Saquon Barkley could have taken part in an autograph signing ahead of the Super Bowl, basking in his soon-to-be NFL fame during the biggest sporting spectacle of the year. But the former Penn State star wanted to beat up his body in a training center in Orlando, Fla., instead.
“If I have anything that conflicts with my training or working out or that’s taking away from me getting better – especially at that time [of the Super Bowl] where I only had such a short period of time to get ready for the combine – I won’t do it,” Barkley said. “It is what it is.”
The former Penn State standout was a notorious nice guy during his collegiate career, often posing for pictures and signing autographs for hours on end. He wanted to please everyone and leave people with a smile. Barkley’s been described as a “people pleaser” by those who know him best, and while it’s an admirable quality, it also figured to make for one of his toughest challenges as he heads toward the NFL where everyone is vying for his time and his attention.
J.J. Redick plans his meals, his naps, his shots and, well in advance of wearing them, even his socks. He eats the same kind of granola bar before every game. He has built a high-level career out of this mind-numbing preparation.
“It’s the only way I know how to be,” he said.
It is hard to catch him off guard, as his coach, Brett Brown of the Philadelphia 76ers, learned one night last summer. He was wooing Redick to the team and, as part of his pitch, he invited him onto the court with Joel Embiid, the team’s talented young center.
It turns out Redick had armed himself ahead of the meeting with a mental dossier of plays he had envisioned running with the likes of Embiid. Redick, still wearing a blazer, picked and popped for jump shots, while Brown salivated at the possibilities for the team.
… The earliest hope for return is in two weeks with a protective mask like Derrick Rose, Russell Westbrook and others have used after facial fracture surgery.
Care must be taken, however, as a repeat fracture would be dangerous because the orbital bone is thin and delicate.
If things go well for Embiid and the 76ers, he could be back in time for the start of the playoffs. However, given the delicacy of the situation, with the team/player being snake-bitten with previous injuries and his importance to the franchise, I doubt the team or player will push their chances.
Some of us have enough trouble sleeping in our beds at home, let alone while traveling or changing time zones.
There are those who drift off by instructing their Amazon Alexa or Google Home to play recordings of babbling brooks and cicadas. Others listen to podcasts like “Sleep With Me” which tells dull bedtime stories. Some watch YouTube videos of people whispering or performing mundane tasks, or listen to electronic and ambient music, like the British group Marconi Union’s “Weightless (Ambient Transmissions Vol. 2),” which has been reported to induce deep relaxation.
You have 60 SECONDS before the most competitive event of your life… What do you do to optimize performance and safe execution?
In the final minute before she raced in the 2018 Winter Olympics, the camera zoomed in for a close-up of American alpine ski racer, Lindsey Vonn, as she prepared for one of the biggest competitions of her life. She assumes a plank position, on arms and toes, as her trainer pushes firmly and deliberately on her back, hips, shoulders, and head in all directions and in no apparent pattern.
Did you wonder what she was doing???
A training strategy, called “rhythmic stabilization”, is used frequently in physical therapy to activate and train muscles across a joint to quickly react and stabilize the joint in response to variable and unpredictable forces.
Well, maybe not exactly, but while growing up his golden retriever deserves at least some of the credit for turning Turris into a 12-year NHL veteran. His ball-obsessed dog would chase a young Turris around their Burnaby backyard, the future hockey pro carrying a ball in his lacrosse stick as his hyperactive blur of fur tried to snag the hard rubber prize.
Call it skills training.
“It helped in ways, like rolling off checks, and just being smart with how you protect the ball,” Turris said to Postmedia last week.
“Just the athleticism that you can grow up with from the fun stuff like that from being outside. Playing games makes things a lot more fun.”
… “I think we must contemplate that technology is having the exact opposite effect than we perceived,” said Julie Lythcott-Haims, the former dean of freshmen at Stanford University and author of “How to Raise an Adult.” “We see the negatives of not going outside, can’t look people in the eye, don’t have to go through the effort of making a phone call. There are ways we see the deficiencies that social media has offered, but there are obviously tremendous upsides and positives as well.”
“I am fascinated by the phenomenon we are seeing in front of us, and I don’t think it’s unique to these six or seven kids who have been the face of the Parkland adolescent cohort,” says Lisa Damour, an adolescent psychologist and author of “Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions Into Adulthood.”
“They are so direct in their messaging. They are so clear. They seem unflappable.”
… “The overselling of mindfulness can lead to this idea that we should always be rigidly focused on what’s in front of us and our minds should be totally clear of any sort of input or thought,” Fisher told Nautilus. “That’s a total misrepresentation. Mindfulness doesn’t mean the eradication of thoughts, in any tradition. In any sort of basic, secular, clinical application, it just means paying attention to the present moment…Maybe we need to clarify what we mean by mindfulness before we slap it on a bunch of posters in every school and every workplace.”
Every year, at least 1 million new meditators arise in the United States alone. “Meditation Has Become a Billion-Dollar Business,” one Fortune headline announced. Willoughby Britton, director of the Clinical and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory at Brown University, and colleagues, wrote in a paper last year, “With more than 20 mindfulness phone apps, mindfulness is a major contributor to the billion-dollar meditation industry that serves more than 18 million meditators.” In a piece in Wired, Robert Wright, author most recently of Why Buddhism Is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment, argued “How Mindfulness Meditation Can Save America.”
One worry is the mindfulness movement’s heavy focus on positive, health-related perks, like stress or anxiety reduction. It turns meditation into a tool for mental hygiene. The reasoning goes like this, Fisher said: “Most of us spend at least four to five minutes a day brushing our teeth, so if we’re going to do that for our teeth, we might as well do it for our minds.” This, Britton and her colleagues write, “represents only a narrow selection of possible effects that have been acknowledged within Buddhist traditions both past and present.”
Sleep medicine has been an expanding discipline during the last few decades. The prevalence of sleep disorders is increasing, and sleep centers are expanding in hospitals and in the private care environment to meet the demands. Sleep medicine has evidence-based guidelines for the diagnosis and treatment of sleep disorders. However, the number of sleep centers and caregivers in this area is not sufficient. Many new methods for recording sleep and diagnosing sleep disorders have been developed. Many sleep disorders are chronic conditions and require continuous treatment and monitoring of therapy success. Cost-efficient technologies for the initial diagnosis and for follow-up monitoring of treatment are important. It is precisely here that telemedicine technologies can meet the demands of diagnosis and therapy follow-up studies. Wireless recording of sleep and related biosignals allows diagnostic tools and therapy follow-up to be widely and remotely available. Moreover, sleep research requires new technologies to investigate underlying mechanisms in the regulation of sleep in order to better understand the pathophysiology of sleep disorders. Home recording and non-obtrusive recording over extended periods of time with telemedicine methods support this research. Telemedicine allows recording with little subject interference under normal and experimental life conditions.
The Indiana Pacers’ sports performance staff runs its teams through a screening about once a month to investigate each player’s risk of a knee injury. The assessment centers on the LESS Test (Landing Error Scoring System) in which a player starts on a 12-inch box, jumps down with two feet, lands and then jumps straight up.
This is all done in front of a Kinect camera powered by Physimax’s markerless motion-capture software platform. One of the Pacers starters performed very poorly on the test and, while he was already undergoing some physical therapy for his knee, the Physimax system detected another issue in the kinetic chain for which there was a swift remedy.
“With this data, we really found that there was something going on also in his hip that was contributing to the knee,” Pacers director of sports performance Shawn Windle told SportTechie. “They literally did a pelvic adjustment, re-tested him and his score improved from 11 and went to a 4, which is a low-risk factor for knee injury.”
Just a few miles separate LAFC and the LA Galaxy, but the roads taken to assemble their respective squads ahead of their first-ever meeting, dubbed “El Trafico” by some fans, this Saturday have been considerably different.
For LAFC, there was the massive challenge of starting from scratch. The team’s objective of inking 28 players was no easy feat, requiring general manager John Thorrington and head coach Bob Bradley to not stray from their plan of pairing players who could fulfill Bradley’s aim of playing quickly through the midfield.
“I think we remained disciplined in our approach,” Thorrington told ESPN FC. “There was a temptation to deviate, but we had tightly defined what we wanted and filtered all our decisions through that.”
The result is a youth-driven squad with a mix of veterans that has a 2017 Atlanta United flavor about it, with a splash of 2015 New York City FC/Orlando City SC.
… New information is always changing how the game is played, of course; coaches and sports scientists have been using GPS for over a decade to assess physical performance and the need for recovery. “Everyone is and will always look for an edge,” says Dave Anderson, former NFL wide receiver and co-founder of the Gains Group, a sports and technology consultancy. “In professional sports, where the difference between wins and losses are paper thin, any potential advantage should be taken seriously.” The question is what potential advantage should be considered rule-abiding—and what crosses the line.
For now, football has decided that collecting data—as well as applying intelligence and ingenuity to analyze it—is above board. What isn’t? Surreptitiously filming other team’s practices, hacking into scouting databases, and stealing signs with Apple watches.
… Inside this steel jungle, on a cold, drizzly January day, drives a man dwarfed by his environment, not to mention his task at hand. Justin Rose maneuvers his Hyundai through the spotless streets of Westend, a quiet — no, dull — neighborhood occupied by serious German businessmen.
Rose, 42, is a serious American soccer hand, as ambitious as any of the Germans who built the buildings towering above him. He has gone from the 1993 Colorado High School Player of the Year at Arapahoe to a full ride at Clemson, to the Under-20 national team to these streets of Frankfurt 13 years ago with a coaching and consulting business, JRR Consulting.
As his neighbors begin buzzing over Germany defending its title in Russia this summer, Rose chews on his own nation choking like a band of rabid, gagging dogs and not even qualifying. Yet, swallowing the olive at Trinidad and Tobago, a country the size of San Diego, in that 2-1 loss Oct. 10 gave Rose all the more reason to dig his heels into the German concrete.
“My goal,” he says, “is to get Americans to win a World Cup.”