Frank Lampard has revealed Chelsea are devising a special training programme for Christian Pulisic after admitting the club’s concern over his fitness record.
The 22-year-old is yet to feature this season and will miss Saturday’s Premier League trip to West Brom as he continues his rehabilitation from a hamstring injury sustained in Chelsea’s FA Cup Final defeat to Arsenal on Aug. 1.
Yahoo Sports, NBC Sports Bay Area, Monte Poole from
Warriors guard Mychal Mulder is neither a doctor nor a physical therapist. Doesn’t even play one on TV. But he’s seen enough of Klay Thompson over the past few days to express encouragement about his progress.
Then again, Mulder has the benefit of an up-close inspection. He has spent some time defending the five-time All-Star in team drills.
“Yeah, anytime I get an opportunity, really,” Mulder said Tuesday after practice. “As you know, Klay wasn’t playing when I first got here. So, now that we got Klay back on the floor, I try to match up with him as much as I can.”
Portland Thorns rookie Sophia Smith laughs when she recalls the conversation with her dad back in high school about her blossoming soccer career.
The No. 1 pick in the National Women’s Soccer League draft and U.S. national team prospect comes from a family of basketball players — and it was just assumed early on she’d head in the same direction.
But no.
“I think he quietly knew that I liked soccer more. But when I had to finally decide and just kind of cut basketball out for good, it was a tough few months, but we got over it,” she said. “He loves soccer now.”
What if I was to tell you that you could increase your sprint times, jumping ability and weight training strength in minutes and that these effects could be career lasting. Would you be sceptical? Well what follows is perfectly legal, yet it can “magic” up greater performance. So, what are we talking about? Potentiation.
Potentiation, or to give it its full name “post-activation potentiation” (PAP), requires athletes to perform broadly related conditioning activities so that each stimulates the other. Or in reality the neuro-muscular system of the athlete to boost speed, power and strength immediately. Performed repeatedly, potentiation will lift these crucial performance variables and improve the athlete.
Although potentiation would seem to be the friend of the sprinter, jumper, hurdler or thrower, it also has validity for the middle and longer distance runner.
HL teams are allowed to reopen their training facilities for voluntary workouts on Oct. 15.
The NHL announced its offseason training protocols Thursday in a 19-page document that takes into account social distancing; increased health and safety measures during the coronavirus pandemic; and competitive balance. A team will need notice from at least five players before reopening its facilities for voluntary workouts, and a maximum of 12 players can be on the ice at the same time.
“The schedule must allow for sufficient time between sessions to allow for proper disinfecting of training facilities and equipment, and to ensure that there is no overlap between players departing and the next group arriving,” the protocols read.
Possibly, the most important goal in training is helping the players to develop skills and behaviours to improve their performance during competition. The coach’s job consists in designing practice sessions that simulate the demands of the game and help the athletes to get better. One characteristic that distinguishes the best football players from the rest is their ability to anticipate what is going to happen in the game and make effective decisions under pressure during the match. However, it seems that the training methodology coaches employ to achieve these goals can be different on a country-to-country basis.
A recent publication4 has analysed the tasks performed in 16 football academies from different European elite clubs. The conclusions are based on the assessment of activities proposed by 53 coaches from 4 different countries (England (n = 15), Germany (n = 14), Portugal (n = 11) and Spain n = 13) during 83 training sessions with players from 5 different categories (from U-12 to U-16). The activities proposed by these coaches were classified into two different categories: active and non-active decision-making tasks. The former refer to activities performed in small groups or teams involving active decision making for the players that are similar to what happens in a real game; for example, small-sided and conditioned games, possession games or technical-tactical work with opposition. The latter include those activities that do not involve active decision making present in a real game; for example, fitness exercises or technical-tactical work without opposition. The data was collected between 2016 and 2018, in the middle of the season and in sessions away from competitions.
… [Samy] Mahour’s performances for his amateur team saw him identified as a potential star on Tonsser, an app for youth soccer players to showcase their skills. Tonsser invites amateur players to track their own stats and performance, as well as upload videos of themselves playing.
Founded five years ago, the app is used by almost 1.5 million players aged between 13 and 19. Many use it for the social aspects it offers, like the chance to be named in the ‘team of the week’ in their league or be voted man of the match by teammates.
For others, like Mahour, the app provides a platform for players whose skills have been overlooked to attract a professional club
The need to develop patient-specific interventions is apparent when one considers that clinical studies often report satisfactory motor gains only in a portion of participants. This observation provides the foundation for “precision rehabilitation”. Tracking and predicting outcomes defining the recovery trajectory is key in this context. Data collected using wearable sensors provide clinicians with the opportunity to do so with little burden on clinicians and patients. The approach proposed in this paper relies on machine learning-based algorithms to derive clinical score estimates from wearable sensor data collected during functional motor tasks. Sensor-based score estimates showed strong agreement with those generated by clinicians. Score estimates of upper-limb impairment severity and movement quality were marked by a coefficient of determination of 0.86 and 0.79, respectively. The application of the proposed approach to monitoring patients’ responsiveness to rehabilitation is expected to contribute to the development of patient-specific interventions, aiming to maximize motor gains. [full text]
… Learning your body’s internal age, or your InnerAge, may seem daunting at first, but it’s a powerful catalyst to learn how to take control of your health and wellness. InsideTracker’s InnerAge has been a revolutionary tool in helping people significantly improve their healthspan. But as the science of aging has matured, so too has our model. After years of research and development, our team reimagined, redesigned, and reengineered the pioneering product InsideTracker first launched in 2015. With greater accuracy and precision, less sensitivity, and more sophisticated tracking and visualization tools, we’re proud to announce the new InnerAge 2.0—one of the most innovative systems to optimize healthspan and longevity!
Proceedings of The 13th Conference of the International Sports Engineering Association, Andrew J. Christenson and Douglas J. Casa from
Soccer/football is one of the most popular sports in the world. Any sport requires continuous adjustments to rules to keep the game safe and engaging. Increased awareness of concussions in the American National Football League (NFL) has consequently raised attention to concussion-related injuries in other sports. One of the first steps the United States Soccer Federation (USSF) has taken to reduce head injuries is to implement age restrictions on heading. This encourages safer play but discourages an important skill until players are a certain age which is not good for player development. An alternative is to ensure mean head acceleration from a header is reduced with minimal rule changes. This paper presents a dynamic model of a player heading a soccer ball to examine the general relationship between ball pressure and mean head acceleration toward the purpose of motivating a more complex and comprehensive analysis of heading in soccer.
In March, the pandemic was young, fears were mounting and Stephania Cormier was in trouble.
“We ran out of swabs,” Cormier said. “We couldn’t find any.”
Cormier is a respiratory immunologist and an LSU biological sciences professor. With her colleague Rebecca Christofferson, a virus expert, she set up the River Road Testing Lab at the LSU School of Veterinary Medicine, where the pair processed COVID-19 tests, relieving overburdened local hospitals and expediting turnaround times.
In March, they fought through 16 to 20-hour work days, quickly exhausting their supply of swabs needed for testing. The team needed an inexhaustible resource guaranteed to contain genetic material.
“That’s when we started playing around with saliva,” Cormier said.
They began work on the new test, and by June, were successfully finding patients who tested positive both with the traditional swab and their saliva test. Today, Cormier estimates that her team is one of five across the country to develop a saliva test that meets the accuracy of nasal swabs
Here’s how the Titans handled news of their positive tests, along with how the situation may impact the schedule of the Vikings, Ravens, Steelers and others.
Sports scientists have identified typical injury patterns. These findings help develop preventive measures.
If professional footballers are out of action due to injuries, this can have serious consequences for the club. However, in order to avoid injuries, it is important to know how exactly and in which situations these injuries typically occur. A research team from the Faculty of Sport Science at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) and the German statutory accident insurance VBG (Department for Sports Injury Prevention) has used videos to analyse moderate and severe injuries among professional footballers. The team reported on their findings and conclusions in the British Journal of Sports Medicine on 26 August 2020.
A German sports doctor on trial for masterminding an international doping network for athletes admitted on Tuesday to helping athletes with blood doping for years but said he made no profit.
… In an interview with investigative reporter Sara Ganim for her podcast series, “Why Don’t We Know,” athlete-rights activist Ramogi Huma of the National College Players Association called the gagging of athletes “unforgivable” — especially at a time when colleges are risking athletes’ health as “test subjects” during a pandemic.
Our findings align with recent disclosures by the investigative college sports website, The Intercollegiate, which used public-records requests to obtain hundreds of athlete rulebooks and found a culture of obsessive control pervading every aspect of college athletes’ lives. One university told football players they must notify the head coach if they plan to get married, while others told athletes they were forbidden from speaking any language other than English during practices.