… MMajor League Soccer’s Canadian teams have had to move south of the border as the season plays out because of the nation’s travel restrictions that require most foreign visitors, including those from the United States, to quarantine for 14 days.
The Whitecaps are staying in Portland for the remainder of the season, with home matches at Providence Park. Toronto FC is playing at Pratt & Whitney Stadium in East Hartford, Connecticut, and the Montreal Impact have set up house at Red Bull Stadium.
While the situation is far from ideal, the teams are trying to make the best of it. Toronto won its opening match at home in Connecticut, 3-1, over the Columbus Crew, the top team in the Eastern Conference.
FIFPRO and members of the FIFPRO Global Player Council wrote to UEFA last week to stress the importance of prioritizing the health of players during this extraordinary period.
We welcome the decision by UEFA today to allow clubs and national teams to use up to five substitutes during European continental competitions this season.
The 40th anniversary of the London Marathon takes place on Sunday, October 4 2020. Athletes will run on a closed-loop circuit around St James’s Park before finishing on The Mall. This year’s lineup includes current champions Eliud Kipchoge and Brigid Kosgei. These athletes can run for more than two hours at speeds an average person could maintain for only a matter of seconds. So what makes them so fast?
… The UVA men’s soccer team will open their season on Saturday at Virginia Tech and with a longer year than usual ahead, Coach George Gelnovatch says his approach to the season changes a little.
“My view on this is one game at a time,” Gelnovatch said, “If we could get all of these games in that’s a huge bonus for me and just probably a bigger level of development to get ready for the more kind of important stretch if that’s the way to say it.”
On the women’s side, things are a little more open, with the spring season scheduled to start in early February and run through mid-April before the NCAA Tournament selection process begins. The UVA women’s team has 11 games currently scheduled for the fall, meaning they can only play nine additional game in the spring. Coach Steve Swanson hopes to play some non-conference games regionally, but that will depend on other conferences schedule decisions.
In a perfect world, we would learn from success and failure alike. Both hold instructive lessons and provide needed reality checks that may safeguard our decisions from bad information or biased advice.
But, alas, our brain doesn’t work this way. Unlike an impartial outcome-weighing machine an engineer might design, it learns more from some experiences than others. A few of these biases may already sound familiar: A positivity bias causes us to weigh rewards more heavily than punishments. And a confirmation bias makes us take to heart outcomes that confirm what we thought was true to begin with but discount those that show we were wrong. A new study, however, peels away these biases to find a role for choice at their core.
… Wearables can be widely applied in soccer games. From monitoring vital signs such as heart rate, temperature, blood oxygen levels, to serving as performance indicators of athletes and players, their uses can vary greatly. Wearable technologies can be used to gauge acceleration, force, rotation, and body orientations of players, just to name a few. Recent studies and research have even gone much further by examining wearable sensors that can monitor the physiological and biochemical profile of athletes to optimise their performance. Saliva and sweat biomarkers are now being explored to diagnose health issues and design personalised recovery protocols for athletes. Emerging research currently works to not only monitor vital signs and improve performance, but to also gauge and improve athlete recovery. This aligns well with competitive tournaments such as the FIFA 2022, where players are expected to consistently perform across a minimum of three games.
Yale University, Yale School of Engineering & Applied Science from
The lab of Prof. Rebecca Kramer-Bottiglio has created a robotic fabric that includes actuation, sensing, and variable stiffness fibers while retaining all the qualities that make fabric so useful – flexibility, breathability, small storage footprint, and low weight. They demonstrated their robotic fabric going from a flat, ordinary fabric to a standing, load-bearing structure. They also showed a wearable robotic tourniquet and a small airplane with stowable/deployable fabric wings. The results are published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The researchers focused on processing functional materials into fiber-form so they could be integrated into fabrics while retaining its advantageous properties. For example, they made variable stiffness fibers out of an epoxy embedded with particles of Field’s metal, an alloy that liquifies at relatively low temperatures. When cool, the particles are solid metal and make the material stiffer; when warm, the particles melt into liquid and make the material softer.
… “People are able to take that data during games and make decisions,” Sean O’Connor, co-founder of STATSports, said in an August 2020 interview with the Times.
“What that allows you to do is build a profile on a player. You expect a player to do X, Y, Z in training and games. When they start to move away from those norms it can be for good or bad reasons.
“If they are in a training session and there is 25 minutes left and they have gone way past what you normally expect them to do, then you can make a call to either taper it off or take them in early.
… An Aug. 8 article in The Washington Post referred to the findings as “bad news for everyone in a general way and scary news for athletes in a specific way.” On Aug. 11, in what would be a highly contentious decision, the Big Ten Conference announced it was postponing its fall season due to ongoing concerns related to the pandemic. The conference later issued a statement on the postponement, which read, in part: “While the data on cardiomyopathy is preliminary and incomplete, the uncertain risk was unacceptable at this time.” Around the same time, Pac-12 announced it would postpone its season as well, in part due to similar concerns.
But over the course of roughly a dozen Undark interviews with physicians and researchers specializing in cardiac radiology, cardiac pathology, and sports cardiology, several expressed concerns over the limitations of the German research, and with a more recent heart imaging study published by a team at The Ohio State University. Some also shared deep misgivings about how the findings of these small studies are being interpreted, reported, and used in the wider world. September’s media coverage has been more circumspect, but these preliminary findings are already being used to guide treatment of virus-positive athletes.
While the experts agreed that Covid-19 can harm the heart, the severity and frequency of the outcomes, as well as how to test for myocarditis, is under fierce debate.
The Mass Illusion newsletter, Jordan Schachtel from
… The NFL has set a science-based standard for COVID-19 testing, one that our schools, universities, local governments, and other institutions with sufficient resources can learn a lot from. At the same time, the league has unintentionally added evidence to the reality of a massive, ongoing false positive “casedemic” in the United States.
The NFL is keeping its players on the field by quietly sticking to the science (and I suspect other major sports are following a similar protocol). No, not “THE SCIENCE!” espoused by hysterical government bureaucrats and pandemic panic salesmen on television. Real science. The kind of science that is defined through experiments, observation, and experience.
… Right now, the scientific evidence for sleep is only low-level, suggesting that CBD might increase sleepiness or decrease the time it takes for a person to fall asleep, she explained.
Further, there is no “direct evidence” in athletes to suggest that CBD helps muscle recovery and sport performance, Lisdahl said. Athletes who claim those benefits are promoting their “objective experience,” she said, something that is neither proven nor disproven by science.
Those in the CBD industry hope that FDA approval will come sooner rather than later
When it comes to developing your own personal hydration plan, remember that there is not a one-size-fits-all approach. Athletes have individual sweat rates and, therefore, varying losses in sodium levels. Not only that, but your sweat rate is also impacted by the environmental conditions in which you train and race, such as the ambient temperature and the humidity.
These factors can also influence your sweat rate and will also be affected by how acclimatized you are—and even the clothing you are wearing. Plus there’s one large factor of your sweat rate that has been predetermined by your genetics and the aging process. So, how do we find our sweat rate?
Forget artificial sweeteners. Researchers are now developing new forms of real sugar, to deliver sweetness with fewer calories. But tricking our biology is no easy feat.
Not only does your brain sense when you’re dehydrated, it monitors what you drink and eat and adjusts your thirst immediately. Runners should pay attention.