Applied Sports Science news articles, blog posts and research papers for December 30, 2016
I am planning to cut back the distribution of this newsletter by asking longtime readers (greater than 1 year) to pay for it. Details are posted at https://sports.bradstenger.com/2016-payments.
This newsletter goes out to approximately 150 people at approximately 100 different sports and technology organizations. My goal is to reduce those numbers and then re-populate the newsletter distribution with new readers/organizations, stopping once the distribution is back to its current size (fewer than 200 readers and approximately 100 organizations).
here’s good news for Arizona Cardinals quarterback Carson Palmer as he turns 37 today.
Recent history shows he can still be an effective and successful quarterback as he enters his late 30s.
If Palmer returns for the 2017 season, he will be the 142nd quarterback since the merger to start a season at age 37 or older, according to the Elias Sports Bureau. He also could be one of four quarterbacks next year who are playing at 37 or older, joining Tom Brady, Drew Brees and Josh McCown.
I remember that school was always, more or less, from 8 o’clock in Germany – you had to start at eight. Afterwards, I went straight to playing football, to Munich, or went to skiing actually. So I was always leaving home and having to go to school to also be allowed to go to the mountains for skiing or off to play football.
Was it difficult juggling your sports interests with your education?
Let’s say it was not easy sometimes but, at the end, I could manage it. I was very happy when I had the right marks in school because my parents were satisfied with me.
The latest indications from Jazz management are that George Hill may return tonight when the Jazz face the 76ers and that Alec Burks may also be back in the lineup soon. The Jazz have enjoyed their projected starting lineup a grand total of 12 minutes this season.
Gordon Hayward, Derrick Favors, George Hill, Rodney Hood and Alec Burks have all missed significant time this season due to a variety of injuries. Is it bad luck, are today’s players soft compared to players of the past, or is it something entirely different?
Jazz fans seem especially impatient with injuries and especially eager to label players as “injury prone” because we remember and revere two of the most durable players ever to play in the league. Karl Malone played 1,434 games in a Jazz uniform. He missed nine games (some due to funerals and suspensions). That’s 99.3 percent of possible games. John Stockton played all 1,504 of his career games in a Jazz uniform. He missed just 22 games, (four for a severely sprained ankle and 18 when he had his knee scoped) playing in 98.5 percent of the possible games. It just wasn’t a Jazz game unless we saw both 32 and 12 in the lineup.
… Any record is only truly achieved when it is done in the same conditions as its predecessors. To go outside that framework is to disrespect everyone that got there before, and make a mockery of athletic achievements, perseverance and the many failures that have eventually pushed success forward. For this attempt to have any validity or meaning, it needs to be raw and real. There needs to be competition, a ratified course, and enough drug tests pre, during and post to give everyone no shadow of a doubt that it is a honest race of the human spirit, and not a science experiment that doesn’t play by the rules. I respect human achievement against the face of adversity, not temporary shortcuts that can’t and won’t be replicated. I also fail to see how 3 runners getting special treatment and an exemption from the standard rules of the game would generate more interest in the sport.
The police officer spied the five-liter Ford Mustang peeling down the Ontario highway, some 80 kilometers over the limit, and gave chase with his siren blaring. Expecting some speed-thirsty punk behind the wheel, the officer instead found an embarrassed 19-year-old, who quickly offered an excuse for his haste. “I’m really sorry, officer,” blurted Gary Roberts. “Believe it or not, I’m trying to race back to play in a championship lacrosse game.”
Until the officer forked over a $300 fine and a scheduled court date, Roberts had fully intended to chomp off everything he could chew. That afternoon, in the fall of 1985, he was headed from training camp with the Ottawa 67s, his club in the Ontario Hockey League, toward the Toronto suburbs, where his Whitby Warriors were competing in the finals of the Minto Cup, the pinnacle of junior lacrosse in Canada. The Warriors wound up repeating as champs, but Roberts was delayed long enough to arrive at the arena too late to dress. “The speeding ticket cost me my last lacrosse game,” Roberts says. “It wasn’t the right decision to risk my life for lacrosse, and trying to juggle lacrosse and hockey at the same time was a little over the top, but I loved it.”
The nation’s dominant football power is driven by muscle and motivation. Meet the human engine that revs the bodies and minds of the national champion Crimson Tide.
Have you had a conversation with your players about why they play football? What is it that motivates them to turn up to training, sometimes three or more times a week, no matter what the conditions? In this article, resident positive psychology expert Lara Mossman looks at the ways in which coaches can empower players to become self-motivated.
… Psychologists have been circling around a possible reason political beliefs are so stubborn: Partisan identities get tied up in our personal identities. Which would mean that an attack on our strongly held beliefs is an attack on the self. And the brain is built to protect the self.
When we’re attacked, we evade or defend — as if we have an immune system for uncomfortable thoughts, one you can see working in real time.
“The brain’s primary responsibility is to take care of the body, to protect the body,” Jonas Kaplan, a psychologist at the University of Southern California, tells me. “The psychological self is the brain’s extension of that. When our self feels attacked, our [brain is] going to bring to bear the same defenses that it has for protecting the body.”
If you are reading this at 3 a.m., chances are that James Proud wants to put you in a deep slumber.
As the inventor of the sleep-tracking device Sense, Mr. Proud has enjoyed heady success in the quickly growing sleep tech field: Sense’s 2014 Kickstarter campaign raised about $2.4 million even though the goal was only $100,000.
One of Mr. Proud’s business partners is Arianna Huffington, who stepped away from her media empire to be the queen of lifestyle wellness.
“I’m fascinated by helping people live better,” said Mr. Proud, 25, a British citizen who came to the United States via the Thiel Fellowship, which gives entrepreneurs $100,000 for skipping college. “And sleep is the foundation of everything. So it’s the best place to start.”
arXiv, Computer Science > Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition; Ang Li, Allan Jabri, Armand Joulin, Laurens van der Maaten from
Real-world image recognition systems need to recognize tens of thousands of classes that constitute a plethora of visual concepts. The traditional approach of annotating thousands of images per class for training is infeasible in such a scenario, prompting the use of webly supervised data. This paper explores the training of image-recognition systems on large numbers of images and associated user comments. In particular, we develop visual n-gram models that can predict arbitrary phrases that are relevant to the content of an image. Our visual n-gram models are feed-forward convolutional networks trained using new loss functions that are inspired by n-gram models commonly used in language modeling. We demonstrate the merits of our models in phrase prediction, phrase-based image retrieval, relating images and captions, and zero-shot transfer.
Substantial research has been completed examining the impact of carbohydrate (CHO) intake on endurance exercise, whereas its role in resistance-based exercise performance, adaptation and cell signalling has yet to be fully characterised. This empirical shortcoming has precluded the ability to establish specific CHO recommendations for resistance exercise. This results in recommendations largely stemming from findings based on endurance exercise and/or anecdotal evidence despite the distinct energetic demands and molecular responses mediating adaptation from endurance- and resistance-based exercise. Moreover, the topic of CHO and exercise has become one of polarising nature with divergent views – some substantiated, others lacking evidence. Current literature suggests a moderately high daily CHO intake (3-7 g/kg per d) for resistance training, which is thought to prevent glycogen depletion and facilitate performance and adaptation. However, contemporary investigation, along with an emerging understanding of the molecular underpinnings of resistance exercise adaptation, may suggest that such an intake may not be necessary. In addition to the low likelihood of true glycogen depletion occurring in response to resistance exercise, a diet restrictive in CHO may not be detrimental to acute resistance exercise performance or the cellular signalling activity responsible for adaptation, even when muscle glycogen stores are reduced. Current evidence suggests that signalling of the mammalian target of rapamycin complex 1, the key regulatory kinase for gene translation (protein synthesis), is unaffected by CHO restriction or low muscular glycogen concentrations. Such findings may call into question the current view and subsequent recommendations of CHO intake with regard to resistance-based exercise.
The aims of this study were two-fold: to determine seasonal changes in dietary intake and body composition in elite soccer players and to evaluate the influence of self-determined individual body composition goals on dietary intake and body composition. This longitudinal, observational study assessed body composition (total mass, fat-free soft tissue mass and fat mass) using dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry and dietary intake (energy and macronutrients) via multiple pass 24-hour recalls, at four time points over a competitive season in elite soccer players from one professional club in the Australian A-League competition. Self-reported body composition goals were also recorded. Eighteen elite male soccer players took part (25 +/- 5 years, 180.5 +/- 7.4 cm, 75.6 +/- 6.5 kg). Majority (>=67%) reported the goal to maintain weight. Fat-free soft tissue mass increased from the start of preseason (55278 +/- 5475 g) to the start of competitive season (56784 +/- 5168 g; p<0.001) and these gains were maintained until the end of the season. Fat mass decreased over the preseason period (10072 +/- 2493 g to 8712 +/- 1432 g; p<0.001), but increased during the latter part of the competitive season. Dietary intake practices on training days were consistent over time and low compared to sport nutrition recommendations. The self-reported body composition goals did not strongly influence dietary intake practices or changes in body composition. This study has demonstrated that body composition changes over the course of a soccer season are subtle in elite soccer players despite relatively low self-reported intakes of energy and carbohydrate.
To examine the impact of ingesting hydrolyzed beef protein, whey protein, and carbohydrate on resistance training outcomes, body composition, muscle thickness, blood indices of health and salivary human neutrophil peptides (HNP1-3), as reference of humoral immunity followed an 8-week resistance training program in college athletes. METHODS:
Twenty-seven recreationally physically active males and females (n = 9 per treatment) were randomly assigned to one of the three groups: hydrolyzed beef protein, whey protein, or non-protein isoenergetic carbohydrate. Treatment consisted of ingesting 20 g of supplement, mixed with orange juice, once a day immediately post-workout or before breakfast on non-training days. Measurements were performed pre- and post-intervention on total load (kg) lifted at the first and last workout, body composition (via plethysmography) vastus medialis thickness (mm) (via ultrasonography), and blood indices of health. Salivary HNP1-3 were determined before and after performing the first and last workout. RESULTS:
Salivary concentration and secretion rates of the HNP1-3 decreased in the beef condition only from pre-first-workout (1.90 ± 0.83 μg/mL; 2.95 ± 2.83 μg/min, respectively) to pre-last-workout (0.92 ± 0.63 μg/mL, p = 0.025, d = 1.03; 0.76 ± 0.74 μg/min, p = 0.049, d = 0.95), and post-last-workout (0.95 ± 0.60 μg/mL, p = 0.032, d = 1.00; 0.59 ± 0.52 μg/min, p = 0.027, d = 1.02). No other significant differences between groups were observed. CONCLUSIONS:
Supplementation with a carbohydrate-protein beverage may support resistance training outcomes in a comparable way as the ingestion of only carbohydrate. Furthermore, the ingestion of 20 g of hydrolyzed beef protein resulted in a decreased level and secretion rates of the HNP1-3 from baseline with no negative effect on blood indices of health.
As he prepared for the College Football Playoff last year, linebacker Ryan Anderson believed he was about to play his final two games for Alabama. Though he technically wasn’t a starter among the Crimson Tide’s historically deep front seven, a strong close to the season had made entering the NFL draft after his junior year a real option, particularly given the lure of guaranteed money and what it could do for his mother, who raised Anderson and four siblings by herself.
But like so many Alabama players recently, Anderson had to make a calculation: Leave after a championship and get paid or come back to try for another title and possibly get paid even more after another year in the NFL factory that Nick Saban’s program has become?
“I wanted to be able to take care of my family,” Anderson said. “But I sat down and my mom told me, ‘I’ve been good without having X, Y and Z this long, so it’s not about me.’ It was my decision, and that just made me feel a whole lot better. That was the ultimate decision when she said she wanted me to come back. That was it.”