… Touré was meant to be finished, exiled, a rusting hulk junked for parts. In the last month he has instead been the key figure in City’s mini-revival before the Premier League meeting with Liverpool at the Etihad Stadium on New Year’s Eve. Best of all he looks like a different kind of Touré, not just a stone and half lighter and “in love with football again” as he declared himself this week, but tactically reconditioned, circuit boards wiped, Barça-years memory stick successfully reinstalled.
With apologies, but he does seem to attract this kind of robot talk. “I’m not a machine, I’m a man,” Touré insisted a couple of seasons ago during a run of poor form. And for all the glories of the past six years, there does seem to have been a slight note of confusion on this front. The internet is full of Touré tribute videos called things like The Machine, or The War Machine. He’s the Train, the Powerhouse, the Unstoppable Midfield Goal-Tractor. Does he clank, do you think, when he walks in his stockinged feet? Do his gears whirr?
Paula Findlay announced in an interview with the Edmonton Journal last week that she intends to qualify for the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games but will be returning to the training philosophy that brought her success in her early days of the sport.
“I’ve put myself back in the position I was in in 2007,” Findlay said in the interview. “I was living at home, going to school, swimming with Keyano, running with the run clubs. And then I would go race in the summer and do super well. I think there is some value in going back to that life a little bit.”
Arsène Wenger has strongly criticised the scheduling of Premier League matches during the Christmas and new year period, describing it as “the most uneven” he has encountered during his 20 years working in this country and claimed it has left Arsenal “with a big handicap” in regards to their title aspirations.
The Frenchman’s ire has been raised by his team having to travel to Bournemouth on Tuesday, after facing Crystal Palace at the Emirates Stadium on Sunday. “Honestly I don’t really know if the Premier League masters the fixtures,” Wenger said, adding that “some teams have more luck than others” in regards to when their matches have taken place during this traditionally busy time of the season.
… Some b.s. you don’t need a protocol to detect, so I didn’t even try to find out whether twisting my body wrings the toxins out of my internal organs or whether breathing through my left nostril stimulates my right brain.
But it’s true that after yoga, climbing steps doesn’t hurt, waiting for Greek carryout promised 15 minutes ago isn’t irritating, and on the drive home my brain doesn’t do anything except drive. Does yoga work? I’d answer this, but working through the full BPP takes time.
Professional Baseball Strength & Conditioning Coaches Society, Tim Rodmaker from
With the continued growth of yoga in professional baseball, there’s little question that the practice offers many potential benefits to players. However, those benefits can only be realized when yoga is taught correctly within the context of an athlete’s sport, needs and schedule. Otherwise, at best, yoga is only marginally helpful, and, at worst, can actually be dangerous. Having been one of the first to bring yoga into professional sports over 13 years ago, I’ve seen–and, admittedly, made–many mistakes while learning the best means of applying yoga effectively and efficiently for sports performance. The following are the five most common errors I still see athletes and coaches making when adding yoga to their training programs:
Mental fatigue is a psychobiological state caused by prolonged periods of demanding cognitive activity. It has recently been suggested that mental fatigue can affect physical performance. Objective
Our objective was to evaluate the literature on impairment of physical performance due to mental fatigue and to create an overview of the potential factors underlying this effect. Methods
Two electronic databases, PubMed and Web of Science (until 28 April 2016), were searched for studies designed to test whether mental fatigue influenced performance of a physical task or influenced physiological and/or perceptual responses during the physical task. Studies using short (<30 min) self-regulatory depletion tasks were excluded from the review.
Results
A total of 11 articles were included, of which six were of strong and five of moderate quality. The general finding was a decline in endurance performance (decreased time to exhaustion and self-selected power output/velocity or increased completion time) associated with a higher than normal perceived exertion. Physiological variables traditionally associated with endurance performance (heart rate, blood lactate, oxygen uptake, cardiac output, maximal aerobic capacity) were unaffected by mental fatigue. Maximal strength, power, and anaerobic work were not affected by mental fatigue. Conclusion
The duration and intensity of the physical task appear to be important factors in the decrease in physical performance due to mental fatigue. The most important factor responsible for the negative impact of mental fatigue on endurance performance is a higher perceived exertion.
The aim of this study was to use the Oslo Sports Trauma Research Centre (OSTRC) overuse injury questionnaire to record overuse injuries over a single season for a men’s professional basketball team in order to; (i) assess the prevalence and severity of overuse injuries and (ii) determine the efficacy of this method in identifying overuse injuries in comparison to the team physiotherapist’s detection of these injuries. Thirteen athletes from a men’s professional basketball team participated in this study. The self-reported, OSTRC injury questionnaire was used to record overuse conditions of the ankle, knee, lower back over an entire 24-week season. Standard time loss injury registration methods were also used to record overuse conditions by the physiotherapist. Overuse injury rates per 1000 hrs of athlete exposure and average weekly prevalence of overuse injuries were calculated using the results of the questionnaire. A total of 183 overuse conditions were identified by the questionnaire, whereas only 28 overuse conditions were identified by the physiotherapist. The team’s average weekly prevalence of all overuse conditions was 63% (95%CI:60-66) with the highest prevalence of injury affecting the lower back (25.9% [95%CI:19.7-32.1]). The overuse injury rate per 1000 hrs of athlete exposure was 6.4. The OSTRC overuse injury questionnaire captures many more overuse injuries in basketball than standard time loss methods. The prevalence of lower back injuries is higher than previously reported in basketball. This additional method of overuse injury surveillance may more accurately quantify the overuse injury problem in basketball and aid earlier intervention and management of these conditions.
The University of Colorado has developed an innovative gas gauge for athletes to use for training. Now licensed to Denver-based MuscleSound, the device measures muscle glycogen in real-time to determine muscle depletion.
Adequate glycogen, a form of energy stored in muscles, is necessary for optimal athletic performance.
“Whether you are running a marathon or recovering from an accident, when the body runs out of glycogen the same thing happens: the muscle eats itself to feed itself,” Inigo San Millan, PhD, said in a statement. San Millan developed the technology, in conjunction with the CU Sports Medicine and Performance Center.
… I’m convinced that smart sensors are going to be massively important in the future, and that vision can’t work if they require batteries. I believe that we’ll be throwing tiny cheap devices up in the air like confetti to scatter around all the environments we care about, and they’ll result in a world we can intelligently interact with in unprecedented ways. Imagine knowing exactly where pests are in a crop field so that a robot can manually remove them rather than indiscriminately spraying pesticides, or having stickers on every piece of machinery in a factory that listen to the sounds and report when something needs maintenance.
These sort of applications will only work if the devices can last for years unattended. We can already build tiny chips that do these sort of things, but we can’t build batteries that can power them for anywhere near that long, and that’s unlikely to change soon.
Can the cloud come to our rescue? I’m a software guy, but everything I see in the hardware world shows that transmitting signals continuously takes a lot of energy.
Research on high school soccer injury epidemiology is sparse. AIM:
To describe high school soccer injury rates, trends and patterns by type of athlete exposure (AE), position and sex. METHODS:
This descriptive epidemiological study used data from a large national high school sports injury surveillance programme to describe rates and patterns of soccer-related injuries including concussion sustained from 2005/2006 to 2013/2014. Injury rates are calculated per 1000 AEs. RESULTS:
Overall, 6154 soccer injuries occurred during 2 985 991 AEs; injury rate=2.06 per 1000 AEs. Injury rates were higher during competition (4.42) than practice (1.05; rate ratio (RR)=4.19; 95% CI 3.98 to 4.41), and in girls (2.33) than boys (1.83; RR=1.27, 95% CI 1.21 to 1.34). Boys’ non-concussion injury rates decreased significantly (p=0.001) during the study period while reported concussion rates increased significantly (p=0.002). Girls’ non-concussion rates were relatively stable and reported concussion rates increased significantly (p=0.004). Player-player contact was the injury mechanism that led to the most competition injuries (injury proportion ratio (IPR)=2.87; 95% CI 2.57 to 3.21), while non-contact injuries were the most common mechanisms among practice injuries (IPR=2.10; 95% CI 1.86 to 2.38). Recovery from concussion was >7 days in a third of the cases. Injury patterns were similar between sexes with respect to position played and location on the field at the time of injury. CONCLUSIONS:
High school soccer injury rates vary by sex and type of exposure, while injury patterns are more similar across sexes. Reported concussion rates increased significantly over the study period in male and female athletes.
Rehabilitation progression and return-to-play (RTP) decision making following hamstring strain injury (HSI) can be challenging for clinicians, owing to the competing demands of reducing both convalescence and the risk of re-injury. Despite an increased focus on the RTP process following HSI, little attention has been paid to rehabilitation progression and RTP criteria, and subsequent time taken to RTP and re-injury rates. Objective
The aim of this systematic review is to identify rehabilitation progression and RTP criteria implemented following HSI and examine the subsequent time taken to RTP and rates of re-injury. Methods
A systematic literature review of databases MEDLINE, CINAHL, SPORTDiscus, Cochrane Library, Web of Science and EMBASE was conducted to identify studies of participants with acute HSI reporting time taken to RTP and rates of re-injury after a minimum 6-month follow-up. General guidelines and specific criteria for rehabilitation progression were identified for each study. In addition, RTP criteria were identified and categorised as performance tests, clinical assessments, isokinetic dynamometry or the Askling H-test. Results
Nine studies were included with a total of 601 acute HSI confirmed by clinical examination or magnetic resonance imaging within 10 days of initial injury. A feature across all nine studies was that the injured individual’s perception of pain was used to guide rehabilitation progression, whilst clinical assessments and performance tests were the most frequently implemented RTP criteria. Mean RTP times were lowest in studies implementing isokinetic dynamometry as part of RTP decision making (12–25 days), whilst those implementing the Askling H-test had the lowest rates of re-injury (1.3–3.6%). Conclusions
This systematic review highlights the strong emphasis placed on the alleviation of pain to allow HSI rehabilitation progression, and the reliance on subjective clinical assessments and performance tests as RTP criteria. These results suggest a need for more objective and clinically practical criteria, allowing a more evidence-based approach to rehabilitation progression, and potentially reducing the ambiguity involved in the RTP decision-making process.
Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports from
This prospective study investigated the incidence and pattern of acute time-loss injuries in young female and male basketball players. Eight basketball teams (n=201; mean age 14.85±1.5) participated in the follow-up study (2011-2014). The coaches recorded player participation in practices and games on a team diary. A study physician contacted the teams once a week to check new injuries and interviewed the injured players. In total, 158 injuries occurred. The overall rate of injury (per 1000 hours) was 2.64 (95% CI 2.23-3.05). Injury rate was 34.47 (95% CI 26.59-42.34) in basketball games and 1.51 (95% CI 1.19-1.82) in team practices. Incidence rate ratio (IRR) between game and practice was 22.87 (95% CI 16.71-31.29). Seventy-eight percent of the injuries affected the lower limbs. The ankle (48%) and knee (15%) were the most commonly injured body sites. The majority of injuries involved joint or ligaments (67%). Twenty-three percent of the injuries were severe causing more than 28 days absence from sports. Number of recurrent injuries was high (28% of all injuries), and most of them were ankle sprains (35 of 44, 79%). No significant differences were found in injury rates between females and males during games (IRR 0.88, 0.55, to 1.40) and practices (IRR 1.06, 0.69, to 1.62). In conclusion, ankle and knee ligament injuries were the most common injuries in this study. Moreover, the rate of recurrent ankle sprains was alarming.
Being overweight can raise your blood pressure, cholesterol and risk for developing diabetes. It could be bad for your brain, too.
A diet high in saturated fats and sugars, the so-called Western diet, actually affects the parts of the brain that are important to memory and make people more likely to crave the unhealthful food, says psychologist Terry Davidson, director of the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience at American University in Washington, D.C.
The New York Times, The Upshot blog, David Leonhardt from
… Choose a month this year — a full 30 days, starting now or later — and commit to eating no added sweeteners. Go cold turkey, for one month.
I have done so in each of the last two years, and it has led to permanent changes in my eating habits. It wasn’t easy, but it was worth it. It reset my sugar-addled taste buds and opened my eyes to the many products that needlessly contain sugar. I now know which brands of chicken stock, bacon, smoked salmon, mustard and hot sauce contain added sugar and which do not.