… Bradley got his shot last September, appearing in six games, and hurling seven innings, for the Atlanta Braves. Last week, at age 26, he bid baseball adieu.
When I asked him why he retired, the former ACC Honor Roll student was every bit as honest and thoughtful as he was four years ago.
“I always told myself that if I got to a place where I didn’t enjoy it anymore, I’d walk away,” Bradley told me on Monday. “I’ve been in that place the last few months. I’ll always love the game, but I was to the point where I wasn’t enjoying going to the park every day. It had became more like a job.”
… He played sparingly as a freshman and sophomore, registering 27 solo tackles as a defensive end, before appearing in every game as a junior. In 2016, everything came together, as Reddick registered 9.5 sacks, with three forced fumbles and three passes defensed for the Owls. He confirmed suspicions about how well he could play in January in Mobile, Alabama, at the Senior Bowl before exploding at the combine. He blazed a 4.52-second 40-yard dash at 6-feet 2 and 237 pounds, in addition to completing 24 reps in the bench press and leaping 36 1/2 inches in the vertical jump.
Yeah, that kind of athleticism, coupled with a mounting array of game film, tends to get you noticed.
Reddick credits the coaches and support staff at EXOS for much of the gains he made leading up the draft, as he spent several months at their facility working six days a week alongside other draft standouts-to-be, like LSU safety Jamal Adams, who went sixth overall to the Jets.
… In Kylian Mbappé — the scorer of Monaco’s consolation goal in Tuesday’s 2-1 defeat in Turin, which completed a 4-1 loss on aggregate — the French champion-in-waiting possesses arguably the most exciting prospect in the world, an 18-year-old player seemingly destined to grace the latter stages of the Champions League for years to come.
Around him is the rest of a new generation, a swath of names that have intruded into soccer’s consciousness over the last few months and are likely to stay there for some time: Tiemoue Bakayoko and Thomas Lemar, Bernardo Silva and Benjamin Mendy. This will always be the season they announced themselves to the world.
“I am very happy with what we have done, and very proud of this team,” Jardim said, deadpan, on Tuesday night. “For many of the players, it has been a first semifinal, a first experience of this level, a good experience for life.”
Professional athletes don’t get to the top by accident. It takes superhuman levels of time, dedication, and focus—and that includes paying attention to what they put in their bellies. In this series, GQ takes a look at what athletes in different sports eat on a daily basis to perform at their best. Here’s a look at the daily diet of Nets guard Jeremy Lin, who spent most of the season recovering from injury.
If you’ve played the game of baseball before, chances are someone has told you to fix your mechanics. Mechanics are an ingrained part of this game that players and coaches alike seek to consistently improve upon and refine. However, what is often neglected when striving for perceived mechanical perfection is how an athlete moves on a fundamental level.
Enter the movement screen: an integral piece of a successful training program, because, when it comes down to it, pitching is movement. If we are going to constantly assess, critique, and change our pitchers’ mechanics, then we also should understand the elements of their fundamental movements.
By gaining an understanding for what players do well and what they need to work on, from a base-movement standpoint, we can begin to positively change their programming in the weight room to improve weaknesses and possibly even solve some of those persistent mechanical faults!
Get ready for a hard truth: You are not perfectly symmetrical, and your uneven strength and mobility capabilities could bring major consequences. But dismay not, everyone faces this issue. The aim of this piece isn’t to scare or dishearten you, but to introduce a new filter through which to view your fitness strategy: uncovering and correcting your side-to-side imbalances.
We all have a dominant side and a host of preferences that follow. We are all also subject to the imbalances presented by societal norms and our chosen daily patterns. Everything you do throughout a typical day, including—and probably especially—everything you do in the gym, only strengthens these discrepancies. We all have drastic side-to-side differences, and unless we build an awareness and concerted practice to reduce them, we only drive them deeper.
I did it. On Saturday afternoon, a few hours after Eliud Kipchoge ran a stunning, historic marathon in 2 hours and 25 seconds in Monza, Italy—narrowly missing his goal of breaking the two-hour marathon mark for Nike’s Breaking2 initiative, but obliterating the current world record and everybody’s idea of what is possible in the sport—I ran a half-marathon on the same course in 1:26:52. My time was more than three minutes beneath my goal of 90 minutes, and almost exactly 10 minutes quicker than my personal best for the half-marathon, which I set last November in Lancaster, England. After crossing the line, I celebrated by collapsing on the tarmac, and closing my eyes for what seemed like a long time.
The curious thing is, my initial burst of endorphin-rich joy at finishing the race in a previously unthinkable time has given way to more complicated emotions. Six months ago, I would have thought I would be ecstatic to run so quickly. Back in December, 90 minutes for a half-marathon—13.1 consecutive miles at six minutes 51 seconds per mile—seemed impossibly fast. Now I’ve not only beaten 90 minutes—I’ve demolished it. So why did I find myself, hours after the race, in a bland hotel room in central Milan, with a tear running down my cheek? Exhaustion is part of the answer, but not all of it.
… asked Franklin if, because he’s acquired some political capital with the 2016 season, does he allow himself an exhale and become more positive? Or does he wipe that from his mind somehow and remain unwavering in his resolution?
“That’s the problem. And I talk about this to the team all the time: I don’t believe in setting goals. Because once you reach that goal, it’s human nature to take a deep breath and say, ‘I’ve arrived.’
“But there’s no time for that. It’s just not how I’m wired. It’s not how I came up in this profession. It’s not how I was raised, either by my family as well as coaches I’ve had.
MDDI Medical Device and Diagnostic Industry News Products and Suppliers, Steven LeBoeuf, PhD from
With lower costs, better form factors, and new features, wearable biometric sensor technology is now enabling ambulatory mobile healthcare, with a focus on prevention, screening, and disease management.
Even in the midst of turbulent market dynamics, wearable devices have continued to see a tremendous amount of growth around the world. While key market players have seen their respective market shares increase or decrease, the macro-level growth remains strong—IDC reports over 100M units sold in 2016, up 25% over 2015.
Taking a slightly longer term view, the technology in these devices has also seen a tremendous amount of innovation in the last 20 years. It wasn’t that long ago that ECG chest straps were cutting edge technology before there was such a thing as “wearables.” Since then we’ve seen GPS, accelerometers, gyroscopes, optical biometric sensors, galvanic skin response sensors, and much more integrated into wearable devices of all kinds.
… Recent advances in sensing, machine learning, and personal device design offer a promising vision for enhancing people’s lives in the most fundamental ways—by improving their health and well-being. HCI researchers at Microsoft have been exploring ways computers and people—healthcare providers and patients alike—can each work together in complementary ways to build a healthier future. … With the recent rise of technologies that gather and track personal healthcare data, it’s important to design to how patients and healthcare providers actually engage with these technologies. As reported in their paper—Self-tracking for Mental Wellness: Understanding Expert Perspectives and Student Experiences—Bongshin Lee, Microsoft senior researcher, along with Lauren Wilcox, assistant professor, and student Christina Kelley, both from Georgia Institute of Technology, conducted research to better understand how personal data about one’s mood, physical health, and social activities—collected on devices such as smartphones and activity trackers—can be used to help students manage stress and improve their mental wellness. By focusing on stress, anxiety and depression, these studies reveal how both students and health professionals prefer to engage with data and devices. This work will inform the design of applications, wearable devices, and reporting systems that help clinicians better understand when students might be struggling.
One of the world’s foremost thinkers on business and social science, Daniel Pink is the author of several bestselling books on business, work, and behavior. Adam Silver has served as the commissioner of the National Basketball Association (NBA) since February of 2014. The two recently sat down for a conversation about 3-pointers, diversity, and how data science is transforming the NBA.
Daniel: How have analytics reshaped the NBA?
Adam: Analytics are part and parcel of virtually everything we do now. Analytics have become central to scouting, to determining playing time. Everything is tracked, not just on the court during games, but during practice—biometrics and wearables are critical. The vast majority of our players are wearing sleep monitors, quantifying everything that goes into their bodies.
We have a partnership with a company called SAP and so we’ve become very transparent in terms of that data as well. You can go on our website or app and crunch virtually any data out there. Part of the result is, for example, the plethora of three point shots now. They’re smarter about the positioning on the floor.
Brian Decker, the retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel who has tried to implement in the NFL a system of predictive character traits he once used to select Green Berets — drawing interest from the likes of Bill Belichick — has been hired as the Indianapolis Colts’ player personnel strategist, according to a league source.
It’s a fascinating move by Chris Ballard, the Colts’ first-year general manager, to reshape Indy’s personnel department and comes 10 days after he dismissed some staffers.
… The lineup shuffle in Game 5 added to Harden’s overall workload and muted the advantages of the lineups that theoretically remained intact, such as the group of regular starters.
Harden filled in the nominal power forward role when necessary on Tuesday, and the position does play to Harden’s strengths (he’s powerful, and big for his position) while minimizing his weaknesses (lateral quickness that would barely keep him in front of Nate Silver, let alone Manu Ginobili). But in Game 5, at least, the bargain seemed to be a bad one.
Harden’s late-game numbers suggest that he got worn down, but anyone looking at him could have told you that.
In biological systems, function emerges from interactions among semi-independent components. An example is the brain — a huge society of neurons capable of producing coherent, robust behavior at the whole organism level. Another example is a group of fish that can switch quickly between a loose spatial configuration ideal for foraging to a tight group formation ideal for escaping predators. A theory for how individual components come together to produce functionally useful patterns at the aggregate level remains elusive.
A first question we might ask is: How collective is the system? Is the system reducible to its parts, or do components come to depend on each other to such an extent that they cannot be considered independently of each other? And, similarly, is a functional pattern at the aggregate level highly sensitive to small changes in components’ behaviors, or is it relatively impervious to perturbations?
These and similar questions are the focus of a working group, “Quantifying Collective Behavior in Living Systems,” being held at the Santa Fe Institute May 3-5.