… He took seven games to score his first goal of the 2015/16 season, while he was out of sorts either side of a desperately disappointing Euro 2016 campaign. Even Roy Hodgson’s decision to have Kane take corners in France was another reason to take aim at the player.
But he just seems to bounce back every time, despite constant questions from all directions. And when he is on a hot streak he is absolutely lethal.
… Rep 1 Sports, the agency that represents the former University of North Carolina quarterback, invited USA TODAY Sports to get an all-access glimpse late last week of how Trubisky wrapped up his preparation for the NFL scouting combine, which begins this week in Indianapolis. Revealed was a taxing grind of on-field workouts, weight-training sessions, media training, psychological tests, and film study
Most significant, however, is what’s about to happen in this room. It mimics the 15-minute, speed-dating-like sessions he’ll face this week at the combine, where teams will crowd a hotel room with coaches, executives and scouts for the most uncomfortable job interview in the NFL.
Trubisky is given a laminated sheet with six plays he has never seen. He’s asked to digest and memorize two, though he’s not given the luxury of studying them in silence. The firing squad shoots its questions.
Sports Medicine Research: In the Lab & In the Field from
Take Home Message: Athletes suffered more lower extremity injuries towards the middle to end of the competition and practices, which suggest that fatigue may play a role in lower extremity injury risk.
… these council fields are the new front line in the battle for supremacy between United and City, and these kids – shivering, laughing, falling over and pushing past – are the trophies both clubs are fighting for.
The reasons are not hard to find. Inside the squat changing room, away from the damp patch on the ceiling where the flat roof leaks, a trophy cabinet spills its silverware on to shelves and filing cabinets either side. On the opposite wall are photos of the young-boys-made-good who won them.
Marcus Rashford, striker for United and England. Danny Welbeck, United, Arsenal and England. Wes Brown, Jesse Lingard. Ravel Morrison – made good, made bad, as innocent here aged eight as he would ever be.
We all know that practice makes us better at things, but scientists are still trying to understand what kinds of practice work best. A research team led by a Brown University computer scientist has found insights about how people improve their skills in a rather unlikely place: online video games.
In a pair of studies reported in the journal Topics in Cognitive Science, researchers looked at data generated from thousands of online matches of two video games, the first-person shooter game Halo: Reach and the strategy game StarCraft 2. The Halo study revealed how different patterns of play resulted in different rates of skill development in players. The StarCraft study showed how elite players have unique and consistent rituals that appear to contribute to their success.
… Creating players who are tactically astute as well as technically competent is a hot topic in coaching research and has come up several times in our Research Summaries of the latest academic research. But what also emerges from the research is how difficult this is to achieve.
The injury burden in collision sports is relatively high compared to other team sports. Therefore, participants in these sports would benefit by having effective injury prevention programs. Exercise-based interventions have successfully reduced injuries in soccer, but evidence on exercise-based interventions in tackle collision sports is limited. Objective
The objective of this review is to systematically examine the evidence of exercise-based intervention programs reducing injuries in tackle collision sports. Data sources
PubMed, EBSCOHost, and Web of Science were searched for articles published between January 1995 and December 2015. The methodological quality was assessed using an adapted Cochrane Bone Joint and Muscle Trauma Group quality assessment tool. Study selection
The inclusion criteria were (1) (randomized) control trials and observational studies; (2) sporting codes: American, Australian and Gaelic Football, rugby union, and rugby league; (3) participants of any age or sex; (4) exercise-based, prehabilitative intervention; and (5) primary outcome was injury rate or incidence (injury risk). The exclusion criteria were (1) unavailability of full-text; and (2) article unavailable in English. Results
Nine studies with a total of 3517 participants were included in this review. Seven of these studies showed a significant decrease in injury risk. These studies included three sporting codes and various age groups, making it difficult to make inferences. The two highest methodological quality studies found no effect of an exercise-based intervention on injury risk. Conclusions
There is evidence that exercise-based injury preventions can be beneficial in reducing injury risk in collision sports, but more studies of high methodological quality are required.
Every year legions of NFL prospects dedicate their winter months to training for the combine. Every year NFL coaches, execs and pundits grumble about the applicability of the combine’s drills to the players’ future pursuits. (This is Bill Belichick, in July 2015, dismissing the utility of “those February drills”: “In the end, [players are] going to make their career playing football.”) Then every year some obscure player rips off a lightning-fast 40-yard dash in Indianapolis. At which point, we all seem to forget about those reservations.
There are, however, at least a few technology-fueled changes afoot. When a runner competes in the 40 today, the NFL Network also shares his split from the first 10 yards, a distance far more relevant to most football positions. At the 2011 combine Under Armour introduced workout shirts featuring built-in sensors that measured heart rate, breathing and acceleration—data that can be used to quantify fitness rather than just raw performance. Last year National Football Scouting Inc., which runs the combine, even established a committee to review the entire event, raising the possibility of further innovations. Just don’t expect any soon. According to its president, Jeff Foster, NFS’s focus over the last 12 months has been on introducing new fan activities. He declined to comment on any future changes for athletes.
… The fact that Fitbit is seeing sales decline is not really surprising. It has not been able to introduce any new advances in its technology beyond the features of counting steps and measuring heart rate. It also hasn’t been able to solve the problem of customers giving up on wearing their devices within a short period of time.
At the same time, there has been a general concern about the security and privacy of data collected by these devices. Programs introduced by employers and insurance companies to incentivise the wearing of devices in return for reduced premiums have been met with suspicion about the potential abuse of this data.
There has also been continued criticisms about the supposed health benefits that have been advanced by Fitbit and others resulting from wearables.
Muscle glycogen levels have a profound impact on an athlete’s sporting performance, thus measurement is vital. Carbohydrate manipulation is a fundamental component in an athlete’s lifestyle and is a critical part of elite performance, since it can provide necessary training adaptations. This paper provides a critical review of the current invasive and non-invasive methods for measuring skeletal muscle glycogen levels. These include the gold standard muscle biopsy, histochemical analysis, magnetic resonance spectroscopy, and musculoskeletal high frequency ultrasound, as well as pursuing future application of electromagnetic sensors in the pursuit of portable non-invasive quantification of muscle glycogen. This paper will be of interest to researchers who wish to understand the current and most appropriate techniques in measuring skeletal muscle glycogen. This will have applications both in the lab and in the field by improving the accuracy of research protocols and following the physiological adaptations to exercise.
University of Alberta, Faculty of Rehabilitation Medicine from
What started a year ago as a partnership between FC Edmonton and the University of Alberta’s Glen Sather Sports Medicine Clinic (GSSMC) has proven to still be going strong with the completion of player pre-season medicals in early February.
FC Edmonton, a Canadian professional soccer team, relies on pre-season medical testing to identify any current injuries and assess the potential risk for future injuries in players.
… The headbands – which look more like ankle braces but on one’s head – were made to absorb contact, hopefully lessening the impact that leads to concussions.
All of it as part of a study being performed by the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
We’ll always be fascinated with sports; it’s a constant. There will always be a sizable percentage of the population that cares about the NBA trade deadline, what the New York Yankees accomplished during winter meetings, and whether Dak Prescott is in fact the real deal. Part of our collective human nature is marveling at what only just a few can do better than anyone else alive.
But if you’ve watched an NBA game and waited 10 minutes for the final minute and a half to play out, or if you’ve sat through a 20-pitch at-bat only to watch a player pop up, you might be understandably underwhelmed. There is something to be said for sports lacking the requisite amount of drama and intensity to keep people interested at all times. Again, this is all understandable. But for millennials, and we assume subsequent generations, it’s also a cause for concern.
Premier League giant Manchester City cares so much about fans’ feelings it has recruited a firm to trawl trillions of their social media posts.
Soon, some of the world’s biggest clubs could even be tailoring the music inside grounds to what supporters write about on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram – thanks to Boston-based Crimson Hexagon.