You hear it from just about every major league hitter: Strikeouts are rising because pitchers throw really, really fast. Relievers trot in from the bullpen, one after another, and overpower the hitters.
But the original postmodern bullpen ace is still the most extraordinary. Aroldis Chapman continues to stretch the limits of plausible pitching.
Get up early and bring yourself to the ground to build the first bricks. That’s how it’s been since winter conditioning began in early January, the true beginning of Mike Riley’s first Nebraska football team.
For the first time since junior defensive tackle Maliek Collins has been in the program, players have been doing their power lifts from the floor, under the direction of NU’s new football strength coach Mark Philipp.
“They feel like coming from the floor, for any lift, it’s more explosive,” Collins said.
… What I’m seeing more and more often is a ridiculous focus on “fitness” of only the high-intensity variety.
High-intensity training is the top of your energy system pyramid. It’s literally the last thing you should train, and only after you’ve built the aerobic base to support it.
The world of collegiate strength and conditioning, especially at the Division 1 level, is often considered a young man’s game. There are several reasons why people move on, such as money and wanting more time for family, but many of them can be attributed to frustration and health.
Oh, here is a big little word: health, which is something that is not ever really talked about, but is a serious concern with strength coaches. We all see health from a pair of binoculars lens. We can see what we see, and we can see that well. Unfortunately, we can’t see anything else that is outside of that view of the binoculars. My wife is a birder, which essentially means walking around with a pair of binoculars around your neck, looking like an idiot trying to see some birds (but that is just my opinion. I apologize to offending the birders. You probably think lifting heavy weights are stupid). Now, the hardest thing in the world to do is find that little bird in that big field or forest with your binoculars, because your field of view is so small. There is so much that we can’t see when we look through binoculars.
Here’s a hypothetical situation to think about. It’s Super Bowl XLIX, and the Seahawks have the ball on the 1-yard line with under a minute to play. It’s second and goal, and Patriots defensive coordinator Matt Patricia – a tech-savvy gameplanner with an aeronautical engineering background – looks down at his Microsoft Surface tablet and sees a probability chart that tells him how likely it is that the Seahawks will hand the ball to Marshawn Lynch, and how likely it is that they’ll try something else, like a quick slant over the middle.
Would it have made a difference in how the next play transpired? We’ll never know. But what we do know is the NFL is going to experience a revolution of analytics and advanced stats, because there’s too much data available and too many smart people who know how to translate that data into a more competitive game.
Tech firm Booz Allen Hamilton is working on the technology to predict offensive plays in NFL games. Known for its work with the federal government, Booz Allen is expanding its horizons for innovation, and sports is an area where its making significant progress.
Combine a fully functional training watch with an activity monitor, and you get the Polar M400. It can track a morning interval workout before punching the clock and then remind you to come unglued from your office chair during the day. This double feature, however, comes at a cost: complexity.
At 3:30 a.m., Todd Steussie got up from the table. He went to the fraternity house bathroom and splashed cold water on his face. Looking in the mirror, he thought to himself: “What am I doing here?”
Of all the moments, Steussie recalled in an interview this week, “that was probably the most surreal.” Eventually, he collected himself and returned to the table. There, he and his classmates completed — yes — a group project due to their marketing professor at 8 a.m.
At 39, after a 14-year career as an NFL offensive lineman, Steussie returned to the University of California-Berkeley not for parties but to complete his undergraduate degree, beginning a journey that has brought him into the middle of football’s looming technology boom.
Three things will matter in the NFL next season: location, location, location.
Last year, the league partnered with Zebra Technologies to install its radio-frequency identification (RFID) system, called MotionWorks, in 18 stadiums, and in 2015 that tracking system will be rolled out to the remaining sites, including Wembley in London. Over the last decade, RFID has become an integral part of any major company’s supply chain logistics and inventory tracking systems. Now it’s set to help teams run their football logistics and track their inventories across the playing field.
Firstbeat represents Finnish modesty at its best. The little known company provides technology used by millions around the world – including the English national football team.
Samsung, Garmin, Suunto, Chicago Bulls, Manchester City…These are some of the brands Firstbeat CEO Joni Kettunen casually mentions while talking about his company. The brands are united by a common factor: they all use Firstbeat’s heartbeat analytics technology.
… Our gadgets have become exceptionally good at collecting data. There’s some debate about the relative accuracy of your Fitbit or phone versus some more scientific methods, but that doesn’t even really matter. I can open up the Health app on iOS and see my walk to the subway each morning, literally step by step. 7:04, two steps. Still 7:04, three more steps. It even knows I went up a flight of stairs! You can collect this data even with just your smartphone, and before long these sensors will be absolutely everywhere. Your watch, your shoes, your shirt, your contacts. “Fitness tracking” won’t be a device—it’ll be a feature, like Wi-Fi or cargo pockets.
Former Broncos tight end Nate Jackson says he believes the NFL will have no choice but to remove marijuana from its lists of banned substances in the near future.
Speaking at a marijuana business conference, Jackson called on the league to allow medical marijuana as a means to help players deal with the physical and psychological pain and head injuries inherent to their profession.
Objective To assess whether players who cross ≥6 time zones and/or undertake ≥10 h air travel prior to competition experience a higher risk of injury during the Sevens World Series than players not required to undertake this level of travel.
Design Five-year, prospective, cohort study.
Participants All players from nine core teams competing in the Sevens World Series from 2008/2009 to 2013/2014.
Results A total of 436 match injuries and 3363 player-match-hours of exposure were recorded in the study, which corresponds to an overall incidence of 129.6 injuries/1000 player-match-hours, irrespective of the nature of pretournament travel. The incidence of injury for those players crossing ≥6 time zones and undertaking ≥10 h air travel prior to competition (99.3 injuries/1000 player-match-hours) was significantly lower than that of players undertaking ≥10 h air travel but crossing ≤2 time zones prior to competition (148.8 injuries/1000 player-match-hours; p=0.003) and of those undertaking ≤3 h air travel and crossing ≤2 time zones prior to competition (146.4 injuries/1000 player-match-hours; p=0.004). There was no significant difference in the incidence of injury for players crossing ≤2 time zones in the week prior to competition, irrespective of whether the length of air travel was ≤3 h or ≥10 h (p=0.904). Precompetition air travel had no significant effect (p=0.879) on the performance of teams in terms of their final Tournament ranking positions.
Conclusions There was no evidence to suggest that players were exposed to a greater risk of injury following extensive air travel and crossing multiple time zones prior to Tournaments in the Sevens World Series.
One of my favourite books is Alice in Wonderland. While analysing the result from a recent survey of 3,7000 coaches it struck me how coaching is its own Wonderland. In essence some of the results are a muddle.
To give two examples:
The most valuable piece of CPD is being used less and less often.
The most impressionable participants are taught by the least experienced coaches