We’ve all heard of buzzy “self-care.” But true self-care is more than just meditation apps and whatever-the-hell-mindfulness-is. Sometimes, it’s just about allowing yourself time to recover. Pro soccer player and defender for Toronto FC, Omar Gonzalez, gets it. During the latest Friday Sessions on our Instagram, co-host Gregory Scott Brown, M.D., spoke with Gonzalez about the importance of recovery for our mental health.
Like a lot of professional athletes, Gonzalez says he copes with the overwhelming pressure of having to perform. Unfortunately, the 32-year-old had to learn the hard way that it takes being proactive in order to be on top of your game. It was only after tearing his ACL in 2012 that Gonzalez changed his mindset and started to take the proper time to let his body recover after workouts.
“People just go, go, go,” he said. “They think that they have to go 100 percent every single time. But if you do that, and you don’t spend the time to recover and to take care of yourself, you’re going to break down pretty quick.”
The AFL Players’ Association will meet this week with concussion campaigner Peter Jess to discuss his proposed $2bn compensation fund to cover footballers who suffer from the long-term effects of head knocks.
Guardian Australia understands the meeting, to take place on Thursday, has been organised with a view to nutting out the architecture of the landmark workers compensation-style trust, into which the AFL would theoretically pay a minimum of $25m a year for the next 80 years.
… This spring training, the 35-year-old has a fresh start for what he and the team are optimistic about being a complete season of power hitting, patient at-bats and superb defense at the hot corner.
Donaldson, in a video conference call Tuesday with reporters after the team’s first full-squad workout in Fort Myers, Florida, said he felt like his limited action was a “fluke ordeal” attributable to the four-month coronavirus pause prior to the midsummer restart.
“As tough as it is for me to kind of say this, you know, I wish I was a robot and I wish I could be 100% and tell you that I’m great, but at the end of the day, it’s a sport and it’s a pretty fast sport,” Donaldson said, “and sometimes things happen.”
… “Even when I talk about young players and what we believe in here at Red Bull, I think they believe in mentoring coaches as well. They thought it might be a very novel idea to invest in this young American who seemed a little crazy and see if they could bring him along a development path. I’m very appreciative of that, I’ve tried to honor them in my development and my work every day.
“They also gave me the opportunity to get into UEFA courses and nurture me within the Red Bull network.”
The troubled times we live in, and the rise of social media, have created an age of endless conflict. Rather than fearing or avoiding disagreement, we need to learn to do it well
The methylome and transcriptome signatures following exercise that are physiologically and metabolically relevant to sporting contexts such as team sports or health prescription scenarios (e.g., high intensity interval training/HIIT) has not been investigated. To explore this, we performed two different sport/exercise relevant high-intensity running protocols in five male sport team members using a repeated measures design of: (1) change of direction (COD) versus; (2) straight line (ST) running exercise with a wash-out period of at least 2 weeks between trials. Skeletal muscle biopsies collected from the vastus lateralis 30 min and 24 h post exercise, were assayed using 850K methylation arrays and a comparative analysis with recent (subject-unmatched) sprint and acute aerobic exercise meta-analysis transcriptomes was performed. Despite COD and ST exercise being matched for classically defined intensity measures (speed × distance and number of accelerations/decelerations), COD exercise elicited greater movement (GPS-Playerload), physiological (HR), metabolic (lactate) as well as central and peripheral (differential RPE) exertion measures compared with ST exercise, suggesting COD exercise evoked a higher exercise intensity. The exercise response alone across both conditions evoked extensive alterations in the methylome 30 min and 24 h post exercise, particularly in MAPK, AMPK and axon guidance pathways. COD evoked a considerably greater hypomethylated signature across the genome compared with ST exercise, particularly at 30 min post exercise, enriched in: Protein binding, MAPK, AMPK, insulin, and axon guidance pathways. Comparative methylome analysis with sprint running transcriptomes identified considerable overlap, with 49% of genes that were altered at the expression level also differentially methylated after COD exercise. After differential methylated region analysis, we observed that VEGFA and its downstream nuclear transcription factor, NR4A1 had enriched hypomethylation within their promoter regions. VEGFA and NR4A1 were also significantly upregulated in the sprint transcriptome and meta-analysis of exercise transcriptomes. We also confirmed increased gene expression of VEGFA, and considerably larger increases in the expression of canonical metabolic genes PPARGC1A (that encodes PGC1-α) and NR4A3 in COD vs. ST exercise. Overall, we demonstrate that increased physiological/metabolic load via COD exercise in human skeletal muscle evokes considerable epigenetic modifications that are associated with changes in expression of genes responsible for adaptation to exercise.
University of Bristol (UK), News and features from
The discovery by a team at the University of Bristol could pave the way for wearable assist devices for people with disabilities and people suffering from age-related muscle degeneration. The study is published today [17 February] in Science Robotics.
Soft robots are made from compliant materials that can stretch and twist. These materials can be made into artificial muscles that contract when air is pumped into them. The softness of these muscles makes then suited to powering assistive clothing. Until now, however, these pneumatic artificial muscles have been powered by conventional electromagnetic (motor-driven) pumps, which are bulky, noisy, complex and expensive.
Researchers from Bristol’s SoftLab and Bristol Robotics Laboratory led by Jonathan Rossiter, Professor of Robotics, have successfully demonstrated a new electro-pneumatic pump that is soft, bendable, low-cost and easy to make.
Engineers have developed a technique that allows them to precisely place microscopic devices formed from folded DNA molecules in not only a specific location but also in a specific orientation.
As a proof-of-concept, they arranged more than 3,000 glowing moon-shaped nanoscale molecular devices into a flower-shaped instrument for indicating the polarization of light. Each of 12 petals pointed in a different direction around the center of the flower, and within in each petal about 250 moons were aligned to the direction of the petal. Because each moon only glows when struck by polarized light matching its orientation, the end result is a flower whose petals light up in sequence as the polarization of light shined upon it is rotated. The flower, which spans a distance smaller than the width of a human hair, demonstrates that thousands of molecules can be reliably oriented on the surface of a chip.
This method for precisely placing and orienting DNA-based molecular devices may make it possible to use these molecular devices to power new kinds of chips that integrate molecular biosensors with optics and electronics for applications such as DNA sequencing or measuring the concentrations of thousands of proteins at once.
The aim of this study was the validation of player and ball position measurements of Kinexon’s local positioning system (LPS) in handball and football. Eight athletes conducted a sport-specific course (SSC) and small sided football games (SSG), simultaneously tracked by the LPS and an infrared camera-based motion capture system as reference system. Furthermore, football shots and handball throws were performed to evaluate ball tracking. The position root mean square error (RMSE) for player tracking was 9 cm for SSCs, the instantaneous peak speed showed a percentage deviation from the reference system of 0.7–1.7% for different exercises. The RMSE for SSGs was 8 cm. Covered distance was overestimated by 0.6% in SSCs and 1.0% in SSGs. The 2D RMSE of ball tracking was 15 cm in SSGs, 3D position errors of shot and throw impact locations were 17 cm and 21 cm. The methodology for the validation of a system’s accuracy in sports tracking requires extensive attention, especially in settings covering both, player and ball measurements. Most tracking errors for player tracking were smaller or in line with errors found for comparable systems in the literature. Ball tracking showed a larger error than player tracking. Here, the influence of the positioning of the sensor must be further reviewed. In total, the accuracy of Kinexon’s LPS has proven to represent the current state of the art for player and ball position detection in team sports. [full text]
Akira Endo, an infectious-diseases modeller at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, noticed the telltale signs of superspreading before such events became a staple of COVID-19 news coverage. One clue came from early investigations of cases in which a single person infected up to ten others1. Another curious fact was that outside Wuhan, China, home to the first big outbreak, infected individuals weren’t immediately causing exponential local outbreaks, says Endo, who was one of the earliest to quantify the phenomenon.
This uneven, sputtering form of transmission, in which some individuals infect many people but most infect only a few, if any, is shared by the coronavirus’s cousins — SARS-CoV, which caused the deadly epidemic of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2003, and MERS-CoV, the source of Middle East respiratory syndrome. A similar mode of transmission occurs with the pathogens that cause Ebola, smallpox and tuberculosis.
As the pandemic enters its second year — a time marked by news of fast-spreading variants of the virus — researchers are now more convinced than ever of the importance of superspreading in how the COVID-19 pandemic has played out, and how it will do so in the future.
… One key caveat for this analysis is that the boundaries of sports and exercise medicine are pretty hazy. [Omeet] Khatra’s definition includes managing sports injuries, enhancing athletic performance, and the use of exercise to improve health. That’s very broad, but the method used to identify top papers was a little more idiosyncratic. They started by identifying a list of 46 journals focused on sports and exercise medicine, and then identified the 100 most-cited articles from within those journals.
That means significant papers published in non-specialist journals don’t show up on the list. A.V. Hill’s original 1923 study on VO2 max was published in the Quarterly Journal of Medicine; Karlman Wasserman’s 1964 paper on the anaerobic threshold was published in the American Journal of Cardiology. In fact, you’d expect that the most ground-breaking findings are the most likely to make it into generalist journals like Nature and Science (where, for example, a classic 1937 paper on the aerobic power of world record-setting runners was published).
So it’s not a comprehensive list, but it still covers a large fraction of the field. It’s dominated by Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, the flagship journal of the American College of Sports Medicine, which contributes no less than 49 of the papers. Next on the list are the American Journal of Sports Medicine, with 18, and Sports Medicine, with 7. The oldest paper on the list is from 1973, reflecting the field’s relatively recent emergence as a distinct discipline: MSSE, for example, was only launched in 1969.
People say you’re entitled to your own opinion but not your own facts. But I need you to hear this: every science has its own facts. And I don’t want to freak you out but they don’t even agree on what a “fact” actually is.
The scientific method relies on the answers to questions like ‘what is evidence’? Sciences are free to answer these questions in their own way and to define their own scientific method.
No Grass in the Clouds newsletter, Ryan O'Hanlon from
… Now, it’s tempting — boy, is it tempting — to tell some grand story of the double-sided coin of winning and losing, motivation and desire. You can reach for whatever you want, really: Is it a failure of leadership? Perhaps the failure of the human body? The impossibility of maintaining a certain level of success, and the long-term price we pay to get what we want? Or maybe you prefer the idea that it’s a failure of confidence — that, like an infectious disease, a tiny spore of self-doubt germinated within the heart of a single Liverpool player, and then quickly ravaged its way through the rest of the team, hopping from player to player, until they became a collection of elite, extremely successful and wealthy professional athletes who were unable to recognize themselves in the mirror? There’s the one about how signing one of the world’s best midfielders made the team worse. And then there’s the other one about how this is just a bug in Jurgen Klopp’s system; it happened with Dortmund, and here it goes again out in Liverpool.
All fun, and all probably wrong. As I.D. Hill wrote all the way back in 1974, in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: “I find it difficult to imagine that anyone, who had ever watched a football match, could reach the conclusion that the game was either all skill or all chance. That both skill and chance are involved seems too obvious.”
While chance is partially a comfy stand in for all the things we still don’t know, every journey into soccer’s heart of randomness has led to a similar conclusion: a lotta this shit is luck, no matter how you slice it. In fact, as Chris Anderson and David Sally wrote in their book The Numbers Game, “half of all goals can be attributed to luck, and the better team only wins half of the time”.
The biggest reason for Liverpool’s season-to-season divergence? You betcha: it’s bad luck
The most visited post on https://biscuitchaserfc.blogspot.com was the introductory post on installing R and Rstudio, followed by loading in the freely available StatsBomb data before plotting.
This post will come from the perspective that you have no experience of coding, and therefore some parts will seem obvious to those that have done something previously…hopefully theres something for everyone!
Harvard Business Review; Brian J. Lucas, Laura M. Giurge, Zachariah Berry, and Dolly Chugh from
… One problem with informal shortlists for male-dominated roles is that the prevalence of men in those jobs lead people to automatically think that men are more suitable for the roles than women. Consequently, when people think about candidates who would be a good fit for those jobs, male candidates are more likely to come to mind over equally qualified female candidates. In other words, an informal shortlist may have more male candidates than equally qualified female candidates simply because men come to mind first. Taken together, informal shortlists pose a particularly daunting barrier to gender equity because they dually suffer from the systemic bias of informal, network-based recruitment and from the implicit bias of selecting top-of-mind candidates in gendered roles.
Our research identifies a simple way to attenuate this gender bias: make your informal shortlist longer.