verton winger Aaron Lennon is happy to be back in training and has thanked people for their support after he was detained under the Mental Health Act in May.
The 30-year-old has been back in pre-season training with Everton for the past week following his treatment for a stress-related illness after the police detained him at the side of a road in Salford.
Lennon, who was treated at The Priory in Darlington and Altrincham and also the Salford Royal Hospital, took to Twitter to show his gratitude and is looking forward to the new campaign.
This was supposed to be the year that Andy Murray dominated men’s tennis. With Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal coming off injuries and Novak Djokovic struggling for motivation, Murray was top of the pile, ready to take control. But then his body intervened.
From the shingles that he revealed after the Australian Open to a couple of bouts of flu and from the elbow injury he suffered in March to the sore hip that left him hobbling through Wimbledon, Murray has struggled with his health throughout the first half of the year.
It’s probably fair to say that he has not been 100 percent fit since he won the season-ending ATP World Tour Finals this past November. Which is why, after the initial shock, Murray’s quarterfinal defeat to Sam Querrey on Centre Court on Wednesday was about right and perhaps the best he could have expected.
School’s out for the summer — and so begins a long few months of parents’ and teachers’ worrying about all the things their children will forget before the fall. The fractions they won’t be able to multiply. The state capitals they won’t be able to identify. “Learning loss” is the name for it.
Forgetting is supposed to be the antithesis of learning, and whether we’re a kid or an adult, most of us are plainly embarrassed if we can’t recall a name or fact. But it turns out that forgetting can help us gain expertise, and when we relearn something we couldn’t recall, we often develop a richer form of understanding.
The notion that forgetting is a hidden educational virtue goes back a century or more. In a series of studies, the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus found that when people relearn information, they’re more likely to recall that information in the future.
… Defender Ollie Cook, 19, said there had been nothing to fear.
“It was pretty tough coming straight back in, but the group did really well and we maintained ourselves really well over the summer,” he told Southampton’s website. “We have a good holiday and come back fresh to meet this kind of challenge.
“We all got very detailed programmes over the summer, which it looks like everyone stuck to pretty well. We know we’ve got to keep ticking over otherwise we’re going to come back and will be shot.”
When it comes to monitoring athletes, it can become a difficult task to quantify their volume and intensities. In my current position, I am lucky enough to be supplied with the greatest monitoring tools available. I am writing this post for those who are looking to monitor their athletes and a VERY cost efficient way. My solution; session RPE.
Behavioral Scientist, David Rand and Jonathan Cohen from
Reasoning, problem-solving, symbolic language, planning—these faculties are fundamental to virtually all of our individual and societal accomplishments. At the heart of them all lies cognitive control. Psychologists and neuroscientists refer to cognitive control, or “controlled processing,” as the ability to flexibly adapt behavior to rapidly changing circumstances and to make decisions that best serve long-term interests over more immediate rewards.
Cognitive control underlies our striking technological achievements over an equally striking range of domains, from agriculture and housing to medicine, transportation, communication and large-scale economies. Given all these positive outcomes, one might expect that expressing cognitive control should inexorably improve with time—that more cognitive control leads to more progress and the enduring success of our species.
Sadly, history seems to indicate the contrary. Around the world, tourists visit the ruins of great structures of sophisticated societies. Anthropological evidence suggests that many of these societies collapsed precisely because of the innovations that accompanied their sophistication: These innovations relied on cognitive control, but they were used ill-advisedly, reflecting a failure in the use of control. It suggests a pattern of increased control followed by collective short-sightedness and irrationality. This pattern is not confined to the distant past. Some have argued that humans are now experiencing such a societal backslide.
Recent studies have reported that skilled tennis players are likely to use proximal body information for anticipating the direction of their opponent’s forehand shot. However, in these studies, the visual stimuli did not include visual information about the ball. Skilled players may have used proximal information owing to the lack of distal information. To address this issue, we developed a novel methodological approach using computer graphics (CG) images in which the entire body was presented by a combination of point-light display (i.e., poor graphical information, PLD) and polygons (i.e., rich graphical information). Using our novel methodological approach, we examined whether skilled tennis players use proximal body information when anticipating shot directions. Methods and results
Fifteen skilled tennis players and fifteen novice players tried to anticipate shot directions by observing four CG forehand strokes (ALPOL: all body parts were represented with polygon; RAPLD: racket and arm were represented with PLD; BOPLD: body parts without racket and arm were represented with PLD; and ALPLD: all body parts were represented with PLD). Our intention in creating CG models with such combinations (i.e., RAPLD and BOPLD) was that because of the richer graphical information provided by polygons compared to PLD, the participant’s anticipatory judgment would be influenced more by body parts expressed with polygons. The results showed that for skilled players, anticipatory judgment was more accurate when they observed RAPLD than when they observed BOPLD and ALPLD. In contrast, for novice players, there were no differences in the accuracy of anticipatory judgments with the four CG models. Conclusions
Only skilled players made more accurate anticipatory judgments when body regions were expressed with rich graphical information, and the racket and arm were expressed with poor graphical information. These suggest that skilled players used proximal information to effectively anticipate shot directions.
Sleep is essential for recovery and performance in elite athletes. While it is generally assumed that exercise benefits sleep, high training load may jeopardize sleep and hence limit adequate recovery. To examine this, the current study assessed objective sleep quantity and sleep stage distributions in elite athletes and calculated their association with perceived training load. Design
Mixed- methods. Methods
Perceived training load, actigraphy and one-channel EEG recordings were collected among 98 elite athletes during 7 consecutive days of regular training. Results
Actigraphy revealed total sleep durations of 7:50 ± 1:08 hours, sleep onset latencies of 13 ± 15 minutes, wake after sleep onset of 33 ± 17 minutes and sleep efficiencies of 88 ± 5%. Distribution of sleep stages indicated 51 ± 9% light sleep, 21 ± 8% deep sleep, and 27 ± 7% REM sleep. On average, perceived training load was 5.40 ± 2.50 (scale 1-10), showing large daily variability. Mixed-effects models revealed no alteration in sleep quantity or sleep stage distributions as a function of day-to-day variation in preceding training load (all p’s > .05). Conclusion
Results indicate healthy sleep durations, but elevated wake after sleep onset, suggesting a potential need for sleep optimization. Large proportions of deep sleep potentially reflect an elevated recovery need. With sleep quantity and sleep stage distributions remaining irresponsive to variations in perceived training load, it is questionable whether athletes’ current sleep provides sufficient recovery after strenuous exercise.
Journal of Orthopaedic & Sports Physical Therapy from
Study Design
Controlled laboratory study, within session design. Background
Gait retraining has been proposed as an effective intervention to reduce impact loading in runners at risk of stress fractures. Interventions that can be easily implemented in the clinic are needed. Objective
To assess the immediate effects of sound intensity feedback related to impact during running on vertical impact peak (VIP), peak vertical instantaneous loading rate (VILR), and vertical average loading rate (VALR). Methods
Fourteen healthy, college-aged runners who ran at least 9.7 km per week participated (4 males, 10 females; age, 23.7 ± 2.0 years; height,1.67 ± 0.08 m; mass, 60.9 ± 8.7 kg). A decibel meter provided real-time sound intensity feedback of treadmill running via an iPad application. Participants were asked to reduce the sound intensity of running while receiving continuous feedback for 15 minutes while running at their self-selected preferred speed. Baseline and follow up ground reaction force data were collected during overground running at their self-selected preferred running speed. Results
Dependent t-tests indicated a statistically significant reduction in VIP (1.56 BW to 1.13 BW, P≤.0001), VILR (95.48 BW/s to 62.79 BW/s, P=.001), and VALR (69.09 BW/s to 43.91 BW/s, P≤.001) after gait retraining compared to baseline. Conclusion
The results of the current study support the use of sound intensity feedback during treadmill running to immediately reduce loading rate and impact force. Within session reductions in impact peak and loading rates transferred to over ground running were demonstrated. Decreases in loading were of comparable magnitude to other gait retraining methods.
The ability to focus is an important driver of excellence. Focused techniques such as to-do lists, timetables, and calendar reminders all help people to stay on task. Few would argue with that, and even if they did, there is evidence to support the idea that resisting distraction and staying present have benefits: practicing mindfulness for 10 minutes a day, for example, can enhance leadership effectiveness by helping you become more able to regulate your emotions and make sense of past experiences. Yet as helpful as focus can be, there’s also a downside to focus as it is commonly viewed.
The problem is that excessive focus exhausts the focus circuits in your brain. It can drain your energy and make you lose self-control. This energy drain can also make you more impulsive and less helpful. As a result, decisions are poorly thought-out, and you become less collaborative.
The purpose of this study was to determine the accuracy of five different resting metabolic rate (RMR) prediction equations in male and female athletes. Twenty-two female (19.7± 1.4 yrs.; 166.2 ± 5.5 cm; 63.5 ± 7.3 kg; 49.2 ± 4.3 kg of Fat-Free Mass; 23.4 ± 4.4 BF%) and twenty-eight male (20.2 ± 1.6 yrs.; 181.9 ± 6.1 cm; 94.5 ± 16.2 kg; 79.1 ± 7.2 kg of FFM; 15.1 ± 8.5% BF) athletes were recruited to participate in one day of metabolic testing. Assessments comprised RMR measurements via indirect calorimetry and body composition analyses via air displacement plethysmography. One-way repeated measures analysis of variance with follow up paired t-tests were selected to determine differences between indirect calorimetry and five RMR prediction equations. Linear regression analysis was used to assess the accuracy of each RMR prediction method. An alpha level of p < 0.05 was used to determine statistical significance. All of the prediction equations significantly underestimated RMR while the Cunningham equation had the smallest mean difference (-165 kcals). In males, the Harris-Benedict equation was found to be the best prediction formula with the lowest root mean square prediction error (RMSPE) value of 284 kcals. In females, the Cunningham equation was found to be the best prediction equation with the lowest RMSE value of 110 kcals. RMR prediction equations consistently appear to underestimate RMR in male and female athletes. The Harris-Benedict equation appears to be most accurate for male athletes while the Cunningham equation may be better suited for female athletes.
IMeasureU has been acquired by motion capture technology company Vicon, it was announced Tuesday.
Aukland, New Zealand-based IMeasureU includes a business line — IMU-Step — focused on the elite sports market in assisting with the rehabilitation of injured players. By attaching IMU sensors to the players, coaches and sports scientists can track strain throughout the rehab process in order minimize the time it takes to return to action.
In unveiling a new type of cycling skin suit at the start of the Tour, Team Sky are both within the rules and, more crucially, making their rivals uncomfortable
The Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Blog, Shubham Tulsiani and Tinghui Zhou from
Given only a single 2D image, humans are able to effortlessly infer the rich 3D structure of the underlying scene. Since inferring 3D from 2D is an ambiguous task by itself (see e.g. the left figure below), we must rely on learning from our past visual experiences. These visual experiences solely consist of 2D projections (as received on the retina) of the 3D world. Therefore, the learning signal for our 3D perception capability likely comes from making consistent connections among different perspectives of the world that only capture partial evidence of the 3D reality. We present methods for building 3D prediction systems that can learn in a similar manner.
WBRC FOX6 News – Birmingham, AL, Christina Chambers from
Virtual reality is more than just a three-dimensional image to Alabama’s athletic training staff.
“One thing that drew us to virtual reality was coach Saban’s attitude, wanting to be on the cutting edge in everything we do in every area. So we were thinking, ‘what can we do differently to change the game a little bit in relation to rehab,’” said head football trainer Jeff Allen.
Allen and the Alabama training staff got the idea to use virtual reality in rehab in December and now after months of testing, Alabama has launched what they call Virtual Reality Rehab.
“We started using it about two or three weeks ago. There are a lot of schools that are using virtual reality for performance training but I don’t know of any other schools that are using it in rehab,” Allen said.
A new 16-week accelerator program for fledgling health and fitness businesses will be located in the FastForward East innovation hub on Johns Hopkins’ East Baltimore campus and receive support from Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures.
Fusionetics is spending a few days this week at the Impact Basketball event in Las Vegas, Nevada testing the new Human Movement Connection system.
By leveraging the Connexion platform and Fusionetics technology, this new system quickly generates a comprehensive snapshot of an individual’s physical and physiological characteristics, including height, weight, heart rate and blood pressure.
YouTube, Artificial Intelligence A.I., Jason Pontin and Andrew Ng from
Work, job, play, privacy, communication, finance, war, and dating: algorithms and the machines that run them have upended them all. Will artificial intelligence become as ubiquitous as electricity? Is there any industry AI won’t touch? Will AI tend to steal jobs and exacerbate income inequalities, or create new jobs and amplify human abilities at work — or, both? How can the global population adjust to the changes ushered in by artificial intelligence and its capabilities? In light of these changes, how will we remake work, education, and community? Can we build it better than we did before?
How does the Crimson Tide use Catapult to track player performance? Alabama head athletic trainer, Jeff Allen, explains how his training staff uses the Catapult system to know whether or not a player is performing at his peak, help Coach Saban structure practices, expedite the rehabilitation of injured players, and manage the potential extended seasons of the College Football Playoff.
… Heavy engineering is the attempt to predict and simulate the real world during your design loops. Specifically the test portion is done in a replicated or simulated environment instead of the true environment in which the product will be used.
We need heavy engineering for the big projects. The military ships, rockets, car air bags, airplane turbines, buildings, and many embedded software projects where the human or monetary cost is too high to test in the real world environment for the product.
Though more and more we’re starting to see “light engineering” used for large projects. What’s the difference? The time to complete a loop – otherwise known as an iteration and decision/ OODA loop – for heavy engineering is 6 months or more. For light engineering it’s short. Sometimes hours, minutes, or seconds for automated systems.
Background Ankle injuries are prevalent in elite volleyball and suggested to result from player contact at the net. Traditionally, ankle sprains are thought to happen in a plantarflexed position, but case studies suggest plantarflexion may not be involved.
Aim Describe the injury situations and mechanisms of ankle injuries in world-class volleyball based on systematic video analysis of injuries reported through the Fédération Internationale de Volleyball (FIVB) Injury Surveillance System.
Methods Videos of 24 injuries from major FIVB tournaments were included for analysis (14 men, 10 women). Five analysts reviewed the videos to determine specific situations and mechanisms leading to injuries.
Results The majority of injuries occurred during two volleyball situations, blocking (n=15) and attacking (n=6). Injuries to blockers were the result of landing on an opponent (n=11) or teammate (n=4). Attacking injuries most frequently occurred when a back-row player landed on a front-row teammate (n=4 of 6). When landing on an opponent under the net, the attacker landed into the opponent’s court in 11 of 12 situations but without violating the centre line rule. Injuries mostly resulted from rapid inversion without any substantial plantarflexion.
Conclusions The majority of injuries occur while blocking, often landing on an opponent. The attacker is overwhelmingly to blame for injuries at the net secondary to crossing the centre line. Injuries while attacking often result from a back-row player landing on a front-row teammate. Landing-related injuries mostly result from rapid inversion with the absence of plantarflexion.
… Obviously, not all of the injuries could have been predicted or avoided. And with the NFL placing added attention on head injuries through the Play Smart Play Safe program, soft tissue injuries are an afterthought in the zeitgeist because “sprained ankle” doesn’t sound the same alarm as “concussion.”
But that doesn’t mean teams still aren’t getting hurt on the field and in the checkbook when it comes to soft tissue injuries. Which is why a Denver-based health technology company named MuscleSound believes it can help reduce those skyrocketing numbers – the dings and the dollars. Armed with a 2017 salary cap of $167 million per team, general managers would prefer to see that money in action, not on the injured reserve.
Using a proprietary, cloud-based software, MuscleSound creates an ultrasound image for individual athletes that delivers real-time muscle energy and health data. The system measures glycogen content – the fuel that makes muscles go – and is able to calculate a player’s ability to store and replenish muscle fuel before and after games.
Patellofemoral pain (PFP) is recognised to be a multifactorial condition with multiple potential causes and a host of treatment options. This can leave both clinicians and runners confused and unsure about what treatment path to take. Do we use education, activity modification, rehab exercises, gait re-training or all of the above!? Do we tape, massage or manipulate, or maybe none of the above?! With lots of options but limited time and resources it helps to know what the key treatment is for runners with PFP. Recent research can shed some light on this complex topic.
… A research team from Université de Montreal, The Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital (The Neuro), and the Ludmer Center for NeuroInformatics recruited former university athletes between the ages of 51 and 75 who played contact sports such as ice hockey and American football. From that group, the researchers formed a cohort of 15 athletes who reported being concussed in their athletic careers, and a control group of 15 athletes who had not been concussed.
The researchers performed a battery of tests on both groups, including neuropsychological testing, genotyping, structural neuroimaging, magnetic resonance spectroscopy, and diffusion weighted imaging. They then pooled the data and fed it to computers that use artificial intelligence software to “learn” the differences between the brain of a healthy athlete versus the brain of a previously concussed athlete. They found that white matter connections between several brain regions of concussed individuals showed abnormal connectivity that might reflect both degeneration and the brain’s method of compensating for damage. Using the data, the computers were able to detect concussion with up to 90-per-cent accuracy.
SummitDaily.com (Summit County CO), Phil Lindeman from
They say about 12 weeks after surgery is the trickiest period for ACL rehab. Now that I’ve passed the magic mark, I have to agree.
“Despite the graft healing and feeling stable, it doesn’t mean your knee is ready to perform,” said Jonathan Bravman, a sports medicine doctor with the University of Colorado-Denver, when I asked why my new ACL is weaker at 12 weeks than the day the surgeon sewed it into place. “That’s a subtle but very important point.”
The Conversation, Jasenka Zubcevic and Christopher Martyniuk from
… As researchers, we have been looking increasingly into the effect these bacteria have on their host’s body, from obesity to mental illness and heart disease. With obesity, for example, these tiny organisms may play a big role by influencing what foods we crave and how our bodies hold onto fat.
In a recent study of the gut microbiome, we set out to determine whether the microbiota in the gut can be affected not only by our nervous system but also by an unsuspected source – our bone marrow.
Our hope is that, by understanding the interactions of the microbiome with other parts of the body, one day treatments could be developed for a range of illnesses.
To anyone who’s watched soccer, it’s obvious that all passes are not created equal. Some are routine. Some are exceptional. The usual simple statistic that divides the completed ones by the attempted ones is missing quite a lot of context. Last year, to help solve that problem, ASA debuted a passing efficiency model designed to take into account the difficulty of the pass, similar to how expected goals is developed. Over 300,000 passes from 2015 were used to build three different models, and this year those models were calibrated to match 2017 performance. Ted Knutson over at Statsbomb just revealed a similar model build on 20,000,000 passes from Opta’s dataset, which calls into question whether or not our 300,000 sample size is sufficient, but alas, all the MLS passes in the history of MLS wouldn’t reach a third of that larger sample, so here we are.
This year we’ve broken out the model by individual player, which makes things pretty interesting because you can see how different players take different levels of risk depending on which part of the field they are on. For example, Philadelphia Union right back Keegan Rosenberry has an expected pass completion percentage of 57.9 percent in his own defensive third. His main competitor Ray Gaddis has 67.7 percent in the same area. They both have actual completion percentages near their expected level. The difference is that Gaddis makes higher percentage passes when controlling the ball in a defensive position. That may not tell you which player is more effective but it does indicate that Rosenberry is more likely to send the ball upfield.
“This repo contains the tutorial material used as part of the workshop on Sports Analytics with R that was given at the 2017 Melbourne Data Science Week”
The New York Times, Jeremy Bowers, Adam Pearce and Joe Ward from
The new conventional wisdom in baseball is that hitters are more effective when they adjust their swings to increase the launch angle of the ball when it leaves the bat. Doing so produces more fly balls that can turn into doubles, triples and home runs. Many players, including Josh Donaldson and Yonder Alonso, attribute their success to this new trend. Nevertheless, this tactic doesn’t work for every player.
… More than 100,000 fans attended last year’s 11-day schedule in Las Vegas, and LeGarie and Hall expect 120,000 to 130,000 this year. Last year their market research found that 38 percent of attendees were from Southern California.
Half of the games are still played in Cox Pavilion, but the other half are played in the adjoining Thomas and Mack Center, capacity 17,923. Last Friday’s session, featuring Lonzo Ball’s debut with the Los Angeles Lakers, sold out in advance — a first.
LeGarie and Hall are even more excited about television growth. Every game is broadcast on an ESPN or NBA TV property, and the league is drawing an audience. The Friday night matchup between the Lakers and Boston Celtics drew 1.1 million viewers on ESPN, and ESPN said its summer league ratings over the first weekend were up 99 percent over last year.