… “We love talking about and there’s nothing better than obviously having an athlete who understands,” Watt said on Wednesday. “We talk about workouts and recovery more than we talk about anything, because she’s right now training extremely hard. So, we literally are talking about deceleration patterns and how you’re supposed to decelerate and which leg you’re supposed to plant off of and cutting.”
Most don’t consider the small things both Watt and Ohai think about. But, for the two, it takes up the bulk of their conversation. They push each other. In culmination, Watt sees himself well-equipped for his next opponent.
On his first day back at his old job, Justin Williams was slouched behind the wheel of his Tesla, a bundle of hockey sticks in the back seat, weaving through late-morning traffic and reminiscing about his short-lived NHL hiatus. Upon announcing in September that he would “step away” from the NHL while weighing whether to retire for good, the 38-year-old right winger had immediately decamped to Costa Rica with wife Kelly for five days of sunshine and quiet. Upon returning here to Raleigh, while his former Carolina Hurricanes teammates slogged through training camp, he had settled into a fulfilling rhythm of “normal dad stuff” —attending school recitals, coaching sports teams, helping son Jaxon, 11, and daughter Jade, 8, with their homework …
“Taking the time to enjoy and do basically whatever I want to do for the first time in a long time,” Williams said. “I had a lot of fun. If I wanted to go play golf, I could just go play golf.”
Tuesday night — Wednesday morning, actually — as the Toronto Raptors landed in Charlotte following a demoralizing, dying-seconds loss to the Portland Trail Blazers and what had to be the worst evening of Terence Davis’s young NBA career, Norman Powell grabbed the rookie guard and told him they’d be having a film session the next day.
Well, yeah, the Raptors watch film every day. And as they were playing the latter half of a back-to-back on the road, film would take place Wednesday morning at the team hotel ahead of that evening’s tip-off against the Charlotte Hornets. But Powell wasn’t talking about the team film session. This would be a private study.
“He said, ‘I know you’ve seen what Nurse said — we’ve all seen it,’” Davis remembered. “Now, it’s how you respond to it.”
… He has worked with many high-profile athletes and assisted in the preparation of the Mexican national football team leading up to the 2018 FIFA World Cup. In May of this year, Dr. Thorpe accepted a position as Director of Performance & Innovation at ALTIS, working with elite track and field athletes in the lead-up to the Olympic Games (Tokyo 2020). As part of his role, he serves as the Director of the ALTIS LIVING LAB, which integrates applied and academic sports performance research in the field to push the boundaries of sports innovation science and knowledge to athletes, coaches, and the industry as a whole.
Freelap USA: Recovery is a wide topic today, and many coaches are afraid for athletes to get tired. When is it okay for athletes to be fatigued, and how does this encourage positive adaptations? It’s important to be fresh for quality sessions, but sometimes you have to push through fatigue. Can you give some pointers on when it’s okay to train through fatigue?
Robin Thorpe: Professionalism in sport has provided the foundation for elite athletes to focus purely on training and competition. Furthermore, high-performance sport and the importance of athletes’ success have led athletes and coaches alike to continually seek any advantage or edge that may improve performance. Enhancing recovery through training and performance may provide numerous benefits during repetitive high-level training and competition, and the rate and quality of recovery in the high-performance athlete may be as important as the training itself.
MLS outfit Chicago Fire have announced Ben Donachie’s switch from Cherries to become their new director of performance.
Donachie was the Dorset club’s lead strength and conditioning coach, having first arrived at Vitality Stadium as a first team sports scientist in October 2012.
But having been offered the chance to move Stateside, the Bournemouth University graduate admitted he cannot wait to get started at his new club.
He told Chicago Fire’s website: “After speaking with Georg (Heitz, sporting director) and Raphael (Wicky, head coach), it didn’t take long for me to decide that I wanted to come on board.
The Spokesman Review, Seattle Times, Nicole Brodeur from
It was 7 a.m. on the day after Christmas, a sleep-in day if there ever was one. But Rachel Balkovec had been up for hours, running the dark, cold streets of West Seattle, swimming in the icy waters of Puget Sound, showering and then driving to work in Kent.
That kind of discipline and focus is why she just made history.
In November, she became the first woman to be hired as a full-time minor league hitting coach for a major-league baseball team – in this case, the New York Yankees. She will report for work in Tampa, Florida, on Feb. 1.
Until then, she is working as a baseball research and development fellow at Driveline Baseball, a pitching and hitting training facility in Kent.
Science and Medicine in Football journal, Editorial, Adam Beavan from
The benefits of differentiating between the physiological and biomechanical load-response pathways in football and other (team) sports have become increasingly recognised. In contrast to physiological loads however, the biomechanical demands of training and competition are still not well understood, primarily due to the difficulty of quantifying biomechanical loads in a field environment. Although musculoskeletal adaptation and injury are known to occur at a tissue level, several biomechanical load metrics are available that quantify loads experienced by the body as a whole, its different structures and the individual tissues that are part of these structures. This paper discusses the distinct aspects and challenges that are associated with measuring biomechanical loads at these different levels in laboratory and/or field contexts. Our hope is that through this paper, sport scientists and practitioners will be able to critically consider the value and limitations of biomechanical load metrics and will keep pursuing new methods to measure these loads within and outside the lab, as a detailed load quantification is essential to better understand the biomechanical load-response pathways that occur in the field.
Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports from
This study investigated the effects of menthol swilling and crushed ice ingestion on cognitive function, total mood disturbance (TMD) and time to fatigue (TTF). Twelve male long distance runners completed three counterbalanced running trials (3 x 30 min at 65% VO2peak and a TTF run at 100% VO2peak ) in hot, humid conditions (35.3±0.3 °C, 59.2±2.5% relative humidity). Trials consisted of precooling with crushed ice ingestion and mid-cooling by menthol swilling (MIX), precooling with water ingestion and mid-cooling by menthol swilling (MENTH) and control (CON). Swilling with either 25 mL of menthol solution or placebo occurred upon entry to the heat, at 15 min intervals during the run and prior to the TTF run. Core temperature, forehead skin temperature, tympanic temperature, perceived thermal sensation and TMD were significantly lower with MIX compared to MENTH and CON (p<0.05). Thirst was satiated in MIX compared to CON, however MENTH did not have a significant effect. After 90 min of running and post TTF run, fewer errors occurred in the executive control task (p < 0.05), as well as decision making and working memory (p > 0.05; d = 0.5 – 0.79) between MIX and CON, however MENTH had no effect compared to CON. The TTF run was significantly longer with MENTH (34.38%; p=0.02) and MIX (39.06%; p=0.001) compared to CON, with no difference between MENTH and MIX (p=0.618). The physical reduction in core and internal head temperature seen with crushed ice ingestion may lead to improvements in cognitive function, however both MENTH and MIX were sufficient for improving exercise performance.
The ability to predict the systematic decrease of power during physical exertion gives valuable insights into health, performance, and injury. This review surveys the research of power-based models of fatigue and recovery within the area of human performance. Upon a thorough review of available literature, it is observed that the two-parameter critical power model is most popular due to its simplicity. This two-parameter model is a hyperbolic relationship between power and time with critical power as the power-asymptote and the curvature constant denoted by W′. Critical power (CP) is a theoretical power output that can be sustained indefinitely by an individual, and the curvature constant (W′) represents the amount of work that can be done above CP. Different methods and models have been validated to determine CP and W′, most of which are algebraic manipulations of the two-parameter model. The models yield different CP and W′ estimates for the same data depending on the regression fit and rounding off approximations. These estimates, at the subject level, have an inherent day-to-day variability called intra-individual variability (IIV) associated with them, which is not captured by any of the existing methods. This calls for a need for new methods to arrive at the IIV associated with CP and W′. Furthermore, existing models focus on the expenditure of W′ for efforts above CP and do not model its recovery in the sub-CP domain. Thus, there is a need for methods and models that account for (i) the IIV to measure the effectiveness of individual training prescriptions and (ii) the recovery of W′ to aid human performance optimization. [full text]
Building Design + Construction, John Caulfield from
Football is often described as game of strategy. So perhaps it wasn’t surprising that the Green Bay Packers, through a joint venture between the team’s development arm and Microsoft, recently opened TitletownTech, a 50,000-sf innovation center in Green Bay, Wis., that is set up to cultivate and provide financial support to high-growth startup companies.
SGA, the architect on this project, has created a three-level “stage on which innovation and collaboration can flourish,” states Brooks Slocum, the firm’s New York Studio Manager. He elaborates that the building’s design applies “spatial strategies” that “maximize” proximity, flexibility and spontaneity.
… PowerDot is an electric muscle stimulation device. You’d be forgiven for thinking it’s similar to abdominal bands that promise to cut fat, increase muscle, and make your body Baywatch ready in just weeks without actually exercising. Thankfully, PowerDot takes a different tack. It positions itself as a “smart muscle recovery and performance tool.” It doesn’t claim to make you fitter, but it might lend a helping hand to your recovery.
With consistent and regular use PowerDot says its device can help athletes – and me, not an athlete – recover faster, reduce muscle soreness, increase strength and endurance, and generally “feel their best.”
The tech behind the premise is fairly simple and is nothing new. The device relies on something called the Gate Control theory, which claims a non-painful stimulus (in this case electricity), can block the pathways that transfer pain signals to the brain, thus lessening the sensation of discomfort. Note, these systems don’t actually heal you, but they can lessen your perception of pain.
Engineers from Duke University and the Institut de Physique de Nice in France have developed a new method to identify objects using microwaves that improves accuracy while reducing the associated computing time and power requirements.
The system could provide a boost to object identification and speed in fields where both are critical, such as autonomous vehicles, security screening and motion sensing.
The new machine-learning approach cuts out the middleman, skipping the step of creating an image for analysis by a human and instead analyzes the pure data directly. It also jointly determines optimal hardware settings that reveal the most important data while simultaneously discovering what the most important data actually is. In a proof-of-principle study, the setup correctly identified a set of 3D numbers using tens of measurements instead of the hundreds or thousands typically required.
Changing a sport system requires the appointment of new leaders or a grass roots cultural revolution. ‘I got caught in a system designed by and for men, which destroys the bodies of young girls,’ said Mary Cain as she cast light on her toxic coach/athlete relationship and exposed unhealthy coaching and nutrition practices. Her candour has inspired a social media movement calling for changes to women’s sport.1 In the following days, major news publications followed up with similar reports of athletic women being body shamed.2–4
It is time for a drastic paradigm change in women’s sport, coupled with education at all levels to improve the long-term health and athletic achievement of female athletes.
… “Hope is not a strategy when it comes to injuries,” said Roseman.
The GM went on to say that, “When we look at the last three years, in 2017, we were able to overcome it. The last two years, the injuries have really hurt our football team. There is a part of that that is natural during the game. Injuries are going to happen. But we have to figure out a way to get better here.”
The Eagles hope they found a way when they hired Arsh Dhanota in June to be their chief medical officer. Dhanota was brough in to observe the team’s training staff, weight staff, sports science, and the various processes that go into making medical decisions and training regimens. He will make his recommendations to Roseman and the Eagles sometime this offseason.