… “It was a mental battle,” Mewis recalled of lockdown workouts. “Just getting through every single day like, ‘Why am I doing this, are we even going to have a season?’ And then with everything else going on in the world, it was like, ‘Is this even important anymore?'”
But soccer was that important to her. Not just important, but integral. On some level she knew she was closer to her goal than she had been in a long time. Closer to playing for the United States, something she did in more than a dozen games in 2013 and 2014 but never since. Closer to again playing alongside Sam Mewis, her younger sister who grew into a world champion and international star in those intervening years. Closer to being one of the best in the world at the game that consumes her.
… Smith’s return to play has been received across the sports world as a story of the triumph of perseverance. He is widely considered a shoo-in to receive the NFL’s Comeback Player of the Year award, and today’s Thanksgiving day game against the Dallas Cowboys will be the latest step in that journey. But nowhere does his comeback inspire more pride, and teach a greater lesson, that at his alma mater, where coaches and administrators have used it as a living example of the kind of fortitude they hope to instill.
“I’ve never met Alex in person,” Owens says. “But just in that story, he makes an impact on me every day.”
Focusing on your teammates around you not only elevates the play of your team, but it will also make you better and more valuable on and off the court. U.S. Women’s National Team outside hitter @Krobin32 shares her tips for making those around you better [audio, 6:51]
BMC Sports Science, Medicine and Rehabilitation from
Background
Cross-sectional studies have shown that balance performance can be challenged by the level of task difficulty (e.g., varying stance conditions, sensory manipulations). However, it remains unclear whether the application of different levels of task difficulty during balance training (BT) leads to altered adaptations in balance performance. Thus, we examined the effects of BT conducted under a high versus a low level of task difficulty on balance performance. Methods
Forty male adolescents were randomly assigned to a BT program using a low (BT-low: n = 20; age: 12.4 ± 2.0 yrs) or a high (BT-high: n = 20; age: 12.5 ± 2.5 yrs) level of balance task difficulty. Both groups trained for 7 weeks (2 sessions/week, 30–35 min each). Pre- and post-training assessments included measures of static (one-legged stance [OLS] time), dynamic (10-m gait velocity), and proactive (Y-Balance Test [YBT] reach distance, Functional Reach Test [FRT]; Timed-Up-and-Go Test [TUG]) balance. Results
Significant main effects of Test (i.e., pre- to post-test improvements) were observed for all but one balance measure (i.e., 10-m gait velocity). Additionally, a Test x Group interaction was detected for the FRT in favor of the BT-high group (Δ + 8%, p < 0.001, d = 0.35). Further, tendencies toward significant Test x Group interactions were found for the YBT anterior reach (in favor of BT-high: Δ + 9%, p < 0.001, d = 0.60) and for the OLS with eyes opened and on firm surface (in favor of BT-low: Δ + 31%, p = 0.003, d = 0.67).
Conclusions
Following 7 weeks of BT, enhancements in measures of static, dynamic, and proactive balance were observed in the BT-high and BT-low groups. However, BT-high appears to be more effective for increasing measures of proactive balance, whereas BT-low seems to be more effective for improving proxies of static balance. [full text]
England goalkeeping coach Martyn Margetson takes us through an intense training session with Pickford, Henderson and Pope as they test their reactions and reflexes by making 600 saves over the course of an international training camp at St. George’s Park. [video, 7:31]
… In 2017, Lawson was ready for a new challenge. She took on a role within USA Basketball and started coaching its 3-on-3 teams. She’s steered them to six gold medals since. Last summer, Brad Stevens hired her as assistant coach onto his staff with the Boston Celtics, making her the first woman to be a coach for the team in its 73-year history. She didn’t expect that job to last less than a year.
“The diversity of my experiences are my strength. This is a day and age that we are talking a lot about diversity. We are having a lot of needed conversations about diversity. If you really believe in it, you know that it creates great value in your organization. I think the same about experiences,” Lawson said at her introductory Zoom press conference in July. “Understanding the game as a player from the college perspective, from the pro perspective, from the women’s perspective, from the men’s perspective, from a coaching perspective, from a media perspective – there are so many things that I’ve experienced.”
Behavioural change techniques are currently used by many global organisations and public institutions. The amassing evidence base is used to answer practical and scientific questions regarding what cognitive, affective, and environment factors lead to successful behavioural change in the laboratory and in the field. In this piece we show that there is also value to examining interventions that inadvertently fail in achieving their desired behavioural change (e.g., backfiring effects). We identify the underlying causal pathways that characterise different types of failure, and show how a taxonomy of causal interactions that result in failure exposes new insights that can advance theory and practice.
… Female athletes are constantly reminded that they are only guests in the sporting world, and the world of sports science is one of the worst offenders. Between 2011 and 2013, women accounted for just three per cent of participants in sport science studies. It is possible that much of what we know in the fields of physiology, nutrition, psychology, and strength and conditioning may not actually apply to women. Women are trained as though they are men – but a woman will always make a second-rate man if she is having to be something she is not.
There are serious consequences to this approach. In my early years as an athlete, I thought it was quite normal not to have a regular period. In fact, I would use it as a marker that my training was going really well. It meant I was leaner, had more testosterone and was more like the ideal male athlete.
IEEE Spectrum; Shreyas Sen, Shovan Maity and Debayan Das from
Medical devices are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the wireless devices people are putting in or on their bodies. The list includes wireless earbuds, smartwatches, and virtual-reality headsets. Technologies still in development, such as smart contact lenses that display information and digital pills that transmit sensor data after being swallowed, will also be at risk.
All of these devices need to transmit data securely at low power and over a short range. That’s why researchers have started to think about them as individual components of a single human-size wireless network, referred to as a body-area network. The term “Internet of Bodies” (IoB) is also coming into use, taking a cue from the Internet of Things.
At the moment, IoB devices use established wireless technologies, mainly Bluetooth, to communicate.
A brave new world awaits World Cup skiers for Period I on the cross-country World Cup. The scheduling is the easy part, three race weekends reduced from four for Period I. The racing in Lillehammer, Norway, has been postponed due to Covid-19 precautions.
In an email to FasterSkier, Cross-Country Program Director Chris Grover wrote the following when asked about the team’s protocols if an athlete tests positive for Covid-19.
Victoria Institute of Sports (Australia), News from
When Lauren returned to campus in Point Cook last week, the Carranballac College Year 8 student was beyond excited to see her friends again and resume face-to-face learning.
While the altered schedule of remote learning certainly had its challenges for Lauren, the evolution of virtual education also provided her with some unexpected opportunities, like advancing her knowledge in a subject she is highly passionate about; sports nutrition.
An avid basketballer and footy player, Lauren was grateful to be invited by her teachers to join the Victorian Institute of Sport’s Advancement Series and hear directly from the dieticians who work with Victoria’s elite athletes.
“I felt honoured that I got educated by the Victorian Institute of Sport first hand,” she said.
… The athletes said the time for “training” athletic administrators who they claim have violated policies and lost the trust of student-athletes is over and the time for their terminations is here.
Former CSU swimmer Ida Donohue told McConnell that athletic administration not only allowed these incidents to happen but encouraged them and continues to do so.
“I can make it blatantly clear to you that athletic administrators you have in place are aware of these issues and the specifics of these issues and are actively, every single day, choosing not act on them,” Donohue said in the meeting. “I’m not asking you to sit down with them to train them; I’m asking for their removal.”
Harvard Business Review; Einav Hart, Eric M. VanEpps, and Maurice Schweitzer from
We often avoid asking questions that feel too sensitive or personal. But avoiding these potentially awkward conversations comes at a cost: When negotiating a salary or choosing where to live, for example, it can be very useful to know how much a coworker earns or how much a friend pays in rent. Learning more about our peers’ circumstances can help us navigate our own professional and social interactions, and asking direct (albeit potentially uncomfortable) questions is one of the most effective ways to access this valuable information. Plus, these questions can sometimes strengthen relationships, as they can help us go beyond small talk and spark real connection. So how do we strike the right balance between seeking useful information and minimizing the discomfort we cause others (or even the risk of alienating them)?
Our recent research shows that, on average, people err too far on the side of politeness. In our studies, we found that people generally avoided asking sensitive questions out of fear that they would offend their conversation partners — but when they actually did ask these questions, most people were far less offended than their partners had expected them to be.
Kate Markgraf admits that she was a bit of “an outside choice” for the brand-new executive role at the top of the women’s program at U.S. Soccer.
As the 11th-most capped player in U.S. women’s national team history, Markgraf didn’t stay inside the sport when she retired in 2010. She served as a soccer analyst for ESPN, critiquing and sometimes criticizing from the outside, and earned two master’s degrees in kinesiology and educational psychology.
She had never been a high-level coach — a career path that hadn’t interested her, and which the USWNT general manager job description initially called for — but she was persuaded to interview anyway.
“All of us, we were all kind of rebels a little bit,” Markgraf says of herself and her former teammates, with whom she won a World Cup in 1999. “We all pushed the envelope.”
Making Sense Of: Technology to Understand People
There are lots of scientific windows into the state of an athletes health. Technology is rapidly changing the accuracy and precision of what we can see about an athlete, and it will continue to change what we know about athletes’ potentials.
Genomics has always been a kind of mirage. Scientific conclusions have been scarce as the data pours in. The more we learn about genomes the more it seems we don’t know. Recently Russian scientists found correlation between “favorable alleles” (tiny genome sections) and reaction times among wrestlers. The article mentions that a total of 185 DNA polymorphism have been scientifically associated with athleticism in the past 20 years. DNA is not destiny, or it would be easier to show scientifically, but little bits of evidence are beginning to accumulate.
Top down, holistic representations of human potential are fuzzy, making it more palatable to work bottom up, to comprehend pieces before trying to explain the whole thing. Modelmaking can do this, whether it’s statistical predictive model for ACL injuries in the NFL, or its a small-scale physical model for working lungs. Here again, the more inter-disciplinary the effort is the more revealing and insight the effort is likely to be.
Questions that get answered generate still more questions, if you are open to the possibilities. An innovation in one field, if it’s going to have impact on a large scale, needs follow-on innovations in other fields to evolve into something that matters. Technological innovations push out into the world, requiring organizational innovations that pull those technologies into real world applications. It’s the circle of life, technologically speaking.
Thank you for your attention. Have a peaceful, restful and safe holiday season.
-Brad