It is often forgotten footballers are, after all, only human. They have skin and bones, hearts and lungs, tendons and muscles just like the rest of us, the only difference being those components tend to be bigger and tighter and in better nick than the average.
But not even footballers’ superior strength and fitness can counteract the science of what they are about to place their bodies through when the Premier League returns on 17 June.
They are “lab rats,” defender Danny Rose said a few weeks back, in the great experiment to rush football back during a pandemic. Yet in terms of the impact on injuries of a too short period between time away and playing, American footballers provided the test subjects almost a decade ago, and the conclusions that scientists drew after analysing this particular control group do not bode well.
Now more than 15 months removed from surgery to repair a ruptured Achilles tendon, Wizards point guard John Wall says he is all the way back to normal from a physical health standpoint.
“I’m 110 percent. I’m healthy,” he said on Tuesday.
Wall, who was meeting with reporters on a conference call to discuss his rent assistance charity effort in Ward 8, added he is still “taking [his] time with the rehab.” There are, of course, other boxes to check off besides simply the recovery of his leg. He needs to be in peak physical conditioning and get back into basketball rhythm before he can return to games.
Science has changed training in team sports by modifying many routines and preparations. The quantification of everything which takes place in a training session is one of the goals for the staff. It is about measuring workloads, recovery times, efforts necessary to achieve adaptation, etc. It is easier to accomplish our goals if we can measure the current state we are in, in order to reach the desired end state.
However, it is possible that some mistakes are being made during the competition as well as knowing the players’ fitness state. Following professor Seirul·lo’s proposal, which is a result of over 40 years of research and practice with athletes, team sports performance assessment should take into account the following criteria.
Clinical Scenario: Hamstring injuries are the most prevalent lower-extremity injury among soccer players. The Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) has addressed this issue by developing the FIFA 11+ program, which is focused on improving strength and decreasing the incidence of lower-extremity injuries in the sport. This critically appraised topic focuses on this program as well as one of its components, the Nordic hamstring exercise, in the prevention of hamstring injuries. Clinical Question: Does the FIFA 11+ program prevent hamstring injuries in college-aged male soccer players? Summary of Key Findings: Four studies were selected to be critically appraised. The PEDro checklist was used to score the articles on methodology and consistency. All 4 articles demonstrated support for the clinical question. Clinical Bottom Line: There is moderate evidence to support the use of the FIFA 11+ program and Nordic hamstring exercise as part of a college soccer team’s warm-up routine. Strength of Recommendation: Grade B evidence exists in support of incorporating the FIFA 11+ program to reduce the incidence of hamstring injuries in male college soccer players.
Important info for sports like @NCAAVolleyball
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plus more on all athletes returning to campus and December plans on our latest @NCAA
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The visual exploratory actions (i.e., scanning head movements) used by football players to perceive their surrounding environment have recently gained interest. While this has resulted in important findings relating to visual exploration during natural match-play, often the study designs lacked the experimental control of laboratory-based experimental settings. We aimed to investigate whether visual exploratory action is associated with passing performance for high-level U13 and U23 players in a controlled skill assessment setting. Methods
Fourteen U13 and 13 U23 football players from a Bundesliga club completed a standardised 32-trial sequence in the Footbonaut. Exploratory head movements were recorded with a head-worn inertial sensor, from which the count, frequency and excursion of head movements were extracted before and during ball possession. Ball reception and disposal were coded for each trial, and performance was operationalised as the time taken to complete each trial. Results
Across all players, visual exploratory action was associated with passing performance. The variables that best explained faster performance were 1) a higher number of head turns before receiving the ball, 2) a lower number of head turns when in possession of the ball, and 3) being an U23 player. However, different combinations of variables explained performance for U13 and U23 players. Conclusion
The findings demonstrate the value of scanning before receiving the ball to prospectively control passing actions in the Footbonaut. Future research should investigate the shared and contrasting characteristics of scanning actions, as they are observed by players in skill assessment tasks such as the Footbonaut, during training and during match-play.
… According to a survey released in May by the Aspen Institute’s Project Play, in partnership with North Carolina State University, Utah State University and George Mason University, 50% of parents worry that their child will get sick by returning to organized youth sports, and 54% of sports parents said their finances have been impacted negatively by the pandemic. Plus, there could be troubling trends for hockey’s ongoing quest to diversify: Only 58% of African American parents in the survey anticipated their child resuming sports activities at the same or higher level as before. The survey included 1,050 adults and was conducted in the first week of May as some states began to reopen.
USA Hockey is aware of these challenges and is working to address them to keep players on the ice. The first thing the organization is tackling is health protocols.
“We recognize things will be a little bit different,” Kelleher said. “There may be dressing at home. There may be limited locker room space. Locker rooms will probably be the big one.”
… Most American soccer families are all too familiar with the trappings of this world: The tryouts, the pressure, the huge time commitments, the word cloud of adjectives like “travel,” “select,” “elite,” “premier” – and most of all, the costs. Oh, the costs.
They can be mind-boggling, easily soaring well into the five figures annually per child, the infamous “pay-to-play” system that excludes the less wealthy and limits the ability of the US and Canada to maximize their huge, diverse populations for competitive success at the international levels. Much of it is spent on gasoline, plane rides, hotel rooms and the other pricey trappings of the travel that’s become all too common among elite leagues and tournaments, the latter of which has become a cottage industry unto itself.
“You talk to lacrosse, you talk to football, baseball, basketball, hockey [officials], they’re all dealing with the same issues,” noted Skip Gilbert, the new CEO of US Youth Soccer, in a recent conversation with MLSsoccer.com.
… This is a few moments from an afternoon at the Bauer research, development, and design center. Keller, 24, the former Boston College captain and 2018 Olympic gold medalist was there last August as part of Bauer’s women’s hockey sponsorship program. She was fitted for skates, saw them being made, and got a glance at the next wave of hockey gear.
Her stick blade’s tape, showing where she most consistently made contact with the puck, confirms Paquette’s analysis. Even though hockey players are finicky about their gear, she wound up using the same stick all year.
Like many women her age and older, Keller grew up using her brother’s hand-me-downs. This kind of touch was appreciated.
“I’m just used to going to a shop and seeing a standard flex and curve,” she said. “To be able to go in and test them and see what my shot looks like and what stick I need, it’s really cool.”
Following a motorcycle accident that left him severely injured and looking for relief, Dr. Jason Wersland pioneered the massage gun category when he conceptualized the original Theragun design in 2008. Over a number of years, the California-based chiropractor continued to tinker and refine the design, launching the first consumer version in 2016. While competition in the category has intensified in recent years, Wersland and his team, including VP of Performance Development Paul Cauldwell, have continued to innovate. 2020 has been a big year of launches for the Theragun team as they built out their model line-up – introducing the Mini and the Elite devices – and created a new motor focused on noise reduction. On top of that, they also created the Therabody app with a step-by-step guide through a recovery program on their Bluetooth enabled devices.
Stanford University, Stanford Medicine, News Center from
A simple blood test may be able to determine how physically fit you are, according to a new study conducted by scientists at the Stanford University School of Medicine.
The test could complement treadmill tests, a more traditional clinical evaluation of fitness, and provide individuals with far more nuanced information about their body’s molecular response to exercise.
The blood test is an offshoot of a complex study conducted by a team of researchers that took hundreds of thousands of molecular measurements from a group of individuals before and after exercising.
The Premier League was given government approval on Saturday to press ahead with its June 17 restart although players will have to stay apart during goal celebrations and disputes to maintain social distancing.
Further details of the league’s plans for dealing with coronavirus cases have been disclosed with clubs likely to have to play even if they only have 15 fit squad members.
In a further boost to the league’s restart plans, there were no positives in the fourth round of twice-weekly testing. Tests were conducted on 1,130 players and club personnel on Thursday and Friday as contact training resumed.
“Only when the tide goes out,” Warren Buffett observed, “do you discover who’s been swimming naked.” For our society, the Covid-19 pandemic represents an ebb tide of historic proportions, one that is laying bare vulnerabilities and inequities that in normal times have gone undiscovered. Nowhere is this more evident than in the American food system. A series of shocks has exposed weak links in our food chain that threaten to leave grocery shelves as patchy and unpredictable as those in the former Soviet bloc. The very system that made possible the bounty of the American supermarket—its vaunted efficiency and ability to “pile it high and sell it cheap”—suddenly seems questionable, if not misguided. But the problems the novel coronavirus has revealed are not limited to the way we produce and distribute food. They also show up on our plates, since the diet on offer at the end of the industrial food chain is linked to precisely the types of chronic disease that render us more vulnerable to Covid-19.
The juxtaposition of images in the news of farmers destroying crops and dumping milk with empty supermarket shelves or hungry Americans lining up for hours at food banks tells a story of economic efficiency gone mad. Today the US actually has two separate food chains, each supplying roughly half of the market. The retail food chain links one set of farmers to grocery stores, and a second chain links a different set of farmers to institutional purchasers of food, such as restaurants, schools, and corporate offices. With the shutting down of much of the economy, as Americans stay home, this second food chain has essentially collapsed. But because of the way the industry has developed over the past several decades, it’s virtually impossible to reroute food normally sold in bulk to institutions to the retail outlets now clamoring for it. There’s still plenty of food coming from American farms, but no easy way to get it where it’s needed.
Royals general manager Dayton Moore cut his teeth in Major League Baseball as a scout, and he didn’t hesitate in saying the pandemic wouldn’t prevent clubs from making informed decisions in this year’s amateur draft.
The lack of amateur games at the high school and collegiate levels has certainly created challenges for scouting directors and scouting departments, but the show will go on. The draft is scheduled to take place Wednesday, June 10, in a shortened format with just five rounds as opposed to 40.
Royals assistant general manager/amateur scouting Lonnie Goldberg, the man who oversees the draft for Kansas City’s MLB club, recently spoke with The Star about how preparations have changed during this unprecedented spring.