… “Rory Delap was just fantastic,” said Thomas Gronnemark, a former record holder of the world’s longest throw-in who now coaches the art for top clubs like Liverpool and Ajax. “There was the quality of his throw-ins and the length, but also — especially — the fastness and the flatness. That’s really important. I see some players who are OK at throwing long, but most of them are throwing way too high and it’s too easy to clear.”
Famously — or infamously, depending on how long you like your parka — Delap’s throws led to both goals in a 2-1 win over Arsenal in Stoke’s first season back up in the Premier League in 2008-09. It’s one of the more symbolic matches in league history: possession overwhelmed by power, a team that prided itself on passing-based purity getting knocked out by a guy simply picking the ball up with his hands and literally throwing it into the penalty area.
“It is a little bit of an unfair advantage,” said former Gunners manager Wenger of that match. “He is using a strength that is usually not a strength in football.”
I got to know Aliphine because she’s a member of the HOKA NAZ Elite professional running team, where I serve on the board. When you meet her for the first time, you’re immediately swept up in her personal force field of positive energy. Aliphine typically lights up a room when she walks in. You may know her from watching her win the Olympic Trials Marathon in February of this year. But her background is fascinating: Aliphine was born in a small village in Kenya, she has 32 brothers and sisters and she came to the US to run in college, graduating from Wichita State University. She became a US citizen in 2016, and she also has a thriving small business knitting and selling her signature beanie hats. For me, Aliphine personifies the American dream, and I feel lucky that she’s my friend & colleague.
Give me some highlights and lowlights from your first month and a half in lockdown mode.
Highs: being able to spend more time with my partner and taking days off if I don’t feel like running. Because, you know, I have a lot of time to get fit. Also, sleeping in and running at whatever time pleases me.
As the scale of the coronavirus crisis became apparent, the first thought for the staff at Manchester United’s academy had nothing to do with football. “The first thing we had to think about was getting the boys home,” head of academy Nick Cox tells ESPN.
“We have a core of foreign-based players and we had to make a very quick decision to try and get them home to their families. Our staff plotted all sorts of routes to get boys home. Flights were being cancelled and borders were being closed and we had to find very creative ways of getting them home to their families.”
Objective: To examine the effects of training intensity and environmental condition on the hydration status of Elite football players. Methods: Eleven elite football players completed three training sessions of varying intensity in cool (12°C) and warm (23°C) environments. Training demands was measured by Global Positioning System, sweat rate and sweat sodium concentration were measured using dermal patches and body mass change. Results: Warm condition increased sweat rate (0.9 ± 0.3 vs 1.7 ± 0.3 L.h-1, P<0.001), fluid intake (0.7 ± 0.1 vs 1.5 ± 0.2 L, P<0.001), total sodium loss (1405 ± 340 vs 2946 ± 958 mg, P<0.001) and total sweat loss (1.4 ± 0.5 vs 2.5 ± 0.4 L, P<0.001) compared to cool. Training intensity increased sweat sodium concentration (16.1 ± 6.6 vs 54.6 ± 22.2 mmol.L-1, P<0.001) and sodium loss (779 ± 231 vs 1405 ± 340 mg) in both environmental conditions. Total sweat loss and sodium loss were positively correlated with total distance covered (r=0.48, P=0.005 and r=0.4, P=0.023, respectively), meanwhile sodium loss was also positively correlated with the total number of high-intensity efforts (r=0.35, P=0.045). Conclusions: The results show that training load and environmental condition have a major impact on the hydration status of elite football players, hence hydration strategies should be developed accordingly.
Sam Kerr says the Olympics postponement means rather than having a break in 2021, the Matildas are set to face four consecutive years of major tournaments.
Matildas captain Sam Kerr says the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic means the Australian national team won’t receive a break from major tournaments until 2025.
Australia’s top female footballers were due to have a break in 2021, with their normal tournament cycle – which includes the Asian Cup, World Cup and Olympics, along with qualifying matches and friendlies – originally finishing after Tokyo 2020.
Alliance for Decision Education, Jillian Hardgrove from
Social distancing has been such a significant shift because, at a basic level, it’s meant that so many habits in our personal and professional lives have changed. As the novelty of the situation wears off, we may find that some of the new habits we’ve developed are troubling, while others are a pleasant surprise. In both cases, however, our habits don’t have to be things that just happen to us. Instead, we can take more control of our lives if we know how to engineer our habits and treat them like the impactful repeated decisions they are. Help your middle or high school students better understand the shifts in their habits they’re experiencing during social distancing: use these free lesson resources from Alliance for Decision Education to teach them how to continue nurturing the new helpful habits they’ve formed and crush the problematic ones.
Carnegie Mellon University, School of Computer Science from
Intelligent tutoring systems have been shown to be effective in helping to teach certain subjects, such as algebra or grammar, but creating these computerized systems is difficult and laborious. Now, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have shown they can rapidly build them by, in effect, teaching the computer to teach.
Using a new method that employs artificial intelligence, a teacher can teach the computer by demonstrating several ways to solve problems in a topic, such as multicolumn addition, and correcting the computer if it responds incorrectly.
Notably, the computer system learns to not only solve the problems in the ways it was taught, but also to generalize to solve all other problems in the topic, and do so in ways that might differ from those of the teacher, said Daniel Weitekamp III, a Ph.D. student in CMU’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII).
The campus may be empty and the halls hallowed, yet there is groundbreaking COVID-related work going on at Northwestern University’s engineering lab.
“It’s a soft-skin compatible device, it goes on the body much like a band aid,” said Northwestern University Professor John Rogers.
About the size of a band-aid, Rogers helped develop a wireless device that tracks the most common symptoms of COVID-19, and it is placed right above the collarbone at the center of the neck. [video, 2:14]
The number of pieces that need to be in place for football to return can be difficult to keep in mind. Testing, sterile environments, quarantine locations, suitability of venues, the scheduling of events, creating an atmosphere in an empty stadium. Each has its own difficulties, which impinge on others. But the most complex challenge of all may be the one players have to undertake themselves.
The assertive aspect of sports psychology – visualising goals, excluding doubt – is understood but last week the international players’ union, Fifpro, reported an increase in depression during lockdown. The former Chelsea doctor Eva Carneiro, in assessing players’ condition, described people we often imagine to be unstoppable machines as “vulnerable”. The anxieties provoked by Covid-19 have inveigled their way into the lives of athletes just as much as they have the rest of us.
Sports Illustrated, The Grove Report blog, Nate Gabler from
… Playing football and brining athletes back to the Ole Miss campus presents some inherent risks. In part one of our What Would Happen if an Ole Miss Athlete Contracted COVID-19 series, we examined how the virus would effect a young person, and how normal training and rehabilitation regimens were thrown off from the impact of the last two months.
Today, in part two, a look at Ole Miss’ tentative plan to re-integrate athletes to Oxford and what measures would have to take place if a football player tested positive in the midst of training camp.
The workouts inside Todd Durkin’s San Diego gym, Fitness Quest 10, have become the stuff of legend.
It started with LaDainian Tomlinson, who brought in Drew Brees, who brought in Darren Sproles, and it has swelled to include other NFL players such as Zach Ertz, Golden Tate, Chase Daniel and Brett Rypien. Brees and Sproles, who announced his retirement in December, are workout maniacs. They push each other so hard, Durkin has had to literally pull the treadmill plug so they’ll stop trying to one-up the other in session-capping sprints. It has set the tone for some epic three-hour, will-testing, music-infused throwdowns, occurring upward of five times a week during the offseason.
Or at least that’s how it used to be. The gym was shut down in late March — right about the time the intensity would have been ratcheted up even further in advance of OTAs — because of the coronavirus pandemic. The players scattered to their respective hometowns and, like many, are working out of their houses and trying to balance all that comes with it.
… Steve McNally, the club’s Head of Sports Medicine and Science, spoke about the programme during an interview with United’s official website, which you can watch at the bottom of this page.
He said nutritionists Mark Ellison and Tom Whitehead had done a “great job” in organising a nutrition plan for the players before the start of lockdown.
“They (the players) all have individual nutrition programmes anyway – that’s part of our normal programme – so we carried those on,” said McNally, who has worked for United since 2006.
“But we did have to tweak those a little bit, because they are not working as hard as they normally do, in terms of their training or the games, so their energy intake needs to be less than they would normally have.
Global launches of new sports nutrition products more than doubled between 2015 and 2019, according to Innova Market Insights, with development trends in the category including plant-powered products, clean label innovation and personalization.
Plant-based products have been proliferating in the food and beverage industry, and sports nutrition is quickly catching on to the trend, Innova said. Pea protein and rice protein showed up in 32% and 21% of plant-based launches in 2019, respectively. Going forward, other alternatives such as fava bean, microalgae and pumpkin seed proteins are expected to appear more frequently in formulations.
… The game is faster and more demanding than ever and the competition for places means young players, in particular, are on the lookout for any ‘marginal gains’ they can make to improve their performance.
For some that now means giving up meat altogether and adopting a plant-based diet. [video, 1:53]