The training adaptations depend on the specificity of stimuli generated during the session. In football, there is a player that differs from the rest: the goalkeeper. The data about goalkeepers’ demand during matches shows that they cover approximately half the distance covered by a field player. If a player covers around 10 to 12 km, a goalkeeper covers 4 to 6 km.1 Besides, goalkeepers perform 90% fewer actions at a high intensity (above 19.8 km/h) than the rest of the players.1,2 This lighter workload during matches replicates during training sessions, given that goalkeepers cover half the distance: 3 km vs. 5 and 7 km.2,3
This impacts both on the work session proposals to improve the goalkeepers’ specific physical condition and the energy requirement derived from the work during training sessions and matches. Therefore, diet and training programmes should be different from those of the field players. Moreover, according to a study that analysed the body composition of more than 80 players from different categories of a Premier League team, goalkeepers usually weigh more and have a higher body fat percentage than the rest of the players.4 For this reason, nutritional strategies should be aimed at achieving an optimum body composition, taking into account the characteristics of each position, as excess body fat can negatively affect sports performance.
The difference in training load presumably shows a lower energy expenditure. The most precise data about how many calories a goalkeeper in elite football burns was recently published in a study led by the prestigious researchers Dr. Graeme L. Close and Dr. James P Morton from Liverpool John Moores University.5
University of Michigan, The Michigan Daily student newspaper, Rian Ratnavale from
Allyson Eggleton lives by a formula.
Event, plus response, equals outcome. In a given race, the junior rower and her teammates on the Michigan women’s rowing team use it to spend energy only on what they can control and not any bumps thrown their way.
It seems simple enough. But when grappling with the age of COVID-19, the Big Ten canceling sports and prior personal struggles, Eggleton rode out — and continues to ride out — that mantra in the face of adversity.
“Student athletes have such a pressure put on them and are seen as these holy icons of grit, strength and perseverance,” Eggleton said. “(Know) that it’s okay to struggle too, and that we all struggle, and that it’s not anything that’s not normal.”
Clip of Nebraska sophomore men’s tennis player Patrick Cacciatore on the biggest difference he’s noticed in himself since his freshman year in college. [video, 1:09]
An international research team has developed “electronic skin” sensors capable of mimicking the dynamic process of human motion. This work could help severely injured people, such as soldiers, regain the ability to control their movements, as well as contribute to the development of smart robotics, according to Huanyu “Larry” Cheng, Dorothy Quiggle Early Career Professor in the Penn State Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics.
Cheng and collaborating researchers based in China published their work in a recent issue of Nano Energy.
The COVID-19 pandemic saw the Canadian Olympic Committee be quick to put together a mental health task force to help its athletes get through the crisis and stay ready for the postponed games.
In the first meeting, the members of the task force were given a graph outlining the phases of disaster. It starts with impact — a feeling of shock and disbelief at what is happening.
In the short time after that, there’s a climb that likely everyone can remember. There’s the heroic phase first.
“It’s a very adrenaline-induced action,” said Bryce Tully, mental performance coach for the women’s national basketball team.
Blood derivative injections have been recently proposed to address osteoarthritis (OA) with overall positive results, although long-term data on their efficacy are lacking. A novel blood derivative has been developed to concentrate growth factors and antagonists of inflammatory cytokines and shown promising early findings. Purpose:
To investigate if the positive effects of a single intra-articular injection of autologous protein solution (APS) in patients affected by knee OA—previously documented at 1 year in a multicenter double-blind randomized saline-controlled trial—last up to 3 years. Study Design:
Case series; Level of evidence, 4. Methods:
A total of 46 patients with Kellgren-Lawrence 2 or 3 knee OA were randomized into 2 groups: 1 ultrasound-guided APS injection (n = 31) or 1 saline injection (n = 15). At 1 year, the saline group was allowed to cross over. Patients were re-evaluated at 24 and 36 months through the visual analog scale for pain (VAS), Western Ontario and McMaster Universities Osteoarthritis Index Likert 3.1 (WOMAC LK 3.1), Knee injury and Osteoarthritis Outcome Score (KOOS), 36-Item Short Form Health Survey (SF-36), and Outcome Measures in Rheumatology–Osteoarthritis Research Society International (OMERACT-OARSI) responder rate. Magnetic resonance imaging evaluation was performed with the MRI Osteoarthritis Knee Score (MOAKS) before and at 24 months after treatment, and radiographs were assessed per Kellgren-Lawrence before and annually after treatment. Results:
In the APS cohort, WOMAC pain improved from 11.5 ± 2.4 (mean ± SD) to 4.3 ± 4.0 at 1 year and to 5.7 ± 5.0 at 3 years (P < .0001 vs baseline). The APS cohort also showed a statistically significant improvement in its KOOS pain score from 39.4 ± 13.1 to 70.6 ± 21.5 at 1 year and to 64.1 ± 24.6 at 3 years (P < .0001 vs baseline) and VAS pain scores from 5.5 ± 2.2 to 2.6 ± 2.5 at 1 year and to 3.4 ± 2.9 at 3 years (P = .0184 vs baseline). VAS pain score significantly worsened from 12 to 36 months (P = .0411). All patients in the saline group decided to cross over to APS, and their final scores were better than baseline, although not significantly better than at the crossover point. Overall, 7 of 26 (26.9%) APS cases and 4 of 14 (28.6%) crossover cases were considered failures as patients underwent further injective treatments or surgical procedures between the 12- and 36-month follow-up. MOAKS findings showed no statistically significant differences. Patients with better cartilage had greater WOMAC pain improvement when their baseline scores were worse, whereas the trend was reversed for patients with cartilage loss at baseline.
Conclusion:
Intra-articular use of APS for mild to moderate knee OA was safe, and significant pain improvement was documented 3 years after a single injection. Patients with better cartilage status seem to respond better than patients with more cartilage loss, with more clinical improvement even when starting from more painful conditions.
“Vitamin D is important to the function of the immune system and vitamin D supplements have previously been shown to lower the risk of viral respiratory tract infections,” says David Meltzer, professor of medicine and chief of hospital medicine at University of Chicago Medicine and lead author of the study in JAMA Network Open. “Our statistical analysis suggests this may be true for the COVID-19 infection.”
The research team looked at 489 patients whose vitamin D level had been measured within a year before being tested for COVID-19. Patients who had untreated vitamin D deficiency (defined as less than 20 nanograms per milliliter of blood) were almost twice as likely to test positive for COVID-19 compared to patients who had sufficient levels of the vitamin.
The gut microbiota affects tissue physiology, metabolism, and function of both the immune and nervous systems. We found that intrinsic enteric-associated neurons (iEAN) in mice are functionally adapted to the intestinal segment they occupy; ileal and colonic neurons are more responsive to microbial colonization than duodenal neurons. Specifically, a microbially-responsive subset of viscerofugal CART+ neurons, enriched in the ileum and colon, modulated feeding and glucose metabolism. These CART+ neurons send axons to the prevertebral ganglia and are poly-synaptically connected to the liver and pancreas. Microbiota depletion led to NLRP6– and Caspase 11-dependent loss of CART+ neurons, and impaired glucose regulation. Hence, iEAN subsets appear to be capable of regulating blood glucose levels independently from the central nervous system.
American Soccer Analysis, Mike Imburgio and Sam Goldberg from
In the world of sports, the search for an all-encompassing player evaluation metric is never-ending. Baseball was the first to develop its metric with Wins Above Replacement. Basketball followed suit with Player Efficiency Rating, and Hockey WAR has come into the fold within the past year. The US Soccer market has been searching for the first iteration of its widely applicable player value metric until very recently, when “Goals Added” was created by our brilliant colleagues at ASA.
Goals Added measures a “player’s total on-ball contribution in attack and defense” by “calculating how much each touch changes their team’s chances of scoring and conceding across two possessions.” Through these calculations, Goals Added returns two numbers: how many total goals a player adds to their team over the course of the season, and how many goals above their average position counterpart a player adds to their team over the course of the season. Due to the nature of publicly available data, Goals Added is currently only available for MLS players. This is where DAVIES, the Determining Added Value of Individual Effectiveness including Style model steps in. DAVIES utilizes publicly available data, accessible to anyone around the world, to estimate a player’s total Goals Added for any given season while accounting for their age and style of play.
… What comes next, though, is the big question, and one that Bettman couldn’t answer despite repeated queries during his annual pre-final round media conference–confined this year to video.
[Gary] Bettman and deputy Bill Daley wouldn’t commit to when the next season might begin, or say if there would even be a season. Only a few months ago, Bettman had said a full 82-game season would begin in December. Not now as COVID-19 continues to linger and free passage across the border between the U.S. and Canada is restricted. Visitors to Canada must quarantine for 14 days.
“Anything that anybody reads or writes or commentates about next season is purely speculation,” Bettman said. “Obviously we’ve started thinking about what the options are. Dec. 1 has always been a notional date. I will not be surprised if it doesn’t slip until later in December or January.”
… Is it merely a coincidence that three of the NFL’s best young stars are elite quarterbacks who could have pursued baseball careers? Or is there a correlation between baseball and the position?
Tom House, the throwing coach for Tom Brady, Drew Brees, and other NFL QBs, specializes in the biomechanics of throwing with the use of motion analysis. In his research, the former MLB pitcher and pitching coach discovered that, despite the obvious differences in throwing a baseball and football, the pure mechanics of throwing are incredibly similar.
“Everybody thought it was two distinct throwing motions until we started capturing in a thousand frames per second and three dimensions and we saw that throwing a football and throwing a baseball were exactly the same thing,” House said.
Every year in March, the NCAA holds its March Madness basketball tournament to crown a National Champion. Prior to this, many conferences also hold a conference tournament to name their Conference Champions. I’ve often wondered ‘Is there any correlation to how a team peforms in their conference tourney and how they perform in the Big Dance?’ So I decided to dive into the data. The data used was taken from the NCAA and Google Cloud ML Kaggle competition. The competition this data was taken from did not occur because the 2020 NCAA Tournament was cancelled due to COVID-19. Conference Tournament data only went back to 2001, so I truncated all the data to 2001.
Bloomberg Politics, Janet Lorin and Brandon Kochkodin from
As college coaches urged student athletes to return to the playing field amid the Covid-19 pandemic, Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut once again pushed for the players to receive better treatment.
In an op-ed in June with Draymond Green of the Golden State Warriors, the Democrat called the fact that athletes do not get paid and do not have adequate health coverage an “abomination,” and another example of systemic racism even further highlighted by Covid-19. Already unpaid, many of the young men and women come from less advantaged backgrounds and areas that have been ravaged by the coronavirus. And the decision makers are often White, while the players are often Black, he said.
For Murphy — 47, and his state’s junior senator — it was yet another chapter in his role as one of the Senate’s leading advocates for paying college athletes.