In honor of Indigenous Peoples’ Day, Global Sport Matters is elevating stories and content from influential individuals including Amanda Blackhorse, Jordan Marie Daniel, Billy Mills, and more.
At Global Sport Matters and the Global Sport Institute we recognize, celebrate, and honor Indigenous communities and their histories. We believe that Indigenous stories matter not only on a single day, but everyday.
It’s one thing to sign with Barcelona. It’s another to turn that opportunity into something great. That’s where Dest’s focus is now after the whirlwind of his transfer from Ajax and his immediate debut has calmed.
… The turnaround in her goalscoring form is not just down to the positional shift. It can also be attributed to the silver lining in the dark cloud of Covid-19: a rest. “I haven’t been this fit in my career,” she says. “I’ve been doing a lot in quarantine but also I could switch off mentally and physically for the first time in many years.
“I’ve always had a tournament in the summer, a World Cup, a Euro, so I never really have days off. It was always just a week and then back in training. So this was the first real break in five years or something. That has been really good for me. I felt really fresh going into pre-season.”
She had help too, training a lot with her younger brother who “plays too, at an amateur level but the highest amateur level, so that’s still really good in Holland. That was nice because I was able to play football a lot and stay fit … and he pushed me as well if I was lazy.”
Whether we should try to change a runner’s technique is a question that divides opinion amongst runners, therapists and coaches. It’s one of my favourite discussion points in Running Repairs Online.
Some say, ‘Yes! It can reduce loading, help pain and improve technique’ others offer a firm, ‘No! We find the optimal technique ourselves over thousands of miles of running, don’t mess around with it!’
In fact, with one world class athlete who I was very fortunate to work with, his coaching team wouldn’t even let us assess his gait! They were so concerned we might alter his winning technique! [video, 10:45]
… I believe that the conversation begun by Dan Leever and Ski Racing Media will ultimately lead to some revelatory conclusions and a decisive and out-of-the-box action plan to drive ski racing in the U.S. forward toward its mission of “Best in the World.” The challenge, as with any sector with deep roots, an entrenched culture, and long-standing ways of functioning, is how to exert sufficient force that will knock it out of its inertia that has propelled it along one certain path for a long time and onto a better course that will lead it to the “promised land” (in this case, the top of the Nations’ Cup).
With all that said, I have three favorite sayings when it comes to being the best ski racer or the best ski-racing country it can be. First, “If you want to ski like everyone else, be like everyone else.” In other words, if you want to be a decent ski racer among many, do what they do. And if you want to be a good ski-racing nation among many, do what the other countries are doing.
Sports Biometrics Conference, Chris Beardsley from
… Why is CNS fatigue important?
When CNS fatigue occurs, voluntary activation is reduced. This means that either the number of motor units that are recruited decreases or their firing rates decrease.
Since motor units are always recruited in size order, this means that the highest threshold motor units (which control the largest numbers of the most highly-responsive fibers) are derecruited, or their firing rates are reduced. Consequently, when CNS fatigue occurs, these important muscle fibers are stimulated to a lesser extent (or even not at all) after a workout. This means that less muscle growth will be stimulated.
Importantly, the failure to achieve maximal levels of motor unit recruitment occurs even when we train to muscular failure. This is because “muscular” failure is actually caused by both CNS fatigue and local, muscular fatigue.
… Cohen’s handpicked team president, Sandy Alderson, pushed heavily for technological upgrades and a bigger analytics staff during his tenure as Mets general manager, but resources allotted to him were often scarce. When Alderson departed the organization in 2018, citing recurring health problems, the Mets’ analytics staff consisted of three employees. That number grew to six following general manager Brodie Van Wagenen’s hiring four months later. The doubling of the analytics staff still left the Mets well behind much of the competition. It’s not uncommon for teams to have analytics departments with 20-plus employees.
“It was just so archaic,” a person familiar with the Mets operating structure during the Wilpons’ ownership said. “Fred Wilpon walked around and tried to pride himself on being this progressive thinker and he just couldn’t grasp a lot of the stuff. It wasn’t like Jeff or Fred, I don’t want to make them out to be bad guys, I just think they didn’t grasp how to invest in stuff that could help you get down the road.”
Fiona Fairhurst was facing a challenge. The competitive swimmer headed up Speedo’s research and development division and was charged with inventing a new swimsuit for Olympic athletes to help them win in their ultra-competitive sport.
Prevailing wisdom at that time was to make swimsuits as small and smooth as possible. If you’ve ever seen the cringe-worthy dad at a public beach wearing a suit that is far too small, you know exactly what I mean.
Instead of pursuing an incremental gain based on conventional approaches, Fairhurst took a more open-minded view. For inspiration, she began to study the fastest aquatic animals in the sea. Realizing that sharks were among the quickest, she drew inspiration from the high-speed predators to completely reimagine what a swimsuit could be.
The Speedo FastSkin suit looks nothing like its predecessors.
Emory University, Emory news center, Woodruff Health Sciences Center from
Many professional athletes experience a rupture of the Achilles tendon, but the injury does not necessarily mean an end to their careers, as many previously thought. Researchers from Emory University’s Department of Orthopedics have found that recovery of strength following surgical repair of an Achilles tendon rupture was associated with increased ability to return to pre-injury level of play among professional athletes, proving that there is hope after recovering from the serious injury.
The goal of the study, published in the official journal of American Orthopaedic Foot & Ankle Society, was to examine the relationship between ankle strength and return to the same level of activity following operative repair of an Achilles tendon rupture. Literature from another common sports injury, anterior cruciate ligament tears, has demonstrated that return to pre-injury sporting activities and higher function following ACL reconstruction is correlated with increased postoperative quadricep and hamstring strength. Thus, study authors hypothesized that increased ankle strength would similarly correlate with return to previous level of sporting activity following operative repair of an Achilles tendon rupture.
Muscle injuries are one of the main concerns in sports performance. This kind of injury entails around 30% of total injuries in elite football, the most common being hamstrings (23%) and the quadriceps (19%) (Ekstrand, Hägglund, & Waldén, 2011). It is estimated that in a team of 25 players there are around 15 muscle injuries per season, this being the cause of 27% of absences due to injury (Ekstrand et al., 2011). Therefore, muscle injuries have significant negative consequences both for the player himself and for the team.
Adequate diagnosis and accurate classification of muscle injuries is a fundamental process to facilitate their prevention and treatment. However, there is a lot of controversy about how these types of injuries should be classified. Although different authors have proposed different terms to classify muscle injuries based on their location – differentiating, for example, between intramuscular, myofascial, musculotendinous, or intratendinous injuries – (Chan, Del Buono, Best, & Maffulli, 2012; Pollock, James, Lee, & Chakraverty, 2014). These classifications still present some limitations.
This disagreement regarding the classification of injuries could be due to several causes: “the first one due to a lack of knowledge about the anatomy and histology of the muscle injury: if we do not know what there is, we can hardly describe it. The second one, to the existence of different classifications based on different origins and using different diagnostic tests (clinical, ultrasound or magnetic resonance imaging, for example), which causes jargon confusion. The third one, is the language: currently, English is the common language in medicine and the translation that we make of many of its words does not have an exact translation in our language”, says Dr. Ramón Balius, specialist in Sports Medicine and member of the study group of the Spanish Society of Sports Traumatology (SETRADE).
With more women tackling contact sports, including Australian football and soccer, the rate of knee injury among players is also on the rise. An estimated 5% of the 500,000 women playing Australian football are likely to sustain an anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury each year.
La Trobe’s Sport and Exercise Medicine Research Centre researchers, led by Professor Kay Crossley, have secured an NHMRC Partnership grant to work with the AFL and other partners to the evaluate the effectiveness of Prep-to-Play, a La Trobe-developed program aimed at curbing injury.
Professor Crossley said sports such as Australian football – which involve pivoting, turning, jumping and landing – were growing rapidly, but proving risky to knees, particularly among young, active women.
From tackles to huddles, there is no doubt that football is not only a game of inches but also close contact and the coronavirus pandemic has made the game more challenging to play mentally for the athletes, coaches and the entire organization.
Dr. John Sullivan is a clinical sports psychologist and sports scientist. He worked with the New England Patriots for more than decade. He believes the emotional health of the players needs to be front and center. “If we are not taking care of our emotional health because emotions run the show in sport and life, we are not going to be ready to be present for our family, our loved ones. But we also won’t be ready on Sunday on every given down. So that’s why emotional health is so important,” Sullivan said.
Sullivan said the amount of sleep the players get is crucial to their emotional health and performance. “Seven to ten hours that allows for neurological growth as well our immunity to spike and stay high. We have to be feeding in regular times it’s critically important and for muscle growth and food runs the brain,” Sullivan said.
Wearable exercise trackers provide data that encode information on individual running performance. These data hold great potential for enhancing our understanding of the complex interplay between training and performance. Here we demonstrate feasibility of this idea by applying a previously validated mathematical model to real-world running activities of ≈ 14,000 individuals with ≈ 1.6 million exercise sessions containing duration and distance, with a total distance of ≈ 20 million km. Our model depends on two performance parameters: an aerobic power index and an endurance index. Inclusion of endurance, which describes the decline in sustainable power over duration, offers novel insights into performance: a highly accurate race time prediction and the identification of key parameters such as the lactate threshold, commonly used in exercise physiology. Correlations between performance indices and training volume and intensity are quantified, pointing to an optimal training. Our findings hint at new ways to quantify and predict athletic performance under real-world conditions. [full text]
A recent academic study flags official NBA scorekeepers as a potential integrity risk in the burgeoning legal sports betting market nationwide.
The study, published last month in the Journal of Prediction Markets, found that that some official scorekeepers are “skewing the statistics” in various venues around the league.
“[I]naccurate official statistics may trigger series ramifications throughout the league,” wrote George Diemer, Jun Woo Kim, and Meredith Kneavel, the paper’s authors.
The new research study represents the latest probe into how box score-type statistics coming from a single source could impact the sports betting market.