LeBron James never took it for granted, no matter how routine it became.
He never counted on playing even one playoff game in a season, even long after it became viewed as a failure if he didn’t play for a title. The NBA is hard. He only made it look easy.
And he said this postseason, his first in two years and the most unusual in league history, will be his most challenging yet.
“This is the toughest championship run for me personally, for the circumstances of just being in here,” he said after he finished practice Monday in a Disney World convention center ballroom.
… The winds of change have been swirling for Chicago for a few years now. The Blackhawks have several young forwards, from rookies Kubalik and Kirby Dach to Alex DeBrincat and Dylan Strome and promising 20-year-old defenseman Adam Boqvist.
If nothing else, beating Edmonton in the qualifying around and getting outclassed by Vegas should be valuable experience for those players and others as a taste of NHL playoff hockey.
“It’s a huge way to get experience for those guys,” Kane said. “The young guys that are around and got a chance to play in this postseason hopefully take this as a valuable learning lesson and we can get better as a group from it.”
Coach Jeremy Colliton, who’s younger than Keith and about 100 days older than injured defenseman Brent Seabrook, wasn’t ready to think about the future immediately after being eliminated. But assuming he returns, he will be tasked with figuring out how to build Chicago back up to being a perennial contender.
Newcastle United will prepare for the 2020/21 Premier League season with a week-long training camp at a multi-million pound complex in the Yorkshire countryside this month.
The Magpies head to Queen Ethelburga’s Collegiate campus near York, on Wednesday, having undergone Covid-19 testing at their Benton base earlier in the week.
Steve Bruce’s squad will make use of the purpose-built sports facilities on-site – the result of a £30m redevelopment in 2016 – as well as taking on Crewe Alexandra on Tuesday, 25th August in what will be their first pre-season friendly of the summer.
Scandanavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports from
Monitoring variations in the functioning of the autonomic nervous system may help personalize training of runners and provide more pronounced physiological adaptations and performance improvements. We systematically reviewed the scientific literature comparing physiological adaptations and/or improvements in performance following training based on responses of the autonomic nervous system (i.e., changes in heart rate variability) and pre‐defined training. PubMed, SPORTDiscus, and Web of Science were searched systematically in July 2019. Keywords related to endurance, running, autonomic nervous system, and training. Studies were included if they (1) involved interventions consisting predominantly of running training; (2) lasted at least 3 weeks; (3) reported pre‐ and post‐intervention assessment of running performance and/or physiological parameters; (4) included an experimental group performing training adjusted continuously on the basis of alterations in HRV and a control group; and 5) involved healthy runners. Five studies involving six interventions and 166 participants fulfilled our inclusion criteria. Four HRV‐based interventions reduced the amount of moderate‐ and/or high‐intensity training significantly. In five interventions, improvements in performance parameters (3000 m, 5000 m, Loadmax, Tlim) were more pronounced following HRV‐based training. Peak oxygen uptake (V̇O2peak) and submaximal running parameters (eg, LT1, LT2) improved following both HRV‐based and pre‐defined training, with no clear difference in the extent of improvement in V̇O2peak. Submaximal running parameters tended to improve more following HRV‐based training. Research findings to date have been limited and inconsistent. Both HRV‐based and pre‐defined training improve running performance and certain submaximal physiological adaptations, with effects of the former training tending to be greater. [link to full text pdf]
People who are evening types go to bed later and wake up later than morning types. They also tend to move around far less throughout the day, according to an interesting new study of how our innate body clocks may be linked to our physical activity habits. The study, one of the first to objectively track daily movements of a large sample of early birds and night owls, suggests that knowing our chronotype might be important for our health.
In recent years, a wealth of new science has begun explicating the complex roles of cellular clocks and chronotypes in our health and lifestyles. Thanks to this research, we know that each of us contains a master internal body clock, located in our brains, that tracks and absorbs outside clues, such as ambient light, to determine what time it is and how our bodies should react. This master clock directs the rhythmic release of hormones, such as melatonin, and other chemicals that affect sleep, wakefulness, hunger and many other physiological systems.
Brett Kuczynski stared at his phone for nearly an hour, agonizing over what to text teammates from his small Illinois school. Just weeks before his senior year was supposed to start, high school football in his home state had been canceled over concerns related to the novel coronavirus pandemic, forcing Kuczynski into a decision his friends might not be able to fathom: He was moving to Florida, one of the pandemic’s hot spots, to pursue a major college football scholarship.
… We managed to reproduce to same results using academy (U19 and U17) data (this is cool) but our models are still struggling to detect in-season changes in fitness. There are two potential explanations (1) changes in fitness during the season are not meaningful or worthwhile, and that’s why it is hard to detect them except during pre-season or RTP phases; (2) our models are too noisy, and we need to improve them using more advanced methods.
I think the answer lies somewhere in-between these two options.
As researcher and practitioner, I believe there is value to find in the area if we want to delve into it. That would need more frequent fitness assessment – for this, 4-min runs [12] could be a solution; better mathematical models to handle the non-linear effects and remove the noise; likely cross-club collaboration agreement [13] to improve sample sizes to then, re-use models at an individual model.
… Garmin has quietly launched it in public beta. You’ll find it in the Fenix 6 public beta (albeit unlisted as in there). And more visibly, also available and listed in the release notes of a recent Forerunner 945 beta. There’s also nifty new LiveTrack 2.0 support, which was added to the Garmin Edge 1030 Plus back a few months ago, that now shows your planned course data to friends. And a new updated live event sharing feature.
How it works:
To get things started you can either pair the trainer from the sensors menu like any other new sensor, or, you can just wait for it to prompt you later in the new ‘Smart Trainer’ menu. So, we’ll do the 2nd one for now – two birds with one stone I suppose.
… Texas and dozens of other states are pressing on amid questions about safety and COVID-19′s long-term health impact on young athletes.
Many teams are already practicing. Utah played its first games this week; at one of them, Davis High coach Mitch Arquette told his players to seize the moment before a 24-20 win over Herriman.
“It really is the mantra of 2020: Win the day,” Arquette told the Deseret News. “You don’t know when you’re going to get another. We really don’t. We could have our game canceled next week.”
Sports Illustrated, All Sooners blog, John E. Hoover from
Lincoln Riley isn’t sure what the right answer is. Not when there are still so many questions.
But Riley does have one hard, fast truth to which he will cling in 2020.
“We’re gonna have our faces covered,” Riley says, “somewhat, somehow.”
Well into their second full week of preseason football practice, Oklahoma players seem to have gotten used to wearing masks during their workouts. Riley said it’s a practice that will continue until epidemiologists and infectious disease experts give them the all clear.
A group of U.S. senators, led by Cory Booker and Richard Blumenthal, on Thursday unveiled outlines of comprehensive legislation that would assist college athletes in ways well beyond making money from their names, images and likenesses.
Guided by what they are calling a college athletes bill of rights, Booker, D-N.J., and Blumenthal, D-Conn., issued a statement saying they will seek to give athletes “revenue-sharing agreements” with the NCAA, conferences and schools, plus the ability to capitalize on their name, image and likeness “individually and as a group, with minimal restrictions.”
The envisioned bill also would create new safety and wellness standards, provide improved health care; attempt to improve educational outcomes and would end the requirement that athletes sit out if they change schools or withdraw from a National Letter of Intent.
… Almost 18 months after that Liverpool defeat, Hansi Flick has replaced Niko Kovac as coach, and the likes of Alphonso Davies and Leon Goretzka have been promoted from the subs’ bench to a starting lineup that is stacked with experience, even after Mats Hummels, Franck Ribery, Arjen Robben, Rafinha and James Rodriguez moved on.
Manuel Neuer (34), Robert Lewandowski (32 on Friday), Jerome Boateng (31) and Thomas Muller (30) played key roles against Lyon on a night when Bayern’s lineup had an average age of 28.
The modern game’s trend toward youth means that players in their late 20s are regarded as offering less resale value and having fewer miles left. While both are statements of the obvious, there is no substitute for knowhow, and Bayern are proving that under Flick’s stewardship.
