… The fact is, as he enters what is historically considered a player’s prime, he’s had just one impact season out of the four he’s thrown in the big leagues. Also at play are his total innings on the mound, during which a player gains experience and knowledge about how to pitch as opposed to just throwing.
At this point in the career of a left-handed starting pitcher like Matz, most guys have thrown 650 innings and made 120 starts. Matz has essentially half that work load under his belt, which means he has spent 50 percent less time learning and feeling out situations than many who have come before him.
The England-capped player worked with physiotherapists Osman Ahmed, a senior lecturer in sports therapy at Bournemouth University, and Tracy Blake, an academic from the University of Toronto, who are co-leads of the Patient Voices initiative.
Mr Defoe, who recently signed to play for Rangers Football Club, contributed his thoughts and experiences to the first in a series of patient-focused studies published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.
Dr Ahmed told Frontline: ‘We are trying to get patients engaged at all levels of the research process and the Patient Voices series is designed to share their first-person perspectives.
In the next couple of days, leading up to Tuesday night at the TD Garden in Boston, the NHL player who defines flying under the radar will be the centre of attention.
Patrice Bergeron, who also defines terms such as team player, two-way player, 200-foot player and other tags coaches love, will play his 1,000th NHL game on Tuesday night. That is a singular achievement by itself but even more remarkable is Bergeron played all of them for the Boston Bruins in an age when players routinely change teams as soon as their contracts expire.
This is not to say Bergeron somehow remained unknown over the past 16 years while working his way into being one of the best players in hockey. He is the centre on one of the top two or three lines in the NHL between Brad Marchand and David Pastrnak, he is a fixture on the Canadian men’s team with gold medals from the 2004 world championship, the 2010 and 2014 Olympics and the 2016 World Cup of Hockey. He also has a Stanley Cup with the Bruins (2011). There is also a gold from the 2005 world junior championship.
… After a successful college career that included an individual NCAA title in the 5,000-meters in 2015, Sisson turned pro later the same year. At first, the transition from competitive collegiate athlete to full-on professional was a little disorientating, since Sisson suddenly found herself with a lot more free time. Along with learning to adopt a more professional approach to her sport by incorporating things like core work and massage therapy, this meant learning to take it easy.
“Some people like being really busy and having things to do and can get pretty restless. But I’m pretty good at resting in between runs. I’m fine with that,” Sisson says.
… I promise, it’s going to work itself out, Butler tells himself each day. It’s going to work itself out. You’re going to figure it out. When? I don’t know, but you’ll figure it out.
Again, Butler is adding up the pluses and minuses.
“We still can be better in so many areas,” he says. “When you see flashes of it in the game when I’m playing, I’m like, Damn, we could be really good if we do this consistently, or, Damn, we could be really good if we don’t make this mistake all the time. It’s special because I think everybody sees it, but then once you go over and you look at it yourself, you’re like, Man, I can actually see what everybody else is talking about.”
Some moments in some games, he thinks he has it solved. At other times, he cycles through the play calls in his head to make sure he is on the same page as his teammates.
San Jose Mercury News, Bay Area News Group, Mark Medina from
No longer did Stephen Curry feel any pain in his left groin. For about a week, he could complete workouts with full intensity. After each workout, Curry said he felt just as great as he did beforehand.
So after missing the previous 10 games with his injury, Curry proclaimed himself ready to play for the Warriors’ marquee game against the Toronto Raptors on Nov. 29. The Warriors’ star, though, encountered a roadblock much more difficult than facing multiple defenders at halfcourt. Dr. Rick Celebrini, the Warriors’ director of sports medicine and performance, told Curry he would have to sit after expressing concerns that a cross-country flight may complicate his progress.
“With Steph, it’s just important we didn’t skip any stages,” Celebrini said. “He was doing so well and was so confident. At the same time, there’s certain times you push the envelope a little bit maybe to get him back in the playoffs or Finals. But that’s a different context than it is with earlier in the year.”
The Arizona Diamondbacks announced Friday changes to their baseball operations staff, which included the addition of a new Mental Skills department.
Furthermore, the D-backs added seven new individuals to their front office, made four front office role changes and hired six new scouts.
A press release from the D-backs said the Mental Skills department is an “all-encompassing effort” to reach players, coaches and staff across all levels of the organization. It will be led by mental skills coordinator Zach Brandon, formerly of IMG Academy, alongside mental skills coach Charley Jauss and player mentor Daniel Bard.
Kyle Shanahan was working with Zebra Technologies, the company that collects all of the NFL Next Gen data, during Super Bowl week in Atlanta, and the coach shared how he and the 49ers staff use the information to their advantage.
While each player, game ball and referee is tracked in every NFL game, not every team tracks its players during practice. The 49ers do, though, and Shanahan explained why.
“We’ve been using the heck out of them the last few years,” Shanahan said this week on ESPN’s “Golic and Wingo.” “We track all of our players. It tells you how fast a guy is, how slow a guy is. It’s been great for us.
“You always try to temper practice and things like that. ‘Hey, I think our guys are doing too much, let’s take it down.’ But you were always going off your gut feel.”
… New research, published in Nature Communications, doesn’t do much to help you get up but it does shed some light on why we count ourselves as morning or evening people. The answer? It’s not anything you’re doing – it all comes down to your genes.
That’s something that we somewhat knew already. Previous research had identified a total of 24 genes that determine the way the human body clock is regulated, known as our circadian rhythm – that is, our internal cycle of sleepiness and alertness. A trio of biologists won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 2017 for discovering the “period gene”, which encodes a protein at night time, letting our bodies know that it is time to sleep, and which then degrades during the day.
The period gene was one of the 24 – the new Nature study has brought that number to 351. “Depending on how many of those genes you carry, you can be anywhere on the scale of ‘morningness,’” says Michael Weedon, a bioinformatics at the University of Exeter Medical School, who led the study. “But our research showed that the top five per cent with the most of those 351 genes go to sleep on average 25 minutes earlier than the five per cent who carry the least.”
The present paper endeavored to elucidate the topic on the effects of morning versus evening resistance training on muscle strength and hypertrophy by conducting a systematic review and a meta-analysis of studies that examined time of day-specific resistance training. This systematic review was performed in accordance with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines with searches conducted through PubMed/MEDLINE, Scopus, and SPORTDiscus databases. The Downs and Black checklist was used for the assessment of the methodological quality of the included studies. Studies that examined the effects of time of day-specific resistance training (while equating all other training variables, such as training frequency and volume, between the groups) on muscle strength and/or muscle size were included in the present review. The random effects model was used for the meta-analysis. Meta-analyses explored (1) the differences in strength expression between morning and evening hours at baseline; (2) the differences in strength within the groups training in the morning and evening by using their post-intervention strength data from the morning and evening strength assessments; (3) the overall differences between the effects of morning and evening resistance training (with subgroup analyses conducted for studies that assessed strength in the morning hours and for the studies that assessed strength in the evening hours). Finally, a meta-analysis was also conducted for studies that assessed muscle hypertrophy. Eleven studies of moderate and good methodological quality were included in the present review. The primary findings of the review are as follows: (1) at baseline, a significant difference in strength between morning and evening is evident, with greater strength observed in the evening hours; (2) resistance training in the morning hours may increase strength assessed in the morning to similar levels as strength assessed in the evening; (3) training in the evening hours, however, maintains the general difference in strength across the day, with greater strength observed in the evening hours; (4) when comparing the effects between the groups training in the morning versus in the evening hours, increases in strength are similar in both groups, regardless of the time of day at which strength assessment is conducted; and (5) increases in muscle size are similar irrespective of the time of day at which the training is performed.
… Innovations to Advance Athlete Health and Safety Competition, first place: TopSpin Technologies LTD, inventors of TopSpin360, a helmet and the first patented training device proven to strengthen neck muscles with a view to help reduce concussions.
Innovations to Advance Athlete Health and Safety Competition, second place: SOLIUS, which developed advanced science using nano-spectrums of light to stimulate essential hormones and peptides to assist in the reduction of injuries, enhance recovery and improve athletic performance.
NFL Punt Analytics Competition: Halla Yang and Alex Wainger. Yang proposed awarding a 5-yard bonus on fair catches, changing the allowed coverage on punt returners and requiring helmet sensor to monitor physical deceleration. Wainger proposed removing the rule that holds the kicking team at the line of scrimmage until the punt.
In November 2018, the Football Technology Innovation department at FIFA conducted a research study with Victoria University at the Mini Estadi, in Barcelona supported by the Barça Innovation Hub to explore the validity of 16 different Electronic Performance Tracking Systems (EPTS). The systems, made up of Global Positioning Systems (GPS), Local Positioning Systems (LPS) and Optical Systems were tasked with tracking 10 players through specific football movements and small sided games. Positional and velocity data were collected by all providers which is now being compared with the processed VICON tracking data to assess the levels of agreement between the two.
The aim of this project is to understand the accuracy and create a more transparent overview of available systems and their accuracies as the global demand for tracking systems increases, with the final goal to create a professional standard.
… [John] Pollard said one of Zebra’s handful of college clients sometimes posts the speed data on the scoreboard during practice, goading players to compete against one another, or their own best numbers.
“The Eagles have been a practice client of ours for some time,” Pollard said. “Also, speaking generally, the Eagles are looked at as an organization amongst the 32 clubs … that looks at innovation, usage of technologies, looking for efficiencies through technologies. They’re typically on the front end of innovation.”
An NFC personnel source said “there’s so much information” generated by RFID that his team’s analytics group and the strength and conditioning staff spend a lot of time parsing it, day to day. “Seeing what data is the most useful, what data is maybe not as useful, making sure we’re looking at the right things,” he said.
… At last month’s United Soccer Coaches convention, U.S. Soccer Federation data analysts Tyler Heaps and Joris Bekkers gave a presentation on how the men’s and women’s national teams have incorporated advanced statistical measures into the roster selection process. The event was hosted by Opta, the sports stats behemoth that tracks data on U.S. Soccer’s behalf.
Heaps said that national team coaches and Federation executives have embraced bringing more data into their decision-making process. It’s especially true for men’s national team general manager Earnie Stewart and new head coach Gregg Berhalter.
… To find out more about the role of parents in the making of elite athletes, Stuart Wilson, currently pursuing his PhD at the University of Ottawa, reviewed data compiled from a previous study done by New Zealander Melissa Wilson, featuring 229 athletes from Canada and Australia. The athletes, who were divided into three groups based on their performance level; elite (competed internationally), pre-elite (junior international or senior national team status) and non-elite (all remaining lower levels of competition) were compared to their parents’ history of sports participation (recreational or competitive sport) and achievement.