… The trade sets in motion plenty of changes for the young defenceman: new city, new sweater, and as a pending restricted free agent, a soon-to-be-signed new contract, too. But not everything will be new for Hanifin — particularly when it comes to the man behind the bench. Bill Peters opted out of his contract with the Hurricanes back in late April and was hired to be the Flames’ head coach just a few days later.
“He’s very demanding, but in a good way,” Hanifin said of Peter, the only NHL head coach he’s ever played for. “He just wants to bring the best out in everyone. I’m happy to be able to play for him again. I’m looking forward to it.
“He’s very easy to talk to when you want to approach him and talk and ask questions,” Hanifin continued. “He’s always there to sit down, discuss what he’s thinking and what he expects. But at the same time he does demand a lot out of his players and expects them to be successful, which I think is perfect, that’s good to see in a coach.”
… With everything that’s happened in the past year, Biles hasn’t thought too much about her unforgettable sweep (five medals, four golds) at the 2016 Rio Olympics. She’s been too busy to think about the past. And now that she’s in the gym again, she likes to keep looking forward, though it is hard to maintain a “what’s next, what’s next?” mindset with a packed schedule.
“I almost had a mental breakdown but I had to reschedule it,” she wrote in a telling pinned tweet, posted in mid-April, nearly six months after she began training for her return to competition at the U.S. Classic championships at the end of July in her birthplace, Columbus, Ohio. That day in April, she remembers, she was working on her bar routine — the uneven bars were her weakest event in an overall stellar appearance in Rio — for basically the first time. “Bar routines always give me like a mini panic attack,” she tells us during her midday break from her every-day-except-Sunday training schedule. “So I was like, “Umm umm — I’m going to pass out.”
Every year in the NBA draft, there are a few prospects who take on an aura of mystery. They are players who possess obvious talent, but also elude easy analysis, fascinating front offices as much for what is unknown as what is known. Most often, they have a few major question marks, but also possess an impressive amount of ability that puts such question marks on the back burner as teams are won over by their potential.
This year, one of the more fascinating prospects is Anfernee Simons, a 19-year-old guard who, after graduating from high school and reclassifying into the Class of 2018, opted to spend a postgraduate year at IMG Academy in Bradenton, Florida, decommitting from Louisville. Now, instead of attending college in the fall as initially planned, Simons will be in training camp with the Portland Trail Blazers, who selected him with the No. 24 overall pick in the 2018 NBA Draft.
Official international tournaments in which youth soccer players participate can involve very congested schedules. Yet, no information regarding physical and technical match performance during congested vs. regular (noncongested) cycles is available. In this study, accelerations, decelerations, mean metabolic power (MP), and technical performance (offensive and defensive variables) were compared across very congested match (VCM; 10 international matches played over 3 successive days, including 2 days with 2 consecutive matches separated by a 4- to 5-hour interval) and 10 regular (noncongested match [NCM]) match periods in elite male Under 15 (U15, n = 11) and Under 17 (U17, n = 13) soccer players. Players wore a 15-Hz Global Positioning System unit with a 100-Hz triaxial accelerometer. The session rating of perceived exertion (RPE) were assessed 30 minutes after match. Results showed a higher number of accelerations per minute observed in VCM vs. NCM (U15; 2.27 ± 0.35 vs. 2.12 ± 0.23; effect size [ES] = 0.49; U17; 2.27 ± 0.41 vs. 2.01 ± 0.31; ES = 0.69). Decelerations per minute were higher during VCM (U15; 1.99 ± 0.27 vs. 1.84 ± 0.25; ES = 0.55; and U17; 1.98 ± 0.35 vs. 1.80 ± 0.27; ES = 0.56). Mean MP was higher in the VCM (U15; 0.42 ± 0.06 vs. 0.37 ± 0.02; ES = 1.08; U17; 0.46 ± 0.03 vs. 0.30 ± 0.03; ES = 1.94). Technical actions per minute were higher in the VCM for U17 (ES = 1.60 and 1.37, for offensive and defensive performance, respectively) but lower (during VCM) for U15 (ES = 3.59 and 0.28, for offensive and defensive performance). U15 reported a higher session RPE in the VCM (7.9 ± 0.5 AUs vs. 6.9 ± 0.5 AUs). The findings suggest that running activity in these youth players was unaffected overall in tournaments with congested schedules, and that the intensity of match-play was actually greater than in regular match schedules.
Sweden’s sports psychologist Daniel Ekvall will have his work cut out to get the national team back into the right frame of mind for their final group game at the World Cup against Mexico that they will probably have to win to progress.
Ekvall was brought into the set-up by manager Janne Andersson to help them get the most out of their performances, and despite the crushingly late 2-1 defeat by the Germans, he is determined to ensure that they look forward, not back.
“It’s to do with the mental recovery, gathering power and energy for the last group game. But otherwise we’ll most likely continue similar routines when it comes to how we work and the content of it,” he told Reuters.
To scroll through Drew Hanlen’s Instagram is to revel in current basketball greatness. Each post features a different transcendent talent — from pros Jayson Tatum to Joel Embid to Zach LaVine , to 2018-19 freshmen (and soon-to-be lottery picks) like RJ Barrett and Cam Reddish — being tutored by a 5-foot-11, 28-year-old who averaged 10 points per game at Belmont several years ago.
And yet, Hanlen has become the go-to training for the burgeoning elite of college basketball and the NBA: since April 1, Hanlen has worked out with and trained De’Anthony Melton, Tyus Battle, Justin Jackson, and Mo Bamba, and while Battle ultimately decided to return to Syracuse for his junior season, the other four are projected to be selected throughout the first round of Thursday’s NBA draft.
Running power meters rely on a combination of accelerometer motion sensors—vector detectors—and complex software algorithms to convert the measured data to assign a power value. It’s a lot different than how most bike power meters work, which gauge real measured energy output from the force applied to the pedal, calculating an objective wattage figure based on your power, multiplied by the stroke rate.
Comparatively, running power meters aren’t as accurate of a measure. Consider them more an indicator of relative effort. As Martyn Shorten, founder of the Portland-based sports product biomechanics lab, BioMechanica, puts it: “These devices are not measuring ‘power’ but trying to measure something that correlates with ‘effort.’”
And that measurement itself can be a useful training tool. Just like in cycling, a runner training with “power” can use their relative numbers to understand pacing on hills and pacing during races, regardless of conditions or heart rate (which can be affected by outside influences like sleep, temperature, and even caffeine intake). The goal: run at the lowest wattage for the fastest pace—a sign of efficiency.
“Do visual tasks have a relationship, or are they unrelated? For instance, could having surface normals simplify estimating the depth of an image? Intuition answers these questions positively, implying existence of a “structure” among visual tasks. Knowing this structure has notable values; it is the concept underlying transfer learning and provides a principled way for identifying redundancies across tasks, e.g., to seamlessly reuse supervision among related tasks or solve many tasks in one system without piling up the complexity. ”
An international team of researchers have developed a low-cost sensor made from semiconducting plastic that can be used to diagnose or monitor a wide range of health conditions, such as surgical complications or neurodegenerative diseases.
The sensor can measure the amount of critical metabolites, such as lactate or glucose, that are present in sweat, tears, saliva or blood, and, when incorporated into a diagnostic device, could allow health conditions to be monitored quickly, cheaply and accurately. The new device has a far simpler design than existing sensors, and opens up a wide range of new possibilities for health monitoring down to the cellular level. The results are reported in the journal Science Advances.
Microelectrodes can be used for direct measurement of electrical signals in the brain or heart. These applications require soft materials, however. With existing methods, attaching electrodes to such materials poses significant challenges. A team at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has now succeeded in printing electrodes directly onto several soft substrates.
Though our thoughts can wander one moment and race rapidly forward the next, the brain itself is often considered to be motionless inside the skull. But that’s actually not correct. When the heart beats, the pumping force reverberates throughout the body and gently pulsates the brain. What’s been tricky is capturing these pulsations with existing brain imaging technologies.
Recently, NIH-funded researchers developed a video-based approach to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) that can record these subtle movements [1]. Their method, called phase-based amplified MRI (aMRI), magnifies those tiny movements, making them more visible and quantifiable. The latest aMRI method, developed by a team including Itamar Terem at Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, and Mehmet Kurt at Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ. It builds upon an earlier method developed by Samantha Holdsworth at New Zealand’s University of Auckland and Stanford’s Mahdi Salmani Rahimi [2].
In the video, a traditional series of brain scans captured using standard MRI (left) make the brain appear mostly motionless. But a second series of scans captured using the new technique (right) shows the brain pulsating with each and every heartbeat.
Baze, an at-home blood testing kit that measures an individual’s micronutrient levels to determine a set of personalized monthly supplements, has completed a soft launch in the US aiming to introduce consumers to the “next level of dietary supplementation,” co-founder Philipp Schulte said.
… One 2011 study at Wake Forest found that men’s soccer matches average 11.26 injuries per match with only 7.2 percent of them being actual injuries. The women’s percentage of real injuries was 13.7 percent.
Beyond that, there’s less whining in the women’s game, less fake outrage at referees, less dramatics. Yet there’s just as much effort and playmaking. It’s refreshing. The players mostly just play.
On March 2, 1962, Wilt Chamberlain scored an astounding 100 points in a game against the New York Knicks — a record that still stands. There’s no doubt that Chamberlain is a giant among basketball players. But no player operates in a vacuum. How much did team culture or the collective mood on the court contribute to Chamberlain’s exceptional performance that day?
This question of how the collective influences individual performance is central to the work of SFI’s investigation into the limits of human performance. In a workshop that takes place June 25-27, experts from a range of disciplines, including physiology, organizational behavior, sports analytics and applied mathematics, explore how the collective affects the individual — including on the basketball court.
“There’s been a lot of work on time series to see what the chance is of making so many baskets in a row. But what is the likelihood of a streak based on what the team is doing as whole?” asks SFI Professor Jessica Flack, the director of SFI’s Collective Computation Group and organizer of the June 2018 workshop.