During the National Football Conference championship game this January, during the Atlanta Falcons’ victory over the Green Bay Packers, Alex Mack, the Falcons’ center, broke his fibula for the second time. When he broke it for the first time, in 2014, doctors put a plate in his leg. The second break landed just above the plate. There was some concern that he would be unable to play in the Super Bowl two weeks later, since a player normally misses six to eight weeks with that type of injury. But on the day of the Super Bowl ESPN’s Adam Schefter reported that Mack would be given a painkiller shot. He started the game. It was the Super Bowl, after all, and football players are celebrated for playing through pain. (The Falcons did not respond to a request for comment.) “I just know his toughness and strength is so great,” the Falcons head coach, Dan Quinn, told reporters.
Mack’s endurance is extraordinary even for an N.F.L. player—he hadn’t missed a snap in more than five seasons before breaking his fibula for the first time—but his story is not atypical. Football is a game of inches, and it is also a game of blown Achilles tendons, torn A.C.L.s, dislocated elbows, strained labra, cracked ribs, separated AC joints, cuts, and contusions. Playing injured is part of the job, and so, too, sometimes, is taking painkillers. It’s one thing to shake it off when someone steps on your hand—even if that someone is three hundred and twenty-five pounds and wearing cleats. It’s another thing to play with a torn labrum or knees that will need replacing.
… There was never a moment in 26 miles when people weren’t yelling my name. We were slow, so slow as a group. I got antsy at 20 miles and took off. I narrowed the lead group from double digits down to 3. But I panicked, I doubted myself with 5 miles to go and backed off the accelerator. With a mile to go I was still in the lead, but as we headed down Boylston St. I found myself in 3rd. They out-sprinted me, and I had to settle for 3rd place.
I was devastated. I had never before let myself be so exposed. I had let the whole world in to my goal and I didn’t complete it. I had gotten everyone’s hopes up and I had said that I would deliver, and I failed. It was both the most amazing and shattering experience of my running career.
… Born just four months shy of the new millennium to two football-playing parents, Christian Pulisic’s place at the heart of the beautiful game always seemed to have more than a hint of inevitability about it. An ex-professional indoor player and esteemed coach for a father and a mother who excelled playing at university level, baby Christian might well have been born with a football already at his feet. But with the Pulisic family’s nomadic tendencies, the route by which their son journeyed in order to align himself with his seemingly predestined fate was a little less orthodox by comparison.
Growing up in Pennsylvania, Christian’s parents insisted upon letting their son discover his own joys in life, unswayed by their own common interest. Nevertheless, whether by pure coincidence or simply at the whim of genetic predisposition, it took little time for Christian to follow in his parents’ footsteps, just like them willingly enticed by the allure of football.
You could have easily missed it but Laura Massaro won Wimbledon on Sunday. “Wimbledon” is often how we within squash tend to tagline the British Open Squash Championships. It’s a bit deferential but is the easiest way to explain the significance of the competition to people outside the sport. Not only did she win the Wimbledon of squash, but she beat another English player, Sarah-Jane Perry, in the final.
I’ll go further. Not only did two English women play in the British Open final for the first time in 26 years, but Nick Matthew reached the final of the men’s event, meaning three of the four finalists on Sunday were English. That is the equivalent of Laura Robson and Heather Watson playing the women’s final at Wimbledon and Dan Evans losing in the men’s final in the same year.
This is incredible, once-in-a-lifetime material but you probably haven’t heard about it.
While Kevin Durant empathizes with fans over the controversy about NBA teams resting star players, he doesn’t see why commissioner Adam Silver is seeking to get team owners involved.
“The truth about it is, it’s only for a couple of players in the league,” Durant told ESPN. “They don’t care if the 13th man on the bench rests. It’s only for like LeBron [James], Steph [Curry], [James] Harden, Russell [Westbrook]. It’s only for like five players. So you want a rule just for those five players?”
As the Chicago Bears aim to curb injuries, coach John Fox has eliminated joint training camp practices from this summer’s schedule.
Over the past two years, the Bears traveled to Indianapolis and New England to practice against the Colts and Patriots prior to the second preseason game. That practice will be discontinued, at least for 2017.
Other people’s attitudes toward laziness and impatience can rub off on you, a new study from France reveals.
Researchers found that people not only pick up on other’s attitudes toward three personality characteristics — laziness, impatience and prudence — but they may even start to imitate these behaviors, suggesting a strong social influence.
Prudence, impatience and laziness are personality traits that guide how people make decisions that involve taking a risk, delaying an action and making an effort, said Jean Daunizeau, a team leader of the motivation, brain and behavior group at the Brain and Spine Institute (ICM) in Paris. Daunizeau is the lead author of the new study, published today (March 30) in the journal PLOS Computational Biology.
The curvilinear relationship between power output and the time for which it can be sustained is a fundamental and well-known feature of high-intensity exercise performance. This relationship ‘levels off’ at a ‘critical power’ (CP) that separates power outputs that can be sustained with stable values of, for example, muscle phosphocreatine, blood lactate, and pulmonary oxygen uptake (\( \dot{V}{\text{O}}_{2} \)), from power outputs where these variables change continuously with time until their respective minimum and maximum values are reached and exercise intolerance occurs. The amount of work that can be done during exercise above CP (the so-called W′) is constant but may be utilized at different rates depending on the proximity of the exercise power output to CP. Traditionally, this two-parameter CP model has been employed to provide insights into physiological responses, fatigue mechanisms, and performance capacity during continuous constant power output exercise in discrete exercise intensity domains. However, many team sports (e.g., basketball, football, hockey, rugby) involve frequent changes in exercise intensity and, even in endurance sports (e.g., cycling, running), intensity may vary considerably with environmental/course conditions and pacing strategy. In recent years, the appeal of the CP concept has been broadened through its application to intermittent high-intensity exercise. With the assumptions that W′ is utilized during work intervals above CP and reconstituted during recovery intervals below CP, it can be shown that performance during intermittent exercise is related to four factors: the intensity and duration of the work intervals and the intensity and duration of the recovery intervals. However, while the utilization of W′ may be assumed to be linear, studies indicate that the reconstitution of W′ may be curvilinear with kinetics that are highly variable between individuals. This has led to the development of a new CP model for intermittent exercise in which the balance of W′ remaining (\( W_{\text{BAL}}^{\prime } \)) may be calculated with greater accuracy. Field trials of athletes performing stochastic exercise indicate that this \( W_{\text{BAL}}^{\prime } \) model can accurately predict the time at which W′ tends to zero and exhaustion is imminent. The \( W_{\text{BAL}}^{\prime } \) model potentially has important applications in the real-time monitoring of athlete fatigue progression in endurance and team sports, which may inform tactics and influence pacing strategy. [full text]
Anticipation of opponent actions, through the use of advanced (i.e., pre-event) kinematic information, can be trained using video-based temporal occlusion. Typically, this involves isolated opponent skills/shots presented as trials in a random order. However, two different areas of research concerning representative task design and contextual (non-kinematic) information, suggest this structure of practice restricts expert performance. The aim of this study was to examine the effect of a sequential structure of practice during video-based training of anticipatory behavior in tennis, as well as the transfer of these skills to the performance environment. Methods
In a pre-practice-retention-transfer design, participants viewed life-sized video of tennis rallies across practice in either a sequential order (sequential group), in which participants were exposed to opponent skills/shots in the order they occur in the sport, or a non-sequential (non-sequential group) random order. Results
In the video-based retention test, the sequential group was significantly more accurate in their anticipatory judgments when the retention condition replicated the sequential structure compared to the non-sequential group. In the non-sequential retention condition, the non-sequential group was more accurate than the sequential group. In the field-based transfer test, overall decision time was significantly faster in the sequential group compared to the non-sequential group. Conclusion
Findings highlight the benefits of a sequential structure of practice for the transfer of anticipatory behavior in tennis. We discuss the role of contextual information, and the importance of representative task design, for the testing and training of perceptual-cognitive skills in sport.
The NFL isn’t trying to get into the helmet business. But they are willing to share their concussion research with manufacturers in an effort to end up with better helmets.
NFL executive vice president of health and safety policy Jeff Miller brought Dr. Jeff Crandall, the chairman of the league’s head neck and spine engineering subcommittee to meet with reporters Tuesday at the owners meeting. And while Crandall said the science is still a few years away, the eventual benefit could be position-specific helmets in hopes of reducing the chances of concussions.
Runners do not have a greater prevalence of knee osteoarthritis (OA) than nonrunners. The hypothesis that joint loads in running do not cause OA is forwarded. Two mechanisms are proposed: 1) cumulative load, which is surprisingly low in running, is more important for OA risk than peak load, and 2) running conditions cartilage to withstand the mechanical stresses of running. [full text]
The National Hockey League team doctor had seen enough.
Hours earlier, he watched Chicago Blackhawks forward Martin Havlat return to the ice for Game 4 of the 2009 NHL Western Conference final, just two days after Havlat had been knocked unconscious during Game 3 by a ferocious bodycheck. In Game 4, Havlat was hit again and was forced to leave the game early.
The team doctor – one of at least 30 physicians charged with safeguarding the health of the NHL’s players – couldn’t understand why Havlat had been allowed back into the Blackhawks lineup for Game 4.
“I think it’s about time now that Gareth and his staff brought an identity to English football and the national team that we can be proud of,” Paul Scholes said in the aftermath of England’s encouraging 1-0 defeat – yes, there is such a thing- away to Germany.
The former Man Utd midfielder was referencing the new three-at-the-back system employed at Dortmund, even if a closer reading of his comments left some ambiguity. “If Southgate feels that’s the right way to go, I think it’s a really good way of playing,” Scholes told the BBC. “It’s going to be difficult and will take a bit of time but if he’s playing this way and England are being successful then that’s what it’s all about.”
… “I basically sent emails cold to all teams asking them if they had any summer internship opportunities,” [Victor] Wang told CBS Sports. “I had done some work prior to applying to teams with the Hardball Times and included a packet of my work with my résumé and cover letter. I was able to end up landing a summer internship with them and have been with them ever since.”
The Indians’ hiring of Wang made sense, given they’ve long been one of baseball’s most innovative teams. It was the Indians who patented long-term extensions for young players. It was the Indians who swam at the deep end of the data pool with the Oakland Athletics during the Moneyball era. It was the Indians whose creative bullpen usage last October led them to the pennant. Those unorthodox strategies all stem from the same root, the same truth — the poor small-market Indians must act as a disruptor, as a tradition-eschewer, in order to compete with richer teams.
By stepping off line, the Indians have enjoyed plenty of on-field successes — and, believe it or not, perhaps even more as the industry’s gatekeepers. Cleveland has produced general managers at a rate reminiscent of the old Expos. The key? Corporate shadiness. But, if the Indians have another key, it’s their willingness to challenge convention — be it in the dugout or in the boardroom.
There’s plenty of knocking on wood this time of year around the NHL as teams hope to avoid injuries that could damage their playoff hopes.
For some, it’s already too late.
The Tampa Bay Lightning lost Steven Stamkos for four months – and counting – and now Tyler Johnson. The Florida Panthers went without Jonathan Huberdeau and Aleksander Barkov for much of the year. The Los Angeles Kings tried to stay afloat without goaltender Jonathan Quick until late February but will likely miss the playoffs.
While the defending Stanley Cup champion Pittsburgh Penguins have withstood a barrage of injuries and the league-leading Washington Capitals have largely avoided them, they’re keenly aware of how quickly even one injury can make a difference.