Coaches are tasked with helping their athletes improve, but when those athletes are underwater, in the case of competitive swimmers, it can be hard to actually see if what they’re doing is right. A University of Pittsburgh invention, called Impulse, helps coaches visualize a swimmer’s form under water.
A swimmer wears a belt around their waist, which is attached to a rope. That in turn is hooked up to a sensor at the edge of the pool. The force of each stroke pulls on the system, creating data that shows up as waves on a screen.
This provides an arm-by-arm representation of a swimmer’s form, and Pitt’s associate head coach for Women’s Swimming, Marc Christian, said that’s important for training. [audio, 1:28]
Aceil Halaby, COO of Bloomer Health Tech, joins Cheddar Innovates to break down how her team is creating a bra to monitor women’s heart health by combining fabrics engineering and machine learning. [video, 5:58]
Amazon’s truly wireless Echo Buds earbuds are excellent for their $130 price, to the point that they were the elephant in the room when we reviewed Apple’s new AirPods Pro. And they managed that resounding feat without one of their biggest rumored features — the ability to double as a fitness tracker and measure the calories you’ve burned.
But don’t rule out fitness tracking just yet, because CNBC and The Verge both spotted a new “Fitness” tab in the Echo Buds section of the Alexa app today.
Here’s a Thursday quick heads up for ya – Garmin has begun the roll-out of PacePro to the Forerunner 945 and FR245/FR245M series watches. You might remember PacePro was introduced on the Fenix 6 about two months ago, and essentially gives mile by mile (or kilometer by kilometer, or even random chunk by random chunk) pacing guidance for races by looking at the terrain and your pacing goals (including time and distance, but also details such as negative split or positive split). It’s like the old-school pace bands that you see at marathons with your splits for it but with way more smarts in it.
It’s super cool tech, but is also something that’s actually more than meets the eye under the covers. Specifically – Garmin designed it to be extensible. Meaning that as they get past this particular firmware update to these devices, they’ll be looking at how to make tweaks to it. Be it covering more use cases, or bringing in partners to leverage it. For example, the way Garmin Connect plops files on the watches was designed to be open to allow 3rd parties to create files as well.
Should your wearable data be protected as health data? Can it be? The more the information gets integrated into your care plan, the more potential there is to improve your health, says Mona Sobhani, Director of Research and Operations at USC’s Center for Body Computing. But also the more potential for your privacy to be exposed. It doesn’t have to be that way. [video, 23:36]
… Here are some surprising things scientists have only recently realized they could do with GPS.
1. Feel an earthquake
For centuries geoscientists have relied on seismometers, which measure how much the ground is shaking, to assess how big and how bad an earthquake is. GPS receivers served a different purpose — to track geologic processes that happen on much slower scales, such as the rate at which Earth’s great crustal plates grind past one another in the process known as plate tectonics. So GPS might tell scientists the speed at which the opposite sides of the San Andreas Fault are creeping past each other, while seismometers measure the ground shaking when that California fault ruptures in a quake.
When I’m not out wrestling polar bears, scaling un-scalable mountains, or leading groups through gale force Antarctic blizzards, I’m at home with my family. You would think that the offspring of a polar explorer would inherently frolic in the snow and cold. However, getting my kids (ages six and three) out snowshoeing can be equally as challenging as a two-month polar expedition. In our house, where we are still reeling from the Terrible Twos and a kindergartner whom we once affectionately called The Ticking Time Bomb, I’ve learned a few key strategies over the past couple of years to make any snowshoe outing with children fun and exciting.
The Deuter Kid Comfort 2 let us head out on multiple 5-plus-mile hikes with a 15-month-old in South Carolina’s Table Rock State Park and North Carolina’s Pisgah National Forest without pause. That’s because the pack was the most comfortable of our tester packs, with straps that made getting a great fit ergonomically across the hips and around our shoulders easy, meaning we were shy of complaints five hours in.
Caltech scientists have developed a new kind of polymer that can carry a chemical payload as part of its molecular structure and release it in response to mechanical stress. The chemical system they have developed could one day be used to create medical implants that can release drugs into the body when triggered by something like ultrasound waves, they say.
I took a music production class awhile back and when discussing digital vs. analog, the instructor said the issue with digital music is that even if it has a really high bit rate, there will always be a ceiling to the sounds captured. Analog music (read: vinyl) doesn’t have those digital constraints, so you can capture a nigh-endless range of sound.**
This analogy seems apt when talking about Glyph, the spirit that is constructed molecule by molecule to “be” whiskey, and requires no aging. Glyph is essentially the digital creation of a traditionally analog product. Alec Lee, CEO of Endless West, which makes Glyph, unknowingly alluded to this digital vs. analog situation during our phone interview this week. I asked him for the pitch on Glyph and the first thing he said was “We’re making electronic music for whiskey.”
Properly replacing water loss experienced during the intense minutes of a professional sports competition is a delicate and vital balance for athletes who battle dehydration on the ice, field or court.
“If you are thirsty you are probably already behind the curve and when you’re an elite athlete at these levels you have to be watching your hydration all day every day,” said Dr. Elizabeth Matzkin, chief of women’s sports medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
… the thing is, if you’re getting fit and getting stronger, you don’t need to become skinny or get abs. That’s not a natural endpoint of most people’s fitness journey. Models and bodybuilders are often only at their leanest for a short time each year, and use photos taken during that time to populate their feed the rest of the year. I follow a lot of Olympic weightlifters on Insta, and the week before a big meet (like the recent world championships), a lot of the smaller lifters post bikini pics. That’s because they do drastic and often unhealthy cuts (crash diets) to make weight, and it’s only deep into those cuts that they have abs for a hot minute. They don’t have that body type year round, and most are only dieting in the first place because they have calculated that a certain weight class gives them the best chance at a spot in the Olympics.
… To be honest, the biggest takeaway I expected to get from this talk was a list of Samuels-approved apps and wearable devices for tracking and analyzing sleep. But at one point, he asked for a show of hands from the audience, which consisted mostly of training staff from various Olympic sports, to see how many were using watches or other wearables to track their athletes’ sleep. No one raised a hand. “Good,” Samuels said. “Don’t.”
That’s not to say that all information about sleep is bad. In fact, one of the first things Samuels does with prospective new patients is ask them to keep a pen-and-paper sleep log for 30 days. The information in those logs can reveal all sorts of useful information like total weekly duration of sleep, regularity of sleep habits, late or early circadian bias, and so on. But pervasive sleep tracking can create its own sleep-troubling anxiety. For athletes who use sleep trackers on themselves and find it useful, that’s no problem. But for a coach or trainer to impose it on a team is more problematic. The simplest and most accurate way of assessing how someone is sleeping, Samuels said, is to ask them: “How are you sleeping?”
We all know that getting a proper bike fit is important when we get a new bike, especially if we’re changing from a road to a tri bike. But is it a one-and-done set up? Not according to Alan Caballero of CL Performance Training, a certified F.I.S.T. dynamic bike fitter.
“If you’re adjusting yourself a lot when on your bike, can’t stay in aero position for very long, or can’t rehabilitate a persistent injury despite treatment, these are indications that you might need to update your bike fit,” he says.
Caballero stresses that comfort comes first because performance will not follow if you can’t sustain your position throughout a ride or race.
Skeletal muscle plasticity is reflected by a dynamic balance between protein synthesis and breakdown, with basal muscle tissue protein synthesis rates ranging between 0.02 and 0.09%/h. Though it is evident that other musculoskeletal tissues should also express some level of plasticity, data on protein synthesis rates of most of these tissues in vivo in humans is limited. Six otherwise healthy patients (62±3 y), scheduled to undergo unilateral total knee arthroplasty, were subjected to primed continuous intravenous infusions with L-[ring-13C6]-Phenylalanine throughout the surgical procedure. Tissue samples obtained during surgery included muscle, tendon, cruciate ligaments, cartilage, bone, menisci, fat, and synovium. Tissue-specific fractional protein synthesis rates (%/h) were assessed by measuring the incorporation of L-[ring-13C6]-Phenylalanine in tissue protein and were compared with muscle tissue protein synthesis rates using a paired t test. Tendon, bone, cartilage, Hoffa’s fat pad, anterior and posterior cruciate ligament, and menisci tissue protein synthesis rates averaged 0.06±0.01, 0.03±0.01, 0.04±0.01, 0.11±0.03, 0.07±0.02, 0.04±0.01, and 0.04±0.01%/h, respectively, and did not significantly differ from skeletal muscle protein synthesis rates (0.04±0.01%/h; P>0.05). Synovium derived protein (0.13±0.03%/h) and intercondylar notch bone tissue protein synthesis rates (0.03±0.01%/h) were respectively higher and lower compared to skeletal muscle protein synthesis rates (P<0.05 and P<0.01, respectively). Basal protein synthesis rates in various musculoskeletal tissues are within the same range of skeletal muscle protein synthesis rates, with fractional muscle, tendon, bone, cartilage, ligament, menisci, fat, and synovium protein synthesis rates ranging between 0.02 and 0.13% per hour in vivo in humans.
Over the expanse of evolutionary history, humans, and predecessor Homo species, ran to survive. This legacy is reflected in many deeply and irrevocably embedded neurological and biological design features, features which shape how we run, yet were themselves shaped by running.
Smoothness is a widely recognised feature of healthy, proficient movement. Nevertheless, although the term ‘smoothness’ is commonly used to describe skilled athletic movement within practical sporting contexts, it is rarely specifically defined, is rarely quantified and remains barely explored experimentally. Elsewhere, however, within various health-related and neuro-physiological domains, many manifestations of movement smoothness have been extensively investigated. Within this literature, smoothness is considered a reflection of a healthy central nervous system (CNS) and is implicitly associated with practiced coordinated proficiency; ‘non-smooth’ movement, in contrast, is considered a consequence of pathological, un-practiced or otherwise inhibited motor control.
Despite the ubiquity of running across human cultures, however, and the apparent importance of smoothness as a fundamental feature of healthy movement control, to date, no theoretical framework linking the phenomenon of movement smoothness to running proficiency has been proposed. Such a framework could, however, provide a novel lens through which to contextualise the deep underlying nature of coordinated running control. Here, we consider the relevant evidence and suggest how running smoothness may integrate with other related concepts such as complexity, entropy and variability. Finally, we suggest that these insights may provide new means of coherently conceptualising running coordination, may guide future research directions, and may productively inform practical coaching philosophies. [full text]
… Educators and educational scholars have long recognized that there is something of a “sweet spot” when it comes to learning. That is, we learn best when we are challenged to grasp something just outside the bounds of our existing knowledge. When a challenge is too simple, we don’t learn anything new; likewise, we don’t enhance our knowledge when a challenge is so difficult that we fail entirely or give up.
So where does the sweet spot lie? According to the new study in the journal Nature Communications, it’s when failure occurs 15% of the time. Put another way, it’s when the right answer is given 85% of the time.
“These ideas that were out there in the education field – that there is this ‘zone of proximal difficulty,’ in which you ought to be maximizing your learning – we’ve put that on a mathematical footing,” said UArizona assistant professor of psychology and cognitive science Robert Wilson, lead author of the study, titled “The Eighty Five Percent Rule for Optimal Learning.”
AccessParks, a broadband company that specializes in bringing the internet to remote places, wants to bring WiFi to more areas in more national parks. They already perform this service for US military bases and now they’ve set their sights on greatly expanding wifi service in Yellowstone National Park. AccessParks, along with concessionaire Xanterra Parks & Resorts, hopes to install high-speed internet service in hundreds of park buildings and popular attractions in Yellowstone. They’ve submitted a proposal to the National Park Service, which requested public comment on the plan a few weeks back—that public comment period ends tomorrow, and you can have your say here.
Sanjiangyuan in Qinghai is set to become China’s first national park, opening in 2020. It’s part of the Chinese government’s plan to follow the US model of national parks by replacing seven different departments with one, the National Park Administration.