Diego Costa is cursing his luck that injuries have once again prevented him from representing Spain. The Chelsea striker has been ruled out for Friday’s UEFA EURO 2016 qualifier against Ukraine and the international friendly against Holland four days later with a hamstring injury that he suffered in a 3-2 win over Hull on Sunday.
“I was in good form, I thought everything was finally going to work out,” Costa said in an interview with Spanish sports newspaper Marca. “You always arrive (to the national team) with some aches. But this time, I would have arrived without any pain. I really wanted to prove my form and my worth… but again it (injury) happened.”
… “Anybody know what today is?” Popovich asked. … It was left to a fellow Aussie, center Aron Baynes, to answer, “It’s Mabo Day.” And with that, Popovich launched into the story of Australia’s Martin Luther King Jr. … As pep talks go, Popovich’s Mabo Day remarks were a tour de force. The coach often devotes a portion of team meetings to the culture or history of some member of the NBA’s most nationally diverse outfit. “Nine of our 15 are from elsewhere, and I’m always looking for ways to make them part of the story,” Popovich says. And while he is reluctant to draw a straight line from the Spurs’ recognition of Mabo Day to the star turn Mills would take in those Finals, he believes that knowing one another’s stories off the court binds the Spurs on the court. “It builds camaraderie and helps them grow as people, and all that carries over,” Popovich says. “They feel connected and engaged and do better work.”
In athlete development, it’s easy to obsess with the physical. Run further, jump higher, move faster — we’ve developed thousands of techniques to push the body harder, longer. Post Activation Potentiation; increased acceleration. Nervous System Training; improved power from the same muscle mass. We see the tangible payoff. So much of our progress in sports science has resulted from training the physical system simply because we’ve had the tools measure it.
But if so much of an athlete’s performance is mental, how are we training them to be better mentally? And how are we doing it empirically?
… The movement required “emerges” from moment to moment, in fractions of seconds, based on the “information” present. Learning to attune to the key “information” sources (defenders positioning as just one example) and calibrating with movement/action is the essence of information-movement coupling and the key to adaptive behaviour. The pre-planned and identical movements seen in the earlier video are far removed from this.
… Everything we do —touch, sense, feel, contract, move— triggers an action potential that is sensed by millions of mechanoreceptors, which follows a path to Spinal tractthe brain. … This path is followed every time. Sensory or motor deficits anywhere along this path can lead to injury. Sometimes, as health care providers we get in a rut and look to treat the body part or underlying movement dysfunction. While this practice is not necessarily bad, it might not be what is needed. Correcting muscle imbalance or addressing joint dysfunction may not be the answer. Removing the athlete from activity to reduce overload may not be the answer. Our goal should aim to fix deficits along the neural path.
‘Bouncing back’ usually refers to resiliency. Resiliency can be described as a positive reaction to adversity (Morgan et al. 2013), or, the ability to use previous negative experiences to be able to adapt to future stressors that may arise (Turner & Barker 2013). Football teams experience many different types of stressors, both as individual athletes and as a collective unit. These stressors can be organised into three headings; competitive, organisational and personal (Fletcher & Sarkar 2012). In most interviews, the individual is usually referring to ‘bouncing back’ from the competitive stressors that occur in football, such as a loss of form, or an individual mistake. A recent example that jumps out is Leicester city. At the end of the 2012/2013 season, they lost a playoff semi final versus Watford. Anthony Knockaert missed an injury time penalty, twenty seconds later, Watford went up the other end and scored to earn them a place in the playoff final (Prentki 2012). However, the next season, Leicester ‘bounced back’ from the difficult end to the previous season, and were crowned champions of the championship, with a club record 102 points. And the player who scored the goal which ultimately got them promoted – Anthony Knockaert.
When looking at resilience and optimal sport performance Fletcher & Sarkar (2012), found many different factors are needed to overcome stressors and produce a positive response, and therefore optimal performance. Two of the main factors that this theory suggests are important if an athlete is seen as resilient or not, are challenge appraisal and meta-cognitions. Challenge appraisal is when the stressor is seen as a challenge to be mastered.
… [Roger] Schmidt, German men’s national team head coach Joachim Löw, former Bayern treble winner Jupp Heynckes, and women’s national team head coach Silvia Neid all hold state-recognized Fußball-Lehrer (literally “soccer teacher”) degrees from the Hennes-Weisweiler-Akademie, which is basically the Top Gun of coaching institutions, a finishing school offering a ten-month course to a select few of Germany’s brightest and most talented young coaches. U.S Men’s National Team coach Jurgen Klinsmann finished at the Akademie in June of 2000.
Schmidt’s success since graduating from the Akademie in 2011 isn’t even a one-off. His classmates included Hannover 96’s current head coach Tayfun Korkut; Augsburg’s Markus Weinzierl; Hoffenheim’s Markus Gisdol; and national team assistant coach Thomas Schneider.
… Kentucky’s players watch less film than NBA teams, most college teams and even some high-school teams. The first time the Wildcats actually see their upcoming opponents is during Kentucky’s pregame meal. Before their most recent game, a scheduled 2:45 p.m. matchup against Cincinnati on Saturday, they first took a look at the Bearcats at their 10:30 a.m. breakfast. … The idea is that showing shorter doses of film closer to the game will make the material fresher in the minds of the 18- and 19-year-old players. Kentucky, after all, is the youngest and least experienced team in the NCAA tournament, as it was in 2012 and 2014.
Redwood, California-based health app maker Hello Heart has raised $1.3 million in a round led by Resolute Ventures with participation from angel investors including Waze CEO Noam Bardin, BlueRun ventures Co-founder John Malloy, and Facebook Product Director Ran Makavy.
“We set out to do one thing — make it simple, painless, and even fun to track and understand your medical data,” Hello Heart CEO Maayan Cohen said in a statement.
… So here’s the big question: does playing football cause chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or are some people who play football already at higher risk for developing it? Repeated head injuries may, indeed, directly cause chronic traumatic encephalopathy. At the same time, it’s possible that the players who sustain brain injuries are genetically prone to them or to other factors that increase the likelihood of developing dementia, emotional or behavioral issues, or premature death.
It’s essential to answer the cause and effect question, in part because not knowing the answer has generated fear among players. San Francisco 49ers linebacker Chris Borland, one of the National Football League’s top rookies in 2014, recently announced his retirement from professional football because of his worries about the long-term effects of repetitive head injuries. In addition, some parents of even younger players, fearing the potential hazard from head injuries, are keeping their kids from playing football, soccer, and other sports.
On April 20, more than 30,000 runners will run the 2015 Boston Marathon. Which one of these 30,000 athletes will burn energy at the highest rate during the race?
That’s easy: the winner—probably. How do I know this? Because the rate of energy consumption during running is largely a function of speed. The faster an athlete runs, the more rapidly his or her body burns energy. And, of course, the athlete who runs the fastest in any given race is the winner.
Actually, it’s a bit more complicated than that. Body weight and movement efficiency also affect the rate of energy use during running. Heavier runners burn more energy at any given pace while efficient runners burn less. But these other factors actually cancel themselves out: heaviness by slowing runners down so they burn less energy and efficiency by allowing runners to go faster so they burn more. In the final analysis, I can’t guarantee that the first person across the finish line of the Boston Marathon will have burned energy at the highest rate during the race, but I can guarantee that someone very close to the front of the field will have this distinction.
Consumer-centric innovation must be coupled with real-world scientific insights that explain how to best deliver nutrition to those that need it, says Lucozade’s senior sports scientist.
In recent decades we have seen how the concepts of football and training have been evolving constantly. The game and its knowledge have assumed importance who once lacked. We still face a sport where the objective is still to put a ball in an upright rectangle in the background opponent defended by eleven players. Evolution has led to interest us in the game, to ask what is the best way to hurt the other team having a number of elements, different from them and those other teams. How can we defend ourselves effectively with the players we have? These questions led us to devise a plan of action for our team, game model.
… In many ways, it’s a perfect fit. AZ are traditional overperformers in the Dutch top-flight. They won the league in 2009 when the coach was current Manchester United boss, Louis van Gaal. One of the ways AZ gained an advantage over rivals was their use of data analysis: Van Gaal is a firm believer in statistics, while hardly anyone else in Holland is (it’s why no-one has ever asked him properly about the subject). The lack of Dutch interest in Moneyball, the book or the film, sums that up: the increasing role of data in football may be the first tactical revolution that the Dutch, usually early-adopters, have missed.
“There is no real evidence that Dutch clubs are using analysis of on-pitch data to improve performance,” says Simon Gleave, head of analysis at Holland-based analytics company Infostrada Sports. “The Eredivisie is not awash with great innovation in this area. It is new and there’s an opportunity to get an edge.”