… “I think for me, obviously, not having the result that we wanted as a team and then, for me personally, not playing how I wanted to do,” Siakam said when asked if he approached the off-season differently. “For me, my summer – or off-season – is always focused on just going back and [getting] better; working on things and making sure that I come back a better player. … In broad strokes, the consensus is the forced isolation following the pandemic hit Siakam especially hard. His fitness was compromised by months of relative inactivity and when he couldn’t perform to his standards on the floor, his confidence withered too. He wasn’t the same person after the restart, let alone the same player.
Question What are normal electrocardiographic and echocardiographic findings in elite female and male US soccer players?
Findings In this cross-sectional study of 238 elite US soccer players, we found that male athletes frequently displayed common training-related electrocardiography changes, whereas female athletes had significantly more abnormal electrocardiograms per the International Recommendations for Electrocardiographic Interpretation in Athletes. Both female and male athletes frequently exceeded American Society of Echocardiography normative value standards for basic echocardiographic parameters.
Meaning Elite US soccer players frequently present with training-related electrocardiography patterns and echocardiographic parameters that are above guideline-defined normal ranges.
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes journal from
… Driven by a shared interest in better understanding the science of what helps people form healthy habits, The Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics (CHIBE) and the Behavior Change for Good (BCFG) Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania collaborated with WW, the largest commercial weight loss program in the world, to organize a one-day conference. This conference focused on three themes: (1) the psychology of sustained behavior change; (2) changing environments to enduringly change behavior; and (3) behaviorally-informed policy to encourage healthy habits.
The papers in this special issue are largely derived from talks given at this one-day conference. They range from conceptual pieces to new experiments in a variety of areas, with topics ranging from a psychological model of what it takes to achieve sustained behavior change to a field experiment with a national gym chain testing the benefits of temptation bundling.
… [Salma] Mousa has examined how soccer can be a useful way to test contact theory, an approach developed by Harvard psychologist Gordon Allport in the 1950s to reduce prejudice, build trust and generally improve group relations through intergroup contact. There are some caveats to make this happen; for example, there need to be a common goal, cooperation, no social hierarchies, and endorsement from a social or institutional authority.
Soccer seems to meet the conditions Allport stipulated, said Mousa, who recently completed her PhD in political science in the School of Humanities and Sciences.
The routine monitoring of training loads and athletes’ fitness is an essential process to ensure an optimal performance progression. Scientific evidence shows us different valid methods for this purpose. For instance, professional teams have access to accelerometers, such as WIMU, to measure the external training load, encoders to measure strength and contact platforms or electric photocells to measure jumping or sprint capacity. However, these tools are technically complex or expensive, making its use difficult for most teams.
Nowadays, the mobile phone has become almost an extension of our body. Almost everybody has a smartphone which functions as a phone, but it also includes a camera, pedometer, GPS and many more features. In the last few years, a series of mobile applications have also been developed, which could facilitate the day to day of the coaching staff.
Micro-supercapacitors are promising energy storage devices that can complement or even replace lithium-ion batteries in wearable and stretchable microelectronics. However, they often possess a relatively low energy density and limited mechanical stretchability. Here, we report an all-in-one planar micro-supercapacitor arrays (MSCAs) based on hybrid electrodes with ultrathin ZnP nanosheets anchored on 3D laser-induced graphene foams (ZnP@LIG) arranged in island-bridge device architecture. The hybrid electrodes with a large specific surface area demonstrate excellent ionic and electrical conductivities, impressive gravimetric (areal) capacitance of 1425 F g−1 (7.125 F cm−2) at 1 A g−1, and long-term stability. In addition to high energy (245 m Wh cm−2) and power (12.50 mW kg−1 at 145 m Wh cm−2) densities, the MSCAs with excellent cycling stability also showcase adjustable voltage and current outputs through serial and parallel connections of MSC cells in the island-bridge design, which also allows the system to be reversibly stretched up to 100%. Meanwhile, theoretical calculations validated by UV–vis absorption spectra partially suggest that the enhanced capacitance and rate capability may result from the improved electrical conductivity and number of adsorbed charged ions (Na+ in Na2SO4 aqueous electrolyte and K+ in PVA/KCl gel electrolyte) on the pseudocapacitive non-layered ultrathin ZnP nanosheets. The integration of the all-in-one stretchable MSCAs with a crumpled Au-based triboelectric nanogenerator and stretchable crumpled graphene-based strain sensor demonstrates a self-powered stretchable system. The coupled design principle of electronic materials and device architecture provides a promising method to develop high-performance wearable/stretchable energy storage devices and self-powered stretchable systems for future bio-integrated electronics.
… Technology solutions are facilitating this development and underpinning the improvement of offers. We have a partnership with a company called Veo, who provide AI cameras which record activity on the pitch by tracking the ball, and then a simple platform allows players and coaches to cut the footage afterwards, to produce highlights packages or footage for analysis. Their cameras are already used in over 200 schools in the UK, and we are working to make them more accessible to colleges.
Veo’s cameras enable colleges to film matches and evaluate performance with students, creating an elevated standard of analysis. It also provides them with footage that helps their career progression – players that have been selected for England Colleges have used the tool to compile a bank of footage of them playing for their country. These highlights reels can be used when they move on to university, or even to send to U.S. scouts.
While the tool is fantastic for a college’s academy team, it can also be useful from a curriculum standpoint. It provides learners on sports qualifications with the opportunity to analyse their own footage and capture evidence which contributes to their overall practical assessment for PE A level or vocational and technical qualifications for sport. Veo cameras provide curriculum staff with a simple and effective way to do this, adding value to the learning experience they can offer their students.
NHL coaches are required to wear masks behind the bench, owners are barred from having face-to-face meetings with players, and teams can travel with no more than 50 people.
Those are among the coronavirus-related protocols the NHL released Tuesday in preparing to open the 2021 season on Jan. 13. Players scheduled to report for the start of training camp over the next two weeks.
The NHL also announced it is tweaking its offside rule for the upcoming season.
Both of the player’s skates must be fully across the plane of the opposing blue line ahead of the puck in order to be offside. That’s a switch from the previous rule in which a player was considered onside if he had at least one skate physically touching the blue line.
Stem cells promise to provide a significant leap forward in the treatment of the tendinopathy of the football player. Here we review the basic science and state-of-the art of this therapy. [video, 41:25]
Florida Gators basketball star Keyontae Johnson is being released from the hospital Tuesday, more than a week following his mid-game collapse, his family says.
Johnson collapsed suddenly during a timeout in the match against rival Florida State on December 12, where he was quickly put on a stretcher and taken to the hospital. His grandfather, Larry DeJarnett, told USA Today that Johnson had been placed in a medically induced coma early on in his treatment.
The school said two days after his hospitalization that Johnson was alert and “following simple commands.” Within a few days, the school reported that Johnson was “breathing on his own” and able to FaceTime with his teammates.
The primary variables influencing the adaptive response to a bout of endurance training are exercise duration and exercise intensity. However, altering the availability of nutrients before and during exercise can also impact the training response by modulating the exercise stimulus and/or the physiological and molecular responses to the exercise-induced perturbations. The purpose of this review is to highlight the current knowledge of the influence of pre-exercise nutrition ingestion on the metabolic, physiological, and performance responses to endurance training and suggest directions for future research. Acutely, carbohydrate ingestion reduces fat oxidation, but there is little evidence showing enhanced fat burning capacity following long-term fasted-state training. Performance is improved following pre-exercise carbohydrate ingestion for longer but not shorter duration exercise, while training-induced performance improvements following nutrition strategies that modulate carbohydrate availability vary based on the type of nutrition protocol used. Contrasting findings related to the influence of acute carbohydrate ingestion on mitochondrial signaling may be related to the amount of carbohydrate consumed and the intensity of exercise. This review can help to guide athletes, coaches, and nutritionists in personalizing pre-exercise nutrition strategies, and for designing research studies to further elucidate the role of nutrition in endurance training adaptations. [full text]
The Marathon Project is in the books, and with it, the 2020 racing season. It was an event American marathoners (and marathon fans) were desperate for after a year rocked by COVID-19, and it was a staggering success. Nothing can replicate the energy, importance, and emotions of the Olympic Marathon Trials held earlier this year, but this was the closest an American event has come to those feelings since that blustery day in Atlanta 10 months ago. London, Valencia, and the World Half were great, but they were also held in the middle of the night in the United States and featured barely any Americans. Watching on Sunday morning, it felt like the largest gathering of US distance fans since the Trials — even if most of that gathering took place on Twitter or the LetsRun messageboards, rather than the barren streets of Chandler, Ariz.
Now that the results are in, it’s time to make sense of it all. And there is a lot to unpack. It has never been harder to analyze marathon results than in the year 2020. What do we make of someone who has never made an Olympic team — or even come close — running the second-fastest marathon ever by an American woman at the age of 37? What do we make of seven men — none of whom finished in the top five at the Trials, and some of whom, I’ll admit, I knew nothing about prior to Sunday — blowing through the 2:10 barrier in the deepest marathon in US history? Celebrating these achievements uncritically seems foolish when there’s a 40-millimeter carbon-fiber-plated elephant standing in the corner of the room. But simply attributing everything to “the shoes” seems cruel when there are so many great stories to tell and individuals to celebrate. Some nuance is required.
Italian giant Juventus is preparing to raid Major League Soccer to find its next star after the resounding success of Weston McKennie, reports Tuttosport.
McKennie, the first American ever to play for Italy’s most-storied side, is enjoying a fine season on-loan from German side Schalke 04, having scored twice and assisted twice in 14 games.
Tuttosport says Juve now has eyes on four MLS youngsters ahead of the January transfer window, including highly-rated FC Dallas full-back Bryan Reynolds.
… Tuesday, the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport (TIDES) at the University of Central Florida released its “Keeping Score When It Counts: Assessing the Academic Records of the 2020-2021 Bowl-Bound College Football Teams.” The annual report contains the football student-athlete Graduation Success Rate (GSR) and Academic Progress Rate (APR) for bowl-bound teams. The overall GSR for bowl-bound teams this year was 78.0%, down from 79.1% in 2019. The average GSR for Black football student-athletes declined slightly, from 73.8% in 2019 to 73.4% in 2020, and the gap between the graduation rates for white and Black student-athletes increased, from 15.6% to 16.3%, over the same span.
This is the first time that the overall football student-athlete GSR has decreased from the previous year since the statistic was first reported in the 2009 bowl-bound report. After a decade of uninterrupted progress, this was a discouraging pause. However, it is worth noting that the current GSR is significantly higher than when the streak started. The overall football student-athlete GSR in 2009 was 65.5, a full 12.5 percentage points below where it is in 2020.