Invigorated by the coaching of Pep Guardiola and physically strengthened by extra hours in the gym, the Bayern Munich forward has produced three seasons of sustained excellence – and, at 31, he is still getting better.
Liverpool’s win over Tottenham featured 11 starters under the age of 24 but the number of young Englishmen playing regularly in the top flight has halved in the last 20 years
A huge majority of sporting outcomes are heavily dependent on speed, agility, and quickness. The fact that these athletic qualities are such “game changers” also makes them a fun topic to cover in lectures and writing. To that end, I thought I’d pay specific attention to speed, agility, and quickness in today’s post.
To study performance, physiological and biomechanical responses during repeated upper-body sprint exercise. METHODS:
Twelve male elite cross-country skiers performed eight 8-s maximal poling sprints with a 22-s recovery while sitting on a modified SkiErg poling ergometer. Force, movement velocity, cycle rate, work per cycle, oxygen saturation in working muscles and pulmonary oxygen uptake were measured continuously. A 3-min all-out ergometer poling test determined VO2peak, and 1 repetition maximum (1RM) strength was determined in a movement-specific pull-down. RESULTS:
Average sprint power was 281 ± 48 W, with the highest power on the first sprint, a progressive decline in power output over the following four sprints, and a sprint decrement of 11.7 ± 4.1 %. Cycle rate remained unchanged, whereas work per cycle progressively decreased (P < 0.05). m. triceps brachii and m. latissimus dorsi were highly desaturated already after the first sprint (all P < 0.05), whereas the response was delayed for m. biceps brachii and m. vastus lateralis. Correspondingly, increases in VO2 mainly occurred over the first two sprints (P < 0.05) and plateaued at approximately 75 % of VO2peak. 1RM correlated with power during the first four sprints and with average sprint power (r = 0.71-0.80, all P < 0.05), whereas VO2peak correlated with power in the last three sprints (r = 0.60-0.71, all P < 0.05).
CONCLUSIONS:
The main decrement in upper-body sprint performance was evident in the first five sprints, followed by highly desaturated muscles and a plateau in pulmonary oxygen uptake already after the first 2-3 sprints. While high maximal strength seems important for producing power, aerobic capacity correlates with power in the last sprints.
How much choice do people really want? Asking people to make their own choices requires time and focus — there’s all those options to consider. Default rules, which establish some starting points, can help.
At just 30 years old, Steve Magness is en route to becoming a living legend. The University of Houston cross-country coach is earning that status through innovation; in a sport rife with coaches who stick to tried-and-true training regimens, he’s not afraid to experiment.
“My athletes are awesome because they are like my own little guinea pigs,” he says. “Even though I teach them about what we do and why we do it, I’m sure they still think we are a bit crazy. But that is kind of our M.O. We try something and roll with it.”
Pierre-Alexandre Fournier’s iPhone knows whenever he takes a deep breath. Not just how quickly he breathes, but how deeply: the actual volume of air he takes in. His heartbeat, too. Not just his pulse rate, but the exact shape of the electrical signals going through his heart: his ECG.
Fournier is one of the co-founders of Hexoskin, a company that makes shirts with inbuilt biometric sensors. These shirts are designed to give athletes the same sort of data they could get from a performance lab—for example, heart rate recovery and lung capacity—but in more natural environments and without needing to be hooked up to a machine.
Stating that sleep is an essential biological process seems as obvious as saying that the sun rises every morning. Yet, researchers’ understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying the effects of sleep loss is still in its earliest stages. The risk for a host of metabolic disorders, including weight gain, diabetes, obesity, and cardiovascular disease, associated with reduced sleep is driving basic investigations on the topic.
… Rather than go into the science of what Miller made with his website GraphMyRun, let’s look at what it can do. Miller has taken practically every piece of data that you might get out on your run and cobbled together some basic software and an extensive graphing library to let you find out incredibly intricate details.
A contact lens that magnifies objects at the wink of an eye has been created by scientists to help people with impaired vision.
The lens contains an extremely thin telescope that is switched on when the wearer winks their right eye and returns to normal when they wink their left eye.
Last year, frozen fruit sales in this country surpassed a billion dollars, shattering all previous records. Sales have more than doubled since 2011.
So what’s behind this explosion of frozen fruit?
Sarah Nassauer, who reports on the food business for the Wall Street Journal, points to a pair of studies from the world’s biggest seller of fresh fruit.
With the NFL combine coming up for potential draftees, the inevitable debates on the relevance of the combine crop up, with arguments about who did well with what scores and why workout warriors like Mike Mamula or Yamon Figurs amounted to nothing in the NFL while slow players like Jerry Rice and Larry Fitzgerald have flourished.
That’s all true; no amount of combine production can replace intelligent evaluation of how a player plays a game. But falling on that crutch leads to faulty thinking, replacing the rule with the exception.
Every winter for one month, the combines for the National Football League and Major League Soccer draw a huge amount of attention in the media for what is simply a day of performance testing. Yet, after the combines players seem never to get tested again making me wonder if the numbers are so valuable shouldn’t teams test again to see if they are getting better, staying the same, or getting worse. This article will review two points that everyone should know: that testing is important, and you must be able to understand the relationships and limits of jumping and sprinting.