DeMarcus Cousins is trying to adjust to accepting being less than he always was and there are times, like Saturday, when it is evident he detests the limitations within a process sure to be long and challenging.
“It’s frustrating as hell,” Cousins said Saturday after a lethargic Warriors effort in a 118-112 loss to the Rockets.
“It’s tough,” he added. “I’m in a gray area, trying to get back to being myself and also just knowing guys are coming at me. Nobody in this league is going to feel sorry for me and I know that.”
Ashton Lambie’s first taste of a velodrome took place in a cow pasture in Lawrence, Kansas, near where his wife, Margaret, was attending grad school.
“I went for fun on a buddy’s bike and loved it,” the 28-year-old recalled of his first turns on a track cycling oval.
He’s not in Kansas anymore. He’s a world record holder in the individual pursuit and leads a talented group of U.S. men’s endurance riders into the 2019 UCI Track Cycling World Championships that will be held Feb. 27-March 3 in Pruszków, Poland.
Known more as a gravel rider and for success in ultra-endurance events such as the Dirty Kanza, a 200-mile race over off-road surfaces, Lambie turned that lark ride on the Kansas track to shattering the world record in the individual pursuit at the 2018 Pan-American Track Cycling Championships in Aguascalientes, Mexico.
A three-year research project carried out by Southampton has found that sudden spikes in training load dramatically increase injury risk – but that building workload over longer periods protects against this.
… n 2017, there were 14,000 so-called tennis professionals, but fewer than 600 broke even before coaching costs.
While the likes of Novak Djokovic and Serena earn fortunes from the sport and even men’s 100th-ranked Vasek Pospisil has banked $5.2 million in a decade on Tour, around 80 percent of professionals quit having earned next to nothing.
In truth, for the majority, a career as a tennis pro has been more fantasy than reality.
Which is why the International Tennis Federation (ITF) has acted on its three-year Player Pathway review, a comprehensive study into the professional game published in 2017, and why players like Furness now see light at the end of the tunnel.
… For the NFL, it’s about more than just building the next generation of great football players; it’s about building the next generation of great leaders — on and off the field.
For those with what it takes to compete to be among the next generation of NFL stars, the league’s Football Development team works to identify and develop the next generation of NFL stars. That includes preparing kids for the game at every level, teaching them the game and giving them every opportunity to showcase their talents.
The U.S. Olympic Committee has tabbed Paralympic executive Rick Adams to serve as its new chief of sport performance, and will also create a new department charged with making it easier for athletes to deal with off-the-field needs, including health care and reporting inappropriate conduct.
CEO Sarah Hirshland announced those changes to the USOC staff Wednesday as part of a reorganization designed to make the approximately 400-person operation more responsive to athletes.
A breakthrough in energy storage technology could bring a new generation of flexible electronic devices to life, including solar-powered prosthetics for amputees.
In a new paper published in the journal Advanced Science, a team of engineers from the University of Glasgow discuss how they have used layers of graphene and polyurethane to create a flexible supercapacitor which can generate power from the sun and store excess energy for later use.
They demonstrate the effectiveness of their new material by powering a series of devices, including a string of 84 power-hungry LEDs and the high-torque motors in a prosthetic hand, allowing it to grasp a series of objects.
PLOS One; Daniel P. Nicolella, Lorena Torres-Ronda, Kase J. Saylor, Xavi Schelling from
This study aimed to determine the intra- and inter-device accuracy and reliability of wearable athletic tracking devices, under controlled laboratory conditions. A total of nineteen portable accelerometers (Catapult OptimEye S5) were mounted to an aluminum bracket, bolted directly to an Unholtz Dickie 20K electrodynamic shaker table, and subjected to a series of oscillations in each of three orthogonal directions (front-back, side to side, and up-down), at four levels of peak acceleration (0.1g, 0.5g, 1.0g, and 3.0g), each repeated five times resulting in a total of 60 tests per unit, for a total of 1140 records. Data from each accelerometer was recorded at a sampling frequency of 100Hz. Peak accelerations recorded by the devices, Catapult PlayerLoad™, and calculated player load (using Catapult’s Cartesian formula) were used for the analysis. The devices demonstrated excellent intradevice reliability and mixed interdevice reliability. Differences were found between devices for mean peak accelerations and PlayerLoad™ for each direction and level of acceleration. Interdevice effect sizes ranged from a mean of 0.54 (95% CI: 0.34–0.74) (small) to 1.20 (95% CI: 1.08–1.30) (large) and ICCs ranged from 0.77 (95% CI: 0.62–0.89) (very large) to 1.0 (95% CI: 0.99–1.0) (nearly perfect) depending upon the magnitude and direction of the applied motion. When compared to the player load determined using the Cartesian formula, the Catapult reported PlayerLoad™ was consistently lower by approximately 15%. These results emphasize the need for industry wide standards in reporting validity, reliability and the magnitude of measurement errors. It is recommended that device reliability and accuracy are periodically quantified.
Hamstring strain injury (HSI) is the most prevalent injury in football (soccer), and a few intrinsic factors have been associated with higher injury rates. OBJECTIVE::
To describe the prevalence of the main intrinsic risk factors for HSI in professional and under-20 football players. DESIGN::
Cross-sectional study. PARTICIPANTS::
One-hundred and one football players (52 professionals; 49 under-20). INTERVENTION::
An evidence-based testing protocol for screening HSI risk factors. SETTING::
Physiotherapy Laboratory, XXXXX University. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES::
Anamnesis, hamstrings ultrasonography, passive straight-leg raise test, functional movement screen, and isokinetic dynamometry were performed. Eleven HSI risk factors for each leg were assessed, besides the player’s age as a systemic risk factor. Reports were delivered to the coaching staff. RESULTS::
Professionals had greater prevalence of HSI history compared to under-20 players (40% vs. 18%). No between-group differences were found for the other screening tests. Altogether, thirty percent of players had already sustained at least one HSI; 58% had history of injuries in adjacent regions; 49% had short biceps femoris fascicles; 66% and 21% had poor passive and active flexibility, respectively; 42% and 29% had deficits in functional movements and core stability, respectively; 7% and 26% presented bilateral imbalance for hamstring concentric and eccentric strength, respectively; 87% and 94% obtained low values for hamstring-to-quadriceps conventional and functional ratios, respectively. Two-thirds of players had 3 to 5 risk factors per leg. None of the players was fully free of HSI risk factors. CONCLUSION::
Most football players present multiple risk factors for sustaining an HSI. Hamstring weakness is the most prevalent risk factor, but the teams should also be aware of deficits in flexibility, core stability, functional movements, and hamstring fascicle length.
Many agree that the future of nutrition is personalized nutrition. However I also often hear that “we have been doing this for years”. Of course both claims are valid. Some form of personalisation has been the basis of the work of a sports dietitian or sports nutritionist. However, there are different levels of personalized nutrition.
The moment you step off the treadmill or lower the barbell for the last time, the clock starts ticking. Will you make it back to your locker in time to scarf down your recovery shake or energy bar before it’s too late? Or will you miss out on some of the benefits of your workout by leaving your tired muscles starved of fuel until you get home for dinner?
That stark choice has been drummed into generations of gym-goers since the 1980s thanks to a theory called the “metabolic window of opportunity,” which holds that your muscles are uniquely primed to recover and grow if you feed them immediately after exercise. Miss the window and you’ve missed a chance to get fitter and stronger. Some fitness researchers have even argued that when you eat is more important than what or how much you eat.
But not everyone agrees. In a recent article in the Journal of Orthopaedic & Sports Physical Therapy, prominent sports nutrition researchers Brad Schoenfeld of Lehman College in New York and Alan Aragon of California State University, Northridge, reassess the evidence for the window theory. Postworkout refuelling is certainly important, they conclude – but the emphasis on a narrow window is misplaced.
arXiv, Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence; Siqi Liu, Guy Lever, Josh Merel, Saran Tunyasuvunakool, Nicolas Heess, Thore Graepel from
We study the emergence of cooperative behaviors in reinforcement learning agents by introducing a challenging competitive multi-agent soccer environment with continuous simulated physics. We demonstrate that decentralized, population-based training with co-play can lead to a progression in agents’ behaviors: from random, to simple ball chasing, and finally showing evidence of cooperation. Our study highlights several of the challenges encountered in large scale multi-agent training in continuous control. In particular, we demonstrate that the automatic optimization of simple shaping rewards, not themselves conducive to co-operative behavior, can lead to long-horizon team behavior. We further apply an evaluation scheme, grounded by game theoretic principals, that can assess agent performance in the absence of pre-defined evaluation tasks or human baselines.
… I recently noticed someone—I wish I could recall who—tweet about Efron and Morris’s classic, Stein’s Paradox in Statistics. At the time, I was vaguely aware of the paper but hadn’t taken the chance to read it. The tweet’s author mentioned how good a read it was. Now I’ve looked at it, I concur. I’m not a sports fan, but I really appreciated their primary example using batting averages from baseball players in 1970. It clarified why partial pooling leads to better estimates than taking simple averages.
In this project, I’ll walk out Efron and Morris’s baseball example in R and then link it to contemporary Bayesian multilevel models.
Zion Williamson’s shoe busted open the conversation about the NBA’s age limit again. After surveying league execs, here’s the good, the bad, and the unintended consequences of letting prospects enter straight from high school.