… The potential for Allen to turn his powerful shoulder cannon into an accurate one was always there, Palmer says, but the key to unlocking it was actually in his feet, not his upper body. “He drastically changed his base that he played with,” Palmer says. “He used to bounce up and down on his toes, with a narrow base, which would cause him to over-stride when he’d go to throw. There is a cascading effect once you over-stride. Now he’s learned to play with a much better base. When you play with all your cleats on the ground, you create more energy and you have more balance.”
In this era, we have a much better grasp of how the kinematic chain works, thanks to advances in technology. Sure, a grizzled quarterback guru with 20 years of experience might be able to watch offseason workouts and make subtle tweaks in a quarterback’s delivery, but these days that same coach could also look down at his iPad and read — thanks to a microchip implanted inside the football — the velocity, the spin rate and integrity of a spiral in seconds.
“Ball don’t lie,” Palmer says. “We also use a 4D, high-speed, motion capture camera system called Biometrek. It’s a startup out here in California. They have 16 high-speed cameras and we’ll throw in their [studio], then you use a computer to turn your guy into a little stick figure. We use that to look at weight distribution, mass and the kinematic sequence, which is the hip going first, then the shoulder and ultimately the arm firing. That was the biggest thing for Josh. Is his first movement going down into the ground and loading? Or was his first movement just at the target? The difference between bad and great, especially in a workout setting, is minor. But Josh is really, really athletic, and that’s an underrated part of this. It allows him to make permanent changes really quickly.”
We took Costa Rican surfer Brisa Hennessy to a sports science lab to find out what makes the physique of a world-class surfer. With the help of Olympian Lolo Jones, each episode of our sports science original series Anatomy of studies the powers and physiques of an elite athlete to find out what makes them special in their sport. [video, 1:00]
I feel like I’ve always dreamed of going to the Olympics, almost in a way that I don’t know when the dream first began. Growing up, I wanted to go the Olympics in every sport I played, from soccer to karate.
In water polo, the community is so small that you know who the “big guns” are from an early age. I started in the Olympic development pipeline in 2011 and slowly started going up the levels until I finally got called up to the national team in 2017.
In non-Olympic years, the national team usually gets together for the summers so we can prepare for various tournaments. But in the year leading up to the Olympics, we are together full-time. People take time off from college, leave their club teams overseas, and we train together in southern California. So at this point, we’ve been together pretty much non-stop since the spring of 2019.
… Wood viewed being cut in China as a wake-up call.
“That one was probably like the biggest testing point for me in my life,” Wood said. “Me thinking I have NBA talent and I can play in the NBA, and then [Fujian] cutting me. They’re saying that I’m not good enough. They don’t think that I’m ready to play in the CBA. It was kind of crazy to me and that’s when the light switched.
“I didn’t have any other options after that. I was cut from a team before that, and then I was cut from China. So now, I’m out here looking for an NBA job. So, I have to do everything in my power to try and get on the team, which means being a G Leaguer.”
Do you tell yourself when you don’t feel like exercising that you’re just being lazy? Actually, Harvard evolutionary biologist Daniel E. Lieberman ’86 says, we’re nearly hard-wired to avoid unnecessary exertion. In his new book, “Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding,” Lieberman explores this idea while using anthropological evidence to bust other myths and misunderstandings about exercise. The Gazette spoke with Lieberman, the Edwin M. Lerner II Professor of Biological Science, about the book and tips for getting motivated to do something as unnatural as exercise.
I often recommend napping to athletes, and 2021 seems like it could be the year of the nap. After all, a synonym of “Working From Home” could be “Napping From Work.” But does the performance science back-up my perceptions of napping as an elixir against aches, pains, and too-distant dinners? The answer, surprisingly, is only partially.
The studies indicate that napping may be helpful for performance. However, it’s not a requirement, and could have downsides based on timing and impacts on nighttime sleep. Let’s break it down.
Background The acute:chronic workload ratio (ACWR) is commonly used to manage training load in sports, particularly to reduce injury risk. However, despite its extensive application as a prevention intervention, the effectiveness of load management using ACWR has never been evaluated in an experimental study.
Aim To evaluate the effectiveness of a load management intervention designed to reduce the prevalence of health problems among elite youth football players of both sexes.
Methods We cluster-randomised 34 elite youth football teams (16 females, 18 males) to an intervention group (18 teams) and a control group (16 teams). Intervention group coaches planned all training based on published ACWR load management principles using a commercially available athlete management system for a complete 10-month season. Control group coaches continued to plan training as normal. The prevalence of health problems was measured monthly in both groups using the Oslo Sports Trauma Research Centre Questionnaire on Health Problems.
Results The between-group difference in health problem prevalence (primary outcome) was 1.8%-points (−4.1 to 7.7 %-points; p=0.55) with no reduction in the likelihood of reporting a health problem in the intervention group (relative risk 1.01 (95% CI 0.91 to 1.12); p=0.84) compared with the control group.
Conclusions We observed no between-group difference, suggesting that this specific load management intervention was not successful in preventing health problems in elite youth footballers. [full text]
University of Colorado Boulder, Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences from
One sweaty, huffing, exercising person emits as many chemicals from their body as up to five sedentary people, according to a new University of Colorado Boulder study. And notably, those human emissions, including amino acids from sweat or acetone from breath, chemically combine with bleach cleaners to form new airborne chemicals with unknown impacts to indoor air quality.
“Humans are a large source of indoor emissions,” said Zachary Finewax, CIRES research scientist and lead author of the new study out in the current edition of Indoor Air. “And chemicals in indoor air, whether from our bodies or cleaning products, don’t just disappear, they linger and travel around spaces like gyms, reacting with other chemicals.”
The agreement between coach and athlete reporting of exertion is generally moderate to good but can vary among studies.
Practitioners should be aware of multiple possible factors that may impact the association between coaches’ and athletes’ rating of exertion.
Practitioners should develop strategies to improve understanding and develop relations to enhance the effective implementation of RPE monitoring. [full text]
The youngest coach in Bundesliga history has his eyes set on winning titles with RB Leipzig to continue his incredibly rapid progression in the football coaching word. Julian Nagelsmann and his ideas on the beautiful game are taking German football to a new level.
Scandanavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports from
This study analyzed the impact of performing four consecutive football matches separated by 48-72 hours during a FIFA tournament on physical load, technical performance and plasma markers of redox state, muscle damage and inflammation in elite female players. Forty-eight players from three national teams were evaluated at seven time points: before (baseline) and throughout the tournament (after each match and before two training sessions). Only data from players who played all matches were included in the analyses (N = 13). The players were divided into high-rank (N = 6) and low-rank (N = 7) team players according to FIFA standards. Plasma creatine kinase (CK), C-reactive protein (CRP), total antioxidant status (TAS), and uric acid (UA) were analyzed at the selected time points. Technical performance and physical load were also quantified according to team rank. Players from low-rank teams played significantly more time than high-rank players (85 ± 10 vs 67 ± 15 minutes; P = .02; d = 1.51). Low-rank team players presented higher values in technical performance actions than the high-rank team players, but most of the differences were explained by the longer match time played. UA content differed across the matches, increasing from baseline (F(4,40) = 3.90; P = .01) and more in the high-rank team players (F(1,10) = 20.46; P = .001), while CRP only differed across the matches (F(4,36) = 2.66; P = .05), also increasing from baseline. A large time effect was shown for UA only in the high-rank players (η2 p = 0.50; P = .02). Four consecutive matches did not result in considerable alterations in plasma stress markers, physical load, and technical performance in elite female football players from distinct rank levels.
How should you structure a larger engineering organization, one with dozens (or hundreds) of engineers? There are many tradeoffs to consider, and no single right answer. But, there are some structures that work better than others.
Summary: the most effective teams are stable, multi-disciplinary, aligned to product delivery.
The guiding principle here is that Conway’s Law is inescapable – you ship your org chart. And, wherever possible, you should optimize for delivery. (This seems obvious. Is it obvious?) Thus, you want to try to build an organization that’s as aligned to what you’re actually shipping as possible. In other words, you’re aiming for a sort of Reverse Conway’s Law: design your organization to match what you want to ship.
Data science intersects with almost every topic you can come into contact with these days. A natural intersection is that of data science and baseball. We spoke to a recent CDS alum, Esteban Navarro Garaiz, who started working with the LA Dodgers on their quantitative analysis team. He spoke to CDS social media team member, Colton Laferriere, about how he got interested in data science, his love of sports and what it was like watching the Dodgers win the world series