Covering the Raptors en route to the NBA championship in 2019, it wasn’t unusual for a reporter to run into a member of the franchise’s sports science team in the lulls surrounding practices or morning shootarounds.
Back in those pre-pandemic days, a friendly face-to-face chat might take place as a health professional awaited the arrival of the next patient. And when the next patient arrived, it wouldn’t necessarily be an NBA player or even a member of Toronto’s organization. Sometimes it would be Dennis Robertson, the infamous Uncle Dennis to then-Raptors star Kawhi Leonard. It wasn’t exactly a secret the team’s training staff occasionally treated Robertson using the expertise and know-how it typically reserved for its roster of finely tuned professional athletes. Maybe it was a simple courtesy the club would afford to any family member in need — although it’s not as though other players’ uncles were seen standing in line behind Robertson. Maybe it spoke to the organization’s whatever-it-takes attitude toward making the most coveted impending free agent in the sport and his entourage feel like Toronto was the best option.
Whatever the case, the anecdote came to mind after the latest report surrounding the dissatisfaction being expressed by various anonymous voices around the Los Angeles Clippers about the special treatment afforded to Leonard and Paul George last season.
Boston Celtics point guard Kemba Walker said Wednesday that his left knee has responded well to a stem cell injection that is expected to keep him out until at least January.
“It’s definitely calmed my knee down a lot,” Walker told reporters in a teleconference from the team’s training camp. “Feeling really good right now. Just taking my time, trying to continue to feel good, get stronger.”
SB Nation, Beyond the Box Score blog, Kenny Kelly from
… Despite his apparent bad luck, Turner still slashed .307/.400/.460 for a 140 wRC+. His 1.3 fWAR put him right on pace for his usual 3-4 win season. With numbers like that, it’s easy to see why he’s the highest-ranked third baseman on the free agent market. Unless Nolan Arenado or Kris Bryant get traded, no team can do better than picking up Turner to man the hot corner this winter.
If you’re really looking for warts, there’s the concerns about his durability. Turner hasn’t appeared in more than 135 games since 2016. In 2020, he only made it into 42 contests after two separate trips to the injured list for a groin strain and then a hamstring strain. Turner hasn’t shown his age in his performance, but his health history reads more like a 36-year-old’s.
… The 27-year-old has netted seven times already this season but nine assists – already his highest of any Premier League campaign – is emblematic of a new role in north London. Having directly assisted Son Heung-Min for seven of his nine goals, let’s take a closer look at the inner workings of his new and highly effective role.
NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman warned players Wednesday they are likely going to have to pay one way or another to make up for the league’s projected lost revenue whenever the 2020-21 season gets underway.
Speaking on a Sports Business Journal panel, Bettman stressed the NHL is not attempting to reopen the collective bargaining agreement some five months after it was extended. Instead, he said, the fiscal realities amid the pandemic mean the 50-50 revenue-sharing split between owners and players will be affected for at least the near future.
Keeping track of how the body responds to training is of the utmost importance to gauge how well one is recovering and balancing life stressors in general. Elite athletes may use advanced methods such as saliva sampling to analyze hormonal balance and advanced tests such as force plate jumping analysis to survey a host of physical markers. The majority of these methods are unnecessary for the general population, but nowadays, simple methods such as heart rate variability and wellness surveys are widely available to help guide training decisions for everybody.
Despite the influx of all this new technology over the past decade, telling us whether to take it easy or not, a perfect model still doesn’t exist. Leveraging technology to the best of our ability should be matched with intuition and, as previously mentioned, common sense.
… In experiments detailed in Haar Horowitz’s master’s thesis and a scientific paper published earlier this year, people interacted easily with the setup, known as Dormio. They chatted with it, albeit somewhat nonsensically, about what they could see and feel as they slipped in and out of wakefulness. One volunteer, prompted by Dormio to think about a fork, described dreaming about a family that was “happy to see the fork. And they’re putting it in a pumpkin,” according to Haar Horowitz’s thesis. Another participant, told to think about a tree, described “a tree from my childhood, from my backyard. It never asked for anything.”
Dream researchers who spoke with The Scientist say Dormio marks an exciting step for a field traditionally limited by scientists’ inability to interact with their study participants. Many experts define dreams broadly as any subjective experiences people have while asleep, although most projects rely on dream reports collected specifically from people woken up from rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep, the stage of sleep at which people are most likely to experience emotional, narrative dreams (though not the only sleep stage in which dreams can occur.
Background: Measuring the physical work and resultant acute psychobiological responses of basketball can help to better understand and inform physical preparation models and improve overall athlete health and performance. Recent advancements in training load monitoring solutions have coincided with increases in the literature describing the physical demands of basketball, but there are currently no reviews that summarize all the available basketball research. Additionally, a thorough appraisal of the load monitoring methodologies and measures used in basketball is lacking in the current literature. This type of critical analysis would allow for consistent comparison between studies to better understand physical demands across the sport.
Objectives: The objective of this systematic review was to assess and critically evaluate the methods and technologies used for monitoring physical demands in competitive basketball athletes. We used the term ‘training load’ to encompass the physical demands of both training and game activities, with the latter assumed to provide a training stimulus as well. This review aimed to critique methodological inconsistencies, establish operational definitions specific to the sport, and make recommendations for basketball training load monitoring practice and reporting within the literature.
Methods: A systematic review of the literature was performed using EBSCO, PubMed, SCOPUS, and Web of Science to identify studies through March 2020. Electronic databases were searched using terms related to basketball and training load. Records were included if they used a competitive basketball population and incorporated a measure of training load. This systematic review was registered with the International Prospective Register of Systematic Reviews (PROSPERO Registration # CRD42019123603), and approved under the National Basketball Association (NBA) Health Related Research Policy.
Results: Electronic and manual searches identified 122 papers that met the inclusion criteria. These studies reported the physical demands of basketball during training (n = 56), competition (n = 36), and both training and competition (n = 30). Physical demands were quantified with a measure of internal training load (n = 52), external training load (n = 29), or both internal and external measures (n = 41). These studies examined males (n = 76), females (n = 34), both male and female (n = 9), and a combination of youth (i.e. under 18 years, n = 37), adults (i.e. 18 years or older, n = 77), and both adults and youth (n = 4). Inconsistencies related to the reporting of competition level, methodology for recording duration, participant inclusion criteria, and validity of measurement systems were identified as key factors relating to the reporting of physical demands in basketball and summarized for each study.
Conclusions: This review comprehensively evaluated the current body of literature related to training load monitoring in basketball. Within this literature, there is a clear lack of alignment in applied practices and methodological framework, and with only small data sets and short study periods available at this time, it is not possible to draw definitive conclusions about the true physical demands of basketball. A detailed understanding of modern technologies in basketball is also lacking, and we provide specific guidelines for defining and applying duration measurement methodologies, vetting the validity and reliability of measurement tools, and classifying competition level in basketball to address some of the identified knowledge gaps. Creating alignment in best-practice basketball research methodology, terminology and reporting may lead to a more robust understanding of the physical demands associated with the sport, thereby allowing for exploration of other research areas (e.g. injury, performance), and improved understanding and decision making in applying these methods directly with basketball athletes.
The paper outlines predictors for the severity of illness, symptom prevalence, illness duration among male and female participants, and estimations of the need for hospitalization.
… What if there was a way to measure in real time when a person was becoming stressed, so the condition could be managed immediately using evidence-based methods? That’s the idea behind Philia Labs, a startup in Melbourne, Australia, that has developed a platform with a wearable device designed to measure physiological stress indicators.
The product is aimed at health care providers and mental health professionals, as well as people who want to monitor their own stress level.
“We are quantifying stress in the body in real time,” says Dilpreet Buxi, the startup’s cofounder and chief executive. “The hardware platform and software will enable interventions both through a health care provider and by the patient to basically enable better health outcomes and a better quality of life.”
Tissue oxygenation is a measure of the oxygen level in biological tissue and is a useful clinical biomarker for tissue viability. Abnormal levels may indicate the presence of conditions such as sepsis, diabetes, viral infection, or pulmonary disease, and effective monitoring is important for surgical guidance as well as medical care.
Several techniques exist for the measurement of tissue oxygenation, but they all have some limitations. For instance, pulse oximetry is robust and low-cost but cannot provide a localized measure of oxygenation. Near-infrared spectroscopy, on the other hand, is prone to noisy measurements due to pressure-sensitive contact probes. Spatial frequency domain imaging (SFDI) has emerged as a promising noncontact technique that maps tissue oxygen concentrations over a wide field of view. While simple to implement, SFDI has its own limitations: it requires a sequence of several images for its predictions to be accurate and is prone to errors when working with single snapshots.
A future powered by Augmented Reality has more and more captured the imagination of the tech world in recent years. In truth, Augmented Reality is very much here, manifest in more niche fields like sports and “extra” features like Apple’s LiDAR scanner for iPad and iPhone 12, Apple’s own first serious moves into the AR sector. Apple itself is rumored to be making a play when it comes to both AR and VR products, and rumors of an ‘Apple Glass’ product, as well as various rumblings of a VR/gaming headset that have started ramping up in recent months.
There are many challenges when it comes to AR; size, form factor, technological constraints, not to mention databases, and privacy. Many of these are yet to be fully conquered, which is why, for now, AR remains beyond the grasp of mainstream users. One man who knows a thing or two about AR is Dan Eisenhardt. Founder and CEO of AR company FORM, Eisenhardt was born in Aalborg, Northern Denmark. A swimmer since the age of six, he spent his early 20s getting degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Business before a trip to Vancouver started an adventure that would put him on the path to AR innovation.
Tasked with pitching an idea in one of his entrepreneurship classes, Eisenhardt came up with the idea of augmented reality swim goggles.
Between 2013 and 2014, 19 people were voluntarily locked in a clinic for days at a time—not once, but on four separate occasions. They were fed a different, strict diet on each of their three-day-long visits, and were forbidden to exercise. Computer access and visitation were allowed, so long as guests didn’t smuggle in snacks. Subjects turned over all their urine, from morning, afternoon, and night, to researchers.
These participants temporarily sacrificed their freedom to help dietician Gary Frost and colleagues at Imperial College London understand how eating habits influence the relative concentrations of metabolites excreted in urine, and thus how urine could serve as an indicator of a person’s diet, which in the team’s experiment ranged from healthy to gluttonous. Frost’s team anticipated that such metabolomics analyses would provide more-reliable data for nutritionists than the traditional tactic of asking free-roaming subjects what they’ve been noshing—an approach that is notorious for its huge error rates.
“Most people have a really bad memory of what they’re eating. . . . People will deny eating a dessert or forget that they ate a chocolate,” says David Wishart, a biochemist who works on metabolomics and nutrition at the University of Alberta but was not involved in Frost’s study. On the other hand, he adds, “blood and urine don’t lie.”
Heali, a Los Angeles-based startup that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to create more personalized nutrition advice and meal planning for people, announced today the beta release of its mobile app.
The Heali app helps people adhere to their choice of 30 different diets (Vegan, Low FODMAP, Paleo, etc.) through recipes as well as grocery shopping and restaurant meal selection guidance.
Heali uses a number of features to help people with their nutritional choices. It has optical character recognition (OCR) so a user can take a photo of a menu description or a product’s nutritional label and the app will understand what ingredients are in that item.