… “Firstly, I accept that the blame that all of us [the players], each time, the last four World Cups we’ve failed and we have a lot of the blame for that … after that, you look around, deeper, and we as Mexican football, what have we done to make that jump [up in class]?” he continued.
“What have we done to give the players that structure that we really deserve to reach a final, a semifinal, the ‘fifth game’? The directors, from my point of view, from 20 years ago until now, we have been going backwards with decisions that aren’t for the benefit of Mexican football. I think at the management level we also still need to make that jump.”
Guardado went on to mention the number of foreigners in Liga MX, the suspension of promotion and relegation, the number of Mexican youngsters getting opportunities and the lack of visibility of the league in Europe.
Soon, the world’s most relentless footballer will finally be able to call himself No.1. This is the story of how Ronaldo moved to the brink of becoming the greatest international goalscorer of all time – by those who know him best
The purpose of this study was to examine the training load (TL) programming of 3 training groups of a National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I men’s college soccer team across a season. Thirty athletes were classified as starters (S), substitutes (NS), or redshirts (RS) based on the percentage of possible minutes played during the season. Training load was quantified at the season, phasic, and weekly levels by the session rating of perceived exertion. Between-group differences were observed at the season level (p < 0.001), and group-by-time interactions for average weekly TL were found at both the phasic (p = 0.04) and weekly levels (p < 0.001). In general, S accumulated greater TL than NS (effect size range for all analyses: -0.59 < d < 1.91) and RS (0.17 < d < 3.67), and NS accumulated greater TL than RS (-0.54 < d < 2.34). Within-group variation at the phasic level was less apparent (-0.35 < d < 1.44); however, all 3 groups displayed training variation at the weekly level (-1.80 < d < 3.24). The session rating of perceived exertion can serve as a low-cost, valid means of quantifying TL in men's college soccer athletes. Practitioners should be especially aware of the possibility of insufficient loading in NS.
… All of this is a lot of effort, which suggests that athletes, coaches, and support staff place a premium on optimizing sleep. On the surface, this seems logical; a lack of sleep has been shown to negatively affect sporting performance, and if you do something for roughly a third of your life, it makes sense to try to optimize that activity as much as possible. I’ve written about this before for SimpliFaster (here and here), and, in general, I think that athletes and coaches now better understand the role sleep plays in performance.
But there is still work to be done, which is why a recent book—Inconvenient Sleep: Why Teams Win and Lose—caught my interest. Authored by Patrick Byrne and his daughter Suzanne—both of whom act as sleep and fatigue consultants to sports teams and businesses—the book explores the facts and myths behind sleep, sleep science, and sleep monitoring within sport (team sports in particular).
The aim of the current study is to examine the dose-response relationships between training load (TL) measures and the consequent changes in aerobic fitness. Data were collected over the 6-week pre-season period in elite youth soccer players. Participants completed a lactate threshold test to identify changes in treadmill speed at 2 mmol·l−1 (S2) and 4 mmol·l−1 (S4). Internal TL was quantified with the following training impulse (TRIMP) methods: Banister TRIMP, Edwards TRIMP, Lucia TRIMP, individual TRIMP (iTRIMP) and rate of perceived exertion was also collected. External TL measures were total distance, PlayerLoad, high speed running (14.4-19.8 km·h−1), very high-speed running (19.8-25.2 km·h−1) and maximal sprint distance (>25.2 km·h−1). Individual high-speed distance was derived from each participants treadmill speed at S4. Different Bayesian regression models were run with different likelihood functions. The best fitting models with both the lowest out-of-sample prediction error and the highest variance explained (R 2) were used. iTRIMP had the strongest relationships with changes in S2 (r=0.93, R2 =0.90) and S4 (r=0.88, R2 =0.82). Explained variance ranged from 10%-69% and 11%-38% for all other internal TL measures and external measures respectively. In summary, the iTRIMP method demonstrates a dose-response relationship with changes in aerobic fitness in elite youth soccer players.
FIBA is seizing the opportunity to “Enlarge the FIBA Family,” one of its strategic pillars, by helping promising start-up companies bring innovation to basketball.
FIBA has taken part in a Global Virtual Accelerator (GVA) program, organized by HYPE Sport Innovation. This program got underway in May this year, during a particularly challenging time. The culmination of the GVA is on Tuesday, September 8, when a closing ceremony dubbed “Demo Day” will see FIBA officially announce which of its short-listed companies it is to conduct pilot projects with.
Many biomedical, orthopaedic, and industrial applications are emerging that will benefit from personalized neuromusculoskeletal models. Applications include refined diagnostics, prediction of treatment trajectories for neuromusculoskeletal diseases, in silico design, development, and testing of medical implants, and human-machine interfaces to support assistive technologies. This review proposes how physics-based simulation, combined with machine learning approaches from big data, can be used to develop high-fidelity personalized representations of the human neuromusculoskeletal system. The core neuromusculoskeletal model features requiring personalization are identified, and big data/machine learning approaches for implementation are presented together with recommendations for further research.
When San Francisco went into COVID-19 lockdown on March 17, the last thing 32-year-old tech entrepreneur Niket Desai had to worry about was staying fit. His regular spot, Barry’s, would be closed indefinitely, but Desai had installed the Tempo Studio, an all-in-one home fitness device designed to turn 30 square feet of your living room into an artificial-
intelligence-powered micro gym.
Tempo is a six-foot-tall weight cabinet (weights included!) kitted out with a 42-inch vertical screen as well as a camera to track movement—a version of Microsoft’s Kinect. While similar devices, like Tonal, offer digital resistance training at home, Tempo is the first one to deploy 3D movement analysis, combined with machine learning and AI to improve your form and curate your workouts.
With high school football kick off just around the corner, football players at Gaffney High School have had to adjust to playing in a pandemic but now they are also fighting the heat index.
Gaffney’s athletic trainer Cheltsea Staley says a new device helps them make sure their players are safe in the warm temperatures.
“The wet bulb takes into account humidity, the ambient temperature, and solar radiation and wind,” Staley said. “So we use that device to make sure out athletes are protected outside in the heat and that we don’t have any heat illnesses occur.”
By just the press of a button and holding it outside for a few seconds the wet bulb device also allows athletic trainers and coaches to be in better communication about what’s best for their players.
I mentioned a couple weeks ago how at Illinois they are testing every member of the campus community… faculty, staff, and students, twice per week.
They developed and received approval for their own rapid test. I heard an interview with university president Timothy Killeen (who was previously a faculty member at Michigan for 20 years), and he mentioned getting the result of his test back 5-6 hours after it was administered. The Illini have their program so dialed in that Killeen said students are required to show their most recent negative result before entering a class. They have both frequency and scale in Champaign. They also have affordability, which Killeen places at roughly $15 per test. They’re working to bring that cost down, but it’s already a helluva lot better than the $50-$100 cost per test we’ve been hearing for tests being administered on most campuses.
Illinois is already accomplishing what we all hope the $5, 15-minute Abbot test will accomplish in the coming months. And Illinois using its rapid test to detect the virus in asymptomatic carriers (something the Abbot test hasn’t yet received authorization for).
While public discourse around college football’s return has focused on the student-athlete risk, fan attendance could have a greater impact on overall public health. For the programs still planning to play this fall, yet another decision looms: Will there be fans at games? And if so, how many?
There have already been instances of the health risks that come from crowded sporting events. The first came Feb. 19, as nearly 2,500 fans of Spanish soccer club Valencia traveled to Italy to watch a Champions League match against Atalanta. They were among the 44,236 fans inside Milan’s San Siro Stadium, and several weeks later, after it was determined to be a coronavirus “super-spreading event” that played a significant role in outbreaks locally and in Spain, the match became known as “Game Zero.”
Cases of myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle, appear to be prevalent among Big Ten athletes, said Penn State’s director of athletic medicine, impacting roughly one-third of all athletes who have tested positive for the coronavirus.
Wayne Sebastianelli, who is also the team doctor for Penn State football, said Monday during a meeting of the State College Area School District board of directors that cardiac scans of Big Ten athletes who contracted COVID-19 showed “30 to roughly 35 percent of their heart muscles” indicated symptoms of myocarditis.
“And we really just don’t know what to do with it right now,” he said. “It’s still very early in the infection. Some of that has led to the Pac-12 and the Big Ten’s decision to sort of put a hiatus on what’s happening.”
… It’s no secret that many universities go to great lengths to let these “amateurs” in demanding athletic fields do as little as possible academically so that they can keep training hard. But it’s supposed to be a wink-wink-nudge-nudge process, not outright fraud. A few years ago, my own university, the University of North Carolina, breached this unspoken rule. The school became embroiled in a high-profile scandal after a professor provided fake classes aimed at athletes that gave them the grades required to keep their eligibility in return for little to no attendance or work. That, of course, made the charade uncomfortably explicit, and UNC faced national attention and some minor sanctions.
As an immediate countermeasure, the university dispatched minders to classrooms. In classes where I had student athletes, especially those in high-profile sports, a man started to appear after each class to ask me if so-and-so athlete had shown up. (This has apparently become a practice at other universities too). It was a no-win situation, because if I refused to cooperate, the students would face sanctions, and maybe even lose their scholarship. And my students were showing up, but many times they were dozing off in class, exhausted from their punishing training regime. Surveillance had brought surface-level compliance, but it had not solved the underlying crisis.
Instead of snitching on them, I took these students aside and did my best to warn them that their interests were not aligned with those of the university and the athletic department.
From needing to “stick to sports” to “it’s just too difficult,” Abbey Forbes has heard every reason why she shouldn’t talk about race. To the UCLA women’s tennis player, those pale in comparison to the reason why she should.
“When you cannot take the color off of your skin, another person should not have the right to say that they cannot talk about it because it makes them uncomfortable,” said Forbes, an All-American. “I think that it is time for us to have these uncomfortable conversations.”
The UCLA Black Student-Athlete Alliance (BSAA) aims to lead those conversations. After months of quietly working, the club that’s part group therapy, part activist organization went on social media in August to lay out its mission to be a safe space for Black athletes on campus. One goal is to discuss and learn from their experiences, then turn them into action they hope can shift the culture at UCLA and beyond.
Though sports revenue nearly doubled during the study period, the players ‘risking their health and safety’ have not seen a comparable increase in benefits, data show