Mike Trout is putting the finishing touches on another Hall of Fame-caliber season. He is a front-runner for the American League MVP award, of which he already owns three.
Derek Jeter slayed the entire ‘96 Braves with his steely glare, and is almost certainly headed to the Hall of Fame next summer.
Yet, because Trout surpassed Jeter in career Wins Above Replacement (72.5 to 72.4) it has become en vogue to debate which player had the better baseball career.
We often look at professional athletes with awe and envy, endowed with genetic gifts most can only wonder at possessing. But those gifts often come with a price
Luck can be anything he wants now that he’s retired: an architect, a football coach, or a world traveler. At the age of 29, he made the courageous decision to leave the game behind.
When we last saw Connor McDavid on an NHL ice surface he was streaking down the right side, trying to burn past Mark Giordano and go in for a scoring chance on Mike Smith. But the play ended with McDavid falling to the ice and colliding with the net at full speed. It was the final game of the regular season, but his off-season started right at that moment with a PCL injury that force him out of the game.
There has been a lot of speculation through the summer about how the recovery process has gone for Edmonton’s captain and most important player, and with training camps on the horizon everyone is wondering if McDavid will be a full-go on Day 1. Speaking at the BioSteel Camp in Toronto on Monday (an event he didn’t hit the ice for), McDavid didn’t commit to that or shoot down the idea he could be ready in a couple weeks.
Outside the football world, most German elite-level athletes are just happy to be able to make ends meet. DW spoke to three of them to find out how they pay the bills while devoting most of their time to sport.
… When [Boyd] Epley, a pioneer in the world of strength and conditioning, recently visited Clemson’s state-of-the-art football training facility — accompanied by Nebraska head strength coach Zach Duval and a few NU administrators — Batson no longer was intimidated. After all, Batson has two national championship rings not to mention 30-plus years in the business, including 23 as Clemson’s head strength coach.
“But believe me, it’s a source of pride for me to say I was brought into this business by a guy who worked with Boyd Epley,” Batson told the Journal Star, referring to Gary Wade, the former Clemson head strength and conditioning coach (1985-96).
Wade, now an assistant athletic director for facilities at Clemson, worked at Nebraska as an assistant under Epley from 1976-79. Batson in 1997 succeeded Wade as Clemson’s head man, meaning the Tigers’ rise as a program — two national championships in the past three years and a No. 1 ranking by the Associated Press and coaches to begin this season — can be attributed in part to the Husker Power phenomenon.
The aim of the present study was to assess the accuracy of heart rate to estimate energy cost during eight resistance exercises performed at low intensities: half squat, 45° inclined leg press, leg extension, horizontal bench press, 45° inclined bench press, lat pull down, triceps extension and biceps curl. 56 males (27.5 ± 4.9 years, 1.78 ± 0.06 m height, 78.67 ± 10.7 kg body mass and 11.4 ± 4.1% estimated body fat) were randomly divided into four groups of 14 subjects each. Two exercises were randomly assigned to each group and subjects performed four bouts of 4-min constant-intensity at each assigned exercise: 12%, 16%, 20% and 24% 1-RM. Exercise and intensity order were random. Each subject performed no more than 2 bouts in the same testing session. A minimum recovery of 24h was kept between sessions. During testing VO2 was measured with Cosmed K4b2 and heart rate was measured with Polar V800 monitor. Energy cost was calculated from mean VO2 during the last 30-s of each bout by using the energy equivalent 1 ml O2 = 5 calorie. Linear regressions with heart rate as predictor and energy cost as dependent variable were build using mean data from all subjects. Robustness of the regression lines was given by the scatter around the regression line (Sy.x) and Bland-Altman plots confirmed the agreement between measured and estimated energy costs. Significance level was set at p≤0.05. The regressions between heart rate and energy cost in the eight exercises were significant (p<0.01) and robustness was: half squat (Sy.x = 0,48 kcal·min-1), 45° inclined leg press (Sy.x = 0,54 kcal·min-1), leg extension (Sy.x = 0,59 kcal·min-1), horizontal bench press (Sy.x = 0,47 kcal·min-1), 45° inclined bench press (Sy.x = 0,54 kcal·min-1), lat pull down (Sy.x = 0,28 kcal·min-1), triceps extension (Sy.x = 0,08 kcal·min-1) and biceps curl (Sy.x = 0,13 kcal·min-1). We conclude that during low-intensity resistance exercises it is possible to estimate aerobic energy cost by wearable heart rate monitors with errors below 10% in healthy young trained males. [full text]
For a while in 2018, it seemed like Apple was going to upend the health industry. The company announced an app that could monitor your heart rate and detect irregularities. It was bringing your medical records to your iPhone. It even launched its own health care clinics for employees and families, which people saw as a trial balloon for understanding the industry.
But this week, CNBC’s Christina Farr reported that several people have left the Apple Health division. Host Molly Wood spoke with Farr, who said the employees were frustrated with the company’s lack of organization and ambition. [audio, 6:17]
Over the last several months, [Aaron Christophel] has been working on creating a custom firmware for cheap fitness trackers. His current target is the “D6 Tracker” from a company called MPOW, which can be had for as little as $7 USD. The ultimate goal is to make it so anyone will be able to write their own custom firmware for this gadget using the Arduino IDE, and with the release of his new Android application that allows wirelessly flashing the device’s firmware, it seems like he’s very close to realizing that dream.
Previously, [Aaron] had to crack open the trackers and physically connect a programmer to update the firmware on the NRF52832-based devices. That might not be a big deal for the accomplished hardware hacker, but it’s a bit of a hard sell for somebody who just wants to see their own Arduino code running on it. But with this new tool, he’s made it so you can easily switch back and forth between custom and original firmware on the D6 without even having to take it off your wrist.
At NextFlex’s Innovation Day 2019, Adam Leech from Epicore Biosystems demonstrated their FHE patch containing a PPG and an accelerometer. [video, 1:24]
Following months of reviews after the death of University of Maryland football player Jordan McNair, the school has hired a new Director of Sports Medicine.
Doctor Yvette Rooks is set to take over that role and will serve as lead team physician.
The move comes after two external investigations into the death of McNair in 2018. The offensive lineman suffered heatstroke during a team workout and died weeks later in the hospital.
Concussion risk in high school football is greater for younger players and on practices on turf-based surfaces, according to a study presented at the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine Annual Meeting.
The epidemiological study examined high school football concussion data in male players aged 14 to 18 years at 1,999 U.S. high schools. Scott Burkhart, PsyD, and colleagues collected data between 2012 to 2017 using the Rank One Health Injury Surveillance Database, a software used for mandatory and voluntary student-athlete injury documentation.
One year ago, VolleyballMag.com published a package of 12 stories about concussions in volleyball. When she saw them, Hawai’i beach volleyball player Julia Scoles was moved.
“If I had read these articles prior to receiving my head-impacts/head-traumas it would have changed the way I viewed and went about my recovery process,” she told us.
… Perhaps this suggests that the sport has reached the limits of bullpenning and specialization — there are too many relievers employed. Through Tuesday, 492 different pitchers who primarily serve in relief have appeared in games this season.1 That already breaks the record set last season (488) and is up from 381 relievers in 2010 and 297 in 1998, the first season that MLB had 30 teams.
This change in personnel may explain relievers’ decline in performance the first time through opposing lineups, relative to starting pitchers, a trend that Ben Clemens at FanGraphs documented in May and has continued into the summer. For the first time this century, starters have been better than relievers in their first time through the order in back-to-back seasons. Craig Edwards, also of FanGraphs, found there have been more low-leverage innings this year and poorer performance within them,2 speaking to less meaningful baseball and more poor teams. Those innings have presumably been pitched by lesser relievers, diluting the group’s overall performance. There have been fewer meaningful innings this season — and also a greater volume of lesser-skilled relievers.
Minnesota Wild goalie Devan Dubnyk led National Hockey League goalies in games played (67) last season, and finished second to Montreal’s Carey Price in usage, playing just 25 fewer minutes.
Dubnyk and Price were absolute workhorses for their respective teams, but that term has certainly become more of a relative one in the NHL over the years. As frequently as we saw both of these netminders in the crease last season, their workload pales in comparison to the burden placed on the position just a decade ago.