Kevin Durant used to worry about how he would play.
There hasn’t been reason for concern for years. He became an NBA MVP and a two-time champion, an explosive scorer who could get 25 points on a bad night and 45 on a good one.
But that was before having one of the most serious injuries a basketball player could face. Now, 18 months after rupturing his Achilles tendon and finally set to play for the Brooklyn Nets, Durant once again has reason to wonder if he will be one of the league’s greatest players.
“Who knows?” he said Tuesday. “I’ve just got to see how I feel in a real NBA game again.”
… After four years as the associate director of operations and video coordinator for the Wisconsin men’s hockey program, she was hired by the Hershey Bears of the American Hockey League to do something she’s dreamed about since she was a sports-loving kid growing up in Colorado.
Shortly after Tony Granato was hired to coach the Badgers in 2016, he and his brother Don, a former UW associate head coach, met with Engel-Natzke and asked about her professional intentions.
“I told them I wanted to be a video coach in the NHL,” she said. “I think I kind of expected them to laugh a little bit, but they both just looked me and said, ‘OK, absolutely. We’ll help you get there.'”
… “I’m a builder, I like to build things,” Vanney said. “I like projects. This club is in a really good place, there’s not a lot of building to do. This club is positioned to be great.”
Vanney doesn’t have a timeline for when he’ll put his hardhat on and get back to building. A lot of speculation has linked him with the vacant LA Galaxy job, considering he spent seven seasons with the club during his playing career and also went to nearby UCLA for college.
“I do need to catch my breath and regroup a bit, but anyone who knows me, knows I don’t sit still very well,” Vanney said. “It won’t be a long thing.”
The desperately needed bye week the Bucs are observing includes a historical, if not mildly humorous, component.
The only other time the franchise had a December bye, in Week 14 of the 1990 season, owner Hugh Culverhouse used it to dismiss surly fourth-year coach Ray Perkins.
While no one expects history to repeat itself this week inside the AdventHealth Training Center, drastic measures do come in various forms.
We live in an exhausting world, but for professional athletes (and those that manage them) battling fatigue is a science. Over the last century, physiologists have been fascinated by what causes fatigue. Giants of the field like Nobel Laureate Archibald Hill designed elegant experiments to understand what exactly happens when we move, but testing isolated muscles in a bath was a long way from being able to fully grasp the intricacies of human functioning. So what do we know about fatigue all these years later and how is it measured today?
In this article we will give you a rough overview of the applications of electromyography. We will explain what electromyography actually is, what the basic principles are and where, why and of course how it is used. Enjoy your reading and learning!
We’re pleased to announce that NURVV Run has partnered with England Athletics, the membership and development body for athletics and running clubs in England.
NURVV Run has been named as the headline partner of the England Athletics Club Run programme, an initiative offering a series of free, practical, coached sessions to running clubs across the country.
Working in collaboration with experienced England Athletics coaches, NURVV will deliver dedicated NURVV Run sessions to clubs as part of the programme. The coached sessions will allow runners to trial NURVV Run for themselves, understand the insights and metrics the smart insoles offer, and learn how these insights can help them discover their true running potential.
Myant Inc., global pioneer and leader in textile computing, has announced the opening of a new business division in the United States to support the growth of its American partnerships. The new division, Myant USA (www.myantusa.com ), will leverage both local expertise in textile design, engineering and manufacturing as well as Myant’s interdisciplinary team of experts at its Toronto-based headquarters to better serve its US-based partners.
Myant says its pioneering work in textile computing is enabling a reality where textiles across daily life become bidirectional interfaces to the human body. This enables a new type of connectedness between people and their bodies, their communities, and their environments, the company says.
Sensors that track everything from infection in the lungs to WiFi usage on a busy university campus are poised to enhance our understanding of, and approach to improving, human health at many levels — a trend that has been accelerated by the challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic, researchers and experts said at the 2020 SENSE.nano Symposium.
Videos from the event are now available online, so anyone can view the presentations and panel discussions featuring leaders from research and industry, representatives of MIT-launched startup companies, and current MIT graduate students.
Neuromuscular deficits are common following knee injuries and may contribute to early-onset post-traumatic osteoarthritis, likely mediated through quadriceps dysfunction. Objective
To identify how peri-articular neuromuscular function changes over time after knee injury and surgery. Design
Systematic review with meta-analyses. Data Sources
PubMed, Web of Science, Embase, Scopus, CENTRAL (Trials). Eligibility Criteria for Selecting Studies
Moderate and high-quality studies comparing neuromuscular function of muscles crossing the knee joint between a knee-injured population (ligamentous, meniscal, osteochondral lesions) and healthy controls. Outcomes included normalized isokinetic strength, muscle size, voluntary activation, cortical and spinal-reflex excitability, and other torque related outcomes. Results
A total of 46 studies of anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) and five of meniscal injury were included. For ACL injury, strength and voluntary activation deficits were evident (moderate to strong evidence). Cortical excitability was not affected at < 6 months (moderate evidence) but decreased at 24+ months (moderate evidence). Spinal-reflex excitability did not change at < 6 months (moderate evidence) but increased at 24+ months (strong evidence). We also found deficits in torque variability, rate of torque development, and electromechanical delay (very limited to moderate evidence). For meniscus injury, strength deficits were evident only in the short-term. No studies reported gastrocnemius, soleus or popliteus muscle outcomes for either injury. No studies were found for other ligamentous or chondral injuries.
Conclusions
Neuromuscular deficits persist for years post-injury/surgery, though the majority of evidence is from ACL injured populations. Muscle strength deficits are accompanied by neural alterations and changes in control and timing of muscle force, but more studies are needed to fill the evidence gaps we have identified. Better characterisation and therapeutic strategies addressing these deficits could improve rehabilitation outcomes, and potentially prevent PTOA. [full text]
ACL injuries are among the most severe knee injuries in elite sport, with a high injury burden and re-injury risk. Despite extensive literature on the injury and the higher incidence of injury and re-injury in female athletes, there is limited evidence on the return to sport (RTS) of elite female football players following ACL reconstruction (ACLR). RTS is best viewed on a continuum aligning the recovery and rehabilitation process with the ultimate aim — a return to performance (RTPerf). We outline the RTS and RTPerf of an elite female football player following ACLR and her journey to the FIFA Women’s World Cup, including the gym-based physical preparation and the on-pitch/sports-specific reconditioning. We used the ‘control–chaos continuum’ as a framework for RTS, guiding a return above pre-injury training load demands while considering the qualitative nature of movement in competition. We then implemented the ‘RTPerf pathway’ to facilitate a return to team training, competitive match play and a RTPerf. Objective information, clinical reasoning and shared decision-making contributed to this process and helped the player to reach her goal of representing her country at the FIFA Women’s World Cup.
Who’s ready for some Wednesday-afternoon football? A third postponement of the Ravens-Steelers game reveals the lengths the NFL will go to keep its schedule on course. But it’s not without a cost.
… What was true of the Williams sisters — that the younger one went on to be the better athlete — is also true across sports generally. This is the “little sibling effect,” one of the most intriguing findings in sports science: Younger siblings have a significantly higher chance of becoming elite athletes, as University of Utah professor Mark Williams and I explore in our new book, “The Best: How Elite Athletes Are Made.”
The effect was demonstrated in a comprehensive analysis of 33 sports in Canada and Australia. The study compared elite athletes — who had reached senior international competition — with near-elite athletes, who had reached the junior international or senior domestic level. One finding: “Elite athletes were more likely to be later-born children.”
On average, the two groups had the same number of total siblings. What mattered was whether those siblings were younger or older. The elite athletes had 1.04 older siblings on average; nonelite athletes had only 0.61.