… This is a TrueHoop series about LeBron James. He is not only one of the biggest, fastest, and strongest humans in history, but he also has a brain wired for obsessive work. He is exceptional in both body and mind; born enormous and strong, and with an immense capacity to work to get stronger. That’s how to build the best individual player in the history of the game.
His determination to outwork everyone comes with many things, one of which is a certain narrow brand of intolerance. LeBron is tough on himself, and that affects those around him, especially young teammates who can’t match his professionalism. He has ridiculed or quit on plenty of young teammates, it’s hard to name many he has successfully nurtured. Less than a year ago he became a meme of angry disdain after J.R. Smith misconstrued the score in crunch time of Game 1 of last year’s Finals; that night LeBron would profoundly injure his hand punching a whiteboard in disgust.
LeBron is the best at so many things, but getting the best out of young players has never been one of them.
ong before radar and camera systems that log every imaginable measurement became necessities at minor league affiliates across baseball, they were like Christmas morning toys to those who understood where the game was going. And in the Atlanta Braves organization, the most curious minds in the front office wanted to know whether their eyes were telling them the truth. That the 17-year-old who stood 6 feet tall and weighed 180 pounds really did hit the ball like grown men five inches taller and 75 pounds heavier.
A Trackman unit, used to evaluate players, was sent to Danville, Virginia, where the kid was spending the last three weeks of the 2015 season in rookie ball. About a year earlier, Ronald Acuña Jr. signed with the Braves for $100,000. He was supposed to be a Kansas City Royal, but the Braves swooped in on international signing day, July 2, with a heftier bonus offer. Atlanta soon recognized its fortune. The entire industry, which devoted tens of millions of dollars annually to teenagers from Latin America, had whiffed on Acuña. He was the Braves’ little secret.
Edmonton Oilers center Connor McDavid’s season ended on April 6 when he slid into the post of the Calgary Flames’ net, injuring his left knee severely enough that he was unable to bear weight on it and had to be helped off the ice. Given that this also happened to be the Oilers’ season finale, fans looking ahead to next season were left with questions about what to expect for McDavid come September.
In the days since the injury, it has been widely reported that McDavid suffered a posterior cruciate ligament (PCL) tear that would not require surgery, and he is expected to be ready for training camp in September. Considering the anatomy of the PCL, the nature of the injury, the demands of the sport and, above all, the athlete himself, there is certainly reason for Oilers fans to be optimistic.
… Kline, 27, served as the Orioles’ 26th man for the second game of Saturday’s doubleheader against the Minnesota Twins, pitching two innings and allowing two solo home runs in the eighth in his major league debut. The Orioles’ second-round pick in the 2012 draft out of Virginia, Kline grew up in Frederick, but the path from there to Baltimore was far longer than the hour-long drive between locations.
In 2013, a broken right fibula required surgery. A platelet-rich plasma injection in May 2015 preceded the Tommy John surgery, and two 2017 arthroscopic procedures on the back of the elbow followed.
After three lost seasons, he returned last year as a reliever, his big arm and breaking pitches playing to the tune of a 2.88 ERA in 44 games between High-A Frederick and Double-A Bowie, with 17 saves along the way.
… A week after Boston, Fauble talked to us about himself, the race, and his future plans.
At the press conference, you spoke about a midrace moment when you told yourself, ‘I can’t bleeping believe I’m leading the bleeping Boston Marathon.’ Is that that strongest word in your vocabulary?
During the race I was thinking something more like “I can’t believe I’m leading the f___ing Boston Marathon.” But the post-race Boston press room has a dignified atmosphere, and I didn’t want to say anything inappropriate there. Or anything that would embarrass me personally.
For most of the 20th century, getting fitter just involved training harder. However, today’s elite athletes, weekend warriors and even recreational gym-goers know that they have to consider not just their workouts but their bodies’ recovery from them too, especially if they want to get stronger or faster. From cryotherapy and stretching to protein shakes and compression tights, we are bombarded with suggestions on how to speed the soothing of our aches and pains. It can, however, be hard to know what works best. Sports scientists don’t have all the answers, but they can help those trying to beat their personal bests, bulk up or just stay fit to sort the restorative strategies from the recovery snake oil.
… On April 17 of this year, expansive research situating sleep within the context of other key lifestyle and health behaviors was published in Sleep, the flagship journal of the Sleep Research Society. Seth Creasy at the University of Colorado, with 11 colleagues from several educational and healthcare institutions, analyzed reports of 75,074 postmenopausal women enrolled in the Women’s Health Initiative Observational Study across 40 clinical centers nationwide. The aim of their analysis was to elucidate the relationship between sleep duration and quality on the one hand and sedentary time and physical activity on the other hand.
From the outset, three important aspects of this study should be noted. First, only postmenopausal women were included, as disturbed sleep and reduced activity are more prevalent after menopause. Thus, participants in this study were at a greater risk for poor sleep due to a specific physiological factor. Second, the authors selected sedentary time and physical activity as health-related “modifiable behaviors,” gently pointing with such terminology towards practical implications of their research. As will be seen from the study findings, treating sedentary time and physical activity as two distinct behaviors, and not just perfect complements of each other, is a fruitful and informative method. And third, the very large sample size allowed the authors to control statistically for numerous demographic and health variables that might affect both sleep and activity but were outside of the study scope.
One negative behavior such as substance abuse or heavy alcohol drinking can lead college students toward a vicious cycle of poor lifestyle choices, lack of sleep, mental distress and low grades, according to new research from Binghamton University, State University of New York.
“We used a robust data-mining technique to identify associations between mental distress in college students with substance abuse, sleep, social behaviors, academic attitude and behaviors, and GPA (short-term and long-term as reflective of academic performance),” says Lina Begdache, PhD, assistant professor of Health and Wellness Studies at Binghamton University, in a release. “Positive behaviors such as abstinence from substance use, studious attitudes, and responsibility toward work and family are reflective of a brain chemistry profile that supports mood and maturation of the prefrontal cortex of the brain. The latter matures last and supports impulse and emotional control as well as rationalization of thoughts.
It can make a fan’s blood boil: Two players lunge for a soccer ball, one of them kicks it out of bounds, and now both are claiming the other touched it last. We may rightly chalk up many “last touch” disagreements to players’ wishful thinking, or to outright deception. But psychologists have identified another possible factor at play—a natural tendency to think our own actions come before external events.
To look for this tendency in the lab, the researchers had pairs of people sit across from each other and asked them both to tap their partner’s left hand with their right finger as soon as they saw a light flash. Sensors on the backs of their left hands revealed who tapped first. After each trial, participants were asked to render their own judgment.
A clear bias emerged: In cases where the taps were simultaneous, participants had a 67% chance of claiming the first touch, researchers report today in Science Advances.
… Like most collegiate programs, Maryland did not have a full-time sports psychologist in the athletics department. [Karen] Tang, who finished competing at the collegiate level in 2015, can’t recall the team ever bringing anyone in to talk to the athletes about mental health. The psychologist she visited worked in the counseling center, located over a mile away from the Maryland athletics department on the sprawling College Park campus.
But some universities, including local programs in recent years, have taken steps to respond to the student-athletes’ needs. Tang hopes that means situations like hers will be spotted sooner.
“I wouldn’t change my experience,” she says. “Yes, I went through some mental health issues, but if I had the support I needed from the beginning, like freshman year … I think it would have just made me better if I had those resources in the beginning.”
University of Pittsburgh, Pittmed, Elaine Vitone from
… Everyday wear and tear on the joints. Sleep, or lack thereof. Both the mundane and the obviously death-defying can do us in.
How do we keep ticking? Researchers in a growing field known as human performance optimization want to know how we can function at our best even when our circumstances aren’t. Human performance is a crucial concern for the American military, says Poropatich, director of Pitt’s Center for Military Medicine Research (CMMR), which works closely with the Veterans Affairs and the Department of Defense (DOD) research arms to solve military medical problems.
But improving performance isn’t just in the interest of service members, of course. “There are lots of people at Pitt” chasing down this goal, says Rory Cooper, “whether it’s post-transplant, or post–spinal cord injury, or amputation, or our own Division I athletes, or special operations forces.” Cooper himself, founder of the Human Engineering Research Laboratories (HERL) and Distinguished Professor in the Department of Rehabilitation Science and Technology in Pitt’s School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, has garnered numerous awards for his contributions to assistive technology, a field that enhances daily living for persons with disabilities. He’s also an elite athlete, medaling in the Paralympics and National Veterans Wheelchair Games year after year.
Connecting hundreds of players in the world of sport in Lausanne is the main mission of the nonprofit ThinkSport. Four years after its creation, director Anna Hellman talks about making the region an epicenter of sports expertise and innovation, and how its annual event, The Spot, can help expand Lausanne as a hub even further. [video, 14:49]
Balance tests are commonly used in clinical practice with applicability in injury prevention and return to sport decisions. While most sports injuries occur in a changing environment where reacting to a non-planned stimulus is of great importance, these balance tests only evaluate pre-planned movements without taking these dynamics environmental aspects into account. Therefore, the goal of this paper was to describe the development of a clinician-friendly test that respects these contextual interactions and to describe the test protocol of an adapted Y-balance test that includes environmental perception and decision-making.
Within the theoretical construct of balance and adaptability, balance errors were selected as outcome measures for balance ability and, visuomotor reaction time and accuracy are selected as outcome measures for adaptability. A reactive balance task was developed and described using the Y-balance test for the balance component, while the FitLight training system TM was chosen for the environmental perception and decision- making component of the test.
With the NBA playoffs in full swing, emotions are running high among super-fans, inevitably leading to lots of heated arguments about bad referee calls and disputed plays. For instance, when a ball goes out of bounds, it can sometimes be challenging to determine which player touched it last. Both players will undoubtedly argue their opponent touched it last, trying to give possession of the ball to their own team. The other player will just as forcefully argue the opposite.
Who is right? According to a new paper in Science Advances, both players are subject to a kind of temporal bias whereby they will perceive themselves touching the ball first. “Our brains tell us that actions generated by ourselves come before simultaneous external events,” the authors write. “Briefly, we have identified what may be a principal cause of arguments in ball games, and it’s about time.”
On the surface, Major League Baseball’s official Opening Day payroll numbers do not offer any surprises. The Boston Red Sox are paying the most in actual salaries as well as the number used in luxury-tax calculations. The Chicago Cubs and New York Yankees also have payrolls in excess of $200 million. The average salary is almost exactly flat year over year despite industry revenue gains.
A deeper dive into the numbers offers a few important lessons as MLB and the MLB Players Association prepare to discuss the game’s economics in early bargaining sessions expected to start soon. Here are five takeaways.
1) The best team in baseball has the lowest payroll