Adnan Januzaj has been taking advice from multiple Olympic champion runner Mo Farah as the Belgium winger bids to get his flagging career back on track after leaving Manchester United.
Januzaj completed a projected £9.8 million move to Real Sociedad on Wednesday after failing to make the grade at Old Trafford.
The 22-year-old has trained at high altitude in the French Alps with Farah this summer in an effort to boost his fitness and admits he has been consulting the 5000m and 10,000m Olympic champion about how to get the best out of himself mentally and physically.
… Who could have imagined such a renaissance at age 35? Going into this season, Federer had not won a major title since a protracted battle with Andy Murray at Wimbledon five years back. He’d been close, suffering through three painful losses in the finals of major tournaments, two at the All England Club. In the fog of this fresh victory, it is easy to forget last year, when he suffered through the indignity of a tripping-tumble to the Centre Court turf as he succumbed in a semifinal defeat. He announced soon afterward that he was leaving the tour for six months, a move needed to heal his wounds and come back with a new perspective. But he was thought by many to be finished.
How quickly it all changes. The 131st Wimbledon is in the books and his name is etched again on the wall of champions. Same as at this year’s Australian Open, with its epic final against Rafael Nadal. Same as at the big tour stops in Palm Springs and Miami. Same as last month at Halle, Germany, where, just as during this fortnight, he did not drop a single set.
“I knew I could go great again maybe one day, but not at this level” he said. “You would have laughed if I told you I was going to win two Slams this year. People wouldn’t believe me if I [had] said that.” Then, he admitted that he, too, had plenty of doubts. “I also didn’t believe that I was going to win two this year.”
… When the Atlanta Falcons drafted Sanders fifth overall in 1989, it marked the third time he’d been drafted by a team in a major American pro sport; the Royals had picked him in the sixth round in 1985, when he was 17, and the Yankees took him in the 30th round four years later. After being released by the Yankees when he committed to training camp with the Falcons, he signed a free agent contract with the Braves in 1991. In 1992, the inevitable happened—the Braves reached the playoffs, and Sanders found himself spinning across the country in helicopters and chartered planes, between postseason baseball and a regular-season football game 1,200 miles apart.
What role might emotional intelligence play in coaching? In this conclusion to his two-part blog, we follow the personal journey of A-Licensed coach Sam Grace, Youth Development Phase Coach at Reading FC, as he seeks to understand the importance of emotional intelligence and how applying the principles outlined by leading psychologist Daniel Goleman can help coaches.
… AIK appointed a working group as well as a reference group (including technical directors in Ice hockey and Floorball, Bayern Munich scout, researchers in child-youth sport and local politicians) to review the activities of children from eight to twelve years of age and the consequences it has for the rest of the club.
The purpose of this review was to determine if it is possible to organise the AIK youth football in a way that is even more consistent with the above mentioned governing documents and implement them in child and youth sport in a better way than how it is done today. The purpose is that these ideals should exist in harmony with our mission the education and development of tomorrow’s players and leaders for our own representation teams (Senior teams both men and women).
A survey in Sweden showed the staggering impact pushy parents were having on children. One in three had considered quitting football – so three Stockholm clubs decided to act
AFL players should refrain from using social media to protect their mental wellbeing, sports psychologists have warned.
Social media has been a hot topic in the AFL recently, with Alastair Clarkson revealing that Hawthorn monitor their players’ use of social media to combat the deluge of criticism posted on online platforms.
IndoorHoops has been around since 2011 and organizes 5-on-5 runs in all five boroughs of NYC, as well as Buffalo and Connecticut. They reserve court times throughout the week at various gyms and charges customers a per-game fee.
The peace and quiet that envelope a lone hiker on a leaf-riddled trail or a rock climber perched on the top of a cliff seem a world away from the noise of a social media feed. But Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE) alumnus Jim Christian SM ’14 had an idea to tap into the superabundance of social-media data to benefit athletes and outdoor adventurers. He, along with MIT Sloan School of Management alumnus Brint Markle MBA ’14, created a device that could help determine avalanche risk. Their device has led to a network in which people can upload and share critical real-time information about the conditions — including avalanche risk — on a particular slope or mountain.
“We want to crowdsource trip data and safety information for the outdoors,” Christian explains. Their motivation inspired a free app, Mountain Hub, on which outdoor adventurers can share information to benefit others.
… Blue Star also announced its 14th acquisition with the purchase of Stack, which produces a magazine and website with content geared toward youth athletes, coaches and sports parents. Stack CEO Nick Palazzo will become Blue Star’s chief digital officer.
Blue Star’s strategy is to become a one-stop destination for everything involved in youth sports, from organizing leagues, camps and tournaments to tracking statistics and producing highlight videos. It already works with other large youth sports organizations, such as AAU, USA Football and U.S. Soccer.
Eccrine sweat has rapidly emerged as a non-invasive, ergonomic, and rich source of chemical analytes with numerous technological demonstrations now showing the ability for continuous electrochemical sensing. However, beyond active perspirers (athletes, workers, etc.), continuous sweat access in individuals at rest has hindered the advancement of both sweat sensing science and technology. Reported here is integration of sudomotor axon reflex sweat stimulation for continuous wearable sweat analyte analysis, including the ability for side-by-side integration of chemical stimulants & sensors without cross-contamination. This integration approach is uniquely compatible with sensors which consume the analyte (enzymatic) or sensors which equilibrate with analyte concentrations. In vivo validation is performed using iontophoretic delivery of carbachol with ion-selective and impedance sensors for sweat analysis. Carbachol has shown prolonged sweat stimulation in directly stimulated regions for five hours or longer. This work represents a significant leap forward in sweat sensing technology, and may be of broader interest to those interested in on-skin sensing integrated with drug-delivery.
Zach Lund is a skeletoner who had been taking the same substance for male pattern baldness, Propecia, with the active ingredient finasteride, from 1999-2005 without incident. For the first several years he used Propecia, he checked WADA’s annual banned list to see if finasteride had been added, but regardless, he always listed it on his doping control forms. In 2005, WADA added finasteride to the banned list. Lund didn’t check the list that year, so he didn’t know it was banned, but he continued to put it down on his forms. Despite literally writing down on his doping control forms that he was taking a banned substance for most of 2005, he wasn’t sanctioned for using finasteride until he tested positive for it on November 10 of that year. Given the nature of the infraction, he reached an agreement with USADA for, essentially, a written warning so he could still compete in the Olympics in early 2006. WADA appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
The hearing was held two days prior to the Turin Opening Ceremonies. Lund was represented by sports attorney Howard Jacobs, who argued finasteride should not be banned.
… new studies are contending that our gut acts as a sort of motherboard for the rest of our organs. While it’s fairly common knowledge that there’s such things as bad and good bacteria – hence the recent explosion in probiotics – few people understand just how much of an effect an off-balance gut can have on everything from our immune system to the way we perform under pressure.
The debate rages on whether the state of our gut is decided at birth, by our diet, or if we played in the dirt as children. But there’s a wave of new science to suggest that you can actually regulate things like stress, courage and mood through your gut by way of your diet.
A few years back, a team of researchers (including Stanford’s Scott Rozelle, PhD, and Brian Sharbono) conducted a study in some of the poorest counties in Shaanxi Province, China where anemia was a chronic problem. The researchers gave daily iron supplements to children in 24 elementary schools, and after just five months, not only were the students’ hemoglobin levels higher, but so were their standardized math test scores.
“People often don’t see nutrition and education as being friends, or as being related,” said Dan Schwartz, PhD, dean of Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, as he began a recent episode of School’s In, the radio show he hosts with Denise Pope, PhD, a senior lecturer. [audio, 27:39]
Runner's World, Sweat Science blog, Alex Hutchinson from
“Man Bites Dog” is always a more intriguing headline than the other way around—so, in flipping through the abstracts from last month’s American College of Sports Medicine conference, it was inevitable that my interest would be piqued by the words “In contrast to our hypothesis…” As a journalist, I like surprises.
The abstract in question was from a team at the University of Connecticut and Hartford Hospital (along with collaborators from the University of Massachusetts). The researchers were investigating the role of vitamin D in blood pressure, both at rest and during maximal exercise—and to their surprise, they found that their subjects with the highest vitamin D levels also had the highest blood pressure.
Despite vitamin D’s current reputation as a super-panacea, there has been some evidence in recent years that more isn’t always better. Could blood pressure be the source of these apparent negative effects? I contacted Amanda Zaleski, the study’s lead author, to find out.