Simone Biles is the greatest athlete in the world today.
For me, this isn’t a debate. It’s a statement of fact. On Sunday, she won a record seventh United States gymnastics championship, continuing her jaw-dropping winning streak in every all-around competition she’s entered since 2013. The 24-year-old hasn’t lost in eight years. Typical gymnasts her age aren’t beating all their rivals by the big margins that, for Biles, have become routine.
Crystal Palace head of sports science Scott Guyett has revealed Wilfried Zaha’s ability to recover quickly from injuries and pain.
The Ivory Coast international’s style of play, dribbling to open up defences, have made him prone to injuries and has suffered different problems in the past including shoulder, hamstring and most recently a groin injury, but has managed to get over them, returning to action before the expected time.
… TGG spoke to the 26-year-old shortly before the Wembley final and he explained that one of the main reasons he’d joined Brentford was because “they have so many specialists to optimise everything.”
One of them is the Danish sleep expert Anna West, who has had a major impact on the midfielder’s time in West London. Via Zoom, they explained more about the work they’d done together
The New York Times, Rory Smith and Tariq Panja from
A couple of weeks ago, as the players who will represent Wales in this summer’s European soccer championships started to report for duty, their coaching staff instituted an unwritten rule: Try, if at all possible, not to mention the F word.
It is not that the word is expressly forbidden; more discouraged. “We don’t want it to be a factor going in,” said Tony Strudwick, the team’s head of performance. “We haven’t used the term. We are not talking about fatigue.”
Discussing it in public might look like making excuses. Talking about it in private might sow doubt in the players. That does not mean, of course, that Strudwick and his colleagues — and every other top team in the world facing a championship-filled summer — are not thinking about it almost constantly.
Native of Avinyó, a province of Barcelona, Albert Capellas’ coaching journey has taken him from FC Barcelona’s famed La Masia to clubs such as Vitesse, Brøndby IF and Borussia Dortmund.
Now the Head Coach of Denmark’s Under-21 National team, which took the continent by storm with their enticing approach to the game flavoured by Capellas’ methodologies in his Positional game, the Catalan coach sat down to speak to Adrián Blanco for MarcadorInt.
Intermountain Healthcare sport psychologist Dr. Tony Kemmochi advised that players on the Utah Jazz or any athlete on a championship run try to reduce tension and relax to improve their mental health.
Dr. Kemmochi spoke about the mental health of athletes during a conference call on Wednesday, June 9.
During the call, Dr. Kemmochi was asked the “unique stressors” that athletes, like Jazz players, are under on a championship run.
“My advice for those athletes in the situation like championships, something big, is to remember to just try to reduce that tense a little bit and relax,” Dr. Kemmochi said.
… scientists are starting to unravel how our wet, spongy, slippery organs talk to the brain and how the brain talks back. That two-way communication, known as interoception, encompasses a complex, bodywide system of nerves and hormones. Much recent exploration has focused on the vagus nerve: a massive, meandering network of more than 100,000 fibers that travel from nearly every internal organ to the base of the brain and back again.
With new techniques for mapping the routes of nerves in animals and measuring interoception in people, researchers are adding surprising new details to the rough sketches Penfield and others devised. For more than 100 years, scientists have known that the vagus nerve carries signals between the organs and the brainstem. As part of the parasympathetic nervous system—active when the body is at ease or recovering from stress—the vagus regulates autonomic functions such as heart rate, breathing, and digestion. But new studies have shown signals carried by vagal fibers climb beyond the brainstem, revealing a broad interoceptive network in the brain that interprets internal changes, anticipates the body’s needs, and sends commands to fulfill them. The network includes brain regions involved in more complex cognition, which means the nerves monitoring the body’s basic workings also respond to—and influence—how we remember, process emotion, and even construct our sense of self.
The Belgium men’s national soccer team has agreed a multi-year deal with Firstbeat Sports.
The agreement will see the international side use the Firstbeat Sports Sensor and app and benefit from the athlete monitoring solutions’ advanced performance analytics through both the Euro 2020 and 2022 World Cup schedule.
University of Texas at Arlington, News Center from
The experience of being “in the zone” is often used to describe a cognitive state of mind known as flow. A person enters a state of flow when highly engaged with a task, often losing track of time and enjoying a high level of success.
Cesar Torres, assistant professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at The University of Texas at Arlington, has recently received a grant of approximately $175,000 from the National Science Foundation to use machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to identify when a person is falling out of flow and introduce an intervention to regain flow.
Torres’s research intermingles computer science and maker culture, drawing inspiration from activities that naturally produce states of flow, such as sewing, embroidering and knitting. In his study, he will use off-the-shelf sensors to capture how study participants enter and exit states of flow as they develop these crafting skills.
Evaluating the biomechanics of soft tissues at depths well below their surface, and at high precision and in real time, would open up diagnostic opportunities. Here, we report the development and application of miniaturized electromagnetic devices, each integrating a vibratory actuator and a soft strain-sensing sheet, for dynamically measuring the Young’s modulus of skin and of other soft tissues at depths of approximately 1–8 mm, depending on the particular design of the sensor. We experimentally and computationally established the operational principles of the devices and evaluated their performance with a range of synthetic and biological materials and with human skin in healthy volunteers. Arrays of devices can be used to spatially map elastic moduli and to profile the modulus depth-wise. As an example of practical medical utility, we show that the devices can be used to accurately locate lesions associated with psoriasis. Compact electronic devices for the rapid and precise mechanical characterization of living tissues could be used to monitor and diagnose a range of health disorders.
Assessment of muscle function is an essential indicator for estimating elderly health, evaluating motor function, and instructing rehabilitation training, which also sets urgent requirements for mechanical sensors with superior quantification, accuracy, and reliability. To overcome the rigidity and vulnerability of traditional metallic electrodes, we synthesize an ionic hydrogel with large deformation tolerance and fast self-healing ability. And we propose a stretchable, self-healing, and skin-mounted (Triple S) active sensor (TSAS) based on the principles of electrostatic induction and electrostatic coupling. The skin modulus-matched TSAS provides outstanding sensing properties: maximum output voltage of 78.44 V, minimal detection limit of 0.2 mN, fast response time of 1.03 ms, high signal-to-noise ratio and excellent long-term service stability. In training of arm muscle, the functional signals of biceps and triceps brachii muscles as well as the joint dexterity of bending angle can be acquired simultaneously through TSAS. The signal can also be sent wirelessly to a terminal for analysis. With the characteristics of high sensitivity, reliability, convenience, and low-cost, TSAS shows its potential to be the next-generation procedure for real-time assessment of muscle function and rehabilitation training.
This biomarker is largely absent in people suffering from major depressive disorder, and this absence is further associated with pessimism in daily life, the study finds.
Researchers used brain imaging to identify differences in the neurotransmitter glutamate within the medial prefrontal cortex before and after study participants underwent stressful tasks. They then followed the participants for four weeks, using a survey protocol to regularly assess how participants rated their expected and experienced outcomes for daily activities.
“To our knowledge, this is the first work to show that glutamate in the human medial prefrontal cortex shows an adaptive habituation to a new stressful experience if someone has recently experienced a lot of stress,” says senior author Michael Treadway, professor in Emory University’s department of psychology and department of psychiatry and behavioral science.
South American players should be given the chance to opt out of playing the Copa America this month, the World Leagues Forum (WLF) said in an open letter to FIFA and the South American Football Confederation (CONMEBOL) on Saturday.
The WLF, an organisation that represents more than 40 professional leagues and their clubs, said the abrupt decision to move the Copa America to Brazil after Argentina pulled out due to a surge in COVID-19 cases “directly affect(s) leagues, their member clubs and their players.”
“As far as the WLF is concerned, given this sudden change of location and circumstances… we consider that players should be given the opportunity to withdraw from the competition and that clubs should be able to recall their players, specifically if there is a travel restriction or a quarantine obligation on their return,” said the letter seen by Reuters.
In one sense, the Bills are already behind the eight-ball as compared to the rest of the AFC East during the 2021 season.
According to an ESPN NFL analytics study, in terms of most net travel miles in their 2021 schedule, the Bills will do more travel than any other divisional foe.