The Dirk Nowitzki Farewell Tour is not yet underway in Dallas — for at least three reasons.
For starters, Nowitzki is still recovering from an inflamed tendon in his left foot that flared up in the midst of his comeback from ankle surgery in April. There is also too much angst about the floundering Cowboys for the locals to fret too much (yet) about the Mavericks’ 3-7 start.
And then there’s the biggest reason: Nowitzki has not definitively stated that this season will be his last.
Martin Brodeur was many things, but most of all he was the greatest goalie of his era.
Give or take a Patrick Roy or Grant Fuhr, who each arrived in the National Hockey League — and the Hockey Hall of Fame — before Brodeur, who will be inducted as part of the Class of 2018 this week.
Brodeur was, of course, a puck stopper of the highest regard, not to mention a goalie so skilled at playing the puck that the NHL changed its rulebook to mitigate the advantage he gave the New Jersey Devils. But, unlike Roy, Brodeur eschewed the current of equipment manipulation that swept through the goaltending profession, with its giant clown pants and jerseys the size of pup tents.
Where so many goalies — particularly his brethren from Quebec — adopted the butterfly style, Brodeur somehow never really did. And whereas a goalie like Ed Belfour was so eternally “focused” he could not bring himself to speak with the media on a game day, Brodeur was the anti-goalie — loose, chatty, and so normal you’d have thought he was a winger.
… He’s a product of professional development and a poster child for the Red Bulls top-to-bottom approach to the process. If a player with the background of Long can rise to the level of elite MLS defender, then perhaps the rest of the league should take notice.
Long was not highly rated coming out of UC Riverside in California, where he played four seasons of college soccer and entered the 2014 MLS SuperDraft as a midfielder. The Portland Timbers grabbed Long in the second round and promptly sent him out on loan to their USL affiliate, Sacramento Republic. After playing just a handful of games for that club, Long played on loan with the Orange County Blues of the same league. In neither place did Long shine or show significant promise.
The Timbers gave up on Long midway through the 2014 season. By July he had already moved up the Pacific coast to Seattle, where he served as training ground fodder for the balance of the campaign. It wasn’t until signing with Sounders 2 in March of 2015 that Long moving fully into a senior team setting. Sounders 2 is where Long began the switch from midfielder to defender, a process he completed by the time he signed with New York Red Bulls II at the start of the 2016 season.
… It was there, in 2013–14, that Shaw got his first taste of playing hockey regularly in an entirely new environment, spending his first professional season with the AHL’s Rampage.
“I was obviously scared and nervous,” Shaw says of making that jump into such a drastic change of scenery. “But I just did what I always tried to do. I just worked hard, did my best on and off the ice…. We had a coaching change and stuff happened in San Antonio, but nothing changed for me. I just did my own thing.”
Shaw managed to weather that first test with the help of veterans like Jed Ortmeyer, his road roommate and one of 10 experienced skaters on that Rampage roster over the age of 30. But after settling into the Texas lifestyle and the upgrade in competition, Shaw was thrust into a veritable North American tour through the minor leagues as he worked his way up to the sport’s highest level.
… “Endurance limits in terms of ultra-endurance is very much a case of trying to limit the amount of damage you do to your body in that particular event,” says Burnley. “In 5,000 and 10,000m running we often talk about getting up to a certain pace and being able to hold that pace. In an ultra-endurance race, you’re just trying to complete the task.”
What that means in practical terms is a shuffling pace. The aim as an ultra-distance runner “is trying to run with minimal leg lift, essentially trying to minimise the energy cost of your run”, says Burnley.
In this episode of Behind the Crest, Presented by Volpi Foods, the U.S. WNT’s last event of 2018 has brought the team to Portugal, where it began training camp with some physical testing that will help High Performance Coach Dawn Scott set a foundation for the players to hit the ground running in January on the road the 2019 Women’s World Cup in France.
Yoga and meditation, two ancient practices, are now officially the most popular alternative health approaches in the United States, each used by around 35 million adults.
That’s the word from two reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention out Thursday, which looked at the changes in the use of yoga, meditation, and chiropractors between 2012 and 2017.
In 2017, about 14.3 percent of US adults surveyed by the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics said they had done yoga in the past 12 months, while 14.2 percent had meditated, the reports show. That’s up from 2012, when 9 percent were doing yoga and 4 percent meditating.
… Most of our goals do not exist on their own, in isolation from other goals, and we can think of our goals in several different ways, each of which can help us with different aspects of our thinking and motivation. Still, there are some pointers and guidance that research has uncovered.
Let’s look at two common ways of thinking about our goals, and the benefits and possible drawbacks of each. We’ll draw first on the insights from a team of three researchers at the University of Bern, in Switzerland, and then on findings from recent work by researchers working in Canada, at the University of Waterloo.
A new fabrication method will allow designers to replace the bulky and inefficient batteries on wearable devices with lightweight, powerful supercapacitors.
Researchers from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst have created a new technique that allows a charge-store system to be easily embroidered into virtually any garment.
The new method uses a micro-supercapacitor and combines vapor-coated conductive threads with a polymer film. The researchers also utilized a special sewing technique to create a flexible mesh of aligned electrodes on a textile backing to create a solid-state device with an ability to store an incredible amount of charge for its size, as well as other characteristics that enable it to power wearable biosensors.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; Marten Scheffer et al. from
All life requires the capacity to recover from challenges that are as inevitable as they are unpredictable. Understanding this resilience is essential for managing the health of humans and their livestock. It has long been difficult to quantify resilience directly, forcing practitioners to rely on indirect static indicators of health. However, measurements from wearable electronics and other sources now allow us to analyze the dynamics of physiology and behavior with unsurpassed resolution. The resulting flood of data coincides with the emergence of novel analytical tools for estimating resilience from the pattern of microrecoveries observed in natural time series. Such dynamic indicators of resilience may be used to monitor the risk of systemic failure across systems ranging from organs to entire organisms. These tools invite a fundamental rethinking of our approach to the adaptive management of health and resilience.
… Whether you’re looking to win, place, or consistently show up and finish workouts feeling strong, here are the newest products and lifestyle trends from the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics’ annual Food and Nutrition Conference and Expo that will help you improve your performance and overall health not only in the coming year, but for the long haul, too.
Player evaluation is as much art as science. All players will be better at some things than others. Questions of talent and system intermingle. How many downsides are too many to carry just because a player has one particularly great skill? How much of a great match, or month, or season is the result of playing in a system that flatters a player’s skills and hides their faults? How much of that performance will translate in a new system? Too often, all of that gets flattened into a simple, impossible question to answer. How good is this player?
That flattening makes good player analysis more difficult. Unsurprisingly, statistics are an effective way of more accurately framing the discussion. Two players this season illustrate that dynamic in opposing ways. On one side there’s Chelsea striker Alvaro Morata. He’s developed a reputation as underwhelming, and even on his best days he manages to leave Chelsea fans feeling cold. Like last weekend, for instance, when he scored two goals in Chelsea’s 3-1 win over Crystal Palace but also managed to miss a golden chance at a hattrick after being played clean through on goal in the dying minutes. On the flip side there’s Arsenal midfielder Lucas Torreira, a young, promising tenacious presence in the center of the field.
Our health is closely related to our social interactions, such as our friendship networks. For example, it has been shown that not only infectious disease, but also health-related traits, such as obesity, depression, and smoking can spread through social networks. Understanding the relationship between social networks and health could help people devise network-based strategies to reduce the incidence of unhealthy behaviors and increase the prevalence of healthy ones.
In our most recent work we explore how a person’s position in their social network (called “centrality” by network scientists) is associated with their health. We exploit data from the NetHealth study, which has monitored smartphone usage (e.g., SMS interactions) and health-related behaviors (e.g., physical activities, heart rates, or sleep habits) of around 700 undergraduates from the University of Notre Dame over more than two years. With such data, we are able to study the relationship between individuals’ dynamic (evolving) social networks and their dynamic health-related behaviors, with a focus on physical activity.
… Building friendships in the locker room may feel secondary to the real goal of being in the NBA: making millions of dollars and competing for banners that, as Bryant stated, will hang forever. But according to a study conducted by global health service company Cigna earlier this year, there’s a loneliness epidemic in the United States, and the workplace presents one of the best opportunities to alleviate the problem.
Shasta Nelson, the author of “Frientimacy: How to Deepen Friendships for Lifelong Health and Happiness,” says there’s no better place for NBA players to form meaningful friendships than the locker room.
“Our loneliness doesn’t come from not having social skills or being around people. It’s because most of us don’t really get known,” Nelson said. “For an NBA player in the spotlight, the public has an image of them, but most of them probably don’t feel known. That’s why it’s important to build friendships with people where they can … let their guard down and be themselves.”