehabilitation and sports medicine showcase. “The hardware and techniques we use are on the forefront of injury rehab,” said Kyle Wilkens, medical director of USSA. “It’s changing the way we serve our athletes.”
… slack empowers your worst people to overwhelm your best. It has that in common with the open office.
It normalizes interruptions, multitasking, and distractions, implicitly permitting these things to happen IRL as well as online. It normalizes insanely short reply times for questions. In the slack world people can escalate from asking in a room to @person to @here in a matter of minutes. And they’re not wrong to – if your request isn’t handled in 5 minutes it’s as good as forgotten.
Somewhere along the way we forgot that interruptions are toxic to real work. It wasn’t always this way. On day 1 of my first trading job the only instruction I received was ‘when the market is open, mute your phone.’ The subtext was ‘or else’. If someone said this to me today I’d give them a hug, and I’m not a hugger.
The Olympic Games are starting to prove themselves not just as a showcase for the world’s elite athletes, but for leading-edge health IT initiatives.
A week ago we reported how the HIMSS Olympic Healthcare Interoperability Initiative alongside SNOMED International, will use the games after PyeongChang – the 2020 Summer Games in Tokyo, the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing and beyond – as a proving ground for interoperability and population health: Using standards-based tech to allow for more seamless health information exchange for the treatment of athletes, trainers and attendees from more than 200 countries.
On Feb. 6, the International Olympic Committee and GE Healthcare announced the launch of a new analytics tool meant to enable personalized care at the 2018 Olympic Winter Games in South Korea that start this week, as well as at the 2020 Summer Games in Tokyo.
STAT, Atheendar Venkataramani, Maheer Gandhavadi and Anupam Jena from
W
hen NFL players went on strike in 1987, NFL teams scrambled to fill their rosters with replacement players, individuals who had some experience with college or professional football but who weren’t on NFL rosters that year. The games they played during the three-week strike were exceedingly unpopular with fans, and the replacement players became a footnote in sports history.
So it’s ironic that these players may actually play a vital role by helping us understand how playing in the NFL affects long-term health.
There is considerable interest in this topic. The main concern is that injuries to the brain may shorten the lives of NFL players. Lifestyle choices, such as substance use (either during or after a player’s career), and the loss of purpose that can come after early retirement, are other factors that may also raise the risk of early death.
… We reached out to a number of Winter Olympians—everyone from Steve Langton, a 6’2″, 227-pound bobsled push-man—to Madison Chock, a 5’2″, 102-pound ice dancer, and many of the builds in between. Given the wildly different demands of each sport and the varying body types of each athlete (not to mention their unique taste preferences), we expected to get back a list of foods that reflected a similar variety. Instead, we found that nearly every athlete we spoke to eats some twist on the same foundational formula. Which raises the question: What is that basic lineup?
Oats, eggs, and coffee.
“The meal has a lot going for it,” says Trevor Kashey, an Ohio-based nutritionist who has consulted for various Olympic teams.
The Conversation; Paul Bradley, Andy Laws and Jack Ade from
… For four decades, clubs used the more traditional system of analysing the distance covered by players from walking through to sprinting. Although this “old” technique provides some basic insight into the physical demands of match play, it lacks important context, such as the tactical reasons why players move.
But our novel approach focuses not only on intense efforts but effectively contextualises these efforts in relation to tactical activities for each position on the field. For example, the overlapping runs a full back might make or running “in behind” for a centre forward. It also considers collectively the moves and decisions a team might make, such as closing down opposition players.