… “I was just doing enough to get by and things were OK,” he said.
[Omar] Gonzalez decided to change his attitude and alter his rest regimen. He signed with Pachuca in December 2015, helped that team win last year’s Clausura title — and now he is flourishing on a team that will be in this year’s Club World Cup.
“Everyone said this is the next so-and-so. And that’s all well and good, but until you get out there and prove it,” U.S. goalkeeper Tim Howard explained.
“He’s matured. When you have ability and other people think you have ability, it’s great. When you actually realize your own ability and potential, I think the game slows down for you a little bit and you get very comfortable with your own movements and your own communication.”
… Theo and I sat down, and he shot me straight: The Red Sox weren’t going to re-sign me. He said that he loved having me in Boston and that he’d be in touch, and he thanked me for everything I had done in my short time with the team.
Then, he dropped a bombshell on me.
He wanted me to know that I had a … reputation. I’m trying to remember his exact words, but basically, he said that I was known as a guy who didn’t understand or didn’t want to accept his role — a role that was basically that of a backup or role player.
Here’s one more reason to take a rest day: Proper recovery is good for your bone health, according to new research presented at the American Physiological Society’s annual meeting.
Researchers from Brock University in Canada analyzed blood samples from 15 elite female heavyweight rowers during their most intense training weeks of the pre-Olympic season. Then, they compared those blood samples to ones taken during recovery weeks, which included rest days.
They found that the rowers had significantly lower levels of osteoprotegerin (OPG)—a protein that protects against bone loss—and higher levels of sclerostin (SOST)—a protein that hinders new bone formation—during high volume, high intensity training weeks (an average of 18 hours a week) compared to lower volume training periods.
… In exercise science, this ebb and flow between challenge and recovery is referred to as progressive overload. Reflect for a moment on what it takes to make a muscle, like your biceps, stronger. If you try lifting weights that are too heavy, you probably won’t make it past one repetition. Even if you do, you’re liable to hurt yourself along the way. Lift too light a weight, however, and you won’t see much, if any, result. Your biceps simply won’t grow.
You’ve got to find the Goldilocks weight: an amount you can manage, but barely. It will leave you exhausted and fatigued—but not injured—by the time you’ve finished your workout. Even so, if you lift every day, multiple times a day, without much rest in between, you’re almost certainly going to burn out. But if you hardly ever make it to the gym and fail to regularly push your limits, you’re not going to get much stronger, either. The key to strengthening your biceps muscle is balancing the right amount of stress with the right amount of rest, and doing so consistently over a period of time. Stress + rest = growth.
Members of the NCAA’s oversight body have previously announced an ambiguous investigation into the highly-murky football staffing process. They don’t know what their goals with the investigation are, they can’t state exactly why they’re looking into it, but they’re looking into it. For instance, one staff — “it probably isn’t who most of you think” — has 195 football-related staff members, Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby said Monday, though he admitted some of those 195 mystery staff members at that mystery school included undergraduate students.
However, Bowlsby did come out and specifically state one area in which the NCAA will examine, and why: strength and conditioning coaches. Bowlsby, chairman of the NCAA Division I Football Oversight Committee, said the NCAA will examine how strength coaches are educated, hired and who oversees them once they’re on the job.
“There are two strength and conditioning organizations nationally,” he told the assembled press at Big 12 media days. “Neither of them have tremendously strong certification processes. We don’t have any state certification on what happens with strength and conditioning coaches, what their academic preparation is, what their standards are, how often they have to be re-certified and the like.
… Caring for pups is one example of what casual observers of behavior might call an animal’s instinct—generally considered to be an innate, genetically encoded phenomenon. But could such epigenetic changes, when encoded as ancestral learning, also be at the root of maternal care and other seemingly instinctual behaviors we see across the animal kingdom?
“We don’t have a general theory for the mechanics of instinct as we do for learning, and this is something that has troubled me for a very long time,” says University of Illinois entomologist Gene Robinson. He studies social evolution in the Western honey bee and recently coauthored a perspective piece in Science together with neurobiologist Andrew Barron of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, suggesting methylation as a possible mechanism for the transgenerational transmission of instinctual behavior, rather than those behaviors being hardwired in the genome (356:26-27, 2017). Robinson and Barron suggest that instinctual traits, such as honey bees’ well-known waggle dance or a bird’s in-born ability to sing its species’ songs, are the result of traits first learned by their ancestors and inherited across generations by the process of methylation. This differs from classical thoughts on animal learning, which say that if a behavior is learned, it is not innate, and will not be inherited.
The Sixers Innovation Lab Crafted by Kimball officially opened the doors today to its 8,000 square-foot lab space located at the base of the Business Operations Facility at the Philadelphia 76ers Training Complex. In a ribbon-cutting ceremony, the Innovation Lab officially recognized its four diverse inaugural companies spanning the esports, daily fantasy sports, pet care and digital cause media industries. The Sixers Innovation Lab ribbon-cutting ceremony included remarks by Sixers CEO Scott O’Neil, Sixers Innovation Lab Managing Director and Founder of AND1 sportswear, Seth Berger, City of Camden Mayor Dana Redd and Kimball Office President Mike Wagner. Esports training platform U GIT GUD, innovative cat feeding system Doc & Phoebe’s Cat Co., and digital cause media company Live Life Nice, join previously announced daily fantasy lineup recommender Monster Roster as official Sixers Innovation Lab companies.
Intel has axed the division that worked on health wearables, including fitness trackers, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The company has been slowly de-emphasizing its own line of wearables for the past several years, and has not mentioned wearables on its earnings calls since 2014.
Gatorade Sports Science Institute, Kevin Tipton from
Every exerciser from elite-level athletes to those participating in physical activity for health and enjoyment can relate to the frustration of exercise-induced injury. Injuries range from very minor scrapes and bumps to more severe harm requiring prolonged inactivity and/or limb immobilization. Thus, there is a great deal of interest among sport and exercise practitioners to utilize interventions that can lessen the impact of injuries and increase the rate of healing and recovery. Among other interventions, nutritional strategies to support recovery from exercise-induced injuries have been considered. Unfortunately, despite the volume of material written about nutritional support for exercise-induced injury, most available information is based on speculation – even wishful thinking – and very few recommendations are backed by data from studies directly examining nutrition in injured humans (Tipton, 2015). This Sports Science Exchange article will discuss the evidence for support of injured athletes and exercisers through nutrition and attempt to make recommendations based on available information.
Recovery from exercise-induced injury may be considered to have two main stages, both of which may be influenced by nutrition choices. The first stage is the healing and recovery stage, characterized by an initial inflammatory response, wound healing and, almost certainly, reduced activity. More severe injuries may also result in limb immobilization and dramatically reduced activity levels. The second stage follows return to activity and rehabilitation.
… A club should consider a £40m signing not as a source of pride but as evidence of dismal failure. Effective scouting operations should be able to get by without an outsized chequebook. Though Corentin Tolisso and Alexandre Lacazette, whose moves are two of the biggest of this summer so far, had both spent their entire careers at Lyon, the rest of the window’s 10 biggest transfers to date had all changed clubs at least once already. The two biggest sales by English teams, Romelu Lukaku and Michael Keane, had previously been owned and disowned by Chelsea and Manchester United respectively. Logically the aim must be to catch the best young players on the first rungs of the ladder, before they make their names and inflate their values.
But perhaps, sometimes at least, it isn’t. It could be that clubs find global audiences particularly appreciative of the teams most crammed with expensively assembled headline players, and therefore more keen to clothe themselves in their branded leisurewear and consume the products of their official noodle partners. In other words, for elite, globally-renowned football clubs, spending more money leads directly to earning even more money. So Chelsea might have been disappointed to lose a brilliant young midfielder for a pittance, but on the plus side it gives them the chance to buy him back in the future, when he is a bit more famous and a lot more expensive.
Harvard Business Review, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee from
For more than 250 years the fundamental drivers of economic growth have been technological innovations. The most important of these are what economists call general-purpose technologies — a category that includes the steam engine, electricity, and the internal combustion engine. Each one catalyzed waves of complementary innovations and opportunities. The internal combustion engine, for example, gave rise to cars, trucks, airplanes, chain saws, and lawnmowers, along with big-box retailers, shopping centers, cross-docking warehouses, new supply chains, and, when you think about it, suburbs. Companies as diverse as Walmart, UPS, and Uber found ways to leverage the technology to create profitable new business models.
The most important general-purpose technology of our era is artificial intelligence, particularly machine learning (ML) — that is, the machine’s ability to keep improving its performance without humans having to explain exactly how to accomplish all the tasks it’s given. Within just the past few years machine learning has become far more effective and widely available. We can now build systems that learn how to perform tasks on their own.
Why is this such a big deal? Two reasons. First, we humans know more than we can tell: We can’t explain exactly how we’re able to do a lot of things — from recognizing a face to making a smart move in the ancient Asian strategy game of Go. Prior to ML, this inability to articulate our own knowledge meant that we couldn’t automate many tasks. Now we can.
To start out the 2017 season, D.C. United scored just four goals in their first six games. Worse, head coach Ben Olsen’s boys were shut out four times. Under normal circumstances, this lack of production would have been cause for concern.
But Stewart Mairs, the team’s director of soccer strategy and analysis, had a note for the manager. D.C.’s expected goals, a value that tracks how much a team should be scoring, was much higher than the actual number of goals the team had scored. In other words, the squad had been getting unlucky, something that can happen over a short stretch of time like six games but wasn’t likely to continue for an entire season. If they stayed the course, Mairs argued, the goals would come. He relayed this information to Olsen, who, despite his old-school reputation, was open to the idea.
“He doesn’t come across as it, but Benny is actually very analytical,” Mairs says. “He’s smart.”
… “I feel very lucky to do what I do,” said Dr. Patrick Lucey, who holds that position. “I tell people what I do, and, you know, I feel very lucky to work in this domain and work with very talented people.”
Those people include seven direct reports in his data science group, all with Ph.Ds, which speaks to the caliber of programmer required to excel in a burgeoning field that leverages some of the hottest technologies in use. That includes machine learning and — clocking in at No. 1 on the hotness scale right now — artificial intelligence (AI).