ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) from
The death of former Wallaby Dan Vickerman in February has drawn into sharp relief the struggles so many athletes face when they retire — be it joblessness, depression, substance abuse or simply a lack of a sense of purpose.
“At the moment, athletes are competing for maybe 10 years, if they’re lucky — 10 years out of an 80-year life,” says Gearoid Towey, an Olympic rower who now helps athletes make the transition to everyday life.
“At the moment, that 10 years for a lot of people, it’s destroying the rest of their lives.”
A record 84 EXOS-supported players were selected in the 2017 NFL draft, making up thirty-three percent of the total selections. This includes a record-tying 16 first-round picks, a record-tying six selections in the top 10, and a record forty-one percent of the top 100 players selected. EXOS has now supported 759 total draft picks.
International Journal of Sports Physiology & Performance from
Guest Editors: Pitre C. Bourdon, Marco Cardinale, Warren Gregson, and N. Timothy CableGuest Editors: Pitre C. Bourdon, Marco Cardinale, Warren Gregson, and N. Timothy Cable
The monitoring of an athlete’s training load and cardiac function have demonstrated to be valuable assessment tools in individual sporting events. Additionally, short-term heat acclimation has shown to be effective for stimulating hypervolemia and augmenting cardiovascular performance. A gap in the literature exists indicating further research is required into both heat acclimation protocols and the monitoring of on-field training load and its cause and effect relationship with heart rate variability in team sport. Purpose: The purpose of this investigation was twofold; 1) identify a novel form of heat acclimation using hot yoga for augmenting cardiovascular and aerobic performance, and 2) identify an effective monitoring protocol suitable for team sport using internal training load and heart rate variability. Methods: The Canadian Women’s National Field Hockey team were participants for examining heat acclimation and the relationship between training load and autonomic modulation during the 2016 Olympic cycle. A maximal graded exercise test was completed prior to and following six hot yoga sessions to examine cardiovascular and aerobic performance measures. Results: In Chapter 4, six days of hot yoga developed hypovolemia that lead to trivial improvements in aerobic power, run time to exhaustion, and a small increase in running speed at each ventilatory threshold. A non-existent relationship between markers of exercise stress and alterations in plasma volume during and post hot yoga were observed. Chapter 5 identified a large relationship between the planned and achieved on field training load over a complete mesocycle. Additionally, a moderate relationship was observed between both time spent above anaerobic threshold, training load and alterations in the Ln rMSSD:R-R ratio. Chapter 6 demonstrated how alterations in the Ln rMSSD outside of the coefficient of variation may identify the development of non-functional overreaching, while an unclear relationship was observed between weekly training load and alterations in Ln rMSSDCV. Conclusion: Hot yoga may elicit a delayed hypervolemic response when recommencing exercise. In addition, individually tailored mesocycles may prevent the development of non-functional overreaching when examined using heart rate variability while further research is required to confirm the Ln rMSSDCV relationship to accumulate weekly on-field training load in team sport.
… To me, far and away the single best use of data is in the moment. How fast are you swimming right now? In this regard, GPS watches have been a true boon to runners, allowing athletes (like me) who don’t have convenient access to a track to make their own track anywhere they have a clear view of the sky.
Overwhelmingly, I use GPS simply like a pace clock—to tell me how fast I am running in the moment. I like having the data, but knowing what I did is not nearly as useful as having a guide to help me with what I want to do—e.g., 5 × (1 km at 3:20, 1 km at 3:50), which is a staple pre-Ironman workout for me. Yes, I’ve done this workout a bunch of times, so it’s nice to be able to compare it to prior efforts. But the real value is knowing how I am executing in the moment.
Many of the established positive health benefits of exercise have been documented by historical discoveries in the field of exercise physiology. These investigations often assess limits: the limits of performance, or the limits of exercise-induced health benefits. Indeed, several key findings have been informed by studying highly trained athletes, in addition to healthy or unhealthy people. Recent progress has been made in regard to skeletal muscle metabolism and personalized exercise regimes. In this perspective, we review some of the historical milestones of exercise physiology, discuss how these inform contemporary knowledge, and speculate on future questions. [full text]
The Acute Recovery and Stress Scale (ARSS) and the Short Recovery and Stress Scale were first established in German for the purposes of monitoring athletes’ current recovery-stress states in an economical and multidimensional manner. The aim of this paper is to document the development and initial validation of the English versions of these two psychometric monitoring tools. A total of 267 English-speaking athletes from a variety of team and individual sports participated in the study. The English versions demonstrated satisfactory internal consistency for both instruments (Cronbach α of .74–.89). Furthermore, good model fit was found for the eight scales of the ARSS, matching the structure and results of the German counterparts. Correlations among and between the scales reciprocate the theoretical constructs of stress and recovery, supporting the construct validity of the scales. Correlation coefficients within stress and recovery ranged between rs = .29 and .68. The correlations between stress and recovery varied between rs = −.29 and −.64. These constructs were further supported by correlations with the scores of the Recovery-Stress Questionnaire for Athletes, thereby showing convergent validity. The findings demonstrate initial validity and reliability of the two measures and reflect the results of the German versions. However, further research is needed before applying these scales in practical settings.
Do you find yourself validating a good run with average pace? Have to catch that runner up ahead of you on the path, so you drop the pace and push a little harder? Desperate to break the four-hour marathon barrier or to get yourself under 1:30 in the half? Do you find that even though you’re pushing yourself harder and harder, you don’t see the results in races? The truth is that you’re likely in a Zone 3 plateau, which means you’re probably pushing too hard too often, and not running slow enough, often enough. It doesn’t matter your pace, slowing down to go faster is the real deal.
… “You’re seeing a convergence of technology now, so we can actually run large-scale clinical studies to get the data to prove odor analysis has real utility,” said Billy Boyle, co-founder and president of operations at Owlstone, a manufacturer of chemical sensors in Cambridge, England.
Mr. Boyle, an electronics engineer, formed the company with two friends in 2004 to develop sensors to detect chemical weapons and explosives for customers, including the United States government. But when Mr. Boyle’s girlfriend and eventual wife, Kate Gross, was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2012, his focus shifted to medical sensors, with an emphasis on cancer detection.
… Persily and de Jonge have developed a new computation method that uses well-established concepts from the study of human metabolism and exercise physiology relating CO2 generation rates to body size and composition, diet and level of physical activity. This results in more accurate estimates of the CO2 generated by individuals, the researchers said, which subsequently yields an improved estimate of the concentration produced by a building’s entire occupant population.
The road back on to the ice for Sidney Crosby after suffering another concussion is an uncertain one, according to two neurosurgeons who deal with sports injuries.
On Monday night, the Pittsburgh Penguins’ superstar suffered the fourth diagnosed concussion of his career after taking a cross-check to the head from Washington Capitals defenceman Matt Niskanen. [video, 4:47]
… Faced with a ticking clock and a very low budget that we would prefer to spend elsewhere, I put this Austrian guy no one had ever heard of back into the scouting queue.
The data suggested he was a solid attacking midfielder who could dribble and had the great ability to create shots for teammates. He also had reasonable tackling stats for a guy who primarily attacked, and scouting agreed that he was decent at pressing.
Now this was clearly a risk. At no time did we ever think, “Yes, this guy will be great in the Championship.” Instead we thought, “For the right price and in the right role, he certainly shows enough potential to be a solid performer in England.”
Everything in transfers comes down to money. Are you paying the right price for the talent and the risk involved?
Leonard Fournette and Christian McCaffrey were first-round selections, proving there is little upside to playing in non-playoff bowls. Just ask Jake Butt, who fell to the fifth round after being injured
Death, taxes and injuries to Mets starters – a few of life’s certainties. Just when the furor over the Mets’ parade of injuries had seemingly reached a climax with news that Yoenis Cespedes’ strained hamstring would put him on the 10-day disabled list, Noah Syndergaard was pulled from Sunday’s game after lasting only 1 1/3 innings. In an era when arm problems frequently shelve baseball’s best young pitchers – often those that throw the hardest – this is troubling news, especially given Syndergaard’s record of past resilience.
But while the Mets appeared to have poorly managed Syndergaard’s injury, allowing him to refuse an MRI after biceps pain scratched him from last Thursday’s start, who’s to blame for the Mets’– or any other team’s – injury troubles?
The touchline pretenders among us aren’t the only ones scouring Football Manager 2017’s database for the perfect signing. From the big dogs in the Champions League, to the relative pups of the USA’s Major League Soccer, football clubs across the planet tap into the same database to help them make crucial decisions about the players that could take them to the next level.
“We have some clubs that will take every single aspect of data,” Sports Interactive’s head of business development, Tom Markham, tells me. “One of the Champions League clubs we are working with will evaluate the composition of teams. They’ll look back at older data and see what is the actual makeup—I’m talking nationalities, I’m talking characters—and they will use the attributes in terms of their evaluation.