Elton Brand earns a decent dollar for being a backup front-line player, which he does well for the Hawks. But in truth, and this is certainly no disrespect to Brand, one of his most important duties might be shagging practice shots for Kyle Korver.
Swish, swish, swish. Brand was a very good rebounder at the height of his 15-year career, but those skills are rarely necessary when Korver’s in a groove and taking aim. There’s usually only one sound dominating the practice gym, and it’s not clank.
For Emma Jackson, rehab is helping her return to full fitness and become stronger than ever. Matt Long visited her in Burton-on-Trent to find out more.
The human mind can be its own worst enemy. When we want to do well in sports, we often intensify attentional focus on bodily movements that are best off left on automatic pilot. The result, even for elite athletes, can be a dire instance of choking. The muscles stiffen or shake. Fluid, expert movement is lost, and the learning of new skills is impaired.
A common assumption is that an internal focus is harmful to performance because it directs unhelpful conscious attention to bodily control. But what if the costs of self-focus are more general and profound than that? Perhaps merely thinking about ourselves in any way is harmful to performance and learning because to do so activates the “self-schema”.
Attention all BSMPGer’s – Only three weeks remain until our early bird pricing runs out for our 2015 Summer Seminar!
This year’s event features Dr. Stress himself, Robert Sapolsky as well as Al Smith and Vincent Walsh from the UK. Join the leaders in Sports Medicine and Performance training for this two day event.
Defending champion Shalane Flanagan skipped the national 10,000-metre championships last June because she was preparing for a marathon…in September. Like Flanagan, many top athletes race sparingly, waiting until their fitness is perfect before toeing the line. But it wasn’t always that way. In the months leading up to his American best of 2:09:55 at the 1975 Boston Marathon, for example, Bill Rodgers raced everything from two miles on the indoor track to 30K on the roads.
He enjoyed racing, but he also used minor races as stepping-stones toward two or three major goal races each year. This approach has benefits that are hard to replicate in workouts: Intermediate goals maintain motivation, and the race atmosphere pushes you to run hard.
England’s Women were put through their paces at St. George’s Park on Sunday as they got together ahead of their first match of 2015 – against two-time World Cup winners USA.
… Over the past several years, your lab has published some incredible research on sprint mechanics. Why should we care about sprinting forces – how can it help us improve upon our training methods? … our approach is considering the overall mechanical output of the neuro-musculo-tendinous system and the resulting forces applied onto the ground to propel the center of mass (CoM), and in turn the entire body. So in this “dynamics” context, ground reaction forces (GRF) in relation to subjects’ body mass are the main determinants of the motion of the athlete’s body, and in turn of his sprint performance.
Medical device manufacturer DexCom over the weekend announced the company is developing an app for the upcoming Apple Watch that will display all of a user’s glucose and blood sugar-related health data on their wrist (via The Wall Street Journal).
The company, whose expertise lies in “continuous glucose monitoring systems for diabetes management,” says the app is expected to be ready when the Apple Watch launches in April. The app would sync to existing monitors manufactured by DexCom that use a “hair’s width sensor” located under the user’s skin to measure and report blood glucose levels every five minutes, a more seamless process than traditional skin-prick glucose monitors, according to the company.
When third-year Stanford medical student Pelu Tran began clinical rotations and started caring for patients in the summer of 2012, he experienced firsthand how paperwork, documentation and billing coding can leave “little time for the patient-physician relationship.” He shared his frustrations with Biodesign classmate and Stanford MBA graduate Ian Shakil and, after the pair tested out an early version of Google Glass, the solution became clear: develop a platform based on the wearable technology that automates the record-keeping process for doctors.
Hospital for Special Surgery, HSS on the Move blog from
How many of you with a thyroid disorder or diabetes are aware of their potential effects on your bone strength? Most of us associate bone loss and fractures with aging, and osteoporosis is generally considered an affliction of older menopausal women. While this is true, the younger among us may also be at risk for brittle bones if they suffering from other hormonal problems, some of them quite common and others rare but still possible. And they are more than a few, but usually easy to treat and even cure as long as you know you have them!
Injury is a part of sport and one of the most difficult times in an athlete’s career is often when they are trying to return from injury and regain function to allow them to perform at the highest level. A lot goes into preparing an athlete who is coming back from injury from all parties involved – rehab professional, strength coach, sport coach, and the athlete themselves. I thought I’d record a few of my random thoughts on this topic from the standpoint of strength and conditioning. I am not a rehab professional; however, a strength coach should be instrumental in assisting athletes who are rehabbing and should work with the rehab professional to make some of the thoughts below build into a solid program:
Big blokes, these rugby men. Irish sides are not renowned as behemoths of the rugby world but Joe Schmidt’s side of today still dwarfs those of 30 years ago. Watching tape of matches even from the early 1990s, never mind the ’80s or beforehand, and the slenderness of those on the field is quite clear compared to the muscled specimens that will be on show over the coming Six Nations weekends. Rugby players are big. And they’re getting bigger.
For decades, Coach Dean Smith would tell his players, both at halftime and after a game, how many points they had scored and had allowed per possession. In the 1960s, he began to assign managers to track the statistic.
“That was always something we went over,” said Jeff Lebo, now East Carolina’s head coach, who played for Smith at North Carolina from 1985 to 1989. “ ‘We’re 1.2 per possession, the other team’s 0.6.’ We knew what that meant.”