USA Triathlon is investing in the future in a big way. A new initiative by the governing body of multisport has been successful at attracting new adolescents to the sport as well as retaining youth triathletes for a lifetime, says Jessica Welk, High School, Collegiate Club, and Women’s NCAA Coordinator for USAT:
“When we looked at our athlete pipeline a few years ago, we noticed a gap at the club level. Kids were competing in youth triathlons, but then exiting the sport. It didn’t make sense for us to have kids competing in youth triathlons, but then no racing opportunity until these same kids get to college [where triathlon is an emerging NCAA sport]. If we lose them, will they ever come back?”
In response, the organization developed the USA Triathlon High School Program to create opportunities for adolescents to compete alongside their peers.
As the head strength and conditioning coach for the San Jose Sharks for the past 11 years, Mike Potenza has established himself as one of the league’s leading experts in preparing the pros. During his tenure with the team, the Sharks have punched their ticket to the playoffs a remarkable ten times, collecting a handful of division championships along the way and advancing to the Stanley Cup Finals, in 2016.
Getting an NHL team ready to perform at a consistently high level over the course of an 82-game season requires creativity, agility and most importantly, the right information. In a recent interview, Potenza talked about his approach, philosophy, and the challenges of working as a trainer at the highest level of sports. He also, more recently, talked about how he uses Firstbeat Sports to provide the physiological data he needs to help keep a diverse roster of athletes competitive year after year.
IEEE Spectrum, Alyssa Pagano and Jeff Hawkins from
The neocortex is the part of the human brain that processes the world around us. It controls language and motor function. It helps us recognize our friends’ faces or our favorite songs. And it’s where our brain stores all of the information we learn.
When you listen to a song, the sounds enters your ears and neurons fire in your neocortex. If you hear that song a second time, fewer neurons will fire. This is because your brain forms new synapses when it recognizes the song as a pattern instead of as distinct notes. That’s how you learn a melody—and how you’re able to tell the difference between two similar songs.
Jeff Hawkins, founder of Numenta, a company that studies the neocortex, refers to this process as “learning through re-wiring”. Hawkins explains that neuroscientists used to think learning was based on how effectively existing synapses fired. Now, they understand the process differently. New synapses replace existing synapses, forming new patterns of firing neurons.
… Erik Hoel, a 29-year-old theoretical neuroscientist and writer, quoted the passage in a recent essay in which he laid out his new mathematical explanation of how consciousness and agency arise. The existence of agents—beings with intentions and goal-oriented behavior—has long seemed profoundly at odds with the reductionist assumption that all behavior arises from mechanistic interactions between particles. Agency doesn’t exist among the atoms, and so reductionism suggests agents don’t exist at all: that Romeo’s desires and psychological states are not the real causes of his actions, but merely approximate the unknowably complicated causes and effects between the atoms in his brain and surroundings.
Hoel’s theory, called “causal emergence,” roundly rejects this reductionist assumption.
“Causal emergence is a way of claiming that your agent description is really real,” said Hoel, a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University who first proposed the idea with Larissa Albantakis and Giulio Tononi of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “If you just say something like, ‘Oh, my atoms made me do it’—well, that might not be true. And it might be provably not true.”
I wrote this to highlight an issue that’s holding back technology development and adoption in sports. If you read it and like it, please share the article on your social media. Thanks!
A Chicago academic medical center has begun using pills equipped with a small sensor to help remind patients to take their medication and provide physicians with real-time data on medication adherence.
Rush University Medical Center is one of just eight systems in the country using the new technology, according to Crain’s Chicago Business. The system is using the smart pill in a small cohort of patients that have Type 2 diabetes or high blood pressure.
The sensor, added to each capsule, sends a signal to a Bluetooth device attached to a patient’s abdomen. Failure to receive the signal prompts an alert from a mobile app. Physicians can also access each patient’s medication history through a web portal.
Female soccer players who underwent ACL reconstruction showed no significant functional differences in the reconstructed and uninvolved limbs and had minimal functional differences compared with female soccer players with healthy knees, according to results.
Researchers assessed postural control and hop performance among 77 active, female soccer players who underwent ACL reconstruction and 77 female soccer players with healthy knees. Using 2-D analyses, researchers also assessed movement asymmetries in the lower limbs and trunk with the drop vertical jump and the tuck jump.
Results showed no differences between the reconstructed and uninvolved limbs in any of the tests. Compared with healthy controls, researchers noted players who underwent ACL reconstruction performed worse on the 5-jump test. Researchers found players who underwent ACL reconstruction also had significantly less knee valgus motion in the frontal plane and a lower probability of a high knee abduction moment on the drop vertical jump test.
Stop Sports Injuries, Steve Grosserode, DPT, and Jared Vagy, DPT from
… Over the last decade, an abundance of evidence has shown ACL injuries can be prevented with a focus on proper movement technique and proximal hip strength. Mandelbaum et al 2005, showed that up to 88% of ACL injuries can be prevented with education, stretching, strengthening, plyometrics and sports-specific agility drills with an emphasis on proper technique, including video feedback movement training.8
With ACL injuries occurring at alarming rates, it is essential to develop strategies to reduce them. Athletes who are predisposed to ACL injury must be identified through screenings. The screenings should analyze movement patterns and test the strength of the muscles that prevent injuries. After the screening, a physical therapist must devise an individual training program that combines the findings from the screening with the latest research. This will ensure athletes continue to play at their strongest and healthiest potential.
Ask most people to name a nutrient lacking in the American diet, and the top answers would probably be calcium, vitamin D or fiber. Though all nutrients are essential for good health, few are more crucial to focus on than magnesium — because we don’t usually get enough in our diet and none of our cells could function without it.
Cells need the mineral to produce ATP, a compound dubbed the body’s “energy currency,” says Fudi Wang, a professor of nutrition at Zhejiang University in China, because it’s the bank that cells draw on to power their functions. In particular, magnesium is involved in regulating blood pressure, blood sugar, heart rate and nerve transmission.
… A growing body of research suggests medical advice many Americans have heeded to cut back on salt has been one of the drivers of obesity, diabetes and heart attack rates, according to DiNicolantonio. The proper amount of salt, he said, can ward off sugar cravings, ease chronic illness and improve sports performance.
“James knows this topic better than anyone I’ve ever met, so this is not some idle opinion. This is fact-based, practical stuff that a lot of physicians don’t understand yet, but they’ll come around,” said Dr. James O’Keefe, a Mayo Clinic-trained cardiologist and director of the St. Luke’s Mid America Heart Institute Preventative Cardiology Program in Kansas City, Mo.
George Burke has a talent for tossing back his daily cocktail — which contains vitamins, minerals, muscle-building compounds, some little-known research drugs and a microdose of LSD — in almost a single gulp. It’s a weird but handy trick for someone who swallows 25 pills a day, most of them purchases off the Internet.
Burke credits the regimen with giving him the cognitive edge he needs to thrive in California’s Silicon Valley, where he’s the co-founder of a food service that caters to athletes and fitness devotees.
He used to get his edge from Adderall, but after moving from New Jersey to San Francisco, he says, he couldn’t find a doctor who would write him a prescription. Driven to the Internet, he discovered a world of cognition-enhancing drugs known as nootropics — some prescription, some over-the-counter, others available on a worldwide gray market of private sellers — said to improve memory, attention, creativity and motivation.
… Following his success with their younger teams, Hoffenheim had already decided that Nagelsmann would be their first team manager in the summer of 2016; a three year contract had been offered and accepted on October 27, 2015. That would give him enough time to prepare while his predecessor, Huub Stevens (appointed to replace Markus Gisdol just the day before) took a shot. The fates however had different plans. Stevens was diagnosed with serious heart problems and handed in his resignation on February 10, 2016. At that time, Hoffenheim had won only 2 out of 20 and were 7 points short of safety. With only 14 games to go, there was hardly any settling in time for the self-confessed chocoholic, but he guided his charges to 7 wins and a 15th place finish that meant they didn’t even have to navigate the relegation play-offs.
An interesting fact at this point – when appointed, Nagelsmann was still a month away from completing his senior coaching license exams, but such was the faith in his abilities (bolstered no doubt by his impeccable record) that the German FA gave him the go-ahead anyway.
… “When it was basically a day-to-day interview, during the interim deal, I said [to the assistants], I said, ‘Listen, if I’m a little worked-up at times, that’s the reason,'” Holtmann told me in February 2015 — right after he’d taken that team projected to finish seventh in the Big East to second place in the league standings and impressed his bosses enough to get the job permanently. “I didn’t want to screw this up for my family, of course, but certainly for their families as well. I had a few of those moments. It was a significant weight, for sure.”
If you’re reading this now, reading a college basketball column in June, you likely know how Holtmann’s story has unfolded. He guided Butler to the 2015 NCAA Tournament, 2016 NCAA Tournament and 2017 NCAA Tournament. He won games in all three and made the Sweet 16 this past March. And early Friday he agreed to an eight-year contract with Ohio State worth a total of $24 million.
Taylor & Francis Group, Science and Medicine in Football from
The visual abilities of competitive football players are substantially better than those of healthy non-athletes, according to the first-ever comprehensive assessment of visual function in English Premier League players, published today in Science and Medicine in Football.
Average visual clarity, contrast sensitivity, and near-far quickness of competitive footballers (both elite and intermediate) were significantly better than those of non-athletes. However, results showed there was no difference in visual function between the elite and intermediate players.
Interestingly, defensive players displayed faster near-far quickness than offensive players. According to the researchers, this visual function may be particularly helpful to defenders who are responsible for ensuring that the ‘offside trap’ is not broken and typically have to quickly switch their attention, and therefore eye gaze, between several opponents in near and far locations.
In the growing world of sports analytics, big data and player statistical analysis is beginning to be embraced in the NHL after its success in Major League Baseball and the NBA. HockeyData Inc. is an independent data tracking and consulting company that provides player tracking and team tracking analysis, depending on the interests of the client.
HockeyData uses statistical models that they create, such as The Hohl Picture (THP), to provide clients “the expected outcome in goals for-versus-against relative to ice-time with the player on the ice.” THP analysis has the ability to predict a player’s future impact on outscoring the opponent, or expected wins. According to HockeyData’s website, the model uses an “accumulation of a player’s decision making and action taking” that reveals the estimated value of “players in the context of their productivity in both direct and indirect contributions to the game.”
In addition, HockeyData offers Team Level Analysis that answers team centered questions such as: What are overall team strengths and weaknesses? Where does success originate within certain lines and how can a team optimize coaching strategies to fit personnel?