The arrival at Manchester City of the USA World Cup-winning midfielders Rose Lavelle, who scored in the 2019 final, and Sam Mewis and the shock post-deadline day announcement that Alex Morgan had signed for Tottenham dominated international headlines. But Manchester United’s recruitment of the forwards Christen Press and Tobin Heath has seen a quieter, but perhaps more knowing, excitement build over the American influx into England’s top flight.
United are relatively new to women’s football but the addition of two World Cup winners, adding balance to a team packed with young talent, has shown they do not want to coast through the season propping up the three teams that dominate the Women’s Super League. They want to disrupt.
That is perhaps what makes their acquisition of Heath (who skipped high school football in her senior year, having committed to the University of North Carolina so she could play with boys), in particular, so exciting. She is a disrupter who thrives on placing herself in “uncomfortable situations”.
… To combat this crushing fatigue, we must further develop the aerobic energy system. But before we figure out how to do that, we must first understand capacity versus utilization training.
Because many runners, especially new runners, overly focus on the wrong type of training…
The muscles in your feet and lower leg are just as important to your running form as are your glutes, quadriceps and hamstrings, but are often forgotten in strength training routines. If you’re going to ramp up training, you can’t afford to ignore your foundation. Your lower limb muscles need to be strong, resilient and function in a coordinated fashion for effective energy storage during each stride and to provide a strong balance to get you through the miles. Neglecting foot exercises that work these important running muscles may predispose you to injury and reduce your running economy.
The muscles of the lower limb and foot are divided into two categories based on their function. The local muscles are the intrinsic foot muscles, often referred to as the “foot-core.”
Scientific American; Susanne M. Jaeggi, Anja Pahor, Aaron R. Seitz from
An online citizen science project is recruiting 30,000 volunteers to assess whether exercises to improve memory and attention are valid—and if so, for whom
Robert Woodard started implementing his bold vision for player development from day one of his tenure as Charlotte’s head coach. And that’s not just a figure of speech.
The very day he was hired last summer, Woodard spent an hour on the phone with Joe Lopez, one of the biggest supporters of the program, the namesake of Charlotte’s Lopez Legacy Suite and a major contributor to the construction of Charlotte’s indoor facility. Woodard had learned that Lopez is the owner of a training facility in St. Louis called Premier Pitching and Performance (P3), founded by Brian DeLunas and Josh Kesel. While Woodard was on the recruiting trail as North Carolina’s pitching coach, he frequently heard Midwest players talk about their training work at P3, so he started doing his homework and following P3 on social media, and he liked what he saw.
“I just always try to look at things from the lens of, if I was an 18-year-old kid who’s a pitcher, the way P3 and Driveline train pitchers — that’s what I would want to be doing,” Woodard said.
… “The CEO of the NFLA, Beasley Reece, and myself sat down and had a really great conversation about their mission — their mission being taking care of their own and taking care of kids,” [Chuck] Morris told CBS Sports. “While it’s great to get endorsements and revenue generation from sponsorships, there still seems to be a bit of a gap — really because of healthcare — in technology. To really service as many people as possible. So what really piqued his interest and what really caused this relationship to forge was our ability to take the technology we have done with Binah.ai, put it inside of the app and then deploy something that any of the guys could use.”
After partnering with David Maman, co-founder, CEO and CTO of Binah.ai, the two created technology that could extract medical-grade vital signs through the video camera of virtually any device such as a smartphone or computer. Binah.ai can extract heart rate, oxygen saturation, respiration rate, heart rate variability and mental stress levels all in less than one minute. Binah.ai’s technology runs through an application called the MyHealthLab app.
“We began to do a pilot, where we did a program with a few of the alumni members, where we did online coaching with our software with the app,” Dr. Morris said. “What came from that was that Fulcrum Performance Lab partnered with the alumni to create multiple locations around the country that would be connected to an alumni facility and a team. We would use those to facilitate services to alumni members, schools in the area and the community in general.”
Objectives To evaluate the restart of the German Bundesliga (football (soccer)) during the COVID-19 pandemic from a medical perspective.
Methods Participants were male professional football players from the two highest German leagues and the officials working closely with them. Our report covers nine match days spread over 9 weeks (May to July 2020). Daily symptom monitoring, PCR testing for SARS-CoV-2 RNA twice weekly, and antibody tests (on two occasions—early during the phase in May 2020 and in the week of the last match) were conducted. Target variables were: (1) onset of typical COVID-19 symptoms, (2) positive PCR results, and (3) IgG seroconversion against SARS-CoV-2. All detected seroconversions were controlled by neutralisation tests.
Findings Suspicious symptoms were reported for one player; an immediate additional PCR test as well as all subsequent diagnostic and antibody tests proved negative for coronavirus. Of 1702 regularly tested individuals (1079 players, 623 officials members), 8 players and 4 officials tested positive during one of the first rounds of PCR testing prior to the onset of team training, 2 players during the third round. No further positive results occurred during the remainder of the season. 694 players and 291 officials provided two serum samples for antibody testing. Nine players converted from negative/borderline to positive (without symptoms); two players who initially tested positive tested negative at the end of the season. 22 players remained seropositive throughout the season. None of the seroconversions was confirmed in the neutralisation test.
Conclusion Professional football training and matches can be carried out safely during the COVID-19 pandemic. This requires strict hygiene measures including regular PCR testing.
Hamstrings injury is the most frequent muscle injury in sports that require high speeds, such as football,1 rugby2 or American football.3 As an example, in football it represents 37% of all muscle injuries.4 What is more, one of the main problems is its high recurrence rate, given that between 12% and 33% of players who have had a hamstrings injury relapse.5 Even though a lot of research and resources have taken place to this matter in the past few years, the occurrence of injuries in football seems to be higher (4% per year), as shown in a study that analysed 36 European clubs during 13 seasons.6
Therefore, due to the impact an injured player has on both an economic and sporting level, a new review5 has recently been published, involving among others, Marc Guitart, member of F.C. Barcelona’s performance department, as well as other experts such as Dr. Julio Calleja or Dr. Pedro E. Alcaraz, in which they analyse the possible mechanisms that determine hamstrings injury.
The understanding that sports injury is the result of the interaction among many factors and that specific profiles could increase the risk of the occurrence of a given injury was a significant step in establishing programs for injury prevention. However, injury forecasting is far from being attained. To be able to estimate future states of a complex system (forecasting), it is necessary to understand its nature and comply with the methods usually used to analyze such a system. In this sense, sports injury forecasting must implement the concepts and tools used to study the behavior of self-organizing systems, since it is by self-organizing that systems (i.e., athletes) evolve and adapt (or not) to a constantly changing environment. Instead of concentrating on the identification of factors related to the injury occurrence (i.e., risk factors), a complex systems approach looks for the high-order variables (order parameters) that describe the macroscopic dynamic behavior of the athlete. The time evolution of this order parameter informs on the state of the athlete and may warn about upcoming events, such as injury. In this article, we describe the fundamental concepts related to complexity based on physical principles of self-organization and the consequence of accepting sports injury as a complex phenomenon. In the end, we will present the four steps necessary to formulate a synergetics approach based on self-organization and phase transition to sports injuries. Future studies based on this experimental paradigm may help sports professionals to forecast sports injuries occurrence.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; Amir Ghasemian, Homa Hosseinmardi, Aram Galstyan, Edoardo M. Airoldi, and Aaron Clauset from
Most real-world networks are incompletely observed. Algorithms that can accurately predict which links are missing can dramatically speed up network data collection and improve network model validation. Many algorithms now exist for predicting missing links, given a partially observed network, but it has remained unknown whether a single best predictor exists, how link predictability varies across methods and networks from different domains, and how close to optimality current methods are. We answer these questions by systematically evaluating 203 individual link predictor algorithms, representing three popular families of methods, applied to a large corpus of 550 structurally diverse networks from six scientific domains. We first show that individual algorithms exhibit a broad diversity of prediction errors, such that no one predictor or family is best, or worst, across all realistic inputs. We then exploit this diversity using network-based metalearning to construct a series of “stacked” models that combine predictors into a single algorithm. Applied to a broad range of synthetic networks, for which we may analytically calculate optimal performance, these stacked models achieve optimal or nearly optimal levels of accuracy. Applied to real-world networks, stacked models are superior, but their accuracy varies strongly by domain, suggesting that link prediction may be fundamentally easier in social networks than in biological or technological networks. These results indicate that the state of the art for link prediction comes from combining individual algorithms, which can achieve nearly optimal predictions. We close with a brief discussion of limitations and opportunities for further improvements.
The NCAA will furlough its entire Indianapolis staff of about 600 employees for at least three weeks in order to save money.
The furloughs could last for up to eight weeks but it will not affect any senior executives within the NCAA.
“These decisions are unfortunate but necessary as we continue to identify ways to cut costs across the national office,” said NCAA President Mark Emmert.
The Executive Committee of European football’s governing body met on Thursday to rule on a variety of matters for 2020 and 2021.
Arguably the biggest decision made was to extend the rule alteration relating to substitutions, which allowed teams to make up to five in-game changes after the coronavirus crisis forced top-flight football to a halt earlier this year.
… First, our fans wanted us to! They told us in no uncertain terms. They had invested six months into watching our games and supporting their teams, and they wanted a resolution. They wanted a champion and repeatedly told us that.
Second, our players wanted to! They, after all, were going to be asked to perform a most remarkable and demanding feat if we resumed play: Come back after more than four months—for most, their longest stretch without skating since they were 3—and dive into games with the highest stakes. What’s more, they’d have to leave their families and commit to living under restrictive conditions for perhaps more than two months.
NHL players decided overwhelmingly to return—and to play a unique play-in round, plus best-of-seven series in all four postseason rounds, so that the 2020 champions could say they ran the same gauntlet that their predecessors had.
The latest all-in-one NBA player metrics were compared in terms of accuracy with a focus on the modern era. The often-used retrodiction test was performed to make the comparison. New metrics were used for the first time in such an analysis, namely Real Plus-Minus (RPM), RAPTOR, Box Plus-Minus 2.0 (BPM), and Estimated Plus-Minus (EPM). Metric accuracy was compared overall and in the context of changing rosters. EPM and RPM, which were the only metrics that used RAPM directly with a Bayesian prior, consistently performed the best among all metrics, with EPM taking the lead overall. RAPTOR was the clear third-place metric with the revamped BPM putting the pressure on in fourth place. New player metrics using the latest methodologies and data are better built for today’s game.
Making Sense Of: Personal Health, Social Fitness, Service Design
The big news from Kinduct came on Tuesday morning. The company is being acquired by mCube, a Silicon Valley company that is building a portfolio of sensor of physiology and activity sensor startups, and which will use Kinduct’s data integration platform to consolidate that sensor data, and to present useful insights to all sorts of users, including the sports customers that Kinduct has built its business with.
Events that form the backdrop for the deal are major product and service announcements by consumer tech giants Garmin and Apple, the ongoing favorable investment climate for personal home fitness technology, and a push for research into population-wide health benefits of consumer wearable technology.
Garmin and Apple both announced new watches. There’s a convergence going on, where watches that feature GPS and heartrate sensing are becoming a computer-like hardware platform that focuses on personal health, and for those who are inclined, fitness training. Garmin’s newest watches are a training watch, the Forerunner 745, and a more consumer-oriented sportwatch, the Venu SQ. Apple launched the Series 6 versions of the Apple Watch.
The new Garmin product leverages the company’s recent acquisition of the Swiss sensor data algorithm startup, FirstBeat, to improve the watches’ training, recovery and sleep applications. Apple launched a suite of services, called Fitness+, that will unlock a range of personal fitness experiences and associated data-enabled personal health feedback. It’s becoming evident that the raison d’etre for the sport watch is to be a customizable, expandable computing device that can positively affect the health habits of its wearer.
I first came to know folks at Kinduct when I wrote an essay on athlete management systems. There was a need at the time, I felt, for the users of these systems needed to get smarter and become stakeholders in the future development of these platforms. Kinduct was building their systems with that idea in mind. As athlete management systems have become a type of COVID contact tracing tool. It shows that the more adaptable an athlete managements system is, the more benefit it provides. There’s a research push in the U.S. to examine how personal health technology can diagnose and treat specific condition in general populations and how it can impact overall health in specific demographic groups like the elderly. Kinduct and mCube seem poised to play important roles in how more people than just athletes co-evolve with emerging personal health technologies.
Thanks for reading. I will be away from my computer next Monday and Tuesday, September 28-29, and it’s unlikely that I will be able to produce a daily Applied Sports Science newsletter on those days. Apologies for any inconvenience.
-Brad