… By dismantling their first two opponents, the Cavaliers are conditioning themselves to be even more fearsome as the postseason marches on. They treated the Raptors and the Indiana Pacers, whom they defeated in the first round, like piñatas. Back at their training compound in the Cleveland suburbs, the restorative powers of the massage table and the cold tub await them.
Rest and recovery are James’s two best friends at this stage. On Sunday, he cluttered the box score of the 207th playoff game of his career with 35 points, 9 rebounds and 6 assists. In four games against Toronto, James averaged 36 points, 8.3 rebounds and 5.3 assists while shooting 57.3 percent from the field. He is 32. Neither the Pacers nor the Raptors were capable of stopping him, or even slowing him. Up next for the Cavaliers: the Boston Celtics or the Washington Wizards, who are still slugging it out in the conference semifinals.
… The one-on-one competitions among that crew were “legendary,” according to Cass Tech’s former secondary coach Jermain Crowell. The Technicians — a fitting mascot for a hotbed of cover corners — won back-to-back state championships with that foursome patrolling the back end of the defense. The most exciting times, according to all of them, came during practice.
Hill had the physical tools. Lewis was the playmaker. Rogers had the best football mind, and Pace was the quickest. They all got the upper hand at various points when coaches used to pit them against one another on a daily basis. The battles were usually followed by some jawing and some discussion about what it would be like when a weekend like this past one finally came.
“We always talked about it, but to see it actually happen, it’s an ecstatic feeling,” Rogers said. “It’s an incredible opportunity. Now that this is happening, we’ve got to find some type of way to get on the same roster so we can play together again.”
… Nike’s Breaking2 project is more than just a slick marketing exercise for a new running shoe. The effort will tell us something important about how fast elite human athletic performance might be improved. But the project should also force us to ask some challenging questions about human enhancement and who it is for.
Nike’s formula for breaking the two hour marathon starts with three of the world’s fastest runners: Eliud Kipchoge of Kenya, Lelisa Desisa of Ethiopia and Zersenay Tadese of Eritrea. Kipchoge won Gold in the marathon in Rio last year, Desisa won the Boston Marathon in 2013 and 2015 and Tadese is the world record holder for the half marathon.
But fast runners aren’t enough. Nike explains that they have consulted experts in: “biomechanics, coaching, design, engineering, materials development, nutrition and sports psychology and physiology.” But at the core of the project is technology: “After years of extensive research and development, Breaking2 will debut a system of groundbreaking innovation that has the potential to elevate every runner.”
… in the midst of all this evasion, what often gets lost is that boredom isn’t always a terrible thing to be avoided, and research is revealing that it can sometimes even be a good thing. This is primarily because boredom can lead to flow.
Flow is the coveted state of “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake,” according to psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, whose 1990 book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, documents how flow manifests in a vast array of people, from rock climbers to surgeons. He has found that anyone engaged in an activity where “the challenges are just balanced with the person’s capacity to act” can experience flow.
… Endurance athletes hit that proverbial wall because their brains run out of glucose, a simple sugar used for energy. While muscles can use either fat or glucose as fuel, the brain can only use the latter—and it takes time to transform that fast food burger you gobbled at lunch into glucose your body can use. So when we push our bodies to the limit, we tend to rely on glucose that’s already been stored in the body. If we exercise too hard, our body breaks those supplies down faster than we can replenish them—hence the bonk. Progressive training—gradually increasing the distance one runs or the weight one lifts over a period of weeks, months, and years—can help reduce the likelihood that you’ll hit the wall.
According to the new study, we can thank a transcription factor called PPARδ for this adaptability.
… The room’s occupant, Vítor Frade, is retired from the teaching post he held at the university for more than three decades. He keeps the office, though, as a convenient place to receive the steady stream of visitors who come from across the world to pick his brain, seek his advice or simply hear him talk. … His great contribution to the sport is tactical periodization, an approach to management that is often characterized — much to his evident frustration — as a coaching style. “It is not a method,” he says, almost as soon as he sits down. “It is a methodology. You have a methodology so that you don’t need methods.” The last word is issued with disdain.
A fascinating insight into the mentality the Lions will face from the All Blacks has been delivered from within the Kiwi camp.
The world champions’ mental skills coach Gilbert Enoka has revealed how he introduced a “no dickheads” policy, which is operated by the players themselves.
The complexity of the brain is yielding to technology. In the area of sleep neurobiology, conventional neuroscience tools such as lesions, cell recordings, c-Fos, and axon-tracing methodologies have been instrumental in identifying the complex and intermingled populations of sleep- and arousal-promoting neurons that orchestrate and generate wakefulness, NREM, and REM sleep. In the last decade, new technologies such as optogenetics, chemogenetics, and the CRISPR-Cas system have begun to transform how biologists understand the finer details associated with sleep–wake regulation. These additions to the neuroscience toolkit are helping to identify how discrete populations of brain cells function to trigger and shape the timing and transition into and out of different sleep–wake states, and how glia partner with neurons to regulate sleep. Here, we detail how some of the newest technologies are being applied to understand the neural circuits underlying sleep and wake. [full text]
… Pixellot are a company specialising in automated sports video solutions, providing fixed-location cameras which stitch together panoramic views of football pitches, allowing teams with a workable way of analysing their performance, and giving coaching staff with the ability to access all the data and angles they need to do their job properly.
The company have also recently partnered with Prozone, who provide football performance data, bringing together two technologies into one product which has been approved by the English Premier League and will be made available to other leagues next season.
Hollywood, like many other industries, has certain ways it does things. When it comes to shooting live action that will then be composited with computer-generated imagery, that means using tried-and-true motion-capture techniques that involve actors wearing suits covered in ping-pong-ball-like sensors and doing their performances on stages surrounded by special cameras.
Rokoko, a Danish startup, thinks there’s an entirely different way to go—inexpensive suits with embedded sensors that can capture actors’ motion no matter where they are, without the need for cameras, and at a fraction of the cost.
Today, Rokoko starts shipping its $2,500 Smartsuit Pro, a garment packed with 19 sensors evenly distributed across the arms, legs, and body, capable of recording an actor’s movements and either sending them to a computer in real-time over Wi-Fi or storing them in a small drive tucked into the fabric.
… There are a number of specialist psychologists who aim to help athletes to navigate the pressures and difficulties associated with elite sport, and which can add to the challenges we all face in our daily lives. But what do these sports psychology consultants do? And what can we learn from the work they have done?
Anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries occur commonly in football. Recent work has reported ACL reconstruction (ACLR) as one of several orthopaedic procedures with unfavorable outcomes for professional athletes. The performance impact to defensive players after surgery has not been quantified. Purpose:
To quantify the effect of ACLR on the performance of defensive players by comparing them to a cohort of matched controls as well as to measure the effect of ACLR on athletes’ career length in the National Football League (NFL). Study Design:
Case-control and cohort study; Level of evidence, 3. Methods:
Thirty-eight NFL defensive players with a history of ACLR from 2006 to 2012 were identified. For each injured player, a matched control player was identified. Demographic and performance statistics were collected from the online NFL player database. Players who returned after ACLR (n = 23) were compared with players who did not return (n = 15) using t tests and chi-squared analyses. Similarly, players who returned after ACLR (n = 23) were compared with their matched controls with t tests and chi-squared analyses. Two-way repeated-measures analysis of variance was utilized to test for significant differences between performance before and after the season of the injury for the players in the ACLR group who returned (n = 23) and for their matched controls. Kaplan-Meier analysis was performed to test for differences in the rate of retirement between the groups. For all analyses, P values <.05 were considered significant.
Results:
Approximately 74% (28/38) of athletes who underwent ACLR returned to play at least 1 NFL game, and 61% (23/38) successfully returned to play at least half a season (ie, 8 games). Athletes in the ACLR group who returned retired from the NFL significantly sooner and more often after surgery than their matched controls. In the seasons leading up to their injury, athletes who successfully returned to play started a greater percentage of their games (81%) and made more solo tackles per game (3.44 ± 1.47) compared with athletes in the ACLR group who did not return to play (54% and 1.82 ± 1.17, respectively) and compared with healthy control players (52% and 1.77 ± 1.19, respectively). After the season of surgery, athletes in the ACLR group who returned to play decreased to 57% games started and 2.38 ± 1.24 solo tackles per game, while their matched controls suffered no significant decreases. Conclusion:
Players who successfully returned were above-average NFL players before their injury but comparatively average after their return.
Read the latest legal filings against the NFL and the question that comes to mind is, where are the cops when you need them? There is direct evidence that the NFL’s medical personnel knowingly engaged in illegal painkiller abuses, yet federal law enforcement and other government arms have sat conspicuously on their hands and have yet to issue so much as slap a wrist to the league. What’s needed and deserved here is a smack with a big stick.
When there are no consequences for egregious misconduct, guess what happens. People continue to act with impunity. That’s basic. The message law enforcement has sent to the NFL is that it enjoys a special and exclusive carve-out from rules that others are forced to obey. NFL medical staff have admitted in depositions in a federal lawsuit to dispensing painkillers in amounts and ways that violated regulations and medical ethical standards. Yet no one affiliated with the league has faced penalties the rest of us — not to mention players — have to face over drug misuse. Instead, the Drug Enforcement Administration gave the league a gentle lecture. That’s it.
The human brain does a great job of looking for potential threats. That’s a survival instinct. And in the general interest of making sense of the world, the brain is also good at looking for patterns. Those two tendencies sometimes prompt people to spot what look like unusual clusters of cancer or other illnesses in a small area or group of people and then come up with what seems to be the cause.
Unfortunately, the human brain is also really good at jumping to conclusions about patterns and threats and then stubbornly sticking to those conclusions and the fear they generate — even when more careful investigation reveals that the initial fears about a cluster are unfounded.
Communities across the United States are struggling with a glaring example of the corrosive problem of misguided citizen science right now as residents glance nervously at the artificial turf on their towns’ playing fields.
… So in reading the studies of Kahneman and Tversky, what interested me is how major league managers avoid the trappings of their human hard-wiring. How do they avoid acting against their own club’s own interest? For example, how do they avoid shying away from making bold call —- a decision that might be unorthodox though it would increase the probability of a win — but could yield much more second-guessing if it fails? How do they stick to what they believe is the best decision when thinking about a situation in the quiet of their office before a game, but a decision that could be swayed by the in-game emotion in the dugout during a game?