Bam Adebayo thinks injuries could be more prevalent than usual when the NBA gets back on the floor next month, given the demands that will be on players’ bodies after a long layoff.
Miami’s All-Star center is also thinking about the financial risks.
Adebayo confirmed Tuesday that he is among five players — a group who could soon graduate from rookie contracts to extensions worth in excess of $100 million — seeking assurances from the NBA about if they’ll be protected in the case of catastrophic injury when the season resumes at the Disney campus near Orlando, Florida.
The bold and brash captain of the U.S. women’s soccer team cemented her place in sports history with an MVP performance in last year’s World Cup, including spot-on penalty kicks under pressure, even as President Donald Trump tweeted criticisms of her. An outspoken advocate for LGBTQ rights, she’d already allied herself with the racial justice movement by kneeling for the national anthem at games and helped lead her team’s gender discrimination lawsuit against the U.S. Soccer Federation.
Leon Goretzka took full advantage of the Bundesliga’s two-month break to emerge as the muscular driving force behind Bayern Munich’s march to yet another title.
The former Schalke midfielder scored the winning goal in the 86th minute on Saturday as Bayern beat Borussia Mönchengladbach 2-1 to move within touching distance of a record-extending eighth consecutive title.
“It’s not a big surprise for me,” Gladbach midfielder Christoph Kramer said of Goretzka. “He’s incredibly athletic, a brutal box-to-box type.”
International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance from
The number of studies examining associations between training load and injury has increased exponentially. As a result, many new measures of exposure and training-load-based prognostic factors have been created. The acute:chronic workload ratio (ACWR) is the most popular. However, when recommending the manipulation of a prognostic factor in order to alter the likelihood of an event, one assumes a causal effect. This introduces a series of additional conceptual and methodological considerations that are problematic and should be considered. Because no studies have even tried to estimate causal effects properly, manipulating ACWR in practical settings in order to change injury rates remains a conjecture and an overinterpretation of the available data. Furthermore, there are known issues with the use of ratio data and unrecognized assumptions that negatively affect the ACWR metric for use as a causal prognostic factor. ACWR use in practical settings can lead to inappropriate recommendations, because its causal relation to injury has not been established, it is an inaccurate metric (failing to normalize the numerator by the denominator even when uncoupled), it has a lack of background rationale to support its causal role, it is an ambiguous metric, and it is not consistently and unidirectionally related to injury risk. Conclusion: There is no evidence supporting the use of ACWR in training-load-management systems or for training recommendations aimed at reducing injury risk. The statistical properties of the ratio make the ACWR an inaccurate metric and complicate its interpretation for practical applications. In addition, it adds noise and creates statistical artifacts.
… “The way we are right now…we don’t know. If you ask me how is the team, I don’t know. Tomorrow we will see how is the level of the team,” Guardiola told reporters on a Zoom call.
Guardiola said his players were in good shape but expressed concern that they had only three weeks of group training to get ready after months without a match. Clubs in Germany and Spain had five or six.
“All Premier League teams have three. We know it is not enough but it is what it is,” said the Spaniard.
… Perhaps spurned on by the 2008 financial crisis – and the flawed decision making behind it – much work on the Peter Principle has been conducted within the last decade. Of this handful of studies, the strongest evidence for the theory comes from a recent study of 131 companies (operating in IT, manufacturing and professional services) that all used the same performance management software. This allowed the researchers to mine the (anonymised) date of nearly 39,000 sales workers, 1,553 of whom were promoted to management roles over the six-year study period.
As you might expect, the team found that the best salesmen or women were the ones who tended to be promoted. To assess their aptitude for the new managerial position, the researchers then examined the effect of this move on their team members.
“The managers are in charge of training and allocating and directing their sales employees,” says Kelly Shue at the Yale School of Management. “So, to figure out if someone is a good manager, we basically looked at the extent to which they improve or change the performance of their subordinates.” If the previously high-performing candidates really were competent at the new job, you would hope there would be a rise in the average performance of the team as a whole.
… One way that scientists have addressed the issue in the context of genes and metabolism analysis is by developing genome-scale metabolic models, or GEMs. These are computer models built from genetic and biochemical data, and associate genes with metabolic pathways in the cell.
GEMs are rapidly becoming a common tool for researchers. “They are powerful tools for integrating experimental data for a specific physiology and building context-specific models that can identify changes in the metabolism of diseased cells, such as cancer cells,” says Maria Masid, a PhD student from the lab of Vassily Hatzimanikatis at EPFL.
Working to further simplify the GEMs, Masid and her colleagues have now published a paper in Nature Communications that introduces a new mathematical method to analyze human metabolism by reducing the complexity of the human genome-scale GEMs by simply focusing on certain parts of metabolism while minimizing the information loss from the other pathways.
Research over the past 15 years on the placebo effect has substantiated its contribution to the efficacy of established treatments for a range of clinical conditions and identified its underlying mechanisms. There is also evidence that placebo effects contribute to the performance benefits of many ergogenic aids, and that performance can worsen when dummy treatments are associated with expectations of a harmful outcome (i.e. nocebo effect). Unfortunately, the bulk of sport research involving placebos and nocebos continues to be hampered by outdated definitions and conceptualizations of placebo effects and their mechanisms. This has implications not only for research but also application, as nearly 50% of athletes report experiencing a beneficial placebo effect, and a similar proportion of coaches report providing placebos to their athletes. The objective of this paper is to attempt to stimulate research by presenting updated definitions of placebo and nocebo effects in the context of sport, describing their major mechanisms and, highlighting the importance of the psychosocial context on placebo effects in the sport setting.
… With carbohydrate rinse-and-spit established in the lab and in elite practice, it’s logical to ask: Are there are other foods and drinks that can improve performance just by tasting them?
The answer appears to be yes, according to a research review published in the European Journal of Nutrition. In addition to the sweet taste of carbohydrates, researchers have investigated the performance benefits of bitter, hot (spicy), and cooling tastes. Here’s what they’ve found about those—jargon alert!—“tastants” and why they work.
Co-director of football at Brentford FC, Rasmus Ankersen, explains how the club changed their academy strategy and how they organise and work with their B-team. They used to be caught in a classic academy mindset, which saw them beaten by wealthier rivals
According to Ankersen, Brentford’s success is only partly due to the data mindset they have when recruiting players. People tend to forget all the hard work that is required when new players arrive in a new environment.
