… Trubisky needed a break and a clear head to make the biggest decision of his football life, and mom took notice. Jeanne Trubisky said her son did “a ton of research” preparing himself for the big decision, but when the likes of Kiper Jr. give praise, that was a factor.
“As a parent, you always believe in your kids, and think they’re capable of great things,” Jeanne said. “It’s when other people start telling you how talented your kid is that things really start to change.
“In Mitchell’s case, it was gradual. Then, all the sudden, it wasn’t gradual.”
… So for how long will Ronaldo remain The Best? After he signed a new contract last fall, which runs until 2021, he said he had another 10 years left on his career.
“I’m going to be here for another five years, but let it be known this will not be my last contract,” he said. “I would like to end my career at this club.”
If he does so, it will be in a different position and with a renewed status to previous years. First, his position: Ronaldo has moved into a more central striking position under Zinedine Zidane. He has lost some of the pace to get him past defenders, and, more importantly, he doesn’t have the energy or desire to track opposing fullbacks.
… To fans suggesting radical roster change, Arena said that “common sense has to prevail at some point. You can say whatever you want from the outside, but reality is, this is basically the nucleus of the team. You can’t blow it up at this point and as important as the game we’re going to encounter in March.”
So if the personnel won’t change much, what will?
“Maybe part of the job is to make the group we have into a better team — taking what you have and making it better, make it more cohesive,” he said. “There’s a word they use for that: coaching.”
New York Magazine, Science of Us blog, Drake Baer from
It’s a truism in fitness that the hardest part of working out is getting to the gym (or yoga studio, running path, or wherever else you may sweat). Thankfully, humans are easily manipulable, and if you manipulate yourself in the right way, you’ll be more likely to keep it up.
The latest mind hack comes from a study led by University of Colorado researcher Bethany Kwan, highlighted by Christian Jarrett at BPS Research Digest. Kwan and her colleagues recruited 98 participants between the ages of 18 and 45, and asked them to run for 30 minutes on a treadmill near their “ventilatory threshold,” or the pace that puts them out of breath. A third of these participants were unwittingly manipulated to feel good about their workout, in that they were told that finishing such a jog leaves you feeling refreshed and relaxed.
Ballistic performances are determined by both the maximal lower limb power output (Pmax) and their individual force-velocity (F-v) mechanical profile, especially the F-v imbalance (FVimb): difference between the athlete’s actual and optimal profile. An optimized training should aim to increase Pmax and/or reduce FVimb. The aim of this study was to test whether an individualized training program based on the individual F-v profile would decrease subjects’ individual FVimb and in turn improve vertical jump performance. FVimb was used as the reference to assign participants to different training intervention groups. Eighty four subjects were assigned to three groups: an “optimized” group divided into velocity-deficit, force-deficit, and well-balanced sub-groups based on subjects’ FVimb, a “non-optimized” group for which the training program was not specifically based on FVimb and a control group. All subjects underwent a 9-week specific resistance training program. The programs were designed to reduce FVimb for the optimized groups (with specific programs for sub-groups based on individual FVimb values), while the non-optimized group followed a classical program exactly similar for all subjects. All subjects in the three optimized training sub-groups (velocity-deficit, force-deficit, and well-balanced) increased their jumping performance (12.7 ± 5.7% ES = 0.93 ± 0.09, 14.2 ± 7.3% ES = 1.00 ± 0.17, and 7.2 ± 4.5% ES = 0.70 ± 0.36, respectively) with jump height improvement for all subjects, whereas the results were much more variable and unclear in the non-optimized group. This greater change in jump height was associated with a markedly reduced FVimb for both force-deficit (57.9 ± 34.7% decrease in FVimb) and velocity-deficit (20.1 ± 4.3%) subjects, and unclear or small changes in Pmax (−0.40 ± 8.4% and +10.5 ± 5.2%, respectively). An individualized training program specifically based on FVimb (gap between the actual and optimal F-v profiles of each individual) was more efficient at improving jumping performance (i.e., unloaded squat jump height) than a traditional resistance training common to all subjects regardless of their FVimb. Although improving both FVimb and Pmax has to be considered to improve ballistic performance, the present results showed that reducing FVimb without even increasing Pmax lead to clearly beneficial jump performance changes. Thus, FVimb could be considered as a potentially useful variable for prescribing optimal resistance training to improve ballistic performance. [full text]
They are itchy. They are awkward. They are cumbersome and largely unattractive and, when used over a long period of time, can develop what has been generously described as “a disgusting crust.” Also, they frequently smell as bad as an unventilated horse stall, and it is debatable whether they work as intended.
“Yeah, but other than that, we love them,” Ross Pierschbacher, an offensive lineman for Alabama’s football team, said on Saturday. (He was kidding.)
Pierschbacher was talking about knee braces, and, despite the fact he is not actively recovering from an injury, he wears a pair in every practice and game for the Crimson Tide.
All of the Alabama linemen take part in what is known as prophylactic bracing.
The New York Times, Sam Borden, Mika Grondahl and Joe Ward from
When player No. 81 took this blow to his head several years ago, it was just one of many concussions that have occurred throughout college football and the N.F.L. But what made this one different was that this player was wearing a mouth guard with motion sensors. The information from those sensors has given researchers a more detailed and precise window into what was happening within the player’s brain in the milliseconds after the hit.
Regenerative medicine is the latest game-changer in orthopedics, utilizing a patient’s own cells to accelerate repair and recovery. Various treatments such as platelet-rich plasma and mesenchymal stem cell therapy have shown to be promising non-surgical options for some of the more commonly seen orthopedic issues. Osteoarthritis, tendonitis, scar tissue prevention and pain or inflammation control have all been treated with these therapies.
… Goal interviewed the club’s Head of Nutrition, Ed Clark, ahead of the game to get an insight into how the club got themselves ready for one of the biggest fixtures of the season and the answer is disarmingly simple; by changing nothing at all.
“We are treating it like any other game,” he said when quizzed on the fixture. “It’s 11 people on a football pitch and we try to do everything we can do to prepare for a game, whether it’s Manchester United or anybody else, it’s just another game. We don’t change our focus, we just keep doing what we’re doing.”
Runner's World, Sweat Science blog, Alex Hutchinson from
Last March, I wrote about an ambitious new study that promised to bring some much-needed data to the contentious debate about the effectiveness of low-carb, high-fat diets—often referred to as LCHF—for endurance athletes. The results have now been published in the Journal of Physiology, and they make interesting reading (the full text is freely available here).
The idea, in a nutshell, is that eating a diet consisting mostly of fat triggers adaptations that make you better at burning fat for energy. Because we all carry around ample stores of fat, transitioning to running on fat effectively solves the fueling problem for endurance athletes, eliminating the risk of bonking and the need to refuel during long races.
Last year, a team at the Australian Institute of Sport led by Louise Burke assembled an impressive group of 21 top race walkers from around the world, many of them headed to the Rio Olympics, and assigned them one or two three-week blocks of intensified training while following one of three carefully controlled diets under strict supervision
Yesterday I stumbled upon a recently published and excellent visual analytics case study: the Circle Line Rogue Train Case. The article describes how data scientists at GovTech’s Data Science Division in Singapore used visualization to discover the origin of a recurring and mysterious disruptions of Singapore’s MRT Circle Line.
This study represents my ideal case for data visualization: the visual exploration of a given data set to solve an important problem somebody has.
One of the questions I am most often asked about football is how much of the game is luck and how much of it is skill. Just how much of a game can be put down to randomness?
We all know there is skill in football. Just look at Lionel Messi, Thomas Muller, Cristiano Ronaldo, Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Wayne Rooney. These players have made big differences in big matches, on many different occasions throughout their careers. Their long-term success isn’t just because they are lucky.
Data science is an exciting discipline that allows you to turn raw data into understanding, insight, and knowledge. The goal of “R for Data Science” is to help you learn the most important tools in R that will allow you to do data science. After reading this book, you’ll have the tools to tackle a wide variety of data science challenges, using the best parts of R.
