… Jones’ explanation was a little simpler: “I just tried to run faster than I was running and I got caught up,” he said after the game. “We finished the drive and scored a touchdown. That was a relief to me for sure.”
Per NFL’s NextGen stats, Jones reached a top-speed of 21.23 miles per hour on his 80-yard, which is faster than any quarterback — including Ravens star Lamar Jackson — has reached since 2018. It was the 15th-fastest play of the 2020 season, per NextGen.
There has been a clear reduction in Alphonso Davies’ playing time this year in comparison to last year with Bayern Munich. While some of the reduction can be attributed to the cornucopia of top-level talent along Bayern’s back line, the primary reason likely lies elsewhere.
Fortunately, enough clues have been dropped by team leaders Hansi Flick, Thomas Muller, and even Nico Kovac that we can combine their comments with some sport science to arrive at the conclusion that Phonzie is just experiencing age-appropriate load management.
This year’s NBA draft combine was different from any other being that teams mostly relied on videos to see how prospects excelled at areas critical to their success at the next level.
Former Gophers and Cretin-Derham Hall standout Daniel Oturu blew teams away with his NBA combine shooting drill numbers this week.
Oturu, who is 6-foot-10 and 240 pounds, shot 67.5 percent from three-point range (104 for 154) and 87 percent from the free throw line (87 for 100) at the P3 Sports Science facility in Santa Barbara, Calif.
… Groom’s journey to featuring at the Olympics next summer began this week in Colorado, where she has linked up with the USWNT for the first time since 2016. A new opportunity for the player to impress with the national team, but a resumption of a footballing relationship with an old friend. The call up brings a welcome reunion with Vlatko Andonovski, the coach who drafted Groom into the NWSL in 2015.
Should Groom become a regular in the national team, it would be her third stint playing under Andonovski. The duo had three seasons together in Kansas City, which included winning the 2015 NWSL Championship in Groom’s rookie season. In 2019 Andonovski, then managing the Seattle Reign, once again acquired Groom in a trade from Sky Blue FC. The Macedonian knows exactly how to get the most out of the dauntless attacking midfielder. After all, the blueprint for “Air Groom” was written by Andonovski in Kansas City.
PLOS One; Fabian Hoitz, Jordyn Vienneau, Benno M. Nigg from
Studies on the paradigm of the preferred movement path are scarce, and as a result, many aspects of the paradigm remain elusive. It remains unknown, for instance, how muscle activity adapts when differences in joint kinematics, due to altered running conditions, are of low / high magnitudes. Therefore, the purpose of this work was to investigate changes in muscle activity of the lower extremities in runners with minimal (≤ 3°) or substantial (> 3°) mean absolute differences in the ankle and knee joint angle trajectories when subjected to different running footwear. Mean absolute differences in the integral of the muscle activity were quantified for the tibialis anterior (TA), peroneus longus (PL), gastrocnemius medialis (GM), soleus (SO), vastus lateralis (VL), and biceps femoris (BF) muscles during over ground running. In runners with minimal changes in 3D joint angle trajectories (≤ 3°), muscle activity was found to change drastically when comparing barefoot to shod running (TA: 35%; PL: 11%; GM: 17%; SO: 10%; VL: 27%; BF: 16%), and minimally when comparing shod to shod running (TA: 10%; PL: 9%; GM: 13%; SO: 8%; VL: 8%; BF: 12%). For runners who showed substantial changes in joint angle trajectories (> 3°), muscle activity changed drastically in barefoot to shod comparisons (TA: 39%; PL: 14%; GM: 16%; SO: 16%; VL: 25%; BF: 24%). It was concluded that a movement path can be maintained with small adaptations in muscle activation when running conditions are similar, while large adaptations in muscle activation are needed when running conditions are substantially different. [full text]
Instead of spending big money on transfer fees and wages (because they can’t), Brentford have decided to invest in specialists who can maximise player performance.
One of them is the Danish sleep expert Anna West, founder of Sleep2perform, who has been working with the Bees since 2016.
“Our philosophy is to focus on doing the basics incredibly well in order to maximise results,” explains Head of Performance Chris Haslam. “Besides training, I truly believe quality sleep is the biggest fundamental tool a player can use to reach peak performance on a daily basis.”
TGG spoke to West, who has also worked with other teams including Crystal Palace, to find out more about her methods.
Stanford University, Stanford Medicine, Scope blog from
Olympic swimmers race about 0.39 seconds faster in the evening than in the morning, and as insignificant as that fraction of a second may seem, gold medals are routinely won by slimmer margins.
“The magnitude of the effect is pretty big,” said Renske Lok, PhD, a Stanford postdoctoral fellow in psychiatry and a circadian biologist. “The difference was amazing, considering that athletes train at all times of the day.”
… The ACWR supposedly follows the classical fitness-fatigue model (Banister et al., 1975). Paradoxically, the rationale for the ACWR resides on several assumptions that are not in agreement with expected coaching practices as, for instance, progressive loading (Foster et al., 1995). Further, the occurrence of a sudden spike, in the context of any sport, could be simply interpreted as a training load error (Drew and Purdam, 2016; Kalkhoven et al., 2020b). In this respect, it is important to note that the ACWR literature includes mostly team sport studies, with the exception of a few studies in individual sports (Collette et al., 2018; Myers et al., 2020). For instance, a single study in swimming found the Acute Recovery and Stress Scale (ARSS) to be more valid than the ACWR to monitor recovery-stress (Collette et al., 2018). In another recent study in junior tennis it was suggested that ACWR and injury history were the best predictors of injury incidence (Myers et al., 2020). It should be noted that tennis is an individual sport with the players directly interacting with each other, therefore it shares some mutual characteristics with most team sports. These mutual characteristics may include a number of contextual factors such as score line, match location, opposition standard, moment of the season, playing formation, player’s role (Paul et al., 2015; Rago et al., 2019a; Curtis et al., 2020), and playing surface (Rago et al., 2019b; Vescovi and Falenchuk, 2019). For this reason, in this article we will refer to individual sports as those sports in which single athletes do not experience direct opposition from their opponents during competitions, with performances being strongly linked to physiological capacity (e.g., track and field or swimming). In this context, the limited number of ACWR studies in individual sports may be therefore not casual thus suggesting an inappropriate load management in some team sports under certain circumstances, probably related to the complexity associated to the existence of contextual factors which, in turn, would influence the physical and physiological profiles of team sport athletes.
Therefore, the aim of this opinion article is to provide a rationale based on coaching practices and scientific evidence from individual and team sports, that may help to better understand and, subsequently improve, training loads and injury risk management in team sports.
Onyx is a fitness app that uses on-device computer vision to bring the at-home training experience to the mass market. The digital training app utilises a smartphone camera coupled with AI-powered movement tracking to count reps, correct form in real-time while providing on-demand workouts.
The central experience with Onyx is personalisation. A user’s training performance is tracked and tailored to their own form giving them an at-home personal trainer.
… the focus of the presentation begins with some of the overarching trends in the wearables and sports technology space, and then gets successively deeper into the weeds as we go along, talking about areas such as indoor training (and the rise of anti-competitive practices), or power meters and even running power. I also talk about the impact of COVID-19 on sports tech as well.
As the NFL approached training camp this summer, its chief medical officer offered a lofty goal for the plan to play amid a pandemic. The league wasn’t going to retreat to a bubble, Dr. Allen Sills said in July at a virtual meeting of the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine. Instead, it had established a set of protocols it hoped would serve as a national model for coexisting with COVID-19.
“I think we have a unique opportunity,” Sills said, “but also a responsibility to use the platform and resources of the NFL to really study and learn and to take that knowledge and apply it for the benefit of the other segments of the society. That is what we plan to do.”
… At IMG Academy, we have created an assessment sheet that is engaging, visual and provides the athlete with a way to track their progress. This data allows the athlete to see what we need to work on and provides us feedback for their readiness to change their habits. Change for many individuals can be challenging. In many cases, athletes have developed a set of habits over their entire life span, and it may be the only way they know how to do things. That is why, as practitioners, we need to be open to listening to the athletes and what they have to say. Many athletes quickly get written off as lazy, do not want to learn, and do not have the ability, but it may be none of these. It may be the first time ever they are getting educated on nutrition. They may have done something their way for years, and it is always worked and thus do not trust that what you are telling them will make a difference. We will never know these key pieces of information until you talk to the athlete to see what roadblocks are holding them back from improving. This assessment has allowed us to change our education tactics to best fit each individual’s learning style.
The NBA is reportedly pushing for a late-December return to action for its 2020-21 season. It’s an ambitious plan that will attempt to jam the league back onto its normal schedule after just one season that saw it derailed by four months.
Basically, what the league wants to do is one of those car commercial power-slides into a parking spot instead of parallel parking.
Let me start with this: I don’t think this is actually what the league wants. I think this is a negotiation tool to throw onto the table so they have something pull away when the National Basketball Players Association objects.
… “I knew when I was in high school I wanted to be a physicist and I knew that I loved football,” [Timothy] Gay says.
From the amount of force that used when players make tackles, to how their equipment works, Gay has studied it all. But, there is a question that remained unsolved for him for a long time: why does the nose of the football tilt upwards when it’s thrown, but downwards when it’s caught?
“I got interested when I observed long bombs, tight spiral passes that would go up at some angle, and they would turn over. In other words, the balls axis would follow the line of trajectory,” Gay says. “As the ball is launched, its tilted up, at the top of the trajectory, the axis of the ball is horizontal, and as the receiver is about to catch it, the ball is tilted down by about the same angle it was thrown but in the opposite direction. You would expect it to go up and come down not having changed its angle, instead what it does it turn over.”