… Mayfield knew he needed a change. More specifically, a physical transformation, which would require an overhaul of his offseason regimen and daily eating habits. He said then he felt too slow and too heavy. And, among other reasons, his performance suffered.
A year and a half later, after a drastic recommitment to eating smarter and exercising harder, Mayfield is in the best shape of his career.
He’s reduced his body fat from 18 to 11%. He lost 14 pounds despite adding 4 pounds of muscle, and now weighs 214, which is lighter than what his listed weight was at Oklahoma. He can do almost twice as many pushups in one stint as before (45 from 25). And he’s hit new personal highs in everything from squats to the vertical jump.
A team’s creative fulcrum – or playmaker – used to be their attacking midfielder, or number 10.
Think Diego Maradona, Johan Cruyff, Zinedine Zidane. However, Uefa’s excellent Technical Report on Euro 2020 has effectively sounded the death knell for this particular position.
“The playmaker is no longer the number 10,” states former England, Russia and AC Milan manager Fabio Capello in the report.
During a meeting of Uniqlo ambassadors, Roger Federer joined wheelchair tennis professionals Shingo Kunieda and Gordon Reid to discuss various aspects of the sport, mainly revealing what the biggest challenge will be in the coming times.
“I don’t see a revolution per se. I think the players will get fitter and stronger,” said Federer. “And thanks to that, they can maintain their level of play for longer. For us, I think the key will be how to stay injury-free for a long period of time, which will be the challenge.”
Additionally, the 20-time Grand Slam champion shared how science will benefit tennis professionals who come of age. In the end, he realized the many similarities between tennis and wheelchair tennis. “But, I think with sports science and things like this, a lot of guys will find good ways.
Very few teams in the 2020-21 season outperformed their pre-season expectations as much as the New York Knicks. First-time All Star Julius Randle won 98 out of a possible 100 first place votes in running away with the award for Most Improved Player. What changed in Randle’s game and how sustainable is his big leap?
Randle has always displayed the ability to create baskets for his teammates, assisting on nearly 16% of his teammates’ made shots over the prior three seasons. In the 2020-21 season, Randle elevated his playmaking to assist on over a quarter of his teammates’ baskets.
While participation in sports-related activities results in improved health outcomes, high school athletes are at risk for lower extremity injuries, especially ankle, knee, and thigh injuries. Efforts to promote the adoption and implementation of evidence-driven approaches to reduce injury risk among school-aged athletes are needed. However, there is limited research regarding the perceived barriers, facilitators, and adherence factors that may influence the successful implementation of effective warm-up routines among this population. Methods
We conducted a qualitative study using semi-structured interviews and focus groups to assess high school basketball coach and player current practices, knowledge, and perspectives about warm-ups and lower-extremity injuries (LEIs). We interviewed coaches (n = 12) and players (n = 30) from May to October 2019. Participants were recruited from public high schools in a joint school district in Southern California. Multiple coders employed thematic analysis of the data using validated methods. Results
Coaches and players reported regular engagement (e.g., daily) in warm-up routines, but the time dedicated (range 5–45 min), types of exercises, and order varied substantially. Players often co-lead the warm-up practice with the coach or assistant coach. Despite regular engagement in warm-up, players and coaches report multiple challenges, including (1) limited time and space to warm-up effectively at games, (2) a perception that young players are not prone to injury, (3) competing demands for coaches’ time during practice, and (4) coaches’ lack of knowledge. Coaches and players perceive that warming up before practice will result in fewer injuries, and many players are motivated to warm up as a result of their personal injury experience; however, they desire guidance on the ideal exercises for preventing injury and training on the proper form for each exercise. Conclusions
Regular involvement in basketball warm-up routines is common among high school teams, but the methods and time dedicated to these practices varied. Players and coaches are eager for more information on warm-up programs shown to reduce LEIs. [full text]
Canadian Running Magazine, Brittany Hambleton from
To foam roll or not to foam roll? That is the question many runners ask themselves, and the debate has been contested on countless group runs. Some runners swear by their foam roller, while others believe it’s nothing but a useless torture device. The sports science world is also a bit torn on the topic, but two new studies have demonstrated there may be some benefits to the popular recovery tool.
Daily Hive (Canada), Offside Montreal blog, Adam Laskaris from
The Canadiens appear to have signed Dale Lablans into a new role as strength and conditioning coach, as per their hockey operations web page.
Lablans’ Canadiens website bio has yet to be updated, but from what we do know about him, he seems to have quite an in-depth work history.
Habs Eyes on the Prize writer Andrew Zadarnowski was the first to pick up the news about Lablans and his involvement with the Canadian Special Forces, working in Petawawa, Ontario.
Zadarnowski added that Lablans wrote a thesis last year at Toronto’s York University for “predictive result analysis for Special Ops candidates.”
Across a range of creative domains, individual careers are characterized by hot streaks, which are bursts of high-impact works clustered together in close succession. Yet it remains unclear if there are any regularities underlying the beginning of hot streaks. Here, we analyze career histories of artists, film directors, and scientists, and develop deep learning and network science methods to build high-dimensional representations of their creative outputs. We find that across all three domains, individuals tend to explore diverse styles or topics before their hot streak, but become notably more focused after the hot streak begins. Crucially, hot streaks appear to be associated with neither exploration nor exploitation behavior in isolation, but a particular sequence of exploration followed by exploitation, where the transition from exploration to exploitation closely traces the onset of a hot streak. Overall, these results may have implications for identifying and nurturing talents across a wide range of creative domains. [full text]
… In a fall 2020 report, my colleagues and I at the Center for American Progress explored the influence of a “purpose and relevance” mindset—a student’s belief that school is related to their values and experiences—on education outcomes. We found that this mindset could be especially important for STEM persistence. Specifically, students in the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 who expressed more interest in their 9th grade math and science courses (evidenced by their responses to questions like “You think this class is boring”) and students who indicated that they found math and science more useful (by agreeing with statements such as “What students learn in this class is useful for everyday life”) also had higher rates, on average, of high school graduation, four-year-college enrollment, and pursuit of a STEM major.
The Conversation; Tim Olds, Carol Maher, Verity Booth from
For most of our lives, the rhythms of our days are governed by crystallised routines: we get up, have breakfast, go to school or work, have lunch, dinner, watch TV, go to bed. For families, weekly routines often revolve around kids’ sport or active hobbies.
Then there are times in life when our routines are upended. Mostly these are life transitions like starting school or retiring. Less often, disruption stems from individual crises like sickness or job loss. Even rarer are social upheavals. The COVID pandemic is certainly one of those.
A number of surveys report changes in parents’ and kids’ physical activity and screen time during lockdowns. But what will this mean for their long term health and fitness?
Australasian Leisure Management, Kunal Sawhney from
… Conclusively, cutting edge technology is indeed transforming and revolutionising the sports world. With such technological advancements, the sports industry has become more resilient, fair, and equitable to all. However, there are certain drawbacks and inefficiencies that are needed to be looked at. Still, with consistent developments, there is no doubt that technology will soon empower the sports industry to heights never imagined before.
For Alcorn State’s football program, traditionally one of the best among the Historically Black Colleges and Universities that play in the Southwest Athletic Conference, this weekend’s game at South Alabama is a significant financial deal.
As one of the lowest-resourced programs in the Football Championship Subdivision, with an athletics department budget in the $6 million range, a $360,000 paycheck to play one game represents a large chunk of their revenue for the year.
But it is unclear whether the team will make the trip to South Alabama because it has not been able to practice Monday or Tuesday as it failed to have an athletic trainer available to treat players for injuries, head coach Fred McNair said in a radio interview Monday and four people with direct knowledge of the situation confirmed to USA TODAY Sports.
According to a commonly held view, the obesity pandemic is caused by overconsumption of modern, highly palatable, energy-dense processed foods, exacerbated by a sedentary lifestyle. However, obesity rates remain at historic highs, despite a persistent focus on eating less and moving more, as guided by the energy balance model (EBM). This public health failure may arise from a fundamental limitation of the EBM itself. Conceptualizing obesity as a disorder of energy balance restates a principle of physics without considering the biological mechanisms that promote weight gain. An alternative paradigm, the carbohydrate-insulin model (CIM), proposes a reversal of causal direction. According to the CIM, increasing fat deposition in the body—resulting from the hormonal responses to a high-glycemic-load diet—drives positive energy balance. The CIM provides a conceptual framework with testable hypotheses for how various modifiable factors influence energy balance and fat storage. Rigorous research is needed to compare the validity of these 2 models, which have substantially different implications for obesity management, and to generate new models that best encompass the evidence. [full text]
