… On Wednesday, Donald got to see the fruits of his donation as Pitt unveiled the “Aaron Donald Performance Center” at Pitt’s practice facility in the South Side. Donald said he was humbled by it all and just grateful he had the opportunity to give something back to Pitt.
Think about that for a moment. The guy gives a huge donation to a football program and yet he is humbled by the fact that they chose to name a part of the facility after him. It is incredible that a player of his ilk and accomplishment is still so grounded he not only didn’t forget his roots, but he is still the same guy he was as an incoming freshman at Pitt when very few people outside of the area knew who he was.
But to me, it isn’t just about the money. I would hope athletes who sign multi-million dollar deals would use some of it for good and to give back to his or her community or school, but I’m not their accountant.
Trevor Bauer has thrown more pitches this season than any other major leaguer. Many pitches have not gone where he wanted, but this is the most fitting category for him to be leading. Bauer, a restless and relentless right-hander for the Cleveland Indians, is a pitching scientist on a crusade. His mission is not just to modernize his craft, but also to get people to celebrate — not denigrate — the direction of the game.
“More so than any other major American sport, baseball has the most diversity of culture and personality, and is the least marketable,” he said over lunch before a game here last month. “Why? It doesn’t make any sense.”
Bauer, 28, is probably doing more to advance the game, on and off the field, than any other player. He produces his own interview show with other major leaguers, runs a crowdsourced charity, believes in an unusual financial strategy and yearns for the rest of the game to match his enthusiasm for the many ways data can make players better.
… I wanted to know more about US Soccer YNT Scouts and what they look for when they’re watching a game. At Man City Cup a few weeks ago, I joined Shawn Beyer at lunch during a break in his scouting assignments. Beyer is a Scout for US Soccer. We talked about the Scouting (Talent Identification) system and what scouts like him are looking for when they’re watching a game. What he told me is not just fascinating information for anyone curious about how USYNT players are discovered. Players who want to improve their soccer can take this information and apply it right away.
In football as in other sports, they’re drawing up business plans, starting marketing agencies, turning up at practice and even monitoring phone use. But by clearing out every obstacle on their kids’ road to stardom, hyperinvolved moms and dads threaten to deprive young athletes of critical life experiences. And they’re driving coaches and agents nuts.
… So while in France, what exactly does her Women’s World Cup role look like?
“Players will start in the morning by filling in a wellness platform as well as doing a urine test so we can get their immediate hydration status,” Scott explains. “Once we have that information, I then follow up with the players who I feel might need some hydration fluid to rehydrate.
“If a player reports any sort of soreness I then follow up with our medical team and liaise with our coaches to plan out our training for later that day.”
… Because of [Trevor] Bauer’s old hand position with a standard four-seam changeup grip, the pitch was naturally released with a degree of backspin that created some lift, as he says in a conversation with Mariners starter Yusei Kikuchi. With the help of high-speed Edgertronic cameras at Driveline, Bauer was able to see in fine detail how he released the ball out of his hand. He altered the grip of the pitch so that when his last finger to make contact with the ball released, his middle finger, it would slip and rotate the ball laterally. By wedging the ball between his middle and ring finger, it allowed him to release the ball with this ideal side spin and achieve a similar hand position as his other pitches.
… Officials in pro sports often express gratitude for the safety net that video review can provide, but a growing legion of sports participants frets about its impact on expectations and wonders if it has helped fuel the toxic environments found at youth and amateur sporting events.
Brian Barlow, a soccer referee in Oklahoma who has worked every level from youth to semipro, was harassed for more than a year by fans touting a sideline video of one of his calls.
“They attacked me personally and they attacked my family,” Barlow said. “I run into some of the parents and they still trash-talk me to my face. And it’s all because of the video, which if they knew the rules, they would know it shows that I was right.
Medical experts have demanded annual brain screenings for all footballers playing for first and second division clubs in Germany. They also recommend checking youth players, according to Bild newspaper.
… The new safety initiatives for 2019, as with almost everything else NFL-related this year, have been largely buried in the public realm this off-season underneath all the angst, discussion, debate and worry over the first-time expansion of replay reviews to include pass interference calls and non-calls.
Yet these safety initiatives deserve further illumination.
On Friday afternoon the NFL’s executive VP of health and safety initiatives, Jeff Miller, spoke with Postmedia for half an hour, ostensibly to discuss the 99-year-old league’s newest health-and-safety collaboration, with NCAA football and its leading, so-called “Power Five” conferences.
… While the NFL and NCAA have taken several steps to make football safer in recent years, they have not done so in concert. But [Brian] Hainline and Dr. Allen Sills, the NFL’s chief medical officer, are longtime colleagues and hope to begin more collaboration. And some of the studies that each side has been working on are now a few years old and have results that can be shared.
“We’re doing research that’s different than what they do, and they’re doing research that’s different than what we do,” Hainline said Friday. “The purpose of this meeting wasn’t to change rules so much. It was to say, ‘What do you all have and what do we all have,’ and really to help the physicians and athletic trainers understand the landscape better. We just want to be able to demonstrate that we have a lot to learn from each other.”
Yuki Oka, assistant professor of biology and Chen Scholar at Caltech, was curious about why that is, and how the brain processes satiation and pleasure signals related to drinking.
In a new paper, Oka shows that thirst satiation is governed by two independent pathways in the mammalian body and brain. These pathways work together to help keep animals properly rehydrated.
Here is how it works: When you are thirsty and you start drinking a glass of water (or any other liquid), the first parts of your body to interact with that liquid are your mouth and throat. These two areas, known collectively as the oropharyngeal region, are lined with nerves that pass along a drinking signal to neurons in a brain structure called the subfornical organ (SFO). The Oka lab has previously shown that the activation of neurons in the SFO generates the sensation of being thirsty. When the SFO receives a drinking signal, it turns off these thirst neurons.
While carbs and fat get alternately praised and punished, protein is basically the golden child among the macronutrients. That’s totally unfair to carbs and fat, first of all, but protein certainly does enough to earn its reliably good reputation. We know protein is a great thing to have, but why exactly do we need it, and what does our body even do with it? Here’s a rundown of what actually happens when you eat protein.
Equinox, Furthermore blog, Cassie Shortsleeve from
Low-carb diets, with the macro comprising about 10 percent of your daily intake, have made a full-fledged comeback thanks to the keto trend. This is even true among people who train hard, despite the fact that carbs provide fast fuel for intense workouts.
Intentionally skimping on them sends you into a state of ketosis, in which you burn fat during exercise instead of glycogen, says Jonathan Dick, Tier X coach, master instructor, and nutrition specialist at Kensington in London. Ironically, burning fat isn’t the most efficient way to actually lose body fat.
Besides that, cutting back on carbs also hurts hydration, recovery, and more.