The recent situation around the world saw many athletes and football players confined to their homes, desperate to stay fit. As much of the shutdown coincided with the offseason in the NFL, players were finding inventive and unusual ways to keep fit and prepare for the new season. It was not just NFL stars who wanted to keep themselves trim either; with gyms closed across the US, much of the population needed alternative methods of working out.
That is where some of our NFL stars stepped in and helped. Technology allowed many to produce their own workouts, regimes, and fitness videos, delivered directly into your homes. Some top stars took to the camera to show you how they were keeping fit during these troubling times. Others shared their tips through their social media channels. So, we have collected a handful of stars here that used their time to help keep the US fit.
… “He’s got some of that dad bod weight going on, so he looks good,” Johnson said. Kelce added that Wentz has “some dad weight going on,” which he is “sure will be very good for injury prevention” and said it looks more natural.
“I’ll take it. Hey, I’m a dad. Dad bod can mean a million different things,” Wentz said Monday, breaking into a smile. “I told Kelce, he could have said ‘dad strength.’ But dad bod’s fine. Whatever we want to call it.”
Brailsford has never been one for sentimentality, and with the rise of rivals Jumbo-Visma he has turned to hard-nosed pragmatism in cutting Froome and Thomas from his Tour de France squad
… While he has drawn comparisons to Liverpool manager Jürgen Klopp due to his history managing both Mainz and Borussia Dortmund, Tuchel is in fact a huge admirer and follower of Pep Guardiola. His tactical prowess and the sheer flexibility he prepares and approaches each game has seen him labeled as one of the brilliant minds of the game over the past few years.
Perhaps the one difference you can draw between the two is the fact that Nagelsmann has always said that the interpersonal relations part of the game is more important than tactics — ‘30% tactics, 70% social competence’ has always been his motto. On the other hand, Tuchel is anything but sociable; he has fallen out with the hierarchy at both Mainz and Borussia Dortmund despite attaining success during both spells.
Perhaps now more than ever, college football teams are leaning on the academic side of their institutions to navigate the path to playing games amid a pandemic.
A prime example can be found at Virginia Tech, where Justin Fuente’s squad is sporting new face shields designed by the university’s helmet lab.
Recent advances in microelectronics, microfluidics, and electrochemical sensing platforms have enabled the development of an emerging class of fully integrated personal health monitoring devices that exploit sweat to noninvasively access biomarker information. Despite such advances, effective sweat sampling remains a significant challenge for reliable biomarker analysis, with many existing methods requiring active stimulation (e.g., iontophoresis, exercise, heat). Natural perspiration offers a suitable alternative as sweat can be collected with minimal effort on the part of the user. To leverage this phenomenon, we devised a thin hydrogel micropatch (THMP), which simultaneously serves as an interface for sweat sampling and a medium for electrochemical sensing. To characterize the performance of the THMP, caffeine and lactate were selected as two representative target molecules. We demonstrated the suitability of the sampling method to track metabolic patterns, as well as to render sample-to-answer biomarker data for personal monitoring (through coupling with an electrochemical sensing system). To inform its potential application, this biomarker sampling and sensing system is incorporated within a distributed terminal-based sensing network, which uniquely capitalizes on the fingertip as a site for simultaneous biomarker data sampling and user identification. [full text]
Google AI Blog, Valentin Bazarevsky and Ivan Grishchenko from
Pose estimation from video plays a critical role enabling the overlay of digital content and information on top of the physical world in augmented reality, sign language recognition, full-body gesture control, and even quantifying physical exercises, where it can form the basis for yoga, dance, and fitness applications. Pose estimation for fitness applications is particularly challenging due to the wide variety of possible poses (e.g., hundreds of yoga asanas), numerous degrees of freedom, occlusions (e.g. the body or other objects occlude limbs as seen from the camera), and a variety of appearances or outfits.
New York Magazine, Intelligencer blog, Will Leitch from
… If you’re looking for another rich institution that could have used its financial clout to make navigating COVID-19 easier, I point you to America itself. Just about every single thing the NBA, and those other sports leagues, has done correctly to get back to a simulacrum of normal business are steps the United States could have taken but didn’t. Why are sports back when nothing else in American life is? This is why.
Gatorade Sports Science Institute, Trent Stellingwerff from
Fatigue during ~1-10 min of high-intensity sports/events is multifactorial, but there are strong mechanistic underpinnings demonstrating skeletal muscle acidosis, via accumulating hydrogen ion (H+), to be a key performance limiter. Accordingly, skeletal muscle has various innate intra- and extra-cellular buffering mechanisms to address exercise-induced acidosis.
Carnosine is a key intra-cellular buffer due to its nitrogen containing imidazole side ring, which can accept (buffer) H+ and slow the decline in muscle pH during intense exercise and contribute as much as ~15% to total buffering capacity.
The Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA) has asked Major League Baseball (MLB) to implement a Decision Limit for dehydrochloromethyltestosterone (DHCMT) of 100 picograms per millilitre of urine, after a number of players tested positive for tiny amounts of the steroid’s long term metabolite. A lawsuit challenging the test developed to detect the long term metabolites of DHCMT could have implications for many Russians ensnared by the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) retesting programme for the Beijing 2008 and London 2012 Olympics.
When Dr. Jonathan Drezner considered how much is still unknown about COVID-19, he just couldn’t recommend that Pac-12 colleges play football or any other sport this fall.
Drezner is the director of the University of Washington Medical Center for Sports Cardiology, a team physician for the Washington Huskies, and one of the medical experts advising Pac-12 universities on their decision. The state of the pandemic is worse than expected, Drezner said, and there is still too much unknown about the effects of COVID-19, including increasing concerns on the impact it has on the heart.
“Across the Pac-12, there are a number of cities where the pandemic is uncontrolled,” he said Wednesday. “Where testing is not available, quick turnaround time for testing is not attainable. There’s so much unknown, and we don’t have the testing infrastructure to protect our athletes.”
College football enters this week with 76 of the 130 programs still intending to play this season. With four of the 10 FBS conferences having already called off their seasons, a shroud of skepticism lingers over the sport.
The narrative in the NFL, more than three weeks after rookies reported, is resoundingly different. While there have been occasional hiccups and 67 opt-outs, the NFL’s use of daily COVID-19 testing and cutting-edge contact tracing technology has fostered an air of inevitability about the season pushing forward.
So as college football sputters toward kickoff, it’s fair to ask what the sport could learn from the early success of the NFL.
An accomplished player in his own right, winning the 1995 European beach volleyball championships to add to his silver medal at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, Marko Klok knows what it takes to perform at the top level.
Now coaching the Dutch women’s national team and successful Swiss men’s club side Lindaren Volley Amriswil, we get the rundown on the power of game analysis in elite-level volleyball.
This really stretched my brain today jumping back into the R-world and trying to manipulate the data. The teams that will combine their analytics and performance department could be sitting on a goldmine (especially when combining with on-ice testing or practice data).