Las Vegas Aces star Liz Cambage is back with the team and expected to play in the first game back from the Olympic break. Aces head coach Bill Laimbeer confirmed Monday after the team’s first practice since the break that she was back and “looked good.”
Cambage pulled out of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics to focus on her mental health. Cambage was the most prolific player on the Australian Opals, the country’s women’s basketball team. The Opals did not medal in Tokyo.
In a statement, Cambage announced she would be stepping down from the team so that she could focus on her well-being and mental health.
Most runs take us over a variety of surfaces. This adds variety to your training and makes it more effective by forcing your body to adjust to the changing terrain.
But do you know how the different running surfaces affect your body? Learn about the most common surfaces and how to use them as an effective training tool.
Ensuring athletes are prepared in the most optimal condition to perform is a huge challenge for coaches and athletes alike. In order to continue to perform at the highest-level athletes must be able to balance stress (training and general life) with recovery. A failure to do so can firstly result in under recovery (and a subsequent reduction in performance), before turning to non-functional overreaching, overtraining and ultimately overtraining syndrome where the risk of athlete burnout , as well as the risk of injury and illness are raised.
The accurate detection of foot-strike and toe-off is often critical in the assessment of running biomechanics. The gold standard method for step event detection requires force data which are not always available. Although kinematics-based algorithms can also be used, their accuracy and generalisability are limited, often requiring corrections for speed or foot-strike pattern. The purpose of this study was to develop FootNet, a novel kinematics and deep learning-based algorithm for the detection of step events in treadmill running. Five treadmill running datasets were gathered and processed to obtain segment and joint kinematics, and to identify the contact phase within each gait cycle using force data. The proposed algorithm is based on a long short-term memory recurrent neural network and takes the distal tibia anteroposterior velocity, ankle dorsiflexion/plantar flexion angle and the anteroposterior and vertical velocities of the foot centre of mass as input features to predict the contact phase within a given gait cycle. The chosen model architecture underwent 5-fold cross-validation and the final model was tested in a subset of participants from each dataset (30%). Non-parametric Bland-Altman analyses (bias and [95% limits of agreement]) and root mean squared error (RMSE) were used to compare FootNet against the force data step event detection method. The association between detection errors and running speed, foot-strike angle and incline were also investigated. FootNet outperformed previously published algorithms (foot-strike bias = 0 [–10, 7] ms, RMSE = 5 ms; toe-off bias = 0 [–10, 10] ms, RMSE = 6 ms; and contact time bias = 0 [–15, 15] ms, RMSE = 8 ms) and proved robust to different running speeds, foot-strike angles and inclines. We have made FootNet’s source code publicly available for step event detection in treadmill running when force data are not available.
A Miami-based startup transforming the way athletes and their coaches prepare for competition will expand into virtual gaming after closing a $5.2 million seed funding round.
StatusPro, a sports technology and gaming firm, uses real-time player data to power holographic experiences that give athletes the ability to simulate practice and game scenarios – all without the physical toll that comes with actually playing the game. Founded by former football players, StatusPro’s seed round was led by Chicago-based venture capital firm KB Partners and TitleTownTech, a partnership between the NFL’s Green Bay Packers and Microsoft Corp. that builds and funds early-stage, high-growth businesses.
When the Phoenix Suns, anchored by stars Devin Booker and Chris Paul, went on their run for the NBA title this season — reaching the finals for the first time since 1993 and coming within two games of clinching the championship — they had a different sixth man backing them up: 5G wireless technology.
As the pandemic locked down NBA facilities around the country, the Suns spent $230 million to renovate the Footprint Center in Phoenix and build a new practice facility — complete with super-fast 5G connectivity from Verizon, high-resolution cameras and over 100 sensors. The technology has helped the team improve player shooting skills and determine when players are getting too fatigued.
The new tools helped general manager James Jones and the rest of the coaching staff better evaluate player performance and adapt in real time. Ryan Resh, the Suns’ head of data analytics, credits 5G with “pushing the NBA’s boundaries” regarding how the coaches train and teach their athletes.
… The WNBA Commissioner’s Cup Championship Game will be the first time the WNBA uses in-game wearables technology to provide unprecedented data such as how fast players sprint, how often they jump and how quickly they change direction. Kinexon Wearables will be worn in the waistband of the Nike uniform shorts. Along with the wearables, the WNBA will use optical tracking technology by Hawk-Eye that will generate 3D immersive highlights, which will be used in real time during the Amazon Prime Video broadcast. The combination of the technologies is expected to gather approximately 50 million data points during the game.
The emergence of the COVID-19 Delta variant has reintroduced familiar and disconcerting late-summer conversations to the world of college sports with the start of fall competition weeks away.
“Our approach is one of caution,” said Dr. Deena Casiero, UConn’s director of sports medicine and head team physician. “When I talk to athletes about this upcoming semester, I tell them we’re in a better place than we were last year, but this is not behind us. This pandemic is not over. … Until we get that [national] vaccination rate up, we are going to see continued mutations, which are going to bring different challenges.”
Yahoo News, Chattanooga Free Press, Mark Wiedmer from
Even being the best at what you do — and make no mistake, Chattanooga native Greg Banks is one of the best athletic trainers on Earth — can have its wake-up calls.
Especially when your bride of 25 years is forced to take care of the kids, the house, three dogs, a cat and her job as a pastor all by herself for 26 straight weeks while you resume your role as head trainer for the U.S. women’s national soccer team during its Tokyo Olympics run.
The group of Japanese centenarians had seemingly magical health powers.
Sure, with an average age of 107, they’re among the longest-living humans on Earth. But they were also shockingly healthy, protected from chronic diseases that inevitably haunt us as we age: obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and cancer.
This month, a Japanese study uncovered one piece of their secret. The key to their healthy longevity lies in their guts, or more specifically, in trillions of microbes thriving synergistically as their hosts gracefully age.
What stood out wasn’t the amount of gut bugs. Rather, it was their composition.
Factors contributing to the accurate measurement of self-reported physical activity are not well understood in middle-aged adults. We investigated the associations between two self-reported surveys and objectively measured physical activity in middle-aged adults, and the influence of individual and sociodemographic factors on these associations, at different intensities utilizing an observational study design. Methods
Participants (n = 156) wore a SenseWear Armband™ (SWA) for a continuous seven-day period over the triceps of the left arm, to measure energy expenditure in metabolic equivalents. Participants also completed the Physical Activity Recall questionnaire (PAR) and Active Australia Survey (AAS). Associations were analyzed separately in general linear models for each intensity. The influence of individual and sociodemographic factors was assessed through moderator analyses. Results
The PAR and SWA were significantly positively associated at moderate (β = 0.68, 95% CI 0.16–1.20), vigorous (β = 0.36, 95% CI 0.20–0.53), moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) (β = 0.52, 95% CI 0.20–0.83), and total METmins (β = 0.63, 95% CI 0.35–0.90), the AAS and SWA were associated at all intensities (moderate (β = 0.41, 95% CI 0.15–0.67), vigorous (β = 0.32, 95% CI 0.19–0.46), MVPA (β = 0.42, 95% CI 0.18–0.65) and total METmins (β = 0.62, 95% CI 0.29–0.96). A significant interaction between the PAR and sex for vigorous-intensity unveiled a weaker association in women. Both surveys tended to under-report physical activity. The largest margins of error were present at light and moderate intensities. For the PAR, participants reported over 20 hours, or 69% less light physical activity than recorded by the SWA per week. For the AAS, participants reported over 7 hours, or 38% less moderate physical activity. Compared to lighter intensities, time spent at a vigorous intensity was overreported by participants with the PAR and AAS by 91 and 43 minutes per week, respectively. The addition of Body Mass Index (BMI) resulted in non-significant interactions between the PAR and SWA for moderate-intensity, and the AAS and SWA for vigorous-intensity; a significant interaction between AAS and BMI indicated that the strength of the association differed by BMI for vigorous-intensity. Conclusions
The PAR and AAS are not equivalent to the SWA, and sex and BMI may alter the associations between the measures. [full text]
In 1891, Dr. James Naismith invented the game of basketball. A year later, physical education teacher Senda Berenson Abbott of Smith College decided to adapt the game for the nineteenth-century woman, complete with a set of modified rules. Each player was confined to a small zone on the court. She was not allowed to bounce the ball more than three times. Otherwise, she might risk overexerting herself—or potentially dislodging her uterus.
“Anxiety about female exercise is at least a century old in the United States,” writes historian Martha Verbrugge. The early twentieth century saw the emergence of a new culture of “active womanhood.” Organized sports flourished in blue-collar industries, nonwhite communities, and some Black colleges and training schools. Schools introduced mandatory physical education. Upper- and middle-class white women regularly took part in non-competitive mixed-gender recreation.