SB Nation, The Ice Garden blog, Meredith Foster from
When Finnish forward Susanna Tapani appeared on The Ice Garden’s Top 25 Under 25 list in 2017, yours truly had this to say:
She represents her country in ice hockey, ringette, and inline hockey. She has medals in all of them. Let that sink in for a second.
Two years, another Olympic bronze, and a historic IIHF Women’s World Championship silver medal later, that statement holds true as ever. She spent the regular 2018-2019 season with TPS Turku in Finland, then headed to Linköping HC for the SDHL playoffs last spring. Now, Tapani looks ahead to the inaugural Aurora Games as a member of Team World.
… “We’re looking for guys who are competitive, who can handle the discipline it’s going to take to get this done, play a team game and basically fall in love with each other and have that empathy so that they feel responsible to each other and depend upon each other,” Popovich said. “That obviously means you don’t need the greatest amount of talent in the world.
“Too little talent is not a good thing, but we don’t have that problem.”
Gregg Popovich on Sunday night gathered his newly formed Team USA for its first practice in the six-week journey toward the World Cup in China.
He’d been preparing for this gathering in one way or another for almost four years, since he was named as Mike Krzyzewski’s successor in late 2015. The message he delivered to the patchwork roster was aimed at responsibility and unity, two things he thinks are going to be vital. Not just because Team USA has had numerous players drop out of this summer’s event but also because of the weight of playing with “USA” on their chests at this point in time.
“It’s our responsibility to not only be the best team we can be, but also conduct ourselves with the USA on our shirt; we’re representing a lot of people,” Popovich said after he conducted his first training camp practice Monday at UNLV. “We have a huge responsibility, not only for the country, to do this in a classy manner, but to continue the success that USA basketball has had over the last 12 years.”
The average child today spends less than three years playing a sport and quits by age 11, according to a new survey of sports parents conducted by the Aspen Institute and Utah State University.
On top of that, only 38% of kids aged 6 to 12 played team sports on a regular basis in 2018, down from 45% in 2008, per the Sports & Fitness Industry Association.
Why it matters: For parents who see the benefits of their kids playing sports and for a nation in the midst of a childhood obesity epidemic, keeping kids active is extremely important.
Experts agree that there’s no one perfect running form. But there can be better running form.
For many people, that entails slightly increasing their cadence, or the number of steps taken per minute as you run. Making this change may lower your risk for some common injuries and might even improve your efficiency.
The catch, of course, is that changing your running form can be challenging. Your body tends to settle on a preferred movement pattern after hundreds or thousands of miles. But take heart: According to new research published in the Journal of Motor Behavior, when runners increased their cadence, their brains quickly adapted to the form tweak, and the higher turnover soon felt natural.
When you buy a cup of coffee, you might have noticed that of the three size options – small, medium and large – the medium-sized serving often costs almost as much as the large. Given the apparent bargain, have you ever opted for the biggest and most expensive option?
If so, you have been nudged by a cognitive bias known as the “decoy effect”, in which the deliberate presentation of an additional, slightly less attractive option – in this case, the relatively expensive medium-sized coffee – pushes you to pay out more money than you would have rationally chosen. “If you frame options in a certain way, you can nudge people in the direction of higher-priced products,” says Linda Chang, a psychologist at Harvard University.
Researchers from the University of Houston have designed a wearable patch that translates human motions and other commands to a robotic counterpart, which can send feedback back to the wearer as well. The team was able to pack transistors, RRAM memory cells, UV light detectors, temperature sensors, strain sensors, and tiny heaters into the 4-micrometer-thick patch, which they claim is nearly imperceptible to the wearer, much like a Bandaid.
Women's Sports Foundation, The She Network, Dexter Davenport from
With incidents of female youth athlete injuries reaching almost epidemic proportions, the need for a comprehensive injury prevention program at the secondary school level has never been more important. Most injuries result in soft tissue damage that can have long lasting implications for joint health. Sports injuries also have negative impacts off the field as pain and rehabilitation interfere with scholastic duties.
Programs that are most successful in reducing the risk of injuries in female youth athletes include a multi-faceted approach:
Designing a fitness program that emphasizes flexibility training, core training, balance and neuromuscular training, and integrated strength training.
Identifying common injuries and possible root causes.
Developing a strategy to prepare youth athletes for both practice and competition.
The Women’s World Cup is in the limelight. In addition to it being a great example of physical activity for aspiring soccer players of all ages, it’s an important reminder of the prevention of and recovery from ACL tears. A sports medicine expert at Baylor College of Medicine discusses this injury and why female soccer players are at risk.
“Female soccer players are one of the highest risk groups among athletes for ACL tears,” said Dr. Theodore Shybut, associate professor in the Joseph Barnhart Department of Orthopedic Surgery at Baylor. “In fact, studies have reported that female athletes are 2 to 10 times more likely to have ACL tears compared to male athletes.”
When the U.S. Women’s soccer team won the World Cup, scores of young women athletes sat up and took notice.
Some athletes may even have pledged to train harder and longer with the same goal in mind. But extra training can come at a price, particularly in South Florida, where sunny days mean teen athletes can train year-round. Young female athletes involved in sports such as soccer, swimming and softball often experience overuse injuries from overtraining.
“In South Florida, we’re seeing a lot of early sports specialization where a child gets involved in one sport at an early age and plays it 12 months out of the year,” said Dr. Gautam Yagnik, orthopedic surgeon at Miami Orthopedics and Sports Medicine Institute, part of Baptist Health South Florida. “That can contribute to overuse injuries.”
How strength and conditioning coach Chris Wright used IMU Step & inertial sensors to help Loughborough Lightning athlete, Caroline Tarnowski, return to performance safely and quickly
In a paper being presented at the Machine Learning for Healthcare conference this week, MIT researchers demonstrate a model that automatically learns features predictive of vocal cord disorders. The features come from a dataset of about 100 subjects, each with about a week’s worth of voice-monitoring data and several billion samples — in other words, a small number of subjects and a large amount of data per subject. The dataset contain signals captured from a little accelerometer sensor mounted on subjects’ necks.
In experiments, the model used features automatically extracted from these data to classify, with high accuracy, patients with and without vocal cord nodules. These are lesions that develop in the larynx, often because of patterns of voice misuse such as belting out songs or yelling. Importantly, the model accomplished this task without a large set of hand-labeled data.
International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism from
The concept and underpinnings of periodization are deeply rooted in the history of athletics (track and field). Indeed, the seminal scientists and coaches who developed the principles of periodization include Dr. Hans Selye with his General Adaptation Syndrome model (Selye, 1950), followed by Matveyev, Bonderchuck, and Bompa (contributions reviewed by Issurin, 2010). Numerous approaches to periodization have emerged from this work, including classical, block, polarized, and complex models (Issurin, 2010; Kiely, 2012). Within this diversity is a central theme: the purposeful sequencing of different training units (long [macrocycle; months], medium [mesocycle; weeks], and short [microcycle; days and within-day duration]) so that athletes can attain the desired readiness to perform optimally for targeted events on demand (Stone et al., 1981). However, it is now appreciated that the chaos and complexities of the individual, exposed to various stimuli (physical, emotional, and genetic), are probably much more complicated than most periodization purists would want to admit (Kiely, 2018). Furthermore, the impact of nutrition on training adaptation and performance needs to be recognized.
At first Alex did not want to dope. The Kenyan runner wanted to compete clean, earn an honest living, and lift his family out of poverty through grit and determination.
But his resolve crumbled as he realised he could not match his opponents, athletes he knew were doping and beating the system set up to catch drug cheats.
Soon, Alex was boosting his performance with erythropoietin (EPO), a substance banned by the world doping watchdog but poorly regulated in Kenya.
“I had to use it, in order to earn a living. You cannot compete with people already using and expect to earn something reasonable,” said Alex, who spoke with AFP on condition of anonymity and asked that his name be changed. “Sport today is not clean.”
For this series of articles, I’ve been looking at the five new key roles in football and have so far explained why the Sporting Director and Director of High Performance are crucial at any ambitious club.
The third position I want to look at is Director of Strategy and Analytics, which may surprise some of you. After all, this is a job that is seriously underrepresented in English football, unlike in US sport.
Yet, for me, this person has the ability to unlock performance potential at any club. Here’s why.