The US national team has won just one of its past nine games, dating to the group stage in last summer’s World Cup, and is winless in its last five outings after Chile rallied for a 3-2 victory over the Yanks last week.
Fitness, head coach Jurgen Klinsmann noted following Wednesday’s defeat in Rancagua, is an issue, just one among many, and according to him it points to the evolution of the USA as a soccer nation.
There were 60 million good reasons for Phil Jackson to accept the formidable challenge of rebuilding the Knicks along with one intangible benefit that could not be banked. Some might think the one he chose, however, borders on obsession: to resurrect his beloved triangle and prove to the world that it is an offense for the ages.
But it didn’t take long after Jackson sat down for a recent interview over lunch to admit that his debut as an N.B.A. executive has been sobering, stressful and, during early morning reflections, doubt-inducing.
“Like nothing I’ve seen before,” he said of the Knicks’ first 41 games, of which they lost 36, a half-season of hell. “So far, my experiment has fallen flat on its face.”
The toll of playing year-round basketball finally caught up with Phoenix Mercury star Diana Taurasi.
Less than a year after leading the Mercury to their third WNBA title, Taurasi announced Tuesday that she will skip the WNBA season this summer after accepting a lucrative offer from her Russian club team to rest.
This weekend, the German Bundesliga returns to action after its month-long winter break. After a grueling World Cup year with a shortened summer vacation for many players, the chance to rest was a long time coming. “The load on players is too high,” Joachim Löw, head coach of the German men’s national team, said back in October. “The high demands on teams in national leagues and of course the Champions League, it’s too much. If you look at the players, they need more of a break.”
The idea that there might be too much soccer also manifested in a different way in October, just across the North Sea. Raheem Sterling, England’s then-19-year-old wonderkid, bowed out of a European Championship qualifier against Estonia because he felt tired. He was roundly criticized for lacking commitment and physical fitness. But among the voices rising to Sterling’s defense was fellow England international Frank Lampard’s. Perhaps this is because Lampard is aware of something many fans and pundits don’t often consider: at the elite level, the game is constantly increasing in speed and intensity. Lampard is going into his 20th year as a professional. He’s lived the changes.
Tip #1 – Don’t Make Them Sore! … if I’m taking my guys in the gym on a Tuesday and crushing them so badly that it affects their performance throughout the rest of the week, that’s not a good thing.
Where there is a will; there is a way. Not all Kenyan athletes have vehicles to use in their long runs, but they still find ways to do that. Below are four typical ways in which most of the Kenyan athletes do their long runs.
Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports from
The purpose of this study was to examine the extent to which fundamental movement skills and physical fitness scores assessed in early adolescence predict self-reported physical activity assessed 6 years later. The sample comprised 333 (200 girls, 133 boys; M age = 12.41) students. The effects of previous physical activity, sex, and body mass index (BMI) were controlled in the main analyses. Adolescents’ fundamental movement skills, physical fitness, self-report physical activity, and BMI were collected at baseline, and their self-report energy expenditure (metabolic equivalents: METs) and intensity of physical activity were collected using the International Physical Activity Questionnaire 6 years later. Results showed that fundamental movement skills predicted METs, light, moderate, and vigorous intensity physical activity levels, whereas fitness predicted METs, moderate, and vigorous physical activity levels. Hierarchical regression analyses also showed that after controlling for previous levels of physical activity, sex, and BMI, the size of the effect of fundamental movement skills and physical fitness on energy expenditure and physical activity intensity was moderate (R2 change between 0.06 and 0.15), with the effect being stronger for high intensity physical activity.
… Comb through U.S. Soccer’s archives and the one thing you’ll find in overabundant supply? Industry. Applying it in exactly the right places got the U.S. through in 2002. Relying on it to a fault doomed the U.S. in 2006, and 2010 settled somewhere in the middle. As it usually does.
What it needed, and still needs, was tactical transition training. The legs were always there. The brain often was not. This is where I think Klinsmann’s done admirable but understandably incomplete work. You saw it in the first half of the team’s eventual 3-2 loss to Chile in late January. There are flashes of truly literate interchange between the lines, and they seem to shift and morph relatively well as the team flips between attacking and defending, and vice versa. Nothing revolutionary, but most can see improvement in this arena. The dead legs in the second half, however, illuminated the scuffed side of the coin.
Today the National Sleep Foundation released new guidelines, serving to clarify the meaning of “enough” in the tedious rejoinder, “Most people don’t get enough sleep.” The sleep-advocacy foundation convened a panel of experts, led by Harvard professor Charles Czeisler, to review hundreds of studies, reminding us that too little sleep can lead to weight gain, depression, and relative deficits of attention—and that too much sleep is, likewise, inadvisable.
Never before has technological innovation had such an impact on how fast, far and high virtually all sports, and athletes can go. Driving the innovation is the world’s universal passion for sports, and the growing global market and revenues, that the industry supports. A recent Forbes article cites, Real Madrid – the Spanish soccer franchise – as the world’s most valuable sports team valued at $3.44 billion. The New York Yankees are valued at $2.5 billion and the Dallas Cowboys come in at $2.3 billion.
With so much at stake, the industry as a whole has amped up its focus on using innovation to push the participant and spectator experience beyond expectations. From global access to professional events to individual athletic performance, technology is shaping business strategies and delivering increasing value across the industry.
Trainers use augmented reality – once relegated to Star Trek rather than a football field – to sharpen athletes’ reactions. Biometrics measure players’ vitals and energy levels to determine when they can return to play after an injury. These are examples of how the sports industry is looking outside itself for innovations that provide a competitive advantage. Medicine, information technologies and lightweight materials from the space and aviation fields– all are making their contribution to the sporting industry, too, often through the process of Open Innovation.
A knee injury can have painful and disabling long-term repercussions, such as the early onset of knee osteoarthritis (OA) or accelerated knee OA. Injury prevention and effective interventions may help reduce the risks, but patient education and monitoring after an injury are also warranted.
Many patients and clinicians focus on immediate outcomes following a knee injury, such as decreasing pain and disability, as well as restoring muscle strength, physical function, and preinjury activity levels. However, the long-term implications following a knee injury are becoming increasingly apparent, and there is a need to educate patients about long-term risks.
The January transfer window is now closed, the rolling Sky Sports tickers stopped, the rumour mill shuttered (for the next 48 hours anyway). All that is left for us to do is watch and see whether any of the myriad new signings across European football will have an impact.
The reality is however that while some new players will be good enough to immediately enter the first team, an alarmingly high number will watch from the bench, or worse. As 21st Club’s Omar Chaudhuri told Sean Ingle for the Guardian last week, “[about half] of new signings [in the January window] are no more utilised on the pitch than players already at the club, despite being brought in specifically to improve the team in the short run…Meanwhile, a quarter of these new players fail to play 20% of minutes.”
Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports from
The objective of this study was to characterize the mechanics of maximal running sprint acceleration in high-level athletes. Four elite (100-m best time 9.95–10.29 s) and five sub-elite (10.40–10.60 s) sprinters performed seven sprints in overground conditions. A single virtual 40-m sprint was reconstructed and kinetics parameters were calculated for each step using a force platform system and video analyses. Anteroposterior force (FY), power (PY), and the ratio of the horizontal force component to the resultant (total) force (RF, which reflects the orientation of the resultant ground reaction force for each support phase) were computed as a function of velocity (V). FY-V, RF-V, and PY-V relationships were well described by significant linear (mean R2 of 0.892 ± 0.049 and 0.950 ± 0.023) and quadratic (mean R2 = 0.732 ± 0.114) models, respectively. The current study allows a better understanding of the mechanics of the sprint acceleration notably by modeling the relationships between the forward velocity and the main mechanical key variables of the sprint. As these findings partly concern world-class sprinters tested in overground conditions, they give new insights into some aspects of the biomechanical limits of human locomotion.