… “He’s here to win. Every single day. And he brings energy like every moment out there on the field,” Callaway said. “He’s been tremendous so far. It’s fun getting to learn who is and what he’s all about.”
Alonso’s setup in the batter’s box is a little unusual. He holds his hands low, the bat bouncing listlessly off his back right shoulder like an umbrella waiting for a rainstorm. He does this thing where he takes kind of a checked swing, snapping his hands downward to help create muscle memory. When he does initiate his swing, he rocks gently back and the hands raise up slightly and whip through the zone to unleash some of the best raw power in the game.
It’s not the setup Alonso has always deployed. When you watch video of him at the University of Florida, his hands are higher, up near his head, and farther from his body — a more conventional look. He had a breakout season his draft year in 2016, but he also spent the season tinkering with his stance.
… “The basic ingredient in a team performance is running, that desire, fitness,” said Solskjaer.
“Our fitness is nowhere near good enough, I can’t wait to get a pre-season done.
“We’ve done fantastic to get to where we are and maybe that’s taken our eye off the ball. We all know to win games of football, it’s about basics and fitness and that’s nothing to do with talent.”
… what might we expect to see in Austria next year? And what did Jesse Marsch do in New York to propel himself forward in the Red Bull family?
Marsch is quite clearly a man of strong principles. His first professional head-coaching role at Montreal Impact ended due to a “difference in coaching philosophies” rather than a string of unacceptable results.
Known for encouraging his players to take ownership of their own performances and development, he chose to empower the Red Bull locker room, through strong personalities such as Dax McCarthy, Sacha Kljesistan and Mr. MLS congeniality – Felipe. With this group of leaders, it’s fair to say that Marsch’s Red Bulls thrived holistically, rather than being dragged upwards by a few high paid stars.
Harvard Business Review, George Stalk, Jr. and Sam Stewart from
… Pilot training, the innate ability of each pilot, and the jets themselves were the key factors. The F-86 that the U.S. pilots flew had vastly superior visibility from the cockpit than the enemy’s MIG 15 and was easier to maneuver at higher speeds. Consequently, Boyd postulated, these technical advantages combined with the skills of the few, best U.S. pilots could react to the enemy’s maneuvers at a much faster tempo than their opponents could react to theirs, causing enemy fighters to become confused, under- or over-react as the fight progressed, and eventually lose the ability to control the situation. “He who can handle the quickest rate of change survives,” Boyd said. He labeled this the Observe-Orient-Decide-Act (OODA) loop.
Despite all the differences between flying fighters and running a company, the OODA loop model is useful for understanding today’s uncertain business environment. Disruptors put the squeeze on competitors with a similar, dynamic loop: They continually scan the landscape, orient themselves to new circumstances, decide how to respond, and act quickly. Then they regroup and repeat the process. With experience and expertise, their “SODA loop” tightens and the tempo accelerates. Legacy companies can and should strive to play the same game.
… It is easy to think ourselves into the just-do-it view. Athletes are often extraordinarily bad at explaining their own successes. After winning the US Women’s Amateur Golf Championship in 2006, Kimberly Kim was asked about how she motivated herself to perform at such a high level. She answered:
I have no idea. I guess it was like God playing for me. I don’t know how I did it. Thinking back, I don’t know how I did it. I just hit the ball and it went good.
Reports of this phenomenon – which the cognitive scientists Sian Beilock and Thomas Carr in 2001 called expertise-induced amnesia – are widespread. So often, athletes, artists and musicians are fluid in their field of practice but inarticulate in interviews.
There is also experimental evidence that certain kinds of thinking can undermine performance: a study from 2018 found that asking runners on a treadmill to focus on their form or breathing lead them to burn more oxygen, and be less efficient.
This is Part Three of a five-part series on total load, the cumulative training and life stress an athlete experiences while training. … It may come as a surprise to many people (it did to me), that unless you are a professional athlete looked after by experts who are minimizing all the non-training sources of stress in your life, that training is rarely the largest component of total load. Assuming that you eat and sleep reasonably well (we will cover those later in the series), then mental stress is quite likely to be your largest stressor.
University of California-San Diego, Jacobs School of Engineering from
Computer scientists at the University of California San Diego have developed FitRec, a recommendation tool powered by deep learning, that is able to better estimate runners’ heart rates during a workout and predict and recommend routes. The team from the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering will present their work at the WWW 19 conference May 13 to 17 in San Francisco.
Researchers trained FitRec on a dataset of more than 250,000 workout records for more than 1,000 runners. This allowed computer scientists to build a model that analyzed past performance to predict speed and heart rate given specific future workout times and routes.
FitRec also is capable of identifying important features that affect workout performance, such as whether a route has hills and the user’s level of fitness. The tool can recommend alternate routes for runners who want to achieve a specific target heart rate. It also is capable of making short-term predictions, such as telling runners when to slow down to avoid exceeding their desired maximum heart rate.
What the research is: A new approach to object recognition that uses a single neural network to simultaneously recognize distinct foreground objects, such as animals or people (a task called instance segmentation), while also labeling pixels in the image background with classes, such as road, sky, or grass (a task called semantic segmentation). While previous research has mainly explored these two segmentation tasks separately, using different types of network architectures, our work shows that both tasks can be addressed in one unified architecture. The new approach is memory and computationally efficient, and establishes strong baseline performance for the recently introduced panoptic segmentation task, which merges semantic and instance segmentation into a combined task.
… “One of the essential problems in self-driving cars is to identify objects around them – obviously that’s crucial for a car to navigate its environment,” said Kilian Weinberger, associate professor of computer science and senior author of the paper, “Pseudo-LiDAR from Visual Depth Estimation: Bridging the Gap in 3D Object Detection for Autonomous Driving,” which will be presented at the 2019 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, June 15-21 in Long Beach, California.
“The common belief is that you couldn’t make self-driving cars without LiDARs,” Weinberger said. “We’ve shown, at least in principle, that it’s possible.”
Richard Allison is a former Royal Marine Commando who has been Arsenal’s Head of Nutrition since July 2017.
In a fascinating interview for Scott Baptie’s Food For Fitness Podcast, Allison lifted the lid on Arsenal’s nutrition programme, which includes collagen shots, DEXA scans and the input of world-renowned chef Raymond Blanc.
The cycling grand tours (the Giro d’Italia, Tour de France and Vuelta España) represent the pinnacle of the cycling road season. Each grand tour comprises 21 daily stages (~200 km or 4 to 5 hours per stage) with only 2 to 3 days of rest, that is, 80 to 100 hours of competition during which riders must cover 3500 to 4000 km with climbing distances ranging from 40-50,000 metres. These races are competed over different types of stages and terrains usually comprising flat stages, mountain stages and time-trials. The demanding nature of these events prove them to be some of the most gruelling events in sport with recent research reporting that grand tour cyclists expend a staggering ~7700 kcals per day during the Giro d’Italia (Plasqui et al. 2019). Additionally, riders have the added challenge of completing tough blocks of back-to-back mountain and summit finish stages alongside the extreme environmental conditions of changing ambient temperatures and altitudes. Given the formidable challenges associated with these races, nutrition can therefore play a pivotal role in the success of riders with the focus being around the challenges of optimal fuelling and recovery, weight management and illness prevention.
Adding to the perpetual discussion regarding whether or not caffeine contributes to overall athletic performance, the British Journal of Sports Medicine (BJSM) recently released a new set of findings based on a synopsis of past studies.
The umbrella review covered 300 primary studies with more than 4,800 participants across 11 analyses. Through its review, the BJSM concluded that, “caffeine is ergogenic for different components of exercise performance including aerobic endurance, muscle strength, muscle endurance, power, jumping performance and exercise speed. (BJSM)
How much impact can caffeine have? “Those who respond most strongly to caffeine might see improvements of around 16%, but this is unusual. For the average person, improvements will likely be between about 2% and 6%,” says the BJSM.
In this mini-series, we attempt to expand our focus to analyze the overall state of player development over the past seven years. More specifically, we attempt to quantify each organization’s respective ability to acquire and develop young talent within the minor leagues. These outputs will give us insight into how important a highly functioning player-development department is to win at the MLB level and extend a competitive window years into the future.
This blog post outlines the details and methods behind the creation of our estimates, as well as provides some initial findings. A subsequent post will take a deeper dive into our results and provide some key takeaways for the industry moving forward.
… He was hired by the Giants as president of baseball operations after four years and two World Series as general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, which brings a heightened level of suspicion among Northern Californians. Standing there in his first public event, with his wide black-rimmed glasses, slightly gapped smile and gentle nature, he looked nothing like their idea of a baseball guy.
And so he decided to answer the season-ticket holder’s question with a question of his own:
“If I told you using an opener would definitely improve your chances of winning on a certain day, how many of you would still not want to use it?”
His premise was inarguable, genius: Whatever you think of me, and regardless of who pitches and for how long, who says no to winning? Who among you, men and women who have shelled out thousands and thousands of dollars for ballgames, cannot unite behind the shared joy of victory?