IN JUNE OF 2018, a gaggle of the NFL’s most talented defensive players gathered at Big Cedar Lodge, a luxurious resort in Missouri’s Ozarks. Von Miller led the group. Bradley Chubb and Bud Dupree were there, as well as legendary sack masters such as Bruce Smith and Warren Sapp. The men ate big steaks and drank. They raced go-karts. They went bowfishing in the middle of the night, firing arrows into the black waters of Table Rock Lake.
They also dissected pass-rushing techniques as if they were science textbooks. Stutter steps and cuts, arm-locks and power — they discussed it all. If he takes two steps this way, you go three that way? But what about coming back inside? Or just putting your head into his chest and flattening him like fresh asphalt? They laughed.
One afternoon, Chuck Smith gave a presentation. Smith is a former defensive end and a pass-rushing guru who trains many of the league’s biggest stars. Standing on a field near the hotel, he explained a rush technique called the cross-chop. Smith asked for a volunteer to help him demonstrate. Shaquil Barrett stepped forward.
NFL cornerback Richard Sherman takes his gaming very seriously. When he isn’t on the football field, deconstructing offenses and holding interception records, the San Francisco 49er has been known to decompress with a little Call Of Duty.
“Playing video games scratches my competitive itch, while allowing me to rest my body,” Sherman tells Men’s Journal. The five-time All-Pro player has even been taking part in charity streaming events on Twitch, squadding up with fellow NFL players like Darius Slay. “There are similar feelings that come from those competitions—the release of serotonin after a great play and that sense of camaraderie with your teammates.”
With the first preseason game of the 2020-21 season looming this weekend, the Nets are focused on gauging Kevin Durant’s physical capabilities following his Achilles tendon rehab — as well as how he should be deployed.
“From a minutes standpoint, seeing how long I can play now,” Durant said of how he hopes to be used this preseason on a Zoom call Wednesday. “And I’m talking with the training staff and the coaching staff to see what my load will be for this first preseason game.
“I’m just looking forward to seeing how my body responds and how we respond as a team my first game.”
Someone might score a slew of touchdowns, or they might be able to dunk on a defender. You can hit a baseball a country mile but what does it matter if you’re not stepping up to the plate off the field, too?
What an athlete does after the buzzer ends is just as important as the game itself. The skills that it takes to be a leader on the field are many of the same that it takes to be a leader off of it, which is why the Boys & Girls Clubs of Southeastern Michigan and Xenith, the sports equipment and apparel company that relocated from Boston to Detroit in 2015, are partnering up in their shared mission to develop and support the 21st-century athlete. This philosophy is centered on three core values: Competition, Career, and Character.
“We’re building out the on- and off-field opportunities. The 21st-century athlete is the future,” says Ryan Sullivan, Xenith CEO.
Habs’ sports science and performance director Pierre Allard’ message to players: “Make sure you’re ready. It’s not a switch you turn on a week before.”
… Here’s what to know about the NBA’s rules on resting players who aren’t injured in 2020-21:
What is load management in the NBA?
Load management is an offshoot of modern sports science research that can help predict when players are most vulnerable to injury and in need of protection. Teams have realized they can dramatically cut injury risk by planning rest days during road back-to-backs — and those who are deep enough can sometimes win regular season games without their stars.
I wrote this blog post for SimpliFaster to provide an assessment of the various wearable technologies on the market focused on the smart shoe and smart insole. I provide a review of Plantiga below, present unpublished results of initial validation studies, and discuss the direction the company is taking.
It seems like the smart insole and smart shoe space is beginning to take off. The technology, including pressure mapping, has advanced rapidly. As you will see below, Plantiga places an inertial measurement unit (IMU) in an insole, but in addition to reporting what an IMU actually measures (acceleration, position, orientation), they use artificial intelligence (AI) to provide performance and health insights based on how we move.
Google AI Blog, Neil Houlsby and Dirk Weissenborn from
While convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been used in computer vision since the 1980s, they were not at the forefront until 2012 when AlexNet surpassed the performance of contemporary state-of-the-art image recognition methods by a large margin. Two factors helped enable this breakthrough: (i) the availability of training sets like ImageNet, and (ii) the use of commoditized GPU hardware, which provided significantly more compute for training. As such, since 2012, CNNs have become the go-to model for vision tasks.
The benefit of using CNNs was that they avoided the need for hand-designed visual features, instead learning to perform tasks directly from data “end to end”. However, while CNNs avoid hand-crafted feature-extraction, the architecture itself is designed specifically for images and can be computationally demanding. Looking forward to the next generation of scalable vision models, one might ask whether this domain-specific design is necessary, or if one could successfully leverage more domain agnostic and computationally efficient architectures to achieve state-of-the-art results.
As a first step in this direction, we present the Vision Transformer (ViT), a vision model based as closely as possible on the Transformer architecture originally designed for text-based tasks. ViT represents an input image as a sequence of image patches, similar to the sequence of word embeddings used when applying Transformers to text, and directly predicts class labels for the image.
That’s the suggestion of a tantalizing new study, in which scientists reprogrammed neurons in mouse eyes to make them more resistant to damage and able to regrow after injury.
While the NBA expects positive COVID-19 cases throughout the 2020-21 season, league sources told ESPN there isn’t a specific number of positive cases or a precise scenario that could cause a game to be canceled or postponed.
In conjunction with league and team health officials, the NBA will consider several variables, including the nature of the positive cases and when, where and how they happened.
For instance, teams could have a similar number of positive COVID-19 cases but differing circumstances for the total, such as potential spread in a facility or isolated cases at home, leading to the NBA’s reluctance to create a fixed number that would lead to play being suspended on a given night.
Athletic directors said the stress of making tough choices during a worldwide pandemic is nothing compared to the level of empathy and pride they feel toward their high school athletes.
Despite the threatening coronavirus, Dirigo athletic director Jessica McGreevy focuses on the positive.
“The hardest part for me was going into the fall season and not being sure if we were going to play at all,” she said. “We got into this job because we love working with kids and love seeing them get onto the fields. It was a moment of relief when we could host our first game. It has been challenging but rewarding at the same time.”
A recent study done on professional soccer players in Poland concluded that the players were not consuming enough carbohydrate and were deficient in several important nutrients. But an expert cited some flaws in the study’s design, highlighting the difficulty of real world sports nutrition research.
… We need the federal government to sort through the science and tell us what’s true. This means stronger guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has return to play considerations lacking specifics related to metrics. There is almost no consistency state by state (and even within states) on what metrics to use to reopen or close sports.
In less than four weeks, barring some sort of rethink or extension, the United Kingdom will leave the European Union. The impact extends to football. For example, as part of the EU, the Premier League could not impose restrictions on hiring foreigners from within the union and the larger European Economic Area (EEA). Now, it can set itself whatever rules it likes, subject to approval from the Football Association (FA) and, of course, the UK government.
On Tuesday, following months of negotiations, the FA, Premier League and Football League unveiled a new framework of regulations to govern the post-Brexit era. They cover the men’s and women’s games and aren’t limited to players, but provide guidelines for managers, assistant coaches, directors of football and performance managers too. Basically, work visas will be handed out based on a points system, which considers club and international appearances, age and the quality of the league a player joins from. It’s a similar principle for the non-playing positions.
The idea is to help further develop the game in England, by limiting access to the best and brightest. In reality, it’s most likely a great big nothing-burger, with a dollop of posturing and politics layered on top. Most of the regulations have little effect and, for those who do, there’s a convenient “exceptions panel” that, if appeals panels under the old work permit rules are anything to go by, will be closer to a “rubber stamp” panel. Oh, and on top of that, virtually all the EU players already in the United Kingdom will be grandfathered in, so most of the effects of these regulations won’t be felt for several years — by which point there could be a bunch of entirely new rules.
… I am often asked by friends whether we should believe polls, a concern that was front and center during the US presidential election. My answer is, “How do I know?” The quality of each poll is rooted in the way in which the data are collected and not in the analysis: the most careful examination of bad data will lead to the most precise wrong answer.
The pitfalls of polling
For argument’s sake, let us make the generous assumption that surveys are constructed in an honest way with a phone conversation that does not suggest a preferred answer. Let us also assume that households are randomly chosen, again in a way that is not biased toward answers of a certain proclivity. The likelihood that the intended respondent is at home or does not hang up before answering the questions is not under the pollster’s control. If only a small fraction of those who are called respond, who is to say that these respondents answer in a similar way to the many for whom a response is not obtained?