Tony Parker wants to make one thing clear: He’s a young 32. Peek at his basketball odometer, though, and it tells a different story. As of March 20 — the 67th contest of his 14th season — Parker has played in 1,189 games, clocked 39,244 minutes and has run, conservatively, more than 2,600 miles on the NBA hardwood in the regular and postseasons. That’s not even counting his two years (’99-’01) at Paris Basket Racing and eight summers leading the French national team. Inevitably, that mileage has taken its toll.
“It happens to everyone,” admits Parker, who, since splashing into the league at age 19 has been considered one of the quickest men in the NBA. “I’m just not as fast as I was at 20.” [video, pre-roll + 1:48]
After a summer with the Sacramento Kings, three weeks of private workouts in Southern California and a season with the Reno Bighorns, Sim Bhullar said simply, “I think I’m ready.”
Ready to be the first NBA player of Indian descent and carry all of the responsibility that comes with that: “I’m just happy that I can be a role model or a trail blazer for younger kids in India and all over the world,” he told NBADLeague.com on Wednesday night after making the drive from Reno to Sacramento. “Hopefully I can help them fall in love with the game more and try to pursue it a lot more.”
When Russell Westbrook finishes the orange wedges, the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and the Taylor Swift and Katy Perry songs, he sits swaddled in white towels, his terry-cloth cocoon. He stretches out over two chairs in the Thunder locker room, his iPod with its eclectic playlist resting on his right thigh, and lets the metamorphosis unfold. “He doesn’t talk,” says guard Anthony Morrow. “He doesn’t blink. He turns into Maniac Russ.” He stares at a wall-mounted TV flashing video of that night’s opponent. Teammates try to engage him. “But he’s somewhere else,” Morrow says. They ask questions and then reconsider: “You know what, man, it’s nothing,” says second-year center Steven Adams. They follow him to the floor, where the transformation is completed. “The ball goes up,” Adams says, “and he becomes a beast.”
Before Westbrook blossomed into America’s fast-twitch phenomenon, before he piled up triple doubles at a rate that recalls Oscar Robertson, before he could do virtually everything on a basketball court—leading the NBA in scoring, ranking fourth in assists and second in steals through last Saturday—he could do only one thing. “I wasn’t that good,” Westbrook says, “but I played hard.”
The world’s most athletic couple is not satisfied.
Not with medals. Not with records. Not after standing on the award stand wrapped in a flag.
Ashton Eaton and Brianne Theisen-Eaton can be better. They know it. Technique can improve. The jump can go longer or higher. The throw can travel farther.
THE PURPOSE OF THIS REVIEW IS TWOFOLD: TO ELUCIDATE THE UTILITY OF RESISTANCE TRAINING FOR ENDURANCE ATHLETES, AND PROVIDE THE PRACTITIONER WITH EVIDENCED-BASED PERIODIZATION STRATEGIES FOR CONCURRENT STRENGTH AND ENDURANCE TRAINING IN ATHLETIC POPULATIONS. BOTH LOW-INTENSITY EXERCISE ENDURANCE (LIEE) AND HIGH-INTENSITY EXERCISE ENDURANCE (HIEE) HAVE BEEN SHOWN TO IMPROVE AS A RESULT OF MAXIMAL, HIGH FORCE, LOW VELOCITY (HFLV) AND EXPLOSIVE, LOW-FORCE, HIGH-VELOCITY STRENGTH TRAINING. HFLV STRENGTH TRAINING IS RECOMMENDED INITIALLY TO DEVELOP A NEUROMUSCULAR BASE FOR ENDURANCE ATHLETES WITH LIMITED STRENGTH TRAINING EXPERIENCE. A SEQUENCED APPROACH TO STRENGTH TRAINING INVOLVING PHASES OF STRENGTH-ENDURANCE, BASIC STRENGTH, STRENGTH, AND POWER WILL PROVIDE FURTHER ENHANCEMENTS IN LIEE AND HIEE FOR HIGH-LEVEL ENDURANCE ATHLETES.
Kansas Assistant Athletics Director for Sport Performance Andrea Hudy announced Monday that the 2015 Midwest Sports Performance Conference will take place Friday and Saturday, May 8-9, inside the Anderson Family Strength & Conditioning Center on the campus of the University of Kansas.
Keeping track of a runner during a long-distance race is no easy task, even with the widespread used of chip timing at events and the prevalence of GPS-based wearable technology. UltraSportsLive. TV, a media and technology platform whose goal is to revolutionize the way endurance sports are viewed, is taking runner tracking to the next level with the launch of a proprietary tracking technology to complement their live video streaming of races—which, to this point, have been focused on ultra-distance trail events.
“In short, the tracking in conjunction with the video were the crucial components to interactive viewing,” says Mike Cloward, co-founder and CEO of Ultra Sports Live. TV, who noted that his company will expand their coverage to include road races beginning at the San Luis Obispo Marathon and Half Marathon on April 26, 2015. “We immediately saw the need for a viewer to have the ability to see participants nearing a camera location and then being able to click on that camera location and watch the participants pass through.”
Each year, only a fraction of sleep disorder sufferers are diagnosed and receive the care they need, even if they’re already seeing other doctors, such as a primary care physician.
Experts from the Johns Hopkins Center for Sleep hope to help patients get a better night’s sleep by providing healthcare staff members with a basic educational tool on their smartphones.
You might not have heard of Hudl, but it’s how 100,000 sports teams spent $30 million last year to review game tape on mobile. Hudl never raised institutional funding since starting in 2006, but it’s quietly amassed 1 billion video clips and 3.5 million users across 40 countries. Now it’s ready to trounce its competitors with a jaw-dropping $72.5 million round of funding led by Accel that will pay for more sales reps so it can sign up as many teams as possible.
“What if you could monitor everybody all the time from their body computer?”
Cardiologist Leslie Saxon poses the question with an air of nonchalance, as if she’s merely asking how your day is going. But the question’s implications—and its answer—are perhaps as far-reaching as anything medical science has ever pondered.
If a computer designed to monitor your health 24 hours a day sounds like science fiction à la George Orwell’s 1984, consider that fitness watches are becoming ubiquitous and Apple and other tech giants are already getting into the business of tapping your health data. Apps on your phone or tablet can tell you to chill out when you’re anxious. But what Saxon has in mind goes beyond urging you to meditate or logging the steps you walk and the calories you burn.
Background The identification of risk factors for groin injury in sport is important to develop and implement injury prevention strategies.
Objective To identify and evaluate the evidence examining risk factors for groin injury in sport.
… Results Of 2521 potentially relevant studies, 29 were included and scored. Heterogeneity in methodology and injury definition precluded meta-analyses. The most common risk factors investigated included age, hip range of motion, hip adductor strength and height. The median DB score across studies was 11/33 (range 6–20). The majority of studies represented level 2 evidence (cohort studies) however few considered the inter-relationships between risk factors. There is level 1 and 2 evidence that previous groin injury, higher-level of play, reduced hip adductor (absolute and relative to the hip abductors) strength and lower levels of sport-specific training are associated with increased risk of groin injury in sport.
Conclusions We recommended that investigators focus on developing and evaluating preparticipation screening and groin injury prevention programmes through high-quality randomised controlled trials targeting athletes at greater risk of injury.
Women are more likely to suffer an anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) rupture than men and the incidence of ACL rupture in women rises with increasing estrogen levels. We used an engineered ligament model to determine how an acute rise in estrogen decreases the mechanical properties of ligaments. Using fibroblasts isolated from human ACLs from male or female donors, we engineered ligaments and determined that ligaments made from female ACL cells had more collagen and were equal in strength to those made from male ACL cells. We then treated engineered ligaments for 14 days with low (5pg/ml), medium (50pg/ml), or high (500pg/ml) estrogen, corresponding to the range of in vivo serum estrogen concentrations and found that collagen within the grafts increased without a commensurate increase in mechanical strength. Mimicking the menstrual cycle, with 12 days of low estrogen followed by 2 days of physiologically high estrogen, resulted in a decrease in engineered ligament mechanical function with no change in the amount of collagen in the graft. The decrease in mechanical stiffness corresponded with a 61.7% and 76.9% decrease in the activity of collagen crosslinker lysyl oxidase with 24 and 48 hours of high estrogen, respectively. Similarly, grafts treated with the lysyl oxidase inhibitor BAPN for 24 hours showed a significant decrease in ligament mechanical strength (CON = 1.58±0.06 N, BAPN = 1.06±0.13 N) and stiffness (CON = 7.7±0.46 MPa, BAPN = 6.1±0.71 MPa) without changing overall collagen levels (CON = 396±11.5µg, BAPN = 382±11.6µg). Together, these data suggest that the rise in estrogen during the follicular phase decreases lysyl oxidase activity in our engineered ligament model and if this occurs in vivo may decrease the stiffness of ligaments and contribute to the elevated rate of ACL rupture in women.
… It turns out that lots of subtle factors can affect how hard exercise feels. Knowing that you’re halfway, or even better, knowing that you’re almost finished can change perception of effort. So can hearing the cheers of a friend or bystander, passing or being passed by a competitor, or the positive or negative internal self-talk echoing in your head. A study published last year even found that subliminal messages – a millisecond image of a smiling or frowning face – can change your perception of effort sufficiently to affect your performance. So there’s a near-infinite list of factors that could quickly change your perception of how hard you’re going.
So can we say for sure that the second wind is “all in your head”? Not necessarily.