… “I don’t think it’s one of those things our team looks at when it comes to age. You come in and this is the expectation you have at whatever age you are. You can sit back and it’s like ‘wow, this is how young you are’, but during practice the coaches don’t necessarily care about that. This is your expectation and this is where our team wants to be and wants to do.” She adds: “But it is amazing to look at them and look at how long they’re going to be in this team. It’s so exciting because you always want the US to be a powerhouse and they are amazing players that can continue our legacy. But you don’t think about that on the pitch – the expectation our team has is set.”
There hasn’t just been evolution on the field. The team spent most of 2016 and early 2017 in a protracted dispute with their federation for better pay after the success of 2015. Finally, in April 2017, the team agreed a deal with US Soccer and now, less than a year later, the federation has just named Carlos Cordeiro as its replacement for outgoing president Sunil Gulati.
With changes on and off the field, how optimistic is Ertz for the future of women’s soccer in her home country? “I’m optimistic,” she says. “It’s important to grow. The opportunities I’ve been given in this sport have been amazing. If you can set a standard and make sure others have those opportunities then that’s what you do. This sport has opened up so many doors for me and to be able to grow that and know the next generation all around the world can enjoy that is extremely important.”
… Surgical treatment of meniscus tears ranges from cutting out the torn portion (while preserving the normal meniscus) to repairing the torn meniscus using sutures. While repairing the meniscus likely provides better long-term outcomes, not all tears are amenable to repair. Repairability really depends on the location of the tear and the tear configuration.
Unlike most soft-tissues in the body, the meniscus doesn’t have a very good blood supply. Attempting to repair a tear in an area with less blood supply typically leads to failure.
One downside to repair, particularly as it relates to professional athletes, relates to healing time. A conservative estimate to return to sports after repair is four to six months.
Based on the reports that Butler thinks he may be ready for the playoffs, one can only assume that he had a meniscectomy. This is a quick procedure in which the torn portion of the meniscus is cut out. Because nothing is repaired, there is no need to let the meniscus heal after the procedure. In these cases, return to sports can occur within four to six weeks.
The soccer news starts with bad news for USMNT player Jordan Morris and the Seattle Sounders. Morris tore his ACL in Seattle’s CONCACAF Champions League round of 16 game against Santa Tecla and will miss the 2018 MLS season. The 23 year-old missed significant time in 2017 due to injuries. That dropped his appearances from 34 in a debut season where he won MLS Rookie of the Year to 18. Morris made 13 appearances for the USMNT in 2017, a key part of the squad when healthy.
“We are going to do what is best for Jordan’s career long-term,” Seattle Sounders GM Garth Lagerwey said. “We think he is a Sounder for the long-term, he is in the club’s long-term plans. Jordan is part of the Sounders, that has not changed, that will not change. We are going to do what’s best for him long-term, which may mean a longer recovery.”
… “Our season would end in early April,” Brown has said, over and over for four years. “Then you watch the playoffs. And all those weeks later, they are still playing. Still. That’s a different situation. Different.”
It takes conditioning and patience. It takes experience and will. It takes dozens of yards of ankle tape. It takes weeks of sleepless nights. But for an NBA championship, it takes the awareness that all of that will be necessary.
During the women’s downhill race on Wednesday, Bode Miller, who has been an NBC color commentator for the alpine ski events at this Olympics, offered some insight on the mental toll of his former profession.
“Everyone says that the pitcher’s mound is the loneliest place in sports. I would say the Olympic start gate is the loneliest place,” Miller said. “You have hundreds of millions of people focused on you. There’s no one who can help you. You’re alone at that point. You’re fully exposed.”
Such is the psychological weight of competing in the Games that even stone-cold killers like Mikaela Shiffrin aren’t unaffected. The 22-year-old two-time gold medalist confessed to throwing up out of nervousness before the first run of her slalom race last Friday. Granted, with the exception perhaps of Austria’s Marcel Hirscher, Shiffrin has had more pressure on her than any other athlete in Pyeongchang.
How does she deal? We asked a few sports psychologists for their tips on performing in such a high-stress environment.
… While social media may assist athletes with sports marketing, ultimately performance is the most important factor for any Olympian. What is the relationship between social media and performance? Currently, little research exists to help answer this question.
As an Olympian, researcher and consultant in sport psychology, I am intrigued by this phenomenon and am currently conducting a study in this area on the Pyeongchang Games.
The field of sport psychology is concerned with understanding the psychosocial factors that positively and negatively influence performances of athletes, as well as the strategies that will promote excellence.
Specifically, researchers have been able to identify the characteristics, which distinguish successful Olympians from those less successful. In a study examining the development of Olympic champions, Daniel Gould, Kristen Dieffenbach and Aaron Moffet found athletes to have a high degree of confidence, mental toughness, optimism, and were goal oriented and students of their sport. These athletes were also able to block out distractions and control their level of anxiety.
We usually think of personality in terms of the differences we can see – Sarah is smiley and chatty, John frets a lot, while Noah is neat and tidy. These differences are fascinating, but if we focus only on observable behaviour, it doesn’t tell us much about the roots of personality.
Looking inside our body gives greater clues. And a trickle of recent findings has recently turned into a torrent, as studies are now revealing how personality is linked with many aspects of our biology, from our hormones and our immune system to the microbes in our gut.
These are important discoveries because personality – especially the traits of conscientiousness and neuroticism – is strongly associated with our future mental and physical health and longevity.
As the U.S. women’s ice hockey team skated to its first Olympic gold medal since 1998, stitched into the sweaters on the backs of every player was a small motion sensor weighing fewer than 10 grams and transmitting reams of data over a dedicated frequency to antennas installed throughout the arena. Combined with camera-tracking of the puck, the Omega Timing system can tally each’s player number of shifts, passes, speed, acceleration, time on ice and more.
That information is generated, processed and distributed in fewer than 100 milliseconds, with some of the statistics displayed on television broadcasts or on the stadium scoreboard. International hockey does not permit on-bench access to this data — the NHL allows iPads for video review — so coaches and players can see the information after the game.
“The analytics and the statistics that we can generate through these sensors will allow to explain exactly how a goal was scored, how he got to the goal — for both teams, for the one scoring it and the one [allowing] it,” Omega Timing CEO Alain Zobrist told SportTechie from PyeongChang, South Korea. “Those information will be available in real-time so we can have very accurate game analysis and player stats coming out of these sensors.”
… In recent years, we have become familiar with the idea that data on our finances, shopping and surfing habits are floating around in cyberspace. Belatedly, we have also started to pay more attention to who controls this data. At this year’s Davos, there were heated debates about the dominant role of companies such as Facebook, Google and Alibaba, not to mention the Chinese and US governments. Merkel also raised the subject in her speech.
For Harari, though, the really big issue is what will happen when computers start tracking not just our emails, messages and money but our bodies as well. “When you merge the revolution in infotech with the revolution in biotech, you get the ability to hack humans,” Harari told the Davos audience. He went on to argue that “the key invention that enables infotech and biotech to merge is the biometric sensor”(which can read fingerprints, for instance) and that “given enough such information and enough computing power, external systems can hack all your feelings, -decisions and opinions”.
This sounds utterly far-fetched now – those fitness gadgets are nowhere near that smart. But the technology is improving so rapidly that Harari thinks computers will eventually “know me better than I know myself”, since “humans often don’t know themselves very well”.
To determine agreement between modified Peetrons, Chan acute muscle strain injury classification and British Athletics Muscle Injury Classification (BAMIC) and to investigate their associations and ability to predict time to return to sport (RTS). Methods
Male athletes (n=176) with acute hamstring injury and MRI (1.5T) ≤5 days were followed until RTS. MRIs were scored using standardised forms. Results
For MRI-positive injuries there was moderate agreement in severity grading (κ = 0.50–0.56). Substantial variance in RTS was demonstrated within and between MRI categories. Mean differences showed an overall main effect for severity grading (p < 0.001), but post hoc pairwise comparisons for BAMIC (grade 0a/b vs. 1, p = 0.312; 1 vs 2, p = 0.054; 0a/b vs 2, p < 0.001; 1 vs 3, p < 0.001) and mean differences for anatomical sites (BAMIC a–c, p < 0.001 [a vs b, p = 0.974; a vs c, p = 0.065; b vs c, p = 0.007]; Chan anatomical sites 1–5, p < 0.077; 2A–C, p = 0.373; 2a–e, p = 0.008; combined BAMIC, p < 0.001) varied. For MRI-positive injuries, total explained RTS variance was 7.6–11.9% for severity grading and BAMIC anatomical sites.
Conclusions
There was wide overlap between/variation within the grading/classification categories. Therefore, none of the classification systems could be used to predict RTS in our sample of MRI-positive hamstring injuries.
The New York Times, Well blog, Gretchen Reynolds from
The secret to a narrower waistline and a longer life span might be found in the corridors of our minds as much as in the cardio rooms of our gyms. A recent epidemiological study suggests that our beliefs about how much we exercise may substantially influence our health and longevity, even if those beliefs are objectively inaccurate — which hints that upending our thinking about exercise might help us whittle away pounds, whether we work out more or not.
The study, published in Health Psychology, grew out of research by one of its authors, Alia Crum, the head of the Mind & Body Lab at Stanford University. Crum and her co-author studied 84 female hotel-room attendants, who told the researchers that they felt they completed little or no daily exercise, although their work consisted mostly of physical labor. Crum and her colleague explained to half of them that, in fact, they were meeting or exceeding national recommendations for 30 minutes of daily exercise; a month later, when the researchers checked back, the women said they believed they were getting more exercise than before. They had lost weight and body fat and developed lower blood pressure. But in fact, their daily exertions were the same.
… Scientists think caffeine affects the body chemical adenosine, which normally promotes sleep and suppresses arousal. Caffeine ties up the receptors in the brain that detect adenosine and so makes it more alert.
But it may also increase stimulation of the central nervous system, making exercise seem like it involves less effort and pain. In high-intensity activities such as resistance training or sprinting, it may increase the number of fibres used in muscle contractions, meaning movements can be more frequent and forceful.
Protein may have both beneficial and detrimental effects on bone health depending on a variety of factors, including protein source. Objective
The aim was to conduct a systematic review and meta-analysis evaluating the effects of animal versus plant protein intake on bone mineral density (BMD), bone mineral content (BMC) and select bone biomarkers in healthy adults. Methods
Searches across five databases were conducted through 10/31/16 for randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and prospective cohort studies in healthy adults that examined the effects of animal versus plant protein intake on 1) total body (TB), total hip (TH), lumbar spine (LS) or femoral neck (FN) BMD or TB BMC for at least one year, or 2) select bone formation and resorption biomarkers for at least six months. Strength of evidence (SOE) was assessed and random effect meta-analyses were performed. Results
Seven RCTs examining animal vs. isoflavone-rich soy (Soy+) protein intake in 633 healthy peri-menopausal (n = 1) and post-menopausal (n = 6) women were included. Overall risk of bias was medium. Limited SOE suggests no significant difference between Soy+ vs. animal protein on LS, TH, FN and TB BMD, TB BMC, and bone turnover markers BSAP and NTX. Meta-analysis results showed on average, the differences between Soy+ and animal protein groups were close to zero and not significant for BMD outcomes (LS: n = 4, pooled net % change: 0.24%, 95% CI: -0.80%, 1.28%; TB: n = 3, -0.24%, 95% CI: -0.81%, 0.33%; FN: n = 3, 0.13%, 95% CI: -0.94%, 1.21%). All meta-analyses had no statistical heterogeneity. Conclusions
These results do not support soy protein consumption as more advantageous than animal protein, or vice versa. Future studies are needed examining the effects of different protein sources in different populations on BMD, BMC, and fracture. [full text]
Royal Society Open Science journal, Andrea Baronchelli from
The origin of population-scale coordination has puzzled philosophers and scientists for centuries. Recently, game theory, evolutionary approaches and complex systems science have provided quantitative insights on the mechanisms of social consensus. However, the literature is vast and widely scattered across fields, making it hard for the single researcher to navigate it. This short review aims to provide a compact overview of the main dimensions over which the debate has unfolded and to discuss some representative examples. It focuses on those situations in which consensus emerges ‘spontaneously’ in the absence of centralized institutions and covers topics that include the macroscopic consequences of the different microscopic rules of behavioural contagion, the role of social networks and the mechanisms that prevent the formation of a consensus or alter it after it has emerged. Special attention is devoted to the recent wave of experiments on the emergence of consensus in social systems. [full text]
… MLS is facing a generation gap with their facilities. Too many teams built the wrong stadiums in the wrong areas. There aren’t enough National Soccer Hall of Fames to go around to trigger redevelopment. Even then, the location issue still looms. Anybody going from the airport to downtown Denver and looking right will see the issue with the Rapids stadium in Commerce City. There’s no airport into the city route that passes the Fire’s stadium in Bridgeview. The Red Bulls built in a part of the New Jersey urban sprawl that somehow manages not to be. The Union’s stadium in Chester offers panoramic camera angles of the bridge over the river, but that’s about it in terms of being part of a neighborhood half an hour’s drive from the heart of Philadelphia.
Those obvious examples make it easier to ignore issues in other markets. Real Salt Lake’s stadium is in an aging part of a commercial district that’s a straight line south from downtown Salt Lake City but still manages to be over 14 miles away. The Impact’s stadium is in Olympic Park while the city’s two other pro sports teams are walkable from downtown. Both followed the MLS model at the time of building for seating rather than amenities. That’s no knock against either of those venues. Pick a North American sports league, and there are teams playing somewhere that got caught between generations of stadiums. All of a sudden, perfectly reasonable for the time begins to look old and problematic by comparison.