… Today Ross, who dealt with injuries to both knees in college, admits the shoulder threw him off slightly during his record run. Couple that with how he started cramping in his calves before his run and his 4.22 may have been even lower.
“That’d be hard to say. I felt like I could have ran in the 4.1s,” Ross said. “I think I definitely could have gone faster if everything was right.”
Tales of Ross’s speed go back to his youth. There’s the popular story he tells about making his brother and cousin collide in backyard football while trying to cover him. In kickball, he was always an inside-the-park-home-run threat. And there was no bigger waste of his time than after school in fifth grade.
… “My career is in a slightly different rhythm from the previous year,” Djokovic recently told the Serbian website Novosti. “I decided to cut down the rhythm, to preserve my health and prolong the career and to dedicate myself more, at the cost of not having to win every tournament I play.”
The desire for Djokovic, who’s almost 30 and has a family, to prolong a career is code for playing fewer events. Although Djokovic is usually present for the full work week whenever he plays, he’s already down to about 15 tournaments a year. It’s hard to see much fat to trim.
Yet Djokovic also said he wants to “dedicate myself” more, which suggests he wants to ramp up his efforts on the fitness and conditioning fronts. That makes sense in the context of the criticisms lodged at the end of last year by the “supercoach” with whom Djokovic unexpectedly parted with last year, Boris Becker. Becker had shepherded Djokovic through the wildly successful period during which he won six of his 12 Grand Slam titles.
… Speaking on BT Sport’s ‘Premier League Tonight’ show on Saturday, Gerrard gave a superb understanding of what he thinks is required to thrive as a top-level footballer.
“I was obsessed,” said Gerrard.
“Obsessed with being the best player in training every single day, and if I didn’t I’d go home and think about it and try and do it again the next day.
… The social network of wearable technology and data sharing now includes millions of people who use digital apps to measure, record and compare how often they run, how far and how fast. Competitive fitness is no longer a phrase used and understood only by evolutionary biologists. And if going your own way has become more difficult in this new runners’ world, to think about nobody else is a rare thing indeed.
Scientists this week show that such exchange of information between runners has a real and measurable impact. People run more when their friends do. And when they see their friends run faster and further, they push themselves to do so too.
In the study, published in Nature Communications, researchers from the MIT Sloan School of Management in Cambridge, Massachusetts, describe how they recorded the daily exercise patterns, geographical locations, and social-network ties of more than 1 million people, who between them ran more than 350 million kilometres over 5 years (S. Aral and C. Nicolaides Nature Commun. 8, 14753; 2017).
International Journal of Sports Physiology & Performance from
Purpose:
To assess the impact of match start time and days relative to match compared to the habitual sleep characteristics of elite Australian Football (AF) players. Methods:
45 elite male AF players were assessed during the pre-season (habitual) and across four home matches during the season. Players wore an activity monitor the night before (-1), night of (0), one night after (+1), and two nights (+2) after each match and completed a self-reported rating of sleep quality. A two-way ANOVA with Tukey’s post hoc was used to determine differences in sleep characteristics between match start times and days relative to the match. Two-way nested ANOVA was conducted to examine differences between competition and habitual phases. The Effect size ± 90% confidence interval (ES ± 90% CI) was calculated to quantify the magnitude of pairwise differences. Results:
Differences observed in sleep onset latency (ES=0.11 ± 0.16), sleep rating (ES=0.08 ± 0.14) and sleep duration (ES=0.08 ± 0.01) between competition and habitual periods were trivial. Sleep efficiency (%) was almost certainly higher during competition than habitual, however this was not reflected in the subjective rating of sleep quality. Conclusion:
Elite AF competition does not cause substantial disruption to sleep characteristics compared to habitual sleep. Whilst match start time has some impact on sleep variables, it appears that the match itself is more of a disruption than the start time. Subjective ratings of sleep from well-being questionnaires appear limited in their ability to accurately provide an indication of sleep quality.
… students in Finland normally take a fifteen-minute break for every forty-five minutes of instruction. During a typical break, the children head outside to play and socialize with friends.
I didn’t see the point of these frequent pit stops. As a teacher in the United States, I’d usually spent consecutive hours with my students in the classroom. And I was trying to replicate this model in Finland. The Finnish way seemed soft, and I was convinced that kids learned better with longer stretches of instructional time. So I decided to hold my students back from their regularly scheduled break and teach two forty-five-minute lessons in a row, followed by a double break of thirty minutes. Now I knew why the red dots had appeared on Sami’s forehead.
Come to think of it, I wasn’t sure if the American approach had ever worked very well. My students in the States had always seemed to drag their feet after about forty-five minutes in the classroom. But they’d never thought of revolting like this shrimpy Finnish fifth grader
Why do people pretend to know things? Why does confidence so often scale with ignorance? Steven Sloman, a professor of cognitive science at Brown University, has some compelling answers to these questions.
“We’re biased to preserve our sense of rightness,” he told me, “and we have to be.”
The author of The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone, Sloman’s research focuses on judgment, decision-making, and reasoning. He’s especially interested in what’s called “the illusion of explanatory depth.” This is how cognitive scientists refer to our tendency to overestimate our understanding of how the world works.
Medtronic has announced another integration with a popular consumer-facing fitness wearable, adding weight to efforts to combine remote patient monitoring with health and wellness.
The Ireland-based medical technology giant last week announced a partnership with Garmin, combining the latter’s vivofit series activity trackers with the Medtronic Care Management Services (MCMS) RPM platform through the Garmin health software development kit.
The integration is designed to combine activity measurements from Garmin wearables with the MCMS platform for both chronic care and post-discharge treatment plans, giving healthcare providers a better idea of what their patients are doing at home.
Rice University computer scientists are mapping a new solution for interior navigational location detection by linking it to existing sensors in mobile devices. Their results were presented in a paper at last month’s 2017 Design, Automation and Test in Europe (DATE) Conference in Lausanne, Switzerland.
Six months ago, the same researchers published a paper on their first technology for a new indoor mobile positioning system called CaPSuLe. The navigational location detection system began as a solution for mobile device users inside large indoor spaces like office complexes or shopping malls where GPS navigation falters under poor signals that quickly deplete battery life.
Both CaPSuLe and the DATE paper technology rely on machine learning for location detection. Both increase the speed of calculations and decrease energy expenditure in comparison with existing location technologies. But CaPSuLe depends on image matching techniques and uploaded data, while the new technology taps into sensors that already exist in most mobile devices.
New devices leverage high-performance, low-cost sensing technologies and signal processing to develop radically new ways to non-invasively address medical-instrumentation challenges.
We’ve seen lots of activities in “wearables” and personal health/wellness devices of many types in the past year, with more to come. These small units can track pulse and respiration, cardiac waveforms, blood oxygen saturation (SpO2) level, and more.
All of the well-deserved attention that these useful medical and fitness products are getting, however, may be obscuring a bigger picture. Engineers, researchers, and scientists are combining advanced sensor types and technologies — along with complex analog and digital signal processing — to provide new insights into a variety of medical issues and to do so in a low- or no-risk, non-invasive way.
I’ve previously written about how muscle stem cells rev their engines in response to a distant injury, like drag cars at the starting line of a race. This priming function helps them respond more quickly to injury and trauma.
Now the same researchers, Stanford neurologist Thomas Rando, MD, PhD, and University of Southern California stem cell biologist Joseph Rodgers, PhD, have identified the specific protein responsible for alerting the stem cells and shown that it can be administered before injury to aid subsequent healing. They published their results today in Cell Reports.
The 2016-17 NBA regular season is over and what should be an exciting postseason has already begun. Sustained health is bound to be a driving force in crowning the eventual champion and this year the league is in a better position than ever. The 4,198 games lost to injury or illness calculated by InStreetClothes.com is the lowest total since the NBA moved away from the injured reserve prior to the 2005-06 season. Nearly 50 percent of the league reduced their injury totals from the prior season and five fewer teams lost over 200 games.
The drop in games lost to injury or illness is bound to draw skepticism from those frustrated with teams utilizing games off for rest more than ever. As ESPN’s Tom Haberstroh noted in February the number of DNP-Rests were on a record pace entering the All-Star Break. The trend continued with teams reporting over 200 games of rest during the course of the regular season. However even with these games included in the games lost sum, the final results would still be the second lowest total of games lost of any 82-game season since 2005. It’s a remarkable turnaround from the 2013-14 season when nearly 5,000 man games were forfeited to injury or illness.
The Houston Rockets led the league in fewest games lost with 57. Despite upping their pace with Mike D’Antoni at the helm, Houston avoided injury and secured the third seed in the Western Conference.
… Seattle’s performance analysis department is the envy of most of MLS, and Ramineni is its chief number-cruncher. The role he and “high performance director” Dave Tenney play in the club’s cutting-edge fitness and recovery practices has been well documented. Few teams manage the league’s high-mileage, high-intensity grind better than Seattle. But the data-centric mindset has come to encompass nearly every move the technical staff makes, from player recruitment to tactics to the training ground and beyond.
A globally-respected practitioner with deep wells of both coaching and clinical knowledge, Tenney arrived in Seattle at the dawn of the Sounders’ MLS era in 2009, initially under the simple title of fitness coach. Since then, he has helped ensure that data analysis, both in terms of infrastructure and culture, lives at the heart of the Sounders’ way. In fact, the club hosts its own sports science convention every June, drawing coaches and industry leaders from around the world.
Perhaps the most revolutionary thing, however, is the simple fact that anyone wearing Rave Green will talk to you about it at all.