Matt Turner’s rise as one of the top American goalkeepers has been a surprise to many people – including himself. But now the New Jersey native has bold ambitions that include a deep playoff run with the Revolution, moving to Europe at some point, and being part of the U.S. national team. ASN spoke with with Turner at length about his rise, his future, and connecting with his family’s ancestry.
… Bronze matured at Lyon into one of the game’s most coveted right-backs and the influence of a world-class squad was hugely important. “I picked up on everything they were doing every single day and just loved being around them. I was like a sponge, just absorbing everything that was going on. I really grew as a person and found myself while I was playing there.”
Alex Greenwood, who also left Lyon for City this week, enjoyed a similar experience during her one season in France. “It was probably the best year of my football career in terms of on the pitch and off the pitch, the way I developed as a person as well as a player,” the former Manchester United left-back said.
“I went there with what I thought was experience and maturity and I have left there with a great deal more. I don’t think you can walk into that dressing room and walk out not having improved when you play with them and train with those players every day.”
… With his new job, Fuld said, “We’re collaborating between our strength and conditioning department, athletic training department and nutrition department. Getting everybody on the same page.
“The idea is to develop a plan for each player. They are all inter-related. In the past baseball has tended to work in silos. You stay in your lane. You stay in yours. I don’t think that’s the best way to go about finding ways to get guys to achieve as much as they can.”
As an example, Fuld cited an outfielder working on his swing. “It’s important to understand how your body works and what your physical limitations may be,” he said, “what can you potentially work on in the training room or the weight room. Maybe there’s some diet-related things that can help you. What I believe is to look at things from a holistic perspective. We have these pieces in place in Philly already. We’ve put an added emphasis on communicating amongst these groups, formulating a plan for everybody, getting everybody’s input — hitting coaches, pitching coaches. Linking those goals to what we can and can’t do from a physical standpoint.”
… “When I started I was the only young one, and I did well, and it opened the door for other young managers,” Nagelsmann says. “I was, I guess, a role model. The club were brave to put me in charge of that professional team and then others recognised it could be possible to work with younger managers. But then if I lost every game at Hoffenheim, we wouldn’t have been successful, that’s it.” He laughs as he trips up over the word “successful” in his second language.
That’s part of his charm: he’s happy to be vulnerable in front of his players. Nagelsmann’s relationship with his team is interesting, too. He likes that he’s in the same age range as most of them. Younger players can learn quicker, and he can relate to them more readily.
He’s also renowned for his adventurous use of new-age technology. At Hoffenheim he installed a massive screen on the training pitch so they could do real-time analysis; he brought in drones; he also used something called the “Footbonaut,” a machine geared toward improving a player’s reaction time and spatial awareness. But his coaching philosophy and approach comes down to two fundamental pillars: efficiency on the field, and a personable approach off it. He sees his role as 30% tactics and 70% social competence.
… If we look at the weekly evolution, the highest load (both internal and external) was registered on game days and, on the contrary, the lowest was registered the day before. For instance, it was observed that the 3 days prior to the game the internal load progressively decreased by around 70-90 units per day and the distance by 700-800 m per day. Besides, the distance covered at high and very high speed was greater 3 days before the game than the day prior to the match. This decrease in daily load is in line with data obtained from a study3 that analysed the second team of FC Barcelona and which also registered a reduction in distance (~ 3000 m) and distance covered at high speed (~ 170 m) the 3 days before the game.
In summary, these results show how an elite team distributes its workload throughout a season in which it won the championship. The authors of the study and some members of Manchester United Medicine and Science department, highlight the evident periodisation that occurs within each weekly microcycle, mainly focused on the recovery and preparation of the matches during the long and condensed competitive period.
Judith Harper always began her “Literature and Performance” class at Westwood High School, in Mesa, Arizona, with a discussion of one of her favorite quotes: “Trust is the result of a risk successfully survived.” These words, from the late psychology professor Jack R. Gibb, capture her teaching philosophy: Harper, who retired this year after 38 years in education, believes that young people will always reach their full potential if they can learn to trust their own voice. In her classes, Harper says, that trust emerged when students took on the small, daily risks she intentionally orchestrated through her lessons—analyzing complex poetry, plays, and novels; writing original scripts based on those texts; and learning how to stage and perform them.
Accelerometry is a recent method used to quantify workload in team sports. A rapidly increasing number of studies supports the practical implementation of accelerometry monitoring to regulate and optimize training schemes. Therefore, the purposes of this study were: (1) to reflect the current state of knowledge about accelerometry as a method of workload monitoring in invasion team sports according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses (PRISMA) guidelines, and (2) to conclude recommendations for application and scientific investigations. The Web of Science, PubMed and Scopus databases were searched for relevant published studies according to the following keywords: “accelerometry” or “accelerometer” or “microtechnology” or “inertial devices”, and “load” or “workload”, and “sport”. Of the 1383 studies initially identified, 118 were selected for a full review. The main results indicate that the most frequent findings were (i) devices’ body location: scapulae; (b) devices brand: Catapult Sports; (iii) variables: PlayerLoadTM and its variations; (iv) sports: rugby, Australian football, soccer and basketball; (v) sex: male; (vi) competition level: professional and elite; and (vii) context: separate training or competition. A great number of variables and devices from various companies make the comparability between findings difficult; unification is required. Although the most common location is at scapulae because of its optimal signal reception for time-motion analysis, new methods for multi-location skills and locomotion assessment without losing tracking accuracy should be developed. [full text]
We’re already collecting amazing stride kinematics for sprinting true @Ergotest Lasercamera, DynaSpeed or photocells + IMU & very clever algorithms. In process of developing same for skating. V, F & P is there, around the corner is “glide-length” & “glide-frequency”
… In the two weeks since the Halo announcement, dozens of Amazon employees have updated their LinkedIn profiles to indicate that they’re working on the Halo team, now that the initiative is public knowledge. Amazon lists another dozen open positions for the Halo team on its jobs site, seeking engineers and others to work on the Halo data platform, devices, mobile apps, user experience and other areas.
Amazon on Aug. 27 announced the $100 Halo health band and an accompanying $4/month membership. They offer the ability to accurately measure body fat and analyze tone of voice to assess the degree of “energy and positivity” in a user’s communication, in addition to detailed sleep tracking and other features. It’s available for purchase via invitation.
Wearable and implantable devices are currently used for a variety of functions, including health tracking and monitoring. However, supplying energy usually requires cumbersome batteries and downtime due to recharging. Now, an international team of researchers suggests that advances in materials and electronic design may be able to convert biomechanical energy into electric energy, paving the way for devices that can be worn and implanted but do not require constant recharging, according to Larry Cheng, Dorothy Quiggle Career Development Professor in the Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics and an affiliate of the Institute for Computational and Data Sciences.
“In this particular review, we are looking at possible energy supply without the need for batteries and other components, so it’s of particular interest to create these energy harvesters for self-powered devices, or ones that could also be used to charge up a battery,” said Cheng.
The ominous skies hovering over Levi’s Stadium haven’t yet forced the San Francisco 49ers to change their plans, but it’s something they and the NFL will have to keep tabs on as they head toward Sunday’s opener against the Arizona Cardinals.
With more wildfires burning all over California combined with a recent heat wave, Bay Area residents woke up to eerie orange skies and falling ash on Wednesday. It created a strange atmosphere for the Niners and coach Kyle Shanahan as they conducted a walk-through and a practice outside the SAP training facility.
Indianapolis Star, Bloomington Herald-Times, Jon Blau from
… “I was born at night, but I wasn’t born last night,” [Scott] Dolson quipped. “I would just never put a date out there I couldn’t be totally sure about.”
But in his first time speaking publicly since the Big Ten halted fall sports, Dolson offered some optimism. He laid out developments with rapid testing for COVID-19. If it’s possible to test athletes the day of a practice or competition, Dolson said, and to have results before they touch the field, it’s possible to establish a “clean” environment.
“All that being said, I’m optimistic that we can get back to playing again. It’s not if, it’s just when,” Dolson said. “It’s hopeful that it’s sooner than later for multiple reasons.”
The teams that have two or more days of time off than their opponent are 5-1 in series openers. The well-rested Tampa Bay Lightning were the latest to take advantage of that, crushing the New York Islanders 8-2 in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference final and in the process taught an important lesson those teams and those in the West should try to head with the Stanley Cup final coming next.
Oklahoma test results for the coronavirus will no longer be shared publicly, with the Sooners set to begin the regular season this week, coach Lincoln Riley announced Tuesday.
“I think we’re to the point now where we’re playing games and obviously any active case or contact trace is going to have game repercussions,” Riley said. “So, just like we would with an injury, we made the decision to not broadcast that. I know we’ve been probably the most transparent school in the country up until then, but you don’t want to give your team a competitive disadvantage, so we’re not going to do that.”
A presentation by Garry Gelade and Lars Magnus Hvattum. This was originally part of a live broadcast on Friends of Tracking, but here we include just the seminar itself.
Making Sense Of: Heart Rate and GPS Data
Two key data points from wearable technology are proving to be the foundation for health management: heart rate and GPS. The green spectrum LED sensors that monitor blood flow, often at the wrist, are accurate enough to provide useful calculations for resting heart rate and heart rate variability, and those measures are, in turn, offer meaningful feedback in the form of athletic status indicators like recovery, stress, readiness and overtraining. GPS tracking sensors report how far and how fast something moves, and when combined with human anthropometric information, it should provide an engineering-like calculation for the quantity of work done, a number that has come to be called “training load.” Where health and human performance researchers seem to be improving their understanding of what’s possible with heart rate data it has been a struggle to get a handle on what GPS can tell us.
Let’s start with a new study recently published in npj Digital Medicine by Stanford researchers, “Multi-task deep learning for cardiac rhythm detection in wearable devices.” The goal was to improve the signal quality from wrist-worn heart rate monitors to where it can effectively distinguish atrial fibrillation (rapid, irregular heartbeats caused by a chaotic misfire of electrical signals of the heart’s pumping mechanism). The authors invented a two-stage machine learning algorithm that first trained on a huge unlabeled raw data set before fine tuning on a much smaller curated data set. They got the quality signal that they were looking for with this stratified approach, and in a manner that was affordable in terms of the cost to acquire good-enough data. Diagnosing a-fib solves a healthcare problem related to preventing strokes, but improving heart rate signal quality stands to improve many, maybe all, of the second-order heart rate measures that are at work in the algorithms that describe health and human performance status. Exciting.
Next study: Josh Hagen and his students looked at core body temperature measured indirectly via heart rate using an algorithm. A person’s heart rate increases during exercise in hot weather, often imperceptibly, as the autonomic nervous system triggers the body’s thermo-regulation system, a/k/a sweat. Hagen found that the heart rate algorithms were a viable alternative to ingestible pill-radios that measure and report core temp directly. This is an example where improving the wrist heart rate signal can have immediate benefit.
University of Virginia researchers reviewed the literature and found that GPS-derived workload metrics had no conclusive association with increased injury risk. A group of academics and sports scientists affiliated with professional sports teams went a step further, saying that using training load measures as part of athletic training in pursuit of reducing injuries is both bad for science and bad for athletes, concluding that “The absence of a clear conceptual framework, causal structure, and reliable methods can promote questionable research practices, selective reporting and confirmation bias.”
We’re seeing heart rate measurement make positive, incremental progress towards increasingly useful and widely accepted biometrics. But we don’t see the same kind of incremental steps that validate common indicators like training load derived from GPS and other time/location measurements. Researchers are having an easier time asking the right questions about heart rate, but can’t seem to get on a fruitful, productive path that would come from asking the right questions about GPS and training load.