Wolfsburg Women goalkeeper Hedvig Lindahl originally feared that “everyone who played football in the world was taking a risk” during the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic – but now feels “very good” about the Women Bundesliga’s imminent return having witnessed the league’s stringent hygiene protocols.
The Frauen Bundesliga will become the first major women’s league in the world to resume after a postponement due to the coronavirus pandemic, with the German Football Association – the DFB – first suspending play on March 13th.
… Harry had major issues creating separation from NFL defensive backs and finished the season with just 12 catches for 105 yards and two touchdowns in seven games. In fact, in a receiving corps that, outside of Julian Edelman, struggled to create space, the rookie was dead last in the group with an average of just 2.2 separation yards, per Next Gen Stats.
To his credit, Harry seemed to recognize his shortcomings. He’s engaging in an intense offseason program in Houston, where he’s working with a man known as The Footwork King, Rischad Whitfield, who has shared clips from their workouts on social media.
The New Orleans Saints players have been keeping in shape and working out amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The Saints facilities are in lockdown mode until players return for training camp in July, some of the teams’ players have maintained a workout regimen and posted on social media. I thought it would be interesting to take a glimpse at the intense workouts of Saints’ RB Alvin Kamara, S Malcolm Jenkins, QB Jameis Winston, RB/WR Ty Montgomery, and S Marcus Williams.
With the Covid-19 pandemic pausing life since March, one major concern for college athletics, especially the West Virginia Women’s Soccer team, is conditioning.
As with many sports, spring is a crucial time for head coach Nikki Izzo-Brown and her team.
“That’s been a huge concern of mine because of spring season and how we’re in the weight room and how we’re developing the athletes physically, injury prevention so we missed all of that,” Izzo-Brown said. “Then you move into the summer months and they can’t play right now and some kids don’t have any access to weights or anything like that. Then you move to last week, the Bundesliga league, which is the German professional league. They were the first ones in soccer to kick off and they had so many injuries. My concern is that piece. We want to play and I know my kids will be like I don’t care coach we can train for two days, we just want to go.
To systematically review the current body of research that has investigated changes in strength-related variables during different phases of the menstrual cycle in eumenorrheic women. Design
Systematic review and meta-analysis. Methods
A literature search was conducted in Pubmed, SPORTDiscus and Web of Science using search terms related to the menstrual cycle and strength-related measures. Two reviewers reached consensus that 21 studies met the criteria for inclusion. Methodological rigour was assessed using the Quality Assessment Tool for Observational Cohort and Cross-Sectional Studies. Random effects meta-analyses were used to compare the early-follicular, ovulatory and mid-luteal phases for maximal voluntary contraction, isokinetic peak torque, and explosive strength. Results
The assessment of study quality showed that a high level of bias exists in specific areas of study design. Non-significant and small or trivial effect sizes (p ≥ 0.26, Hedges g ≤ 0.35) were identified for all strength-related variables in each comparison between phases. 95% confidence intervals for each comparison suggested the uncertainty associated with each estimate extends to a small effect on strength performance with unclear direction (−0.42 ≤ g ≤ 0.48). The heterogeneity for each comparison was also small (p ≥ 0.83, I2 = 0%). Conclusions
Strength-related measures appear to be minimally altered (g ≤ 0.35) by the fluctuations in ovarian sex hormones that occur during the menstrual cycle. This finding should be interpreted with caution due to the methodological shortcomings identified by the quality assessment.
… Neville hailed the “big impact” that Dawn Scott has had on the England set-up since joining as senior physical performance manager last November. He praised Scott for introducing a system, ahead of the SheBelieves Cup in March, in which England’s players’ menstrual cycles were monitored.
Speaking to the Oxford Union podcast, Neville revealed his increased knowledge of female physiology and the “workings of the female body” had helped shape his vision for the women’s game going forward. “There needs to be a bespoke model for the physical side, the mental side, in terms of the preparation, you can’t just put them both together, males and females, and say one shop fits all,” he said.
Hockey Canada announced today that it has cancelled all summer camps for national teams through Sept. 1 due to the ongoing coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. As the decision was made with the health and safety of all coaches, staff and participants as the top priority, Hockey Canada maintains a commitment and high standard of excellence to learning and coaching. As such, various programming and training sessions will be held virtually this summer.
“It is certainly disappointing to come to this decision for our summer events this year, but it is the right decision as we keep the health and safety of our participants a priority,” said Tom Renney, chief executive officer of Hockey Canada. “There is level of camaraderie and learning that takes place in-person, but we have found a way to mitigate some of the impact and still share best-in-class experiences through virtual learning. The coaches and professionals in their field will continue to guide and lead our athletes so when we are able to return to hockey, they will be physically and mentally prepared and equipped to compete at the highest level.”
EurekAlert! Science News, Carnegie Mellon University from
Although we often think of knowledge as “knowing that” (for example, knowing that Paris is the capital of France), each of us also knows many procedures consisting of knowing how, such as knowing how to tie a knot or start a car. Now a new study has found the brain programs that code the sequence of steps in performing a complex procedure. In a just published paper in Psychological Science, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have found a way to find decode the procedural information required to tie various knots, with enough precision to identify which knot is being planned or performed. To reach this conclusion, Drs. Robert Mason and Marcel Just first trained a group of participants to tie seven different knots, and then scanned their brains while they imagined tying or actually tied the knots while they were in an MRI scanner. The main findings were that each knot had a distinctive neural signature, so the researchers could tell which knot was being tied from the sequence of brain images collected. Furthermore, the neural signatures were very similar for imagining tying a particular knot and planning to tie it.
Dr. Just noted that “Tying a knot is an ancient and frequently performed human action that is the epitome of everyday procedural knowledge, making it an excellent target for investigation.”
None of the studies have yet published peer-reviewed results, but we’re getting the first evidence that the idea works. On Thursday, researchers at WVU’s Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute reported that Oura ring data, combined with an app to measure cognition and other symptoms, can predict up to three days in advance when people will register a fever, coughing or shortness of breath. It can even predict someone’s exact temperature, like a weather forecast for the body.
Professor Ali Rezai, the institute’s director, said the technology is valuable because it’s tuned to reveal infection early on, when patients are highly contagious but don’t know it. He calls the combination of the smart ring and app a kind of “digital PPE,” or personal protective equipment. ‘It can say, “This individual needs to stay home and not come in and infect others,’” he said.
There’s more: Researchers at Stanford University studying changes in heart rate from Fitbits tell me they’ve been able to detect the coronavirus before or at the time of diagnosis in 11 of 14 confirmed patients they’ve studied. In this initial analysis, they could see one patient’s heart rate jump nine days before the person reported symptoms. In other cases, they only saw evidence of infection in the data when patients noticed symptoms themselves.
“The bottom line is it is working, but it’s not perfect,” said Stanford professor Michael Snyder.
… The current coronavirus outbreak provides a few examples of detect-to-protect technologies that have helped minimize damage. The pulse oximeter—a device worn on the finger that measures blood oxygenation in patients—has been promoted(5) as a vital early warning tool in dealing with the puzzling problem of “happy hypoxics”, coronavirus-infected patients who feel and appear fine, but have critically low levels of oxygen in their blood.(6) Other examples include the airborne particle counters that come with many home HEPA air purifiers (my wife calls it a dog detector because it flips on high every time our furry dog walks into the bedroom), the infrared cameras used to measure body temperature of passengers walking through airport terminals, and kits containing nontoxic fluorescent dyes and ultraviolet flashlights being sold as a visual aid to teach people better handwashing protocols (see glogerm.com).
There are scientific and commercial challenges facing emerging detect-to-protect technologies: the science side involves identifying the sensing problem and its best solutions, while the commercial side involves identifying the paths to translating the most promising concepts into the real world. Some technologies might be excellent detect-to-protect solutions for problems that are far removed from what their inventors had in mind. Yet others will remain of dubious value forever. This challenge is made more difficult by the lack of a “killer application” for translation of many low-fidelity detect-to-protect sensing systems. Even very high-fidelity detect-to-treat sensing systems face this challenge when the small problem they solve just does not have a sufficiently broad market. The current pandemic underscores this issue in a stark and painful way.
… “When we talk about maximum transmission [of the coronavirus], the hands are the place where I focus on the most. When we talk about the high-five and also the handshake, this is almost the perfect pathogen to spread it,” Dr. Neel Gandhi, a professor of infectious diseases, epidemiology and global health at Emory University, told ESPN.
When asked if the coronavirus will bring about the end of the high-five and handshake, Gandhi said probably.
“Of all of the things we would say we would advise against, the high-five and the handshake are two in the current era, in the current pandemic, [that] we should not continue to use,” he said.
One of the outcomes of the Covid crisis is that organisations in football will have to work collaboratively to restore the health of the sport. One such collaboration may be formal partnerships between clubs; we’ve explored why, and how to go about it.
… I don’t know how many pitchers have ever been in the majors throwing a legit 100, but it’s probably not much more than 18. Not all these kids will make it, but if you throw 95 or more, you’re getting drafted and you’re going to get a shot. Probably a lot of shots.
So why is [Luke] Little not at the top of the charts? I bet you could go back 20 years, all the way to Jon Peters, and find a kid, often from Texas or Oklahoma, who popped up his senior year and found velocity, and then a big check in early June.
Interest in the defunct XFL is quite high, according to reports. There are dozens of motivated and qualified parties looking to purchase the league in bankruptcy proceedings with an eye to relaunching it as soon as February, according to The Athletic. Which begs one obvious question – why not the NFL?
Who could possibly benefit more from the remnants of the XFL than the NFL? Who could better cultivate that asset, and, as is their want, turn it into a potential money-making enterprise every spring? There is not another entity on the planet that could benefit more from resurrecting the XFL construct and taking it over; it could be a boon to the NFL on a multitude of levels, it could solve their long-running issues of referee-development, coach-development, player-development and it could do it at a time when the league’s diversity crisis is at an all-time high.
… The fundamental flaws in the prevailing model have now been laid bare by COVID-19. Recreation options that serve low-income kids, already minimized by a shift in recent decades toward expensive travel teams, are threatened. And there is no coordinated leadership in how or when to return to youth sports, the last cog in our sport ecosystem to halt play and the first to restart. The Amateur Athletic Union recently announced plans to host a volleyball tournament in Orlando in June for up to 15,000 athletes, coaches, and spectators from 34 states, only to reschedule when 70 of the teams pulled out.
Sports parents are feeling pressured, and many are scared. Half worry that their child, or they, will get sick when organized play resumes, according to a survey our program conducted with three universities. Fears run deepest among African Americans, the population hit hardest by COVID-19 and the economic fallout. Only 58 percent of black parents expect their child to resume sports at the same level as before.
Then there is perhaps the most telling stat: 1 in 5 parents say that since the shutdown, their child has lost interest in playing sports again. That’s an indictment of a sports model that has failed to meet a kid’s needs.
Making Sense Of: Sports as Product
On-field and on-court entertainment competes for our attention with all of the other entertainment that the world has to offer. The standard context for sports on-field and on-court product is its value as entertainment product. Sports science has a frequently overlooked role in the development and success of sports product. Better, fitter athletes play with more style, grace and effectiveness. As the level of competition improves, so does the drama of sports.
The extended absence of sports at all levels has created an unprecedented opportunity to develop sports product. I am excited to see new brand leagues, like bigtime professional volleyball. Established professional sports leagues are set to experiment with competition formats, looking at alternative regular season and playoff schedules (baseball, basketball, soccer).
Despite all of the innovation the single, one surefire way to degrade sports product is to accelerate professional athletes’ return to play when they simply are not ready or prepared to do so. Analysis showing increased injuries during the Bundesliga restart has sports leagues around the world taking note. And there’s enormous concern for what might happen to American baseball pitchers, who regularly experience serious injuries under normal work demands.
This is a moment for sports science. Will the athlete health and performance
experts who work in service of elite athletes come through? Will the athletes be physically prepared and can they avoid injury when games begin? The groups with the most organizational knowledge have the best odds of coming through this experimental time in sports with the best results.
Situations where knowledge is lacking are going to be problematic. Women’s health has long been undermined by male-centric medical practice. Be aware, women’s sports science has the same problem. As sports restart, the opportunity to re-prioritize women’s athletic health and performance is a gigantic opportunity to improve sports product.