Since turning 28 years old, Frank Gore has rushed for 6,651 yards. That’s the 4th most rushing yards from age 28+ in NFL history. Gore has also hit the 1,000-yard mark in 5 seasons since turning 28, tied with Emmitt Smith for the most ever.
Catnap, kip, snooze, siesta; whatever you call naps, there is no doubt these once frowned-upon short sleeps are gaining acceptance. The increase in popularity is not surprising, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the US finding around a third of American adults do not get the recommended seven hours sleep each night.
Insufficient sleep not only affects our overall performance, but can affect some physiological functions such as changes to hormones, metabolic factors and immunity. From a business perspective, insufficient sleep can translate into lost profits due to decreased worker productivity. This has led companies such as Google, Nike and Ben & Jerry’s to encourage or allow napping at work, providing employees with napping facilities such as napping pods and quiet rooms in which they can nap if desired.
For the first time ever, American junior players will be able to show off their tennis skills in front of scouts from several college tennis programs throughout the country, as USTA Player Development hosts the inaugural USTA All-American College Combine.
The USTA All-American College Combine scouting event is designed to give U.S. junior players exposure, knowledge and data to help in their college recruitment.The event will be held June 14-16 at the USTA National Campus at Lake Nona in Orlando, Fla.
This article is the first part of a four part series of an inside look at a performance model for American Football. It is written to give tangible insight into training means for conditioning, strength, speed and power. Throughout the series, different aspects of training will be explored with attention placed on the developmental experience of the student-athlete. This section will cover the physical qualities needed for athletic performance and will give details on how to enhance it.
Notre Dame Insider, South Bend Tribune, Mike Vorel from
… “When I was getting recruited, he sat me down in his office and said, ‘Be prepared when you get here. This is going to be the hardest offseason of your life,’” said [Cameron] Lawrence, who enrolled early at Mississippi State in Jan. 2009. “I’m thinking, ‘I’m a pretty tough guy. I’ve been through a lot. I can handle this.’ But when I got on campus, it was an eye-opening experience.”
[Matt] Balis didn’t wait long to make good on his promise. Lawrence’s first college workout was also Balis’ first at Mississippi State. He introduced himself to his team with a soul-crushing conditioning session, and he even gave it a name:
Preventive medicine techniques have alleviated billions of dollars’ worth of the economic burden in the medical care system through the implementation of vaccinations and screenings before the onset of disease symptoms. Knowledge of biomechanical tendencies has progressed rapidly over the past 20 years such that clinicians can identify, in healthy athletes, the underlying mechanisms that lead to catastrophic injuries such as anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) ruptures. As such, preventive medicine concepts can be applied to noncontact musculoskeletal injuries to reduce the economic burden of sports medicine treatments and enhance the long-term health of athletes. Purpose:
To illustrate the practical medical benefits that could be gained from preventive biomechanics applied to the ACL as well as the need and feasibility for the broad implementation of these principles. Study Design:
Literature review. Methods:
The recent literature pertinent to the screening and prevention of musculoskeletal injuries was reviewed and compiled into a clinical commentary on the current state and applicability of preventive biomechanics. Results:
Investigators have identified neuromuscular training protocols that screen for and correct the underlying biomechanical deficits that lead to ACL injuries. The literature shows that when athletes comply with these prescribed training protocols, the incidence of injuries is significantly reduced within that population. Such preventive biomechanics practices employ basic training methods that would be familiar to athletic coaches and have the potential to save billions of dollars in cost in sports medicine. Conclusion:
The widespread implementation of preventive biomechanics concepts could profoundly affect the field of sports medicine with a minimum of initial investment. [full text]
Athletics and analytic technology have become increasingly intertwined in recent years, in nearly every sport at both the professional and collegiate levels. It’s no secret that Virginia Tech, a school that prides itself on innovation, has been a leader in this trend. There has been a lot of talk about the men’s basketball team’s unique use of technology and data analytics, but the men’s tennis team has flown under the radar with its innovative practices.
This Tuesday, when Virginia Tech faces off against the College of Charleston at Burrows-Burleson Tennis Center, it will be the first college ever to implement a live line-call review and challenge system.
“The challenge system is through this technology called PlaySight, which we had installed in 2015. This system is used for statistic tracking and also can call the balls in and out,” said junior Freddy Mesmer. “In the match, we will get two challenges per set. If you get your challenge right, you get to keep it and if you’re wrong, you lose one.”
This wearable device, which is strapped to a patient’s arm and continuously collects data, will be trialled by two UK hospitals in the coming months.
Created by the Scotland-based snap40 the device alerts doctors and nurses to when a patient’s vital signs indicate a further health risk may occur.
“The device is warn on the upper arm and it monitors six different vital signs: heart rate, respiratory rate, oxygen saturations, temperature, emotion, posture and changes in the blood pressure,” Chris McCann, snap40’s CEO and founder, tells WIRED. His firm has just been awarded £1 million healthcare development contract from NHS England’s Small Business Research Initiative.
The New York Times, The Upshot blog, Aaron E. Carroll from
I once received a lot of blowback for an Upshot article in which I showed (with evidence) that exercise is not the key to weight loss. Diet is. Many, many readers cannot wrap their head around the notion that adding physical activity, and therefore burning more calories, doesn’t necessarily translate into results on the scale.
Well, here we go again because some of those folks also believe that fitness devices — Fitbit, Vivosmart, Apple Watch — must be helpful in losing weight. Unfortunately, evidence doesn’t support this belief either.
For some time, people have been trying to prove devices like these succeed in promoting weight loss. In 2011, a study compared four groups getting a mixture of behavioral weight loss programs and use of an armband that measured activity and energy expenditure. All the intervention groups lost weight, but those with behavioral programs and technology lost the most.
Scientists at Purdue University found that when teenage girls head a football regularly there is a risk of low-level brain injuries which – in some cases – lasts for four or five months
For all the improvements in computer technology over the years, we still struggle to recreate the low-energy, elegant processing of the human brain. Now, researchers at Stanford University and Sandia National Laboratories have made an advance that could help computers mimic one piece of the brain’s efficient design – an artificial version of the space over which neurons communicate, called a synapse.
“It works like a real synapse but it’s an organic electronic device that can be engineered,” said Alberto Salleo, associate professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford and senior author of the paper. “It’s an entirely new family of devices because this type of architecture has not been shown before. For many key metrics, it also performs better than anything that’s been done before with inorganics.”
A few Oregon basketball players were under the close watch of Andrew Murray, the school’s director of performance and sports science, before practice last week.
Jordan Bell, Dillon Brooks and Payton Pritchard were among the players who strapped on a backpack and were hooked up to electronic monitors as they ran up and down the court before taking a few jump shots.
“What they were doing, they were testing some of their feet, some of the pressure points, that’s what they were working on,” Oregon coach Dana Altman explained.
Oregon has dealt with with foot injuries to Bell, Brooks and Dylan Ennis in the past two seasons.
Previous injury is a well-established predictor of subsequent injury in sports medicine. Some have interpreted this to mean that either our current methods of rehabilitation are inadequate or there is some permanent damage to the tissue and 100% rehabilitation is not possible. In 2011, we illustrated that these analyses and interpretations failed to account for the fact that some athletes are more prone to get injured, either physiologically, or because of their role/type of play. We suggested that the appropriate analysis would simply require using statistical methods that measured how each individual athlete’s risk changed from preinjury to postinjury.
In this paper, we revisit our recommendation and illustrate that it too would be flawed if the risk of injury changed over time independent of an injury ever occurring. This might be expected if general fitness were to decline over the season, or if the style of play changed between early season games and postseason championship games.
The Penguins’ 5-2 loss Sunday to lowly Detroit shouldn’t have been a complete surprise to anyone who has paid attention in recent weeks. They have a 3-1-3 record over their last seven games. That may sound good, but it really isn’t because they faced only two playoff teams and three of the NHL’s four worst teams.
Most teams would love to earn nine points over seven games, but the Penguins aren’t most teams. They are championship contenders, and they should fare better against those opponents. Injuries have been a factor, but they just looked like mentally and physically fatigued against the Red Wings.
There is no reason to panic yet, but the Penguins need to rest if they want to make another deep playoff run. Outside of injuries, fatigue may be the only opponent capable of derailing their quest to repeat as Stanley Cup champions. The biggest challenge to repeating is the fatigue coming from playing until June 12 and the short offseason it produced. The Penguins played 24 playoff games, and seven went into overtime. The downtime was even less for the six Penguins who played in the World Cup of Hockey in September.
It appears the Cleveland Cavaliers aren’t the only ones struggling to find the right balance between rest and play during the grueling 82-game regular season.
“I do recognize that there isn’t an easy solution to that problem, and I’m sympathetic to fans who turn out — whether they buy tickets to games or watching games on television and don’t see their favorite player on the floor,” NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said during his annual All-Star Game press conference Saturday night. “But we also have to be realistic that the science has gotten to the point where there is that direct correlation that we’re aware of between fatigue and injuries.
“And as tough as it is on our fans to miss one of their favorite players for a game, it’s far better than having them get injured and be out for long periods of time. So we’re always still looking to strike that right balance.”