Jose Mourinho believes Gareth Bale is “arriving” at peak physical condition and confirmed he will start Tottenham’s Europa League game with Royal Antwerp on Thursday.
Bale has been building up his fitness following a knee injury which put the brakes on his second spell at the club following his loan return from Real Madrid.
The Arizona Coyotes renounced their rights Thursday to their top 2020 draft pick after saying they learned more about his bullying of a Black classmate with developmental disabilities four years ago.
The team parted ways with Mitchell Miller after taking criticism for selecting him in the fourth round earlier this month despite knowing of his 2016 assault conviction. Arizona acknowledged it knew about the incident when it selected Miller 111th overall.
… As an experienced endurance coach who respects science, I have long been highly circumspect in using science to inform my coaching practices. I always check new science against what I know from real-world experience before I incorporate it into my coaching practice. But studies based on the big-data approach are my kind of science because they’re really just a formalized version of the learning we coaches do in the real world.
So I was particularly excited to see a new study titled “Human Running Performance from Real-World Big Data” in the journal Nature. It’s a true landmark investigation, drawing observations from data representing 1.6 million exercise sessions completed by roughly 14,000 individuals. Its authors, Thorsten Emig of Paris-Saclay University and Jussi Peltonen of the Polar Corporation, are clearly very smart guys who understand both statistics and running. The paper is highly readable even for laypersons like myself, and it’s also available free online, so I won’t belabor its finer points here. What I will say is that its three key findings squarely corroborate the conclusions that elite coaches and athletes have come to heuristically over the past 150 years of trying stuff.
Determining associations between training load and injury occurrence in team sports has been a popular topic of research in recent years. A fine balance exists between applying the optimum training stimulus to promote adaptation, and exceeding the optimum stimulus, which is associated with a higher incidence of injury (Bowen et al., 2017). As a result, monitoring and understanding training load is vital to optimise physical performance, and reduce injury risk.
Distance travelled performing high-speed locomotion tasks (e.g. high-speed running, very high-speed running, and sprinting) has received significant attention when investigating training load. Despite only 1-4% of locomotion distance travelled during Football being classed as ‘sprinting’, these moments typically occur during the most significant moments of competition (Barnes et al., 2014).
The Pac-12 conference announced Sept. 24 that basketball will begin on its originally scheduled start date in compliance with COVID-19 guidelines overseen by the Pac-12 COVID-19 Medical Advisory Committee.
Players will receive daily antigen testing as well as one weekly polymerase chain reaction, PCR, test which looks directly at DNA chains in close detail. USC Athletics’ testing is available due to the Pac-12′s recent partnership with Quidel, the corporation providing the rapid, daily antigen tests for student-athletes. In the event of a positive test, that student-athlete will isolate and agree to cardiac monitoring following their isolation period. Athletes have been associated with a higher risk of cardiac complications after Covid-19 recovery due to their high levels of exercise. “When people have inflammation or infection of the heart and they exercise at high levels, there’s pretty good data out there that suggests that it could lead to a risk of sudden cardiac arrest.” said Dr. Eli Friedman, medical director of sports cardiology at Miami Cardiac & Vascular Institute.
Though the Trojans are returning for an unprecedented season, USC women’s basketball coach Mark Trakh is ready.
In a study published in Advanced Intelligent Systems, researchers from the University of Surrey detail how their device, called the Multimodal Transistor (MMT), overcomes long-standing challenges and can perform the same operations as more complex circuits.
One of the breakthroughs is the MMT’s immunity to parasitic effects that reduce a transistor’s capacity to produce uniform, repeatable signals. These have hindered traditional “floating gate” designs ever since their invention in 1967, but this new structure promises efficient analogue computation for robotic control, AI and unsupervised machine learning.
Traditionally, gate electrodes are used to control a transistor’s ability to pass current. With Surrey’s device, on/off switching is controlled independently from the amount of current passing through the structure. This allows the MMT to operate at a higher speed than comparable devices and to have a linear dependence between input and output, essential for ultra-compact digital-to-analogue conversion. This also gives engineers unprecedented freedom of design, which could lead to greatly simplified circuits.
Vanderbilt University, Research News @ Vanderbilt from
A trans-institutional team of Vanderbilt engineering, data science and clinical researchers has developed a novel approach for monitoring bone stress in recreational and professional athletes, with the goal of anticipating and preventing injury. Using machine learning and biomechanical modeling techniques, the researchers built multisensory algorithms that combine data from lightweight, low-profile wearable sensors in shoes to estimate forces on the tibia, or shin bone—a common place for runners’ stress fractures.
The research builds off the researchers’ 2019 study, which found that commercially available wearables do not accurately monitor stress fracture risks. Karl Zelik, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, biomedical engineering and physical medicine and rehabilitation, sought to develop a better technique to solve this problem. “Today’s wearables measure ground reaction forces—how hard the foot impacts or pushes against the ground—to assess injury risks like stress fractures to the leg,” Zelik said. “While it may seem intuitive to runners and clinicians that the force under your foot causes loading on your leg bones, most of your bone loading is actually from muscle contractions. It’s this repetitive loading on the bone that causes wear and tear and increases injury risk to bones, including the tibia.”
… MLB is fortunate that Rays manager Kevin Cash created a path for the Dodgers to prevail 3-1 and wrap it up in six games with his all-analytics, no-feel decision to remove pitcher Blake Snell after 5 1/3 dazzling innings. Had Tampa Bay won and forced a Game 7 on Wednesday, commissioner Rob Manfred would have faced the possibility of delaying his sport’s showcase event while following
health protocols and assessing whether Turner had infected others around him.
The Stanford Daily student newspaper, odie Meng and Hannah Basali from
Of the 45 positive COVID-19 cases recorded among undergraduate and graduate students on Stanford’s campus, 29 are student-athletes. Thirteen of those are football players, according to Stanford Athletics Communications Director Scott Swegan. Twelve students are currently in isolation on campus.
Swegan told The Daily that student-athletes participating in contact practices receive “polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing three times per week,” in addition to the football program’s daily antigen testing. This combined testing strategy follows “the County of Santa Clara’s most recent guidance for collegiate athletics.”
When the Big Ten instituted a 21-day window before players can return from a positive virus test, cardiac screening was the big reason why. Now, cardiologists say that testing may not be needed for many.
… The NCAA initially said schools could reach the maximum of 27 games by entering one multiteam event (MTE). Last week, however, the NCAA changed course and announced that teams could play in two multiteam events to reach that number.
“In cutting down from 31 [games] to 27 [games], it should have been where you just give 27 games,” he said. “We didn’t do that, so then people tried to form their own MTEs, get into different things and now, you can get into two MTEs. You’re trying to figure out games. I just think the planning in that regard was not very good. Once you cut down from 31 to 27, you should’ve just given everyone an opportunity to schedule and not worry about the MTEs. We actually have formed our own because we had to. It’s crazy. It could’ve been easy to just say ‘Everyone’s got 27, let’s go.'”
Association football teams can be considered complex dynamical systems of individuals grouped in subgroups (defenders, midfielders and attackers), coordinating their behaviour to achieve a shared goal. As research often focusses on collective behaviour, or on static subgroups, the current study aims to analyse spatiotemporal behaviour of dynamic subgroups in relation to successful attacks. We collected position tracking data of 118 Dutch Eredivisie matches, containing 12424 attacks. Attacks were classified as successful (N = 1237) or non-successful (N = 11187) based on the potential of creating a scoring opportunity. Using unsupervised machine learning, we automatically identified dynamic formations based on position tracking data, and identified dynamic subgroups for every timeframe in a match. We then compared the subgroup centroids to assess the intra- and inter-team spatiotemporal synchronisation during successful and non-successful attacks, using circular statistics. Our results indicated subgroup-level variables provided more information, and were more sensitive to disruption, in comparison to team-level variables. When comparing successful and non-successful attacks, we found decreases (p < .01) in longitudinal inter- and intra-team synchrony of interactions involving the defenders of the attacking team during successful attacks. This study provides the first large-scale dynamic subgroup analysis and reveals additional insights to team-level analyses. [full text]
During postseason play, starting pitchers are working less than ever. And regardless of whether those early moves make sense in practice or on paper, they kind of suck.
