In a disappointing and potentially franchise-altering first-round series loss, Russell Westbrook used up 38 percent of Oklahoma City possessions with a shot, drawn foul or turnover — a larger share than LeBron James accounted for in almost single-handedly dragging Cleveland past Indiana. Westbrook’s usage rate was almost the same as LeBron’s in the 2015 Finals, when James carried an injury-riddled misfit crew within two games of the championship.
Facing elimination, with every teammate but the redoubtable Steven Adams bricking away, Westbrook attempted a jaw-dropping 43 shots. He somehow launched 19 triples. He made seven. Utah coaches and players were happy with almost all of them.
There is something wrong with this. Just how wrong it is, why the Thunder still play this way, and what it means for their uncertain future are matters of debate.
To see Patric Hornqvist in the Stanley Cup playoffs is to see a blissful warrior. He has the embodiment of that moment in a superhero film when our champion gets walloped in the face, contemplates the impact, and then smiles as he or she re-engages in the fight with that “this is gonna be fun” smirk.
“This is what you train for the whole summer. The whole year. For this kind of emotion,” he said. “We’ve been through it before, but we have to enjoy it, too.”
He enjoys it. Greatly and obviously. When he comes off the ice from practice, he returns to his stall in the Pittsburgh Penguins’ dressing room, rips off his shoulder pads and, in typical fashion, declares, “OK, let’s make it quick” to assembled media. But it never really is that quick. Give Hornqvist an opportunity to wax enthusiastic about this team and the postseason, and he holds court.
“This is the best time of year to be out there, and you just enjoy every second of it,” he said.
Darren Sproles had transitioned from “pissed” as he was helped off the field and into the locker room at Lincoln Financial Field after suffering a torn ACL and broken arm in the midst of the Week 3 victory over the New York Giants last September. He was working hard in his recovery, unsure of his football-playing future, when his 8-year-old daughter, Devyn, looked him in the eye one day and told him what she thought he should do …
Daniel Murphy today confirmed what was pretty obvious to anyone who watched him work out at Nationals Park yesterday afternoon: His surgically repaired right knee is still in pain when he tries to run, which has left his potential return from the disabled list up in the air.
“I’m not in a position where I can run right now to play,” the veteran second baseman said in his first session with reporters since he returned from extended spring training earlier this week.
Murphy, who had microfracture surgery on his right knee October 20, tried to get through a full workout yesterday afternoon. He looked comfortable taking batting practice, and he moved around well fielding grounders hit to both directions. But he ran from the plate to first base at less-than-full speed, and then after spending several minutes on the ground getting his knee worked on by a trainer, he attempted to run to first one more time and had to pull up after 45 feet.
… Watching how Ibrahimovic handles the forthcoming sequence may be a more sober measurement of his impact on the Galaxy — let’s take his impact on MLS as a whole as a given — than the viral spectacle of his first goal for the club. After all, a footnote to that goal was a grinning and relieved-looking Ibrahimovic, after the game, talking about his goal in terms of how well his leg had held up after his long recovery from injury.
He’ll need to be mindful of managing his body in MLS. It’s hard to overstate just how different the weekly regimes of an American soccer player are from most of their European-based counterparts. It’s not just the travel time over a full continent that’s challenging, it’s building the impacts of that travel into training and regeneration routines to keep players at something near their peak, especially when limitations on charter flights restrict clubs to commercial schedules. Add in extreme weather shifts and artificial turf, and the rhythms of life in MLS can represent a real challenge to players anything less than fully fit.
Ibrahimovic can at least be sure of a first-class seat on the forthcoming flights; Galaxy team administrator Zack Murshedi block-books six to eight first-class seats on each flight as soon as the MLS schedule comes out, and these are generally allocated on the basis of who is scheduled to play, and then generally by age, which would naturally include Ibrahimovic, even if he weren’t a world superstar.
Scientific American, Katherine L. Milkman and Angela Duckworth from
Spring has finally sprung, which means bathing suit season is just around the corner. That ominous thought will lead many Americans to start a workout routine in the coming weeks, but having great abs at the beach isn’t the most important reason to exercise. Too little exercise is responsible for 9% of premature deaths worldwide, and we know that physical activity improves mental health as well as reducing the risk of diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. In spite of that, less than half of Americans exercise as much as they should.
So what’s the problem? It’s the same challenge that stands in the way of attaining most goals: a combination of forgetfulness, procrastination, and limited motivation. Thankfully, the field of behavioral science has solutions to offer.
How does the human brain make sense of our busy, ever-changing environment?
It’s a question that has plagued neuroscientists since the birth of the field. Researchers now understand that our dominant senses—taste, touch, smell, sight, and hearing—take in information via specialized receptor cells and relay it as electrical signals to be processed by higher order areas of the brain. Such processing is critical to perception: Our memories and experience help put that sensory information into proper context. But where and how such contextual processing is taking place has remained an open question. Two studies recently published by researchers at Italy’s Scuola Internazionale Superiore Di Studi Avanzati (SISSA) suggest that a brain area called the posterior parietal cortex (PPC) is critical to adding meaning to sensory information by pulling in data from the past.
… Communication on the field is one thing. Players can learn basic directions and navigate training sessions with a few basic words.
But when things go wrong, when players need to talk about things that are bothering them or pull a teammate aside, there must be a level of understanding that goes beyond just language.
“When you have a team of a lot of cultures — I think we have around 12 … if you count coaching staff and staff, we have a lot more than that — it’s important for them to get to know each other so any type of communication can flow better,” said Sánchez, Orlando City’s mental coach and video analyst.
In the game of soccer, fitness coaches may struggle with finding an appropriate way to develop the speed qualities of their players during the season. It may be tempting to not address speed development while practice loads, fitness work, and strength training takes priority. The assumption may be that scrimmage and match play will take care of the maintenance of high-speed running. However, this is a shortsighted approach. The qualities that are important for sprinting fast and efficiently are both capacity and skill based. Because of this, capacities need to be maintained and improved and skill needs to be reinforced in a structured manner. Accomplishing this without overloading an athlete during their competition period can certainly be a daunting task, but there are strategies that can have great benefit with little cost.
Micro dosing is a training method that involves applying relatively frequent, small doses of load that have a cumulative or compounding effect. In other words, small doses applied with consistency add up to a large amount of practice over time. Elite soccer athletes are getting faster and faster on average, so the accumulation of little bits of sprint training may give the competitive advantage for success when others are neglecting it. Let’s first look at why speed development is important for these athletes.
Many consider agility or change of direction ability to be the most important quality in soccer, but straight sprints are the most common type of movement that happen directly before a score, both by the scorer and the player assisting (2). Sprint efforts can happen as often as every 2.5 minutes on average, reaching speeds up to and exceeding 30km/h (5). Most of these bursts last less than 5 seconds, but some analyses attribute as many as 10% of the sprints during a match to long efforts of 5 seconds or more (1). Positionally, these numbers will vary, but we can be sure that field players will reach a velocity fast enough to be considered a sprint multiple times during a match.
The NFL and the players’ union will host a symposium on mental health on May 14.
Entitled “Beyond The Physical: A Symposium on Mental Health in Sports,” the forum will feature a series of panels with current and former NFL players as well as mental health organizations, caregivers, medical providers and media personalities. The aim is to raise awareness of mental health and promote a culture in which people, including athletes, are encouraged to seek help and support to achieve overall wellness.
Confirmed panelists include NFL wide receiver and co-founder of Project 375 Brandon Marshall; former NFL cornerback Asher Allen; former Pro Bowl running back Warrick Dunn; Atlanta Falcons senior director of player affairs Kevin Winston; and representatives from Active Minds, Mental Health America (MHA) of Georgia, the American Psychological Association, and Campaign to Change Direction.
Executive producer Alex Gibney and the helmers of ESPN’s six-part series on athletics technology joined The Hollywood Reporter’s Marisa Guthrie for a talk following the show’s premiere.
Sports are riddled with superstitions, traditions and rules that keep the game fair and sacred for its fans. But as technology and science progress, the boundaries will be pushed farther and farther.
This is what the six-part television series Enhanced on ESPN, which premiered at Tribeca Film Festival on Thursday (April 26), will tackle. After a screening of part one, “Knowledge,” directors Chai Vasarhelyi, Alison Klayman and Jesse Sweet and executive producer Alex Gibney joined The Hollywood Reporter’s East Coast TV editor Marisa Guthrie for a conversation about the documentary series.
… RocketBody’s creators claim that it can accurately measure metabolic rate over time using medical-grade EKG. By doing this, it can work out when your body is at its highest performance capacity, something called “supercompensation.” It aggregates information including a user’s anthropometric data (the study of the measurements and proportions of the human body), their training goals, heart rate and variability, calories eaten and burned, and more. It then uses this to design a set of exercises and a nutrition plan to make sure that every workout is timed to coincide with your body being at its most ready.
“I used to be a professional athlete and was seriously injured 10 years ago, so the only thing I could care about was getting myself out of bed,” creator Timofei Lipsky told Digital Trends. “In 2015, after trying taking blood tests [and other investigations], I started using EKG as a source of data we needed to build a metabolic curve.”
To develop his technology, Lipsky teamed up with a Ph.D. scientist with expertise in biophysics and neural biology. “After a number of months, we succeeded in identifying super-compensation and extended the team with top-level hardware and software engineers to hack a wearable and a mobile app,” he continued.
Researchers have created a flexible, wireless sensor worn on the skin which monitors the pH of the wearer’s sweat in real time. Developed in the course of the EU-funded project CONTEST, the device is a stepping stone towards eliminating invasive blood tests when monitoring chemical levels in the body.
Monitoring chronic conditions such as diabetes and kidney disease currently involves drawing blood from the patient’s body. However, the substances tested in the blood such as glucose and urea are also found in sweat. “Human sweat contains much of the same physiological information that blood does, and its use in diagnostic systems has the significant advantage of not needing to break the skin in order to administer tests,” says Prof. Ravinder Dahiya, one of the project’s coordinators, in a Glasgow University news item. With an effective sweat monitoring sensor, painful pin-prick blood tests could therefore potentially become a thing of the past. But only if the device measuring the levels of these substances in sweat has been designed also with the user’s comfort in mind.
… With many university tennis programs being shuttered over the previous two decades, and with more resources going to revenue-producing college sports like football and basketball, there was a sense that collegiate tennis needed to be modernized.
“What are the time demands of student-athletes, and how do we maintain excitement in the sport? These were questions we wanted to address,” Russell says.
Those concerns dovetailed with the USTA’s commitment to shortening the time it takes to play and watch tennis at all levels.
The first of the ITA’s goals was to get dual matches to finish in under three hours, down from the four- or even five-hour marks of years past. No-ad scoring was instituted; doubles matches were reduced to six-game sets; dead rubbers were shortened; time between doubles and singles was cut; even the warm-up was eliminated.
Top-class football is changing before our eyes. Liverpool’s 5-2 rout of Roma in the first leg of their Champions League semifinal merely confirmed it. The game is moving into a new tactical era: Attacking pressing is becoming so rapid that it should probably be called “storming.”
That is why we are seeing so many big wins in big games. And it’s also why we’re seeing managers such as Jose Mourinho struggling to adjust (more on that below).
Liverpool are only the most obvious practitioners of storming. Gegenpressing — as the Germans call the style — means chasing up the opposition’s defence the moment you lose possession, in order to win the ball near their goal. “Gegenpressing is the best playmaker in the world,” Jurgen Klopp likes to say. When it works, a storming team can rack up the goals.
You see this trend even in matches between two world-class teams. When Germany put seven past Brazil at the 2014 World Cup, we thought this was a one-off. In fact, it was an only slightly exaggerated portent of what has come since.