… When you watch him up close, the first thing you wonder about has nothing to do with his jumper. It’s his frame. He’s got the kind of legs that make you worried for his safety, and baffled that he’s actually a professional athlete. Keon Clark bones.
“When I recruited him,” John Calipari says, “I’m like, ‘Look at this dude’s legs. He can’t be this skinny.’ And then all of the sudden, he went out there, and those skinny legs ran real fast. And he’s tough. He’ll go in and get banged, and he’s fine.”
The word Calipari uses is “wiriness,” and it conjures very specific skills on a basketball court. It means initiating contact and absorbing it without a problem.
Nelson Agholor keeps a whiteboard on his locker stall. On the board, Agholor tracks how many drops he’s totaled in a given practice during organized team activities, and he writes a quote for motivation.
That board offers guidance for Agholor entering Year 3 on the Eagles after two disappointing seasons for the former first-round pick.
“It’s just something you want to do to keep yourself accountable,” Agholor said of keeping track of the drops. “You look at it. You try to get better each day. You want to repeat the same habits.”
Freddie Freeman is serious about playing third base, saying that he originally suggested shifting to the hot corner to the Atlanta Braves a few weeks ago.
Freeman, who has been sidelined for more than a month because of a broken wrist, told reporters Wednesday that his “mindset is to return as a third baseman.” He has played his entire career at first base.
In many ways, Gylfi Sigurdsson is a player defined by his limitations, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. As is often the case, players of a certain level fail to kick on due to a lack of identity, lacking standout characteristics that would help further their appeal to larger clubs, putting a ceiling on where their talent can take them. As strange as it sounds, being fairly good at lots of things—rather than being extremely good at just a few of them—can dampen the sexiness of the players talent, and convince people, wrongly or rightly, that they’re little more than average.
As far as Sigurdsson is concerned, he’s as aware of what he’s good at and what he isn’t as much as we are. While you wouldn’t want him anchoring midfield, tasked with winning the ball back, tracking on the wing or dictating the pace of a game, you’d be hard pressed to find a player better suited to drifting in and out of matches from within their own pocket in the final third, taking shots from range, picking killer passes and making timely late runs in to the box to finish off moves coming in from out wide. Too good to be a one trick pony, while lacking the versatility to ever really trouble the upper echelons of the game, Sigurdsson operates in an extremely specific way, and that’s what helps make him such an intriguing prospect.
The purpose of this study was to observe heart rate (HR) responses in match settings over the course of a conference season in National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I women’s soccer. Twenty-one female collegiate soccer players were provided a HR monitor and instructed to wear it for the duration of match play. Player positions included six defenders (DEF), six midfielders (MID), and nine forwards (FWD). Defenders were further identified as either center defenders (CD) or outside defenders (OD). A one-way ANOVA was used to determine if mean HR varied between FWD, MID, and DEF. An independent t-test was used to determine if there was a difference between CD and OD HRs. FWD, MID, and DEF did have significantly different mean HR (p<=0.05), but post-hoc analysis revealed no significant differences (p>=.05). However, CD demonstrated significantly lower HRs than OD (p=.009). Player position, specifically in the CD and OD role, impact the intensity of exercise in match settings and may be used to specify training and conditioning sessions.
This study aimed to identify the most sensible heart rate-based indices to physical measures of training load and intensity. Twenty professional football players competing in the Russian league and in the UEFA Champions League were monitored during 15 training sessions (270 individual records) using GPS devices (10 Hz) and heart rate telemetry. Expert knowledge and a collinearity r < .5 were used initially to select the external physical markers for the final analysis. A multivariate-adjusted within-subjects model was employed to quantify the correlations between heart rate indices with various measures of training intensity and load. The number of accelerations > 2.5 m/s and the number of high intensity bursts remained in the final multivariate model for training load. The adjusted correlations with Banister’s TRIMP were r = .49 and r = .3, respectively. For training intensity, the same previous variables expressed as per minute plus the volume of high speed running per minute remained in the final model. The adjusted correlations with the percentage of time spent above 80% of individual maximum heart rate (tHR80%) were, in the same order, r = .3, r = .22 and r = .18. The results of this study demonstrate the validity of TRIMP and tHR80% as measures of training load and intensity, respectively, and identified accelerations and high intensity repeated efforts (high intensity bursts) as being moderately predictive of heart rate responses.
WBUR, CommonHealth, Meghna Charkrabarti, Carey Goldberg, Zoë Mitchell from
Baseball players that increased the amount of time they slept improved their performance on tasks that could translate to the baseball diamond, according to a new study by Cheri Mah, a research fellow at the University of California San Francisco Human Performance Center. The players who increased their sleep had improved reaction times and were more attentive.
This is just one of the studies presented to about 7,000 researchers who were gathered in Boston for the annual sleep research conference, SLEEP 2017. [audio, 9:47]
To ensure that elite adolescent athletes meet their unique training, growth and maturation demands, it is imperative to have access to valid measures of energy intake. Contemporary methods demand close attention-to-detail, meaning that athletes often do not fully adhere to real-time protocols. This study represents the first investigation of a real-time dietary assessment designed using a comprehensive behaviour change framework (COM-B). In a crossover design, 12 elite adolescent male rugby players recorded their energy intake via an estimated food diary (est-FD) and photography-based mobile assessment (‘Snap-n-Send’), combined with a 24-h dietary recall interview. Two 4-day assessment periods were divided into three separate recording environments: 96 h free-living and researcher-observed; 72 h free-living and 10 h researcher-observed. Assessment periods were one month apart. All foods and beverages were provided and weighed by the research team to quantify actual intakes. ‘Snap-n-Send’ reported a small mean bias for under-reporting across 96 h (−0.75 MJ day−1; 95% confidence interval [CI] for bias = −5.7% to −2.2%, p < .001), 72 h (−0.76 MJ day−1; 95% CI for bias = −5.6% to −2.1%, p = .004) and 10 h (−0.72 MJ day−1; 95% CI for bias = −8.1% to −0.1%; p = .067) environments. The est-FD reported a moderate mean bias for under-reporting across 96 h (−2.89 MJ day−1; 95% CI for bias = −17.9% to −10.2%; p < .001), 72 h (−2.88 MJ day−1; 95% CI for bias = −17.9% to −10.1%; p < .001) and 10 h (−2.52 MJ day−1;−26.1% to −5.3%; p = .023) environments. Results evidence the ability of ‘Snap-n-Send’ to accurately assess the diet of elite adolescent athletes, signalling the exciting promise of this comprehensive and theoretical behavioural approach within valid dietary assessment.
… While many of the screens in the FMS don’t mimic movements on the pitch, analyzing a soccer player’s performance in the screen can provide useful insight into how they move.
As in other sports, the FMS is utilized as a return to play protocol and in preseason testing to evaluate readiness to train and perform. Said FMS Certified strength coach Darcy Norman, “it allows the medical staff and fitness staff to have similar lines of communication with regards to what that player needs for their performance. It also creates a platform to have better conversations with a player on why they are moving the way they are moving and how improving the way they move will help their performance.”
“I wanted to find and explore neural circuits that regulate specific behaviors,” says Shah, then a newly minted Caltech PhD who was beginning a postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia. So, he zeroed in on sex-associated behavioral differences in mating, parenting and aggression.
“These behaviors are essential for survival and propagation,” says Shah, MD, PhD, now a Stanford professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and of neurobiology. “They’re innate rather than learned — at least in animals — so the circuitry involved ought to be developmentally hard-wired into the brain. These circuits should differ depending on which sex you’re looking at.”
His plan was to learn what he could about the activity of genes tied to behaviors that differ between the sexes, then use that knowledge to help identify the neuronal circuits — clusters of nerve cells in close communication with one another — underlying those behaviors.
… Running economy is the energy utilized under a submaximal velocity, usually measured by the consumption of oxygen, per kilometer run, per kilogram body weight. The greater the running economy, the more efficient the runner and the better the performance. Numerous factors, both genetic and adaptive, can affect an athlete’s efficiency, with the focus here being the individual’s biomechanics.
Let’s take a look at what goes into efficient form and break down each phase into its biomechanical constituents. I will address the common errors that occur in each phase to give the reader an idea of what to look for in an athlete’s form. After reading, you should have a better understanding of what it takes to improve running economy to minimize energy expenditure over long distances.
Tuesday marked the seventh anniversary of the French player revolt at Knysna, the South African training camp where players refused to leave their bus and train in protest to the expulsion of teammate Nicolas Anelka for swearing at head coach Raymond Domenech at halftime of the World Cup match against Mexico.
From the national shame of that afternoon to today, the French have turned around their national team program. French soccer is the envy of the world with a seemingly endless supply of young talent. Players like Monaco’s Kylian Mbappe and Borussia Dortmund’s Ousmane Dembele are just the two most prominent examples of young players coming through the French system.
Scientific American, Gareth Cook and Steve Sloman from
… You argue that we don’t know as much as we think we do. Can you explain this?
People overestimate how well they understand how things work. Direct evidence for this comes from the psychological laboratory. The great Yale psychologist Frank Keil and his students first demonstrated the illusion of explanatory depth, what we call the knowledge illusion. He asked people how well they understand how everyday objects (zippers, toilets, ballpoint pens) work. On average, people felt they had a reasonable understanding (at the middle of a 7-point scale). Then Keil asked them to explain how they work. People failed miserably. For the most part, people just can’t articulate the mechanisms that drive even the simplest things. So when he again asked them to rate their understanding, their ratings were lower. By their own admission, the act of attempting to explain had pierced their illusion of understanding. We have replicated this basic finding many times, not only with everyday objects, but also with political policies. Matthew Fisher has shown that people overestimate their ability to construct logical justifications for their beliefs.
… I’m continually disappointed by the lack of education that clubs provide. Families pay a lot to be in the clubs mainly to use soccer as a path to college…. and the clubs don’t prepare families for the process.
What are some things that would keep you from recruiting a player?
Parents can scare coaches. Parents who treat their sons like a client and recruiting like a business transaction scare me. I also refuse to use admissions favors and won’t pursue kids who aren’t serious and capable students.
An athlete performance coach for a professional team showed me her in-season workflow. This was in August 2016, after the season. She relied most on two apps, one for monitoring athletes’ wellness and a second that tracked training loads from games and practices. Her daily reports with crucial key performance indicators were handcrafted in Excel, then cut, pasted and emailed to the head coach. She had a multiplier to connect four high-capacity thumb drives to her USB port. While her apps kept their data in the cloud, she needed lots of player data local, on her machine, to do the Excel calculations and graphs.
Her situation is far from ideal but it is the norm among practicing sports scientists. The profession has forced them to become technical experts unto themselves with tools, methods, inputs and outputs that are unique to their specific sport and team. The work is hard, and it is made more difficult because she is mostly on her own. Help, to the extent it is available, comes from peers who also use lots of technology but also don’t get much formal training to improve their technical skills.
“It’s unfair what’s being asked of these people,” says Kevin Forbes, who works on athlete performance products at Kinduct Technologies, makers of a widely-used athlete management system, based in Halifax, Canada. “There are hundreds of companies and products. They’ve all got their niches. Performance staff have to understand all these vendor solutions and then put them together. Whatever they come up with is going to be unique for their players and their team.”
Imagine turning to your iPhone for all your health and medical information — every doctor’s visit, lab test result, prescription and other health information, all available in a snapshot on your phone and shared with your doctor on command.
Runner's World, Sweat Science blog, Alex Hutchinson from
I’ve done enough “real” VO2 max tests—the trips to the lab, the expensive and cumbersome equipment, the brutally exhausting treadmill protocol, and in one case, the puking in the corner afterwards—that I’ve been intrigued to notice the recent trend of GPS watches and heart-rate monitors promising to estimate my VO2 max for me. Could it possibly be that simple?
I’m clearly not the only one wondering, because I noticed at least four presentations at the recent American College of Sports Medicine conference addressing that very question. Overall, the results look better than I might have expected, but there are some differences between the various approaches taken by different watches.
Sports performance software company Kinduct is offering its solutions with Zebra’s ultra-wideband technology to provide football teams with a single source for each player’s performance, health and fitness management during the coming season.
There hasn’t been a gold standard for how orthopaedic spine surgeons promote new bone growth in patients, but now Northwestern University scientists have designed a bioactive nanomaterial that is so good at stimulating bone regeneration it could become the method surgeons prefer.
While studied in an animal model of spinal fusion, the method for promoting new bone growth could translate readily to humans, the researchers say, where an aging but active population in the U.S. is increasingly receiving this surgery to treat pain due to disc degeneration, trauma and other back problems. Many other procedures could benefit from the nanomaterial, ranging from repair of bone trauma to treatment of bone cancer to bone growth for dental implants.
When the Georgetown University Law Center offered computer programming last year, it was an experiment, a single class for about 20 students. It was filled almost instantly, and the waitlist swelled to 130. This semester, the law school has five programming classes, and the waitlist still overflowed.
“They aren’t going to become programmers, but they realize these are skills that will make them better lawyers,” said Paul Ohm, the Georgetown law professor who teaches the course. His students, for example, learn to write short, tailored programs that can identify clusters of words and concepts in Supreme Court rulings more accurately than a Google search or standard legal software.
It’s the same in every field, from marketing to manufacturing to medicine. Code, it seems, is the lingua franca of the modern economy.
… Ernest Kim, the lead designer for React technology at Nike, offered to FN a simple explanation to what the cushioning compound does: “Nike React offers this unique blend of great cushioning, great energy return, lightweight and durability that makes it a perfect match for basketball.”
Kim also proclaimed that React is Nike’s “most complete foam ever.”
… One thing Propeller had to discover was just how important it was to fit seamlessly into patients’ lives. A major breakthrough, he said, was figuring out that patients’ habits around battery charging are hard to change and, ultimately, not worth changing.
“We thought we made huge progress on charging because we got the battery to last 30 days. We thought this was a grand slam, when we went from 2 or 3 days to 30 days,” he said. “It turns out 30 days is no man’s land. People do not charge things on that cadence. … So what we found was that instead of helping patients manage asthma, we were trying to build charging habits. It was horrible.”
Massachusetts lost its leadership in the textile trade a century ago. But a new research effort at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology could launch a comeback, by developing smart fabrics that can send messages, tune in audio signals, or change colors on command.
“Fabric is the new software,” said Yoel Fink. an MIT professor of materials science and chief executive of Advanced Functional Fabrics of America. AFFOA is a public-private partnership founded last year, headquartered at MIT, and backed by more than $300 million from universities, corporations, and federal and state governments throughout the United States.
“As a state that was fundamentally all about fibers and textiles for years and years, this was an opportunity for us to grab back some of our heritage,” said Governor Charlie Baker, who attended Monday’s grand opening of AFFOA and its Fabric Discovery Center, a laboratory for creating innovative fibers, fabrics, and clothing items.
… a healthy liver is the one organ in the adult body that, if chopped down to a fraction of its initial size, will rapidly regenerate and perform as if brand-new. Which is a lucky thing, for the liver’s to-do list is second only to that of the brain and numbers well over 300 items, including systematically reworking the food we eat into usable building blocks for our cells; neutralizing the many potentially harmful substances that we incidentally or deliberately ingest; generating a vast pharmacopoeia of hormones, enzymes, clotting factors and immune molecules; controlling blood chemistry; and really, we’re just getting started.
Objectives: Achilles tendon (AT) ruptures are a potentially career-altering and ending injury. Achilles tendon ruptures have a below average return-to-play rate compared to other common orthopaedic procedures for National Football League (NFL) players. The objective of this study was to monitor the incidence and injury rates (IR) of AT ruptures that occurred during the regular season in order to evaluate the influence of player position, time of injury, and playing surface on rupture rates.
Methods: A thorough online review was completed to identify published injury reports and public information regarding AT ruptures sustained during regular season and post-season games in the National Football League (NFL) during the 2009-10 to 2016-17 seasons. Team schedules, player position details and stadium information was used to determine period of the season of injury and playing surface. IRs were calculated per 100 team games (TG). Injury rate ratios (IRR) were utilized to compare IRs.
Results: During eight monitored seasons, there were 44 AT ruptures in NFL games. A majority of AT ruptures were sustained in the first eight games of the regular season (n = 32, 72.7%). There was a significant rate difference for the first and second four-game segments of the regular season compared to the last two four-game segments of the regular season. Defensive players suffered a majority of AT ruptures (n = 32, 72.7%). The IR on grass was 1.00 per 100 TG compared to 1.08 per 100 TG on artificial turf (IRR: 0.93, p = .80).
Conclusion: A significant increase in AT ruptures occurred in the first and second four game segments of the regular season compared to the last two-four game segments of the regular season. Defensive players suffered a majority of AT ruptures compared to offensive or specialist players. There was no difference between AT rupture rates and playing surface in games.
Introduction A growing body of evidence suggests even small rises in serum creatinine (SCr) are of considerable clinical relevance. Given that participants in endurance events are exposed to potential (repeated) renal insults, a systematic review was undertaken to collate current evidence for acute kidney injury (AKI), complicating such events.
Methods A systematic review of studies and case reports meeting inclusion criteria on Medline and EMBASE (inception to October 2015). Included: studies with markers of renal function before and after endurance or ultraendurance events; case reports of severe AKI. Two reviewers assessed risk of bias using the Newcastle-Ottawa scale.
Results Eleven case report publications (n=27 individuals) of severe AKI, were retrieved, with risk factors including systemic illness or nephrotoxic medications usually identified. From 30 studies of endurance and ultraendurance events, mean rise in SCr was 29 (±12.3) µmol/L after marathon or ultramarathon (17 studies, n=568 participants) events. Where follow-up tests were conducted, SCr returned to baseline within 48 hours. Rises in biomarkers suggest potential parenchymal insult, rather than simply muscle breakdown. However, evidence of long-term deleterious effects is lacking.
Conclusions Raised levels of SCr are reported immediately after endurance events. It is not clear whether this is either clinically significant, or if repeated participation predisposes to long-term sequelae. The aetiology of severe exercise-associated AKI is usually multifactorial, with risk factors generally identified in the rare cases reported. On-site biochemistry, urine analysis and biomarkers of AKI may help identify collapsed runners who are at significant short-term risk and allow suitable follow-up. [full text]
During a soccer game early last year, Tiffany Lin began experiencing a sharp pain in her right knee.
Then a freshman at Manhattan’s Beacon School, Lin tried to play through the pain but sought out a doctor when it wouldn’t subside.
The diagnosis? She had Osgood-Schlatter disease, which is the inflammation of the area just below the knee. It mostly occurs during growth spurts and is exacerbated by continuous pounding of the knees that happens during sports such as soccer and running.
It wasn’t difficult to figure out the culprit. Lin, a fullback, played on three soccer teams: her varsity high school squad, club ball in lower Manhattan and a recreation team. At times, she was playing the sport seven days a week.
Sports Medicine Research: In the Lab & In the Field, Nicole Cattano from
Take Home Message: Former collegiate athletes were less physically fit and healthy than adults who were physically active in college about 30 years after participation. This highlights a need for early identification, prevention, and education to help these at-risk individuals.
… let’s revisit some basics of metabolic physiology. Several factors contribute to your hunger levels, not just the amount of activity that you do. There are a number of major players in appetite regulation including:
Your body composition (especially muscle mass)
Resting metabolic rate
Gastric response to ingested food
Changes in appetite hormones (e.g. insulin, ghrelin, cholecystokinin, glucagon-like peptide-1 and Peptide YY, leptin)
An athlete’s power traditionally develops from physical training. Power output is critical for success in sport, but power becomes more selective at the highest level, depending on an athlete’s ability and training. If all things are equal physically, what is the key ingredient that will separate athletes at the top of elite sport?
The gut microbiome.
The gut is another route to increase horsepower. Optimizing gut microbiota means increasing the quality and diversity of the microbiota, which can increase the power of overall health. This power output propels an athlete to the top of the game via stronger immunity, lower inflammation, enhanced nutrient metabolism, and resilient brain function and behavior.
… I believe you can largely forget about exotic, exorbitant eats like goji berries, chia seeds, and coconut oil. The humble spud is the real superfood.
A Danish physician named Mikkel Hindhede proved you could survive on potatoes alone in the early 1900s, when he had three laborers eat nothing but spuds with a dollop of margarine for 309 days. Five doctors examined the men afterward and determined they were all in excellent health. One participant was described as “a strong, solid, athletic-looking figure, all of whose muscles are well-developed, and without excess fat.”
This Fall, Gatorade is expected to launch a major new online offering to the market. The Gatorade Gx platform, including customizable hydration pods, creates a new, direct-to-consumer business model for Gatorade and more sustainable product delivery system. Building on years of science and research at the Gatorade Sports Science Institute, Gx incorporates compelling aspects of the latest trends in personalization and customization.
The 3-year journey from idea inception to consumer product launch is one of the best examples I’ve seen of a collaboration between a design agency partner and a brand. It began when Gatorade asked longtime partner, Smart Design, to help develop a way to track hydration needs of athletes, based on innate physical differences, different sports activities, levels of exertion, duration of exercise, and weather conditions.
… When it comes to sports nutrition here at UCLA, we are constantly experimenting with strategies to get through to athletes. Some approaches work better than others, and we are always on the lookout for new ideas.
A glance across campus set the gears in motion for one of our most recent endeavors. Walk across any quad at UCLA, and you will find most of the students listening to music, texting, or checking their social media accounts on their smartphones. Since college students are the most web-savvy, app-friendly generation yet, one of the most effective ways to get information to them is through their phones. This led us to wonder: “What if we could harness that power for sports nutrition?”
… Nutrition periodisation is the ultimate basic practice for runners to get the most out of their training, but it does require you to embrace change DAILY. Each different running intensity is tied to different fuel use in your body and to understand this article it is important to recognise one key fact; the faster your run, the more your body relies on carbohydrate for fuel.
I understand some runners have conflicting opinions on the role of carbohydrate, but if you utilise any hard session during your training week (think 200m sprints, 1km repeats, or a 20 minute tempo), you will perform these sessions better if you provide more carbohydrate as fuel for your body. Conversely, training periods that have high volumes of “easy” to “steady” running require less carbohydrate and a diet that complements these sessions can prioritise fat burning and improved body composition. Below is a description of the three major cycles of a good training program, and how your diet should change based on these cycles (sorry it’s a long one to start with).
… There’s a familiar refrain in NFL reporting that seems to crescendo whenever controversy of a non-football variety is introduced into the dialogue. “Well,” says the player, “the NFL locker room is the most diverse place on earth.” Players use it as a catch-all when asked by a reporter if another player’s politics or sexual orientation are a distraction.
So, in coming up with the following questions, we sought to test the theory: Just how diverse is an NFL locker room, in identity, thought and experience? And how does the makeup of a roster differ from that of the U.S. population as a whole?
… The biggest difference between professional and collegiate games is speed of play. In any game, if a player gets enough time they can achieve almost anything. Creating space gives them this time.
What is special about this is that it applies to all the sports I’ve worked in. In AFL, Clarko’s cluster is one of the most extreme examples of how by compressing space with men, time on the ball was reduced. In the NFL, no quarterback has any chance if the O-line can’t give him space. Even as you watch the NBA finals, you see players making space and therefore making time. In rugby, the greatest teams will seem to make time, but in essence they are making space, creating an illusion of time.
The recently completed 2016/17 NBA season was the first to pass without a single head coach being fired since 1970/71. Given that the league saw 18 in-season sackings between 2012 and 2016, the current stability of NBA coaching jobs is unprecedented in the modern era. It remains to be seen whether 2016/17 will stand as an outlier, but the recent stalling of the NBA’s coaching carousel is an interesting phenomenon.
As of the end of the 2016/17 season, the median NBA coach had been in his job for 2.1 years, compared to just 11 months in England, Germany and Spain’s top football divisions. While the European leagues have the added threat of relegation, the longevity of many NBA coaches in similarly pressurised environments could be interpreted as a sign that franchises have improved processes regarding the recruitment and performance measurement of coaches.
… after the loss, he carved out time for deep introspection. “I did something that very few do,” he said, recalling the aftermath of the June 18 defeat. “I went for almost 50 days without sleeping – thinking about it, and trying to overcome the loss. I went to get professional help. Not a psychiatrist – professional help from people who have had great defeats. Like [influential manager] Marcelo Bielsa. Five days with him, exchanging ideas. Confronting ways of thinking, and how to overcome that.”
“After 50 days, I came to great conclusions.”
He took solace, above all, from the Argentine literary icon Jorge Luis Borges. “He writes,” Osorio said, “that the defeat has the humility that the noise of victory doesn’t know, doesn’t deserve.”
… This season, there have already been 31 DL placements that list the word “hamstring” in the transaction, well on pace to eclipse the 57 from 2016. The victims include many All-Stars: Prado, Yoenis Cespedes, Jean Segura, Justin Turner, Ian Kinsler, Carlos Gomez, Hunter Pence, Yunel Escobar, Kendrys Morales, Troy Tulowitzki and most recently, Neil Walker and CC Sabathia. The vast majority of those injuries happened on the basepaths, while Sabathia felt a telltale twinge in his left leg while pushing off the mound during the fourth inning of his start against the Angels on Tuesday night.
“Baseball is pretty sedentary compared to other sports,” says Dr. Kevin Wilk of Champion Sports Medicine in Birmingham, Ala., who is also the longtime director of rehabilitative research at the American Sports Medicine Institute. “You are pretty still, and then you have a sudden burst, whether it’s chasing a fly ball, sprinting from home to first or first to third, or a pitcher moving to cover first base. The hip is extended because they’re trying to stretch it out, and they come up lame because the hamstrings weren’t ready to handle the force.”
… Chile’s style of play can be as exhausting as it is bold. The relentless pressing is tiring and this team is ageing. The heart of the side came through the 2007 U-20 World Cup; those key players are now reaching the veteran stage and this is their fourth consecutive tournament at the end of a grueling domestic season. There could be a price to pay for this next year, when it really matters
There was certainly a price to pay toward the end of the first half. As the intensity of Chile’s pressing dropped off, the team became stretched out. Emre Can was given acres of space in which to advance and played a pass out left to Jonas Hector, whose low ball behind the Chilean defence was turned in by Lars Stindl.
… At one end, they could have seen Ajax pull off an extra time aggregate victory at Schalke, on paper the least winnable match of the season. At the other, a 4-0 win against Go Ahead Eagles was the equivalent of watching an English Premier League team play a League Two side.
This range shows the difficulty inherent in judging a player over the course of a season. It’s near-impossible to watch a representative sample of performances, made harder still when certain key individuals like the head coach may only see the player once or twice.
Google Translate, Decorrespondent, Michiel de Hoog from
The KNVB plans to scout coaches. A good plan, because clubs and peasants often make a headache to someone. Three experts have useful advice on how to do that, a good coach scout.
