… We usually define rest as a period of time without any training. For most people, this is usually about 24 hours between workouts. However, recovery is different, and could indicate a time span of several minutes to hours (such as taking a short break during training between rounds). Recovery could also indicate the time required to induce some form of physiological adaptation, such as the observed rapid increase in plasma volume, which could improve aerobic fitness. But how necessary are both rest and recovery as part of a training program?
… Today, a range of illnesses is brought about by the lack of exercise, poor diet, insufficient sleep, widespread pollution, and bad genes. But another culprit exists—the light bulb. Research shows that animals exposed to artificial light succumb to a range of ailments, including an “increase in cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and obesity,” said professor Mariana Figueiro, director of the Lighting Research Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Animals are not alone. Experts have uncovered that shift workers—those performing the millions of jobs, from security guards to surgeons, at times other than nine to five—have an increase in the risk of cancer and heart disease. By culling reams of data about maladies and connecting them to where people live, what they do, and who they are, researchers have found an epidemiological smoking gun. Ruling out all the other medical factors, one cause for these afflictions is the bright lights beaming over their heads. The lights disrupt their body clock, or circadian rhythm, bringing about these health issues.
Specifically, we are experiencing too much of the wrong kind of light at the wrong part of the day, and these lights affect our health.
U.S. Soccer has announced that Ellie Maybury has been named the Head of Performance for the U.S. Women’s National Team while Julian Haigh has been named the USWNT Sports Scientist.
Maybury and Haigh, who have been overseeing the USWNT’s fitness since the latter part of 2019, will now be full-time members of U.S. head coach Vlatko Andonovski’s staff.
Maybury will be responsible for creating and executing the overall day-to-day sport science and performance plan for the USWNT, which includes the athletic development of players, optimal preparation of players for competition, monitoring of players’ training/match loads, maintaining optimal recoveries for post-training/competition, injury prevention strategies, nutritional strategies and prescription of strength and conditioning training programs.
… Human brains are constantly faced with such ambiguous sensory inputs. In order to resolve the ambiguity and correctly perceive the world, our brains employ a process known as causal inference.
Causal inference is a key to learning, reasoning, and decision making, but researchers currently know little about the neurons involved in the process.
In order to bridge the gap, a team of researchers at the University of Rochester, including Greg DeAngelis, the George Eastman Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and Ralf Haefner, an assistant professor of brain and cognitive sciences, received a $12.2 million grant award from the National Institutes of Health for a project to better understand how the brain uses causal inference to distinguish self-motion from object motion.
A common notion is to walk 10,000 steps a day to improve ones’ physical fitness, so pedometers have been a popular wearable health device from before the days of fitness trackers and smartphones. However, simply walking 10,000 steps does not improve physical fitness or improve lifestyle-related illnesses. The international standard of improving physical fitness is to measure the maximum oxygen intake and to have the individual work at more than 60% of that. Interval training uses an individuals’ peak aerobic capacity to efficiently and effectively improve physical fitness. However, this requires going to the gym and training with a machine on a regular basis, which is both time consuming and costly. Therefore, a team at Shinshu University led by Dr. Shizue Masuki who was a part of Dr. Hiroshi Nose’s group (also of Shinshu University and corresponding author of this study) that developed Interval walking training (IWT) in an earlier study set out to see whether physical fitness could be easily determined and exercise intensity during training could be continuously monitored in the field without going to the gym.
As of 20 June 2020, the Center for Disease Control’s tabulations show more than 2.2 million recorded cases of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and nearly 120,000 in deaths in the United States (1). Infected patients present with a wide range of symptoms, from completely asymptomatic to rapidly progressive pneumonia leading to death. Rigorous and widespread testing remains a critical component of strategies for containing this pandemic. The limited availability of molecular diagnostics constrains the use of these technologies to those who present with disease. The current gold standards rely on detection of viral RNA, typically by reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), but these approaches, as commonly implemented, have notable disadvantages. First, the nasopharyngeal swab is uncomfortable and may not be tolerated well by all patients, particularly children or the elderly. Second, false-negative test results remain a significant concern, with some RT-PCR tests exhibiting false-negative rates as high as 29% (2). Third, swab samples must be collected by trained staff to avoid false negatives or inconclusive tests (3, 4). Fourth, samples must be transported via viral medium to centralized laboratory facilities, where transport delays from rural or remote areas can reach 48 hours or longer (5). Alternative tests based on antibodies offer some promise, but the appearance of antibodies [immunoglobulin M (IgM) and IgG] can lag weeks to months after the initial exposure (6). Furthermore, positive antibody titers may potentially only reflect prior exposure as opposed to protective immunity. Emerging evidence suggests that re-infection by endemic coronaviruses is not atypical, thereby adding complications to protocols for follow-up molecular testing (6, 7). The net result is a continuing gap between widespread population-level testing and the availability of tests that is likely to persist for the foreseeable future (8–11). These circumstances motivate the development of complementary technologies for diagnosing and monitoring COVID-19 infections (2, 12, 13).
… Organizing the world into abstract categories does not come easily to computers, but in recent years researchers have inched closer by training machine learning models on words and images infused with structural information about the world, and how objects, animals, and actions relate. In a new study at the European Conference on Computer Vision this month, researchers unveiled a hybrid language-vision model that can compare and contrast a set of dynamic events captured on video to tease out the high-level concepts connecting them.
Their model did as well as or better than humans at two types of visual reasoning tasks — picking the video that conceptually best completes the set, and picking the video that doesn’t fit. Shown videos of a dog barking and a man howling beside his dog, for example, the model completed the set by picking the crying baby from a set of five videos. Researchers replicated their results on two datasets for training AI systems in action recognition: MIT’s Multi-Moments in Time and DeepMind’s Kinetics.
British Journal of Sports Medicine, Editorial from
The Tokyo 2020(1) Olympics are expected to be the hottest in modern history,1 resulting in much conjecture within the literature.2–5 Long-term (~10 to 14 days) heat acclimation/acclimatisation (HA) is the gold-standard strategy to protect against heat-mediated performance decrements and exertional heat illnesses (EHI).6 Short-term heat reacclimation (~5 days), proximal to competition, can also be incorporated within athlete training and taper programmes, complimenting the earlier long-term HA. This approach allows the balance of training/load and HA agendas within the often time poor and logistically challenging elite sport environment.5 7 8
However I hear and see a lot of people aggravating their injury within the first 1 month of running despite putting in a very solid rehab.
Although they’ve built up a solid strength base, they’ve lost the “spring in their legs” to regularly produce and accept forces in their lower limbs – which ultimately gets the better of them.
ESPN College Football, Paula Lavigne and Mark Schlabach from
As debate swirls about the return of college fall sports amid an increasing number of positive COVID-19 tests on campuses, football coaches and athletic directors have been loudly championing their schools’ health and testing protocols.
The schools are much less forthcoming, though, about the actual number of positive tests in their programs and other related data.
In response to a series of questions from ESPN about their COVID-19 testing protocols, almost half of the 65 schools in the Power 5 conferences declined to share data about how many positive tests their programs have had to date.
Softball player Kamia Green stayed idle during the COVID-19 shelter-in-place orders, like most other student athletes in the spring.
The 13-year-old catcher has been playing for about four years, the last several in leagues. She has mostly played around the Akron area and was a middle-schooler at Akron’s Miller South School for the Performing Arts before moving to Kent. She will be a seventh-grader at Stanton Middle School this fall.
About the first week of June, Kamia and others started pitching and catching practices.
During that time, she recalled catching a ball for her pitcher friend.
“I threw it back and my arm was just killing me,” Kamia said, describing a sharp pain.
A new technology that uses a protein’s structure to predict the inner wiring that controls the protein’s function and dynamics is now available for scientists to utilize. The tool, developed by researchers at Penn State, may be useful for protein engineering and drug design.
Nikolay Dokholyan, professor of pharmacology at Penn State College of Medicine, and postdoctoral scholar Jian Wang created an algorithm called Ohm that can predict allosteric sites in a protein. These are locations where proteins are particularly sensitive to relay certain changes in their structure and function as a result of external stimuli including other proteins, small molecules, water or ions. Signaling at and between allosteric sites in proteins regulate many biological processes.
A former associate athletic director at West Point claims he was fired for trying to rein in other sports officials who allegedly mismanaged injury prevention programs.
Jonathan Oliver sued the Army West Point Athletic Association on Aug. 27 in U.S. District Court, White Plains, in a lawsuit that depicts a sports department at war with itself and a chain of command that tolerates insubordination.
west point athletics lawsuitSports officials that Oliver supervised banished him from his office, according to the lawsuit, and refused to cooperate with Oliver’s attempts to prevent and monitor injuries.
One-hundred and twelve athletes across 16 different sports at the University of Nevada responded to the university’s 2019-20 end-of-season survey, which yielded 43 responses about mental health concerns, according to an analysis by Out of Bounds.
Out of Bounds obtained the end-of-season survey results via a public records request. Any potentially identifiable student information was redacted by the university. Those redactions are noted in this newsletter when relevant.
The first survey response regarding mental health concerns was a direct accusation that one head coach, whose name was redacted, “does not really care about anyone’s mental health and treats people as [redacted] business instead of [redacted] players,” and the last of those 43 responses was a suggestion by one athlete that the Wolf Pack’s athletics staff hold monthly or annual meetings to remind them of the importance of athletes’ health and well-being.
Making Sense Of: Personal and Group Health Tracking
The pandemic has changed a great deal about how we live, including major shifts in how we exercise. Those shifts are starting to be reflected in new software for wearable technology products.
Strava has seen significant growth this year, much of it attributed to COVID and quarantines. Strava is showing positive results from the company’s decision to cut down on the number of free services available to users. This is a good sign for every company building a business around sports training technology. The hypothesis that customers will pay money to improve themselves via technology is bearing out.
Garmin introduced a group interface, perfect for team use. Gathering groups of users into a single data set should be fertile new territory for Firstbeat Analytics, the Swiss startup acquired by Garmin in June which is expert at algorithms to interpret sensor data related to human health and performance.
Home fitness equipment and subscription services like Peloton are also growing rapidly. These technologies consist of user-controlled software that connects a singular pieces of fitness equipment (a bike, a treadmill, a mirror and coming soon, a rowing machine) to the Internet for media and services. As these platforms (Tonal and Mirror are others) gain users expect the consumer wearable technology to emulate aspects of these interfaces and experiences. Again, it’s more of the group stuff that plays into the strengths of Strava and Garmin’s new team setup.
The big picture culture change is a shift to greater individual knowledge of our own health, fitness and training. The collaboration between coaches, performance staff and athlete becomes more effective when athletes can be an authoritative expert on their own fitness, training, recovery and endurance. The ideal situation will allow more time for teams’ skill development, both individually and collectively. Those gains come as a result of teams’ reduced time spent on fitness and the increased player availability that comes from fewer athletes’ getting injured.
