… Preparation. For roughly two decades now, Ichiro has been training the same way. He only takes three or four days off from his program each offseason, as he claims he actually feels more tired and stiff when he doesn’t do it. But you can’t walk into your local L.A. Fitness and work out like Ichiro. Why? Because Ichiro’s program is built around a set of machines that are extremely rare inside the United States. Texas Rangers ace Yu Darvish also uses these special machines, but no one depends on them quite like Ichiro.
The story behind Ichiro’s unusual routine begins in Tottori City, Japan, at the headquarters of World Wing Enterprise. The company’s slogan is straightforward—”the company that researches and develops advanced training concepts.” Not only do they research advanced training concepts, they also manufacture exercise equipment built around those concepts.
… NBA players don’t just show up a few minutes before tipoff, get dressed and play ball. In the modern NBA, game days are elaborate and structured, organized in a way that is designed to foster development, health and peak production. Each player, depending on his playing status and pecking order, uses a three-hour window before tipoff in different ways, going through a scripted routine developed through years of practice and persistence.
Some prefer to work out early. Others late. Some insist on eating the same pregame meal before every game. Others don’t eat at all. Some have to work out with one coach and one coach only. Most go through the same shooting routine, without change, every time. Some even sneak into the Moda Center in the morning for a little private shooting session.
The Blazers’ pregame is detailed down to the minute, with end-of-the-bench players like Pat Connaughton, Jake Layman and Tim Quarterman starting workouts at 4, and veteran players rotating in two at a time every 20 minutes, from 4:40 to 6:20.
A hard workout only creates the potential for fitness. It’s realized when you recover afterwards. When you take it easy after a hard workout the body’s adaptive process kicks in and you become more fit. During recovery the body restores itself by rebuilding damaged cells, creating new neural pathways, expanding capillary beds, rebalancing its chemistry, developing muscles, and much more. During this physiological renovation it makes all of the body’s systems affected by the workout slightly better able handle the stress that produced the need for rest in the first place. This is called overcompensation. The overcompensation process is at the heart of adaptation and therefore race performance. The ultimate result is that the three determiners of your endurance fitness—aerobic capacity, anaerobic/lactate threshold, and economy—improve slightly. The amount of improvement is determined by the type of workout stress applied and how long the recovery lasted.
Recovery and adaptation are essentially the same thing. This adaptive process takes some time and can’t hurried. How much time you need to reduce fatigue and gain fitness depends on how great the preceding workout stress was. If it was only slightly more difficult than what your body was already adapted to then you will probably be ready for another stressful workout again in around 48 hours. A workout that was a great deal harder than your current level of adaptation was capable of handling requires a longer period of recovery.
Training distance runners is similar to other rewarding endeavors in life in that it seems rather daunting to begin with, and then stays challenging throughout. The athletes themselves are in most cases strongly self-motivated, task-oriented, and inquisitive, while the training is based on scientific principles. If the coach is not a strong people-person and well-schooled in science, the learning curve can be steep. Important in this process are the workout planning fundamentals.
For these reasons a good distance coach cannot be just a good distance runner themselves, but more importantly a person eager to learn and apply scientific theory to the development of interesting, effective, and sequential training workouts and schemes.
All mainstream distance races from the 800 meters to the 10,000 meters are characterized by having a comfort zone component and a critical zone component to them. The former is approximately the first three-fourths of the race and the latter is usually the last one-fourth of the distance.
Training NBA players is an entirely different proposition than working out the average athlete—the bodies are different, the goals are different and the time available to commit to fitness is different. But if you ask Mubarak Malik, the director of player performance for the New York Knicks, the basic principles are the same. While Malik—or “Bar,” for short—designs specific regimens that to each player’s body type, injury history and playing style, he maintains that anyone looking to live a healthy lifestyle must be dedicated and disciplined, even outside of the gym.
“He’s one of the best strength coaches in the NBA,” says Knicks center Kyle O’Quinn. “He studies from the different techniques around the world. He’s so knowledgeable, and he tailors every program to the player, and that’s the best way to do it.”
Scientists have known that a lack of sleep can interfere with the ability to learn and make memories. Now, a group of University of Michigan researchers have found how sleep deprivation affects memory-making in the brain.
Previously, researchers knew that depriving mice of sleep after the mice performed a task resulted in the mice forgetting aspects of that task. But researchers weren’t sure what function of the hippocampus—two seahorse-shaped structures located in the temporal lobe of the brain where many long-term memories are made—was kept from doing its job.
Now, U-M researchers have found that interfering with sleep-associated oscillations—or the rhythmic firing of neurons—in one subsection of the hippocampus is likely the culprit. Their results are published in Nature Communications.
Choosing to re-frame stress as a challenge, not a threat, was a consistent theme that emerged during my interviews with high performers, and their approach has been backed up by increasing amounts of evidence.
Experiencing stress is a normal part of being alive, it’s simply the human response when we experience any form of challenge or demand. Whether the stress is physical or psychological, our heart rate, breathing rate and blood pressure increase and our mental alertness is enhanced. It would actually be counterproductive to remove all stress from our lives. ‘Positive stress’ can motivate us, focus our energy, and get us excited about improving performance, but only if we feel that the demands being made of us are within our coping abilities.
We’ve written in the past about the work of Stanford chemical engineer Zhenan Bao, PhD, who last year created a super stretchy material that can be used in the development of artificial muscle or skin. In a recent episode of Stanford’s “Future of Everything” radio show, Bao spoke with host Russ Altman, MD, PhD, about her work and about other materials that can sense pressure, heal after injury and even interface with electronic devices. [audio, 27:57]
The first fully functional microprocessor logic devices based on few-atom-thick layered materials have been demonstrated by researchers from the Graphene Flagship, working at TU Vienna in Austria. The processor chip consists of 115 integrated transistors and is a first step toward ultra-thin, flexible logic devices. Using transistors made from layers of molybdenum disulphide (MoS2), the microprocessors are capable of 1-bit logic operations and the design is scalable to multi-bit operations.
With the drive towards smart objects and the Internet of Things, the microprocessors hold promise for integrating computational power into everyday objects and surfaces. The research is published this week in Nature Communications.
… The integrity of an e-tattoo lies in its adherence, thinness, flexibility, and durability (particularly being able to function in extreme conditions). A lack of one or more of these qualities could explain why the market hasn’t exploded.
Electronic tattoos are very hard to design, and as such expensive to produce. One of the main advantages of electronic tattoos is their flexibility, which requires all the components of the circuit to be flexible, which make their design complex and time-consuming.
But scientists are working to make the manufacture of flexible digital tattoos simple, practical, and relatively inexpensive.
Science Advances; Ruth García-Gavilanes, Anders Mollgaard, Milena Tsvetkova and Taha Yasseri from
Recently developed information communication technologies, particularly the Internet, have affected how we, both as individuals and as a society, create, store, and recall information. The Internet also provides us with a great opportunity to study memory using transactional large-scale data in a quantitative framework similar to the practice in natural sciences. We make use of online data by analyzing viewership statistics of Wikipedia articles on aircraft crashes. We study the relation between recent events and past events and particularly focus on understanding memory-triggering patterns. We devise a quantitative model that explains the flow of viewership from a current event to past events based on similarity in time, geography, topic, and the hyperlink structure of Wikipedia articles. We show that, on average, the secondary flow of attention to past events generated by these remembering processes is larger than the primary attention flow to the current event. We report these previously unknown cascading effects.
The Orlando Magic opened their season expecting to have, in the words of general manager Rob Hennigan, an identity as “a smart, physical, unselfish, defensive-minded team.”
That identity never cemented itself. Not even close.
After attempting to play two big men simultaneously, the Magic ended that experiment on Feb. 14, when the team traded power forward Serge Ibaka to the Toronto Raptors for speedy swingman Terrence Ross and a future first-round pick.
Now, in the words of coach Frank Vogel, the Magic are a “small-ball team that plays up-tempo and does a lot of switching and swarming.”
… Craig Custance: I thought Dean Lombardi certainly earned the chance for at least one more season in Los Angeles. The guy won two Stanley Cups, after all. But this is an unforgiving business, and in winning those Cups, he raised the expectations to a level so high that it ended up costing him his job when they weren’t met. The job ahead isn’t going to be an easy one for new GM Rob Blake, mostly because of the contracts on the books. There are some legacy contracts that aren’t looking good, most notably the Dustin Brown and Marian Gaborik deals. Blake has a small window in which to fix things because the last thing the Kings want is for the wheels to come completely off before Drew Doughty enters the last year of his contract, in 2018-19. The Doughty-to-the-Toronto Maple Leafs talk that is merely a whisper now is only going to get louder as that end date closes in.
Pierre LeBrun: When I spoke with Dean Lombardi two weeks ago, there was zero sense from him that he knew this was coming. He sounded energetic, had already spent most of March bouncing all kinds of ideas off assistant GM Blake as they tackled a season gone wrong and what needed to be done. Specifically, Lombardi talked to me about how it was clear his team needed to adapt to the faster NHL. His heavy and hard Kings won two Cups, but he knew they had to change. He won’t get that chance. Was it a harsh decision by the Kings after Lombardi helped them win two Cups? Perhaps. But it has been three tough years for the Kings, who, since winning the Cup in 2014, have missed the playoffs in two years and were knocked out in the first round in the other. Knowing Lombardi, he would at least be happy that Blake got the GM job. For Blake, I’m sure he had mixed emotions — he enjoyed working under Lombardi. Blake has the chance to be the next Steve Yzerman, a Hall of Famer turned hard-working GM, and is not a guy looking to cut corners. Lombardi prepared Blake well, after all. And no doubt Blake’s focus will be to get this team to upgrade in the speed/skill department. That much you can count on.
When a team changes course, it often does so with a new general manager. But the
Yankees’ makeover has been directed by a man who has led them for two decades.
DL stints have already shaken up the MLB season, and some are blaming WBC participation. But are the critics right to say that the tournament causes injuries at a disproportionate rate? We dug into the numbers to find out.