Alyssa Thomas was already playing without shoulders. If you’ve watched a Connecticut Sun game before, then you probably know this already, because they bring it up in every broadcast: Thomas has had torn labrums in both shoulders for years. Like most players in the WNBA, she plays overseas during her nominal offseason to supplement her salary with the Sun, so she has had to put off surgery and its associated seven-month recovery period.
Still, even with two busted shoulders that make it hard for her to raise her arms above her head — much less shoot a basketball — Thomas has been someone for the Sun to lean on, playing the fifth-most minutes per game of any player this season. Then, in Game 2 of the WNBA semifinals against the Las Vegas Aces, reinjury struck and she left with a dislocated right shoulder.
The Miami Heat’s strength and conditioning program is so difficult that it often takes players to levels they didn’t realize were possible.
When Dion Waiters was traded to the Heat in 2017, he wrote in The Players Tribune that team president Pat Riley gave him notice about his conditioning.
“We’re going to get you in world-class shape. Not good shape. Not great shape. World-class shape,” Riley said, according to Waiters.
… Earlier this month, a plethora of Pac-12 coaches told The Athletic’s Bruce Feldman that the conference’s designated start date is too soon. Several unnamed coaches suggested to Feldman they would need “a minimum” of eight weeks before their teams could be physically ready to play football.
“We’re waaaaay behind strength-wise,” one coach told Feldman. “Our strength coach doesn’t think we could play till the middle of November.”
The day after the Pac-12 rolled out its plan for returning to play, UCLA head coach Chip Kelly went on the Dan Patrick Show and sounded dubious about the timeframe, saying “it’s pushing it” when asked if six weeks is enough time to get ready.
International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance from
Purpose: To examine the concurrent and construct validity of numerically blinded ratings of perceived exertion (RPEs).
Methods: A total of 30 elite male youth soccer players (age 16.7 [0.5] y) were monitored during training and matches over a 17-wk in-season period. The players’ external loads were determined via raw 10-Hz global positioning system. Heart rate (HR) was collected continuously and expressed as Bannister and Edwards training impulses, and minutes >80% of the players predetermined the maximum HR by the Yo-Yo Intermittent Recovery Test Level 1. RPE was collected confidentially 10 to 15 min after training/matches using 2 methods: (1) a traditional verbal response to the 0 to 100 category-ratio “centiMax” scale (RPE) and (2) numerically blinded RPE centiMax scale (RPEblind) with the response selected manually via a 5 × 7-in tablet “slider.” The RPE and RPEblind were divided by 10 and multiplied by the duration to derive the sessional RPE. Linear mixed models compared ratings, and within-subject repeated-measures correlations assessed the sessional RPE versus HR and external load associations.
Results: There were no differences between the RPE and RPEblind (0.19; 95% confidence intervals, -0.59 to 0.20 au, P = .326) or their session values (13.5; 95% confidence intervals, -17.0 to 44.0 au, P = .386), and the ratings were nearly perfectly correlated (r = .96). The associations between the sessional RPE versus HR and external load metrics were large to very large (r = .65-.81), with no differences between the RPE methods (P ≥ .50). The RPEblind also reduced verbal anchor clustering and integer bias by 11% and 50%, respectively.
Conclusions: RPEblind demonstrated concurrent and construct validity versus the traditional method, and may be used in situations where practitioners have concerns regarding the authenticity of athlete ratings.
International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism from
Background: Athlete-reported outcome measures (AROMs) are frequently used in research and practice but no studies have examined their psychometric properties.
Objectives: Part 1-identify the most commonly used AROMs in sport for monitoring training responses; part 2-assess risk of bias, measurement properties, and level of evidence, based on the COnsensus-based Standards for the selection of health Measurement INstruments (COSMIN) guidelines.
Study appraisal and synthesis methods: Methodological quality of the studies, quality of measurement properties, and level of evidence were determined using the COSMIN checklist and criteria.
Results: Part 1-from 9446 articles screened for title and abstract, 310 out of 334 full texts were included; 53.9% of the AROMs contained multiple items, while 46.1% contained single items. Part 2-from 1895 articles screened for title and abstract, 71 were selected. Most measurement properties of multiple-item AROMs were adequate, but content validity and measurement error were inadequate. With the exclusion of 2 studies examining reliability and responsiveness, no validity studies were found for single items.
Conclusions: The measurement properties of multiple-item AROMs derived from psychometrics were acceptable (with the exclusion of content validity and measurement error). The single-item AROMs most frequently used in sport science have not been validated. Additionally, nonvalidated modified versions of the originally nonvalidated items are common. Until proper validation studies are completed, all conclusions based on these AROMs are questionable. Established reference methods, such as those of clinimetrics, should be used to develop and assess the validity of AROMs.
… In the United States, we often take for granted that the best or right way to assess people’s skills and abilities is through individual standards of achievement. In essence, we assess all people as though they were cross-country runners, when many might actually be basketball players—or soccer players, or football players, or a whole host of players from different sports!
It doesn’t have to be this way. In fact, in other cultures, people sometimes use a very different standard of achievement: how well people work together.
Building upon this idea, Nicole Stephens, Sarah Townsend, and I investigated whether how we assess achievement—as individuals or as we work together in groups—might help to explain a key disparity that has been documented time and again: the social class achievement gap in the U.S.
Professional football players have some particular physiological characteristics which allow them to run an average of 10-12 km per match as well as reaching speeds above 30 km/h. This makes those muscle groups with higher involvement in acceleration and deceleration scenarios (such as the hamstrings) be more susceptible to injury (they represent 12-16 % of total injuries).
One of the reasons why this area is more sensitive to getting injured could be related to the composition of its muscle fibres. The hamstrings have a high proportion of type II fibres, also called fast fibres,1 and due to structural and metabolic differences with respect to type I fibres, make them more vulnerable to damage from mechanical stress.2 That’s why if we know how these types of muscle fibre respond to workload, it could help prevent injuries.
Robohub, Wyss Institute, Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital Communications from
A group based out of the Spaulding Motion Analysis Lab at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital published “Enabling Precision Rehabilitation Interventions Using Wearable Sensors and Machine Learning to Track Motor Recovery” in the newest issue of Nature Digital Medicine. The aim of the study is to lay the groundwork for the design of “precision rehabilitation” interventions by using wearable technologies to track the motor recovery of individuals with brain injury.
The study found that the technology is suitable to accurately track motor recovery and thus allow clinicians to choose more effective interventions and to improve outcomes. The study was a collaborative effort under students and former students connected to the Motion Analysis Lab under faculty mentorship.
Paolo Bonato, Ph.D., Director of the Spaulding Motion Analysis Lab and senior author on the study said, “By providing clinicians precise data will enable them to design more effective interventions to improve the care we deliver. To have so many of our talented young scientists and researchers from our lab collaborate to create this meaningful paper is especially gratifying for all of our faculty who support our ongoing research enterprise.” Bonato is also an Associate Faculty member at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.
… A new article in the Nature journal Scientific Reports describes one such device designed to be worn under the clothes and promising reduced fatigue in lower back muscles on the order of 29-47 percent. The article, “Low-Profile Elastic Exosuit Reduces Back Muscle Fatigue,” comes from researchers at Vanderbilt University. Led by Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering Karl Zelik and recent Ph.D. graduate and primary author Erik Lamers, the researchers employed surface electromyography to measure changes in low back muscle fatigue in male and female participants to arrive at their findings.
“These findings show how exosuits could provide valuable back relief to frontline and essential workers who have been taking a physical toll and supporting all of us throughout this pandemic. What we learned has the potential to shape the biomechanical and industrial standards of future wearable technologies,” said Zelik, who holds secondary appointments in biomedical engineering and in physical medicine and rehabilitation.
Medtech company Masimo announced today that it is launching the Radius T Continuous Thermometer, a connected sensor system that can take a patient’s temperature over time in lieu of the manual process, for consumers.
The tool is able to send temperature readings and also warning alerts if there is a spike to a corresponding app. Users can customize the alerts and notifications functions. The app is able to present both real-time temperature values and trends data.
University of North Carolina, The Daily Tar Heel student newspaper, Zachary Crain from
… Victoria Jackson, a former UNC track and cross country runner and current professor of history at Arizona State University, said if the NCAA can enforce amateurism standards, it should be able to enforce COVID-19 guidelines to protect athletes.
“But again, that’s not it, it’s the legal liability,” Jackson said. “So it shows you that it’s the legal liability, not whether or not they can actually do it.”
At Penn State, around 15 percent of athletes showed heart problems following infection with the virus. While the long-term consequences of contracting COVID-19 are still largely unknown, there have been previous cases of college athletes filing lawsuits against universities and the NCAA after dealing with the brunt of long-term health complications following their collegiate careers.
Creating a nutrition plan doesn’t have to be complicated or unreachable. The plan you create, should be personalized for you and not a plan your friend or teammate is persuading you to try. It’s hard to figure out where to start when there are numerous “nutrition experts” out there providing unreachable goals and/or concepts of health. Try these four tips when aiming to re-establish your nutrition plan for your fresh start this Fall.
Nobel laureate and economist Milton Friedman famously cautioned: “One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.” In college football, the inverse is true: one of the great mistakes is to judge programs by their results rather than their intentions. As the opening weekend of conference play for the Southeastern and Big 12 Conferences came to a close, the results reminded us yet again that in this odd college football season, we need to think about our thinking about college football teams as much as we need to think about college football teams.
… ESPN spoke with the three winningest coaches from the past four decades (minimum 1,000 games coached, by winning percentage) — Jackson, former Lakers and Miami Heat coach Pat Riley and Popovich of the San Antonio Spurs — and asked them to draw up one of their favorite plays. Jackson tapped WTF. Riley chose “5 Chest” from his vaunted 5 series. Popovich took a page from D’Antoni’s Phoenix Suns playbook (see Pop’s hand-drawn play), one that would get the team a good 3-point look at the end of the game.
