Gerhard de Beer arrived at the University of Arizona on July 30, 2013 as a 6-foot-7, 240-pound South African discus thrower intent on becoming a football player.
He walked off the Buffalo Bills’ practice field on June 14, 2018 as a 320-pound offensive tackle having completed his first NFL minicamp more than 8,000 miles from his hometown of Pretoria.
De Beer, who turns 24 on Thursday, is attempting to join former Pro Bowl kicker Gary Anderson and former wide receiver Jerome Pathon as part of a small group of South African natives to play a sport unfamiliar to most in their home country.
The first question Czech tennis ace Petra Kvitova asked after her hand was slashed in a violent attack was: Will I play at Wimbledon again? Now, 18 months later, she’s aiming for her third Grand Slam title.
It may seem obvious – as you push on through a long run, veering wildly between sensations of agony and elation – that running can have a huge effect on your state of mind. It is an intuitive idea that a growing number of neuroscientists have begun to take seriously, and in recent years they have started to show us what actually plays out on the hills and valleys of your grey matter as you run.
Their findings confirm what many runners know from their own experience: we can use running as a tool to improve the way we think and feel. And we are now learning precisely why running can return focus, vanquish stress and improve mood. Plus we know why – if you’re lucky – you might get a brief glimpse of nirvana.
The Conversation; Costas Karageorghis, Jonathan Bird and Marcelo Bigliassi from
With the 21st FIFA World Cup in Russia now in full swing, fans await a symphony of soccer set to a musical score. Football has long been established as one of the world’s most popular spectator sports, characterised by a vibrant music culture embodied in chants from the terraces, era-defining soccer anthems, pre-match and half-time entertainment, and players’ use of music as part of their pre-match routine.
In our recent study published in Sport, Exercise and Performance Psychology, we looked at how young players in the Premiership Academy youth league used music to psychologically prepare themselves for match performance. We presented a grounded theory to illuminate the science behind this phenomenon, illustrated in the diagram below.
We studied 34 academy players from a UK Premier League football club using questionnaires, reflective journals, interviews and observations. We found how players used music both to stimulate and to regulate emotion prior to a match. Music is also used to build a sense of group identity, by increasing perceptions of group cohesion and creating a positive team atmosphere.
NPR, Goats and Soda blog, Michaeleen Doucleff from
… Attention is a tricky beast. Unlike some brain processes, say vision or the ability to detect faces, there’s not one key region in the brain that controls our ability to focus on one task and disregard distractions.
“Instead it appears [that] hundreds of different parts [of the brain] have to communicate and interact with each other when we pay attention,” says neuroscientist Monica Rosenberg at Yale University.
And measuring how well a person’s brain can execute this complex process has been thorny, say cognitive neuroscientists Mike Esterman and Joe DeGutis at the Boston Attention and Learning Lab.
Sport and the Future, an international conference took place during the 2018 FIFA World Cup Russia™ in Moscow on 29 June. The event gathered over 300 representatives from international sporting organisations, leading experts on worldwide sports and the heads of international and national football associations, leagues and clubs.
The main purpose of the conference was to discuss current trends in developing the global sports industry. The plenary session of the conference began with speeches by leading figures from FIFA President Gianni Infantino, CIES President Pierre Cornu, FIFA Master Alumni Association President Giancarlo Dapoto, Dean of the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE) Yaroslav Kuzminov, Deputy Minister of Sports in Russia Pavel Novikov and Deputy Secretary General of the Football Union of Russia Alexander Zorkov.
“It’s a great pleasure that the CIES has joined forces with the Football Union of Russia, the Higher School of Economics, who are our academic partner in Russia, and the FIFA Master Alumni Association to organise this important conference,” said CIES President Pierre Cornu. “The latter gathered more than 300 participants to discuss the future of sport and sports management. At a time when the global sports environment continues to change at great pace, these debates are a necessity. This conference also provides an opportunity to reinforce the links between all the partners involved in the event, which is a great satisfaction to me.”
The commercial market for technologies to monitor and improve personal health and sports performance is ever expanding. A wide range of smart watches, bands, garments, and patches with embedded sensors, small portable devices and mobile applications now exist to record and provide users with feedback on many different physical performance variables. These variables include cardiorespiratory function, movement patterns, sweat analysis, tissue oxygenation, sleep, emotional state, and changes in cognitive function following concussion. In this review, we have summarized the features and evaluated the characteristics of a cross-section of technologies for health and sports performance according to what the technology is claimed to do, whether it has been validated and is reliable, and if it is suitable for general consumer use. Consumers who are choosing new technology should consider whether it (1) produces desirable (or non-desirable) outcomes, (2) has been developed based on real-world need, and (3) has been tested and proven effective in applied studies in different settings. Among the technologies included in this review, more than half have not been validated through independent research. Only 5% of the technologies have been formally validated. Around 10% of technologies have been developed for and used in research. The value of such technologies for consumer use is debatable, however, because they may require extra time to set up and interpret the data they produce. Looking to the future, the rapidly expanding market of health and sports performance technology has much to offer consumers. To create a competitive advantage, companies producing health and performance technologies should consult with consumers to identify real-world need, and invest in research to prove the effectiveness of their products. To get the best value, consumers should carefully select such products, not only based on their personal needs, but also according to the strength of supporting evidence and effectiveness of the products.
In the friendly confines of Wrigley Field, there is some new tech this summer alongside the trademark bricks and ivy of the historic ballpark. Attend a game this season, and you might notice white plastic weathervanes sprouting from the pillars of the upper and lower decks, or wooden boxes with brightly colored buttons by the gates.
These pieces of hand-crafted technology were built by a school just two miles west of Wrigley Field as part of the Array of Things project, an ambitious University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory initiative to “instrument the city” with a network of sensors collecting data on activity, environment and infrastructure. For the third straight year, students at Lane Technical College Prep High School worked with researchers from Array of Things and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago on building, programming and deploying their own sensor “nodes,” gaining hands-on experience with technologies that helps scientists better understand cities.
In a recent study, researchers at the University of Waterloo in Canada combined the two technologies to detect changes in glucose levels without the need for painful finger pricks several times a day.
“We want to sense blood inside the body without actually having to sample any fluid,” said George Shaker, an engineering professor who leads a large team working on the concept. “Our hope is this can be realised as a smartwatch to monitor glucose continuously.”
The research involves collaboration with Google and Infineon, which jointly developed a small radar device and sought input from select teams around the world on potential applications.
It’s a fascinating voyage: A patient swallows a capsule. Once it reaches the stomach, the capsule dissolves and the thin strip inside unrolls and adheres to the stomach lining.
Canan Dagdeviren, who leads the “Conformable Decoders” team at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Mass., likens her team’s device to “a Fitbit for the stomach.”
“You see how your stomach is doing while you are eating, while you are sleeping, while you are talking, while you are under stress or you’re happy,” she said.
Introduction Anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury can result in joint instability, decreased functional performance, reduced physical activity and quality of life and an increased risk for post-traumatic osteoarthritis. Despite the development of new treatment techniques and extensive research, the complex and multifaceted nature of ACL injury and its consequences are yet to be fully understood. The overall aim of the NACOX study is to evaluate the natural corollaries and recovery after an ACL injury.
Methods and analysis The NACOX study is a multicentre prospective prognostic cohort study of patients with acute ACL injury. At seven sites in Sweden, we will include patients aged 15–40 years, within 6 weeks after primary ACL injury. Patients will complete questionnaires at multiple occasions over the 3 years following injury or the 3 years following ACL reconstruction (for participants who have surgical treatment). In addition, a subgroup of 130 patients will be followed with clinical examinations, several imaging modalities and biological samples. Data analyses will be specific to each aim.
Ethics and dissemination This study has been approved by the regional Ethical committee in Linköping, Sweden (Dnr 2016/44-31 and 2017/221–32). We plan to present the results at national and international conferences and in peer-reviewed scientific journals. Participants will receive a short summary of the results following completion of the study.
For years, pain medication has been relied on to treat athletes’ injuries but as the country wakes up to the dangers of opioid addiction, more and more trainers and sports medicine doctors alike are turning to mind-boggling, high-tech (and pill-free) treatments to aid in a player’s recovery, pain management and healing.
Further expanding its distribution beyond the practitioner channel, Thorne Research announced earlier this week that it is now the exclusive supplement supplier for a leading training center in Florida for athletes.
… On a day-to-day basis, Second Spectrum is the NBA’s successor to SportVU, a name that burst into prominence around a half-decade ago. Articles like this one from ESPN’s Zach Lowe introduced fans to a camera-fed, digitized version of the game that converted players on the court (plus the ball) into moving dots on a diagram — dots from which machine learning and researchers could cull a nearly endless amount of information never before available to league decision-makers.
These early revelations were just the infancy of optical tracking in the NBA, with companies like Second Spectrum now at the forefront of their continuing rise. It’s an NBA geek’s paradise; all the best parts of public stat and video sites rolled into one, then put on steroids.
But while basketball nerds could die happy after just a few hours of access, it’s Second Spectrum’s other innovations in the works that could really raise eyebrows.