… “I’ve been talking to my coach Gary and obviously he has a lot of plans for me,” says Farah, speaking exclusively to AW from his Surrey home. “I think the important thing for all of us is just to keep ticking away because we’re not even sure what’s going on.
“If I were, for example, to have time off now, complete time off, when I start training back up again, it’s going to be difficult. Later on, you can build on that, because you already have the foundation and the base.
“It’s not like I’m saying I’m going to run 100-plus miles a week,” he adds. “It’s just doing what you can. Some days I’ll do a run in the evening, some days if I feel okay I’ll run in the morning, 10 miles or 12 miles.”
… “It was obviously a tough time,” Coleman told Sky Spoerts. “The immediate aftermath of it was probably the toughest, in the first few days after. You’ve got a lot of medication in the system, in a lot of pain and you’re a bit drowsy most of the time so you can get a bit low.
“I think I was in hospital for four or five days before I got back to Donegal for a month and as soon as I got there, it was a case of this injury has happened and it’s unfortunate, but the only way I can get over it and come back stronger is to use my mental strength that I knew I had. I looked at it as another challenge that I needed to overcome.
“In a weird way, I really started to enjoy the rehab and the challenge of getting back. I look back at that time as a massive learning phase for me and it sounds mad but it’s probably something I wouldn’t change.
Every so many days during February and March of 1990, Dave Eiland would go to the local high school. He’d scramble to find someone to catch him and the former Yankees right-hander would build up his throwing intensity. During that MLB lockout of 1990, Eiland went to the local fields so he wouldn’t forget the feeling of the slope of the mound under his feet. He didn’t want to forget the feel of where his arm needed to be when he released the ball. He wanted to remind himself what it felt like to take that full stride toward the plate.
“That is what is going to be so hard for these guys,” Eiland said about today’s pitchers, who are now idling as baseball is shut down during the national emergency caused by the coronavirus pandemic. “Some of them may have a mound at home, but for the most part, they don’t. It’s not like a normal offseason, they can’t go to the Driveline Baseball and places like that. They can’t even go to their local high schools and throw off the mounds.
“When they come back it’s going to be really tricky.”
… “Four or five years ago, these guys were at IMG when actually some of our fourth- and fifth-year players were at IMG and heard a lot about some of the state-of-the-art sports science stuff that they were actually into and doing there, just when you’d visit in recruiting or whatever,” Saban told Gold. “I never really thought much about it, and then when we had this opportunity come up, we researched these guys and they’d done a phenomenal job at Notre Dame of eliminating injuries by something like 50 percent and even better at Indiana.
“So, when they came in and we interviewed them, there was no question that from a sports science standpoint and from a conditioning standpoint they were light-years in advance of what a lot of people have done in their programs for a long, long time, which we’ve done the same thing for a long, long time, too. And we’d actually brought some NFL people at the end of the season because we wondering if there was something that we could do to improve performance and injury prevention because we seemed like we’d gotten a lot of guys hurt this past season.
… To hear pupils like [Will] Lowery, along with former Crimson Tide players Preston Dial and Mike Johnson explain it, Cochran meant much more to the Alabama football program than that. Considered a master motivator, the leader of Alabama’s famed “Four Quarter Program,” Cochran not only built sound bodies for the Crimson Tide, but he helped build sound minds.
“He helped forge me into a leader,” Johnson said. “Everybody knows he’s a vocal guy, but I think his being vocal kind of allows other guys to step their voice up and voice their opinions. He rubs off on you in that way, so it wasn’t just a weight-room thing. Obviously, he did a great job of getting me physically stronger and doing that kind of stuff. But for me, it was learning how to be a leader.”
… As Alabama’s Tua Tagovailoa can attest, the biggest talking point often boils down to a player’s health and durability, making events such as the NFL Combine of vital importance as players prepare for the draft. In that vein, Sporting News in early April spoke with Dr. Lyle Cain — sports medicine specialist at the Andrews Sports Medicine & Orthopaedic Center and Alabama’s team orthopedic surgeon — to discuss how he helps treat and prepare players for those events.
Below is the interview between Sporting News and Dr. Cain, which touches on such subjects as how players prepare for the draft, COVID-19’s impact on that preparation and the subjective nature of how teams analyze players
LaLiga are willing to get the league campaign back underway and one of the main questions is whether the players will be in shape when football returns.
It is estimated that teams may go back to individual training between May 4 and 11, after almost two months training at home.
Bernardo Requena and Luis Suarez, both from the Football Science Institute, have shared their sports science expertise with MARCA.
Imagine a single garment that could adapt to changing weather conditions, keeping its wearer cool in the heat of midday but warm when an evening storm blows in. In addition to wearing it outdoors, such clothing could also be worn indoors, drastically reducing the need for air conditioning or heat. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, say they have made a strong, comfortable fabric that heats and cools skin, with no energy input.
“Smart textiles, that can warm or cool the wearer are nothing new, but typically, the same fabric cannot perform both functions. These textiles have other drawbacks, as well — they can be bulky, heavy, fragile and expensive,” the researchers say. “Many need an external power source.” Guangming Tao and colleagues wanted to develop a more practical textile for personal thermal management that could overcome all of these limitations.
Existing electronic skin (e-skin) sensing platforms are equipped to monitor physical parameters using power from batteries or near-field communication. For e-skins to be applied in the next generation of robotics and medical devices, they must operate wirelessly and be self-powered. However, despite recent efforts to harvest energy from the human body, self-powered e-skin with the ability to perform biosensing with Bluetooth communication are limited because of the lack of a continuous energy source and limited power efficiency. Here, we report a flexible and fully perspiration-powered integrated electronic skin (PPES) for multiplexed metabolic sensing in situ. The battery-free e-skin contains multimodal sensors and highly efficient lactate biofuel cells that use a unique integration of zero- to three-dimensional nanomaterials to achieve high power intensity and long-term stability. The PPES delivered a record-breaking power density of 3.5 milliwatt·centimeter−2 for biofuel cells in untreated human body fluids (human sweat) and displayed a very stable performance during a 60-hour continuous operation. It selectively monitored key metabolic analytes (e.g., urea, NH4+, glucose, and pH) and the skin temperature during prolonged physical activities and wirelessly transmitted the data to the user interface using Bluetooth. The PPES was also able to monitor muscle contraction and work as a human-machine interface for human-prosthesis walking. [full text]
Driven by 20 years in the military, the CEO of Theradaptive hopes his firm’s regenerative “paint” technology platform can transform bone repair, spinal fusion, and sports medicine.
The Boston-based firm, spun out of MIT, has a computational platform it says turns recombinant proteins into material-binding variants that behave like a paint. This can then be used to coat implants, devices, and injectable carriers to enable long-term local delivery without off-target effects.
“Our approach takes protein sequences that we discover using a lab-based test and optimizes them in several ways using our computational processes,” CEO Luis Alvarez (pictured below) told this publication.
“For example, we can take a set of sequences which exhibit tight binding to a given implant material and make those sequences easier to manufacture, bind tighter, and able to survive terminal sterilization. We can also tune the strength of binding so that you can predict the release rate of the protein. This has allowed us to make protein therapeutics that stick to implants like a paint and make them bioactive.”
Associated Press, Cliff Brunt and Mitch Stacy from
Under normal circumstances, you would almost have to force Indiana linebacker Thomas Allen out of his school’s athletic facilities.
Allen had season-ending surgery on his left shoulder in November, and his dedicated rehabilitation led him to recently declare himself 85% to 90% healthy even though he was restricted to individual workouts when spring practice began in March.
His recovery plan changed dramatically when the coronavirus pandemic shut down campuses and college sports. He is among many football players across the country recovering from injuries who have limited access to top-tier equipment and one-on-one help. Some experts say those issues could lengthen recovery times and put athletes at risk of re-injury.
As the coronavirus pandemic forces all sports leagues to evaluate how to once again host thousands of fans at stadiums across the country, at least one prominent data scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology says there are steps teams can take that will make arenas “as safe as public parks.”
Professor Alex Pentland, the head of the human dynamic lab at MIT, released a white paper this week suggesting companies can use digital tools to help create safer environments — and told ESPN there are applications to sports as well.
“The big things are distancing practices,” such as asking fans to wear masks, Pentland said.
… It’s highly unlikely that the stay-at-home circumstances of the last seven weeks, with the cancellation of pro days and personal visits and medical rechecks, have softened Roseman’s resolve to stay away from players with checkered medical pasts in this week’s draft. But we’ll see.
The Eagles’ medical and training staffs have undergone a major renovation in the last 12 months. They have a new chief medical officer (Arsh Dhanota), a new director of sports medicine (Tom Hunkele) and a new director of sports performance (Ted Rath).
And while Roseman obviously has a lot of confidence in all of them, the fact of the matter is the Eagles, like every other team in the league, probably have less of a handle on this draft class than any in the last 50 years because of the pandemic restrictions.
During his tenure as Head of Football Strategy for Everton, Richard Battle spent a significant portion of his time helping to develop information systems and analytics for the club.
Now, as boss of Left Field Football Consulting, he’s advising other teams on how to improve their information strategies as well. We asked him for his predictions on how football data science and analytics would develop over the next five years and here’s what he told us:
1. Tools and tech
“I think football will go where a lot of wider industry in general is going – away from environments where people try to build and sell systems that do“everything”, to an acceptance that clubs will use many different software pieces,” says Battle, who was with Everton for two and a half years.