New England Patriots tight end Rob Gronkowski, who is returning from back surgery that cut short his 2016 season after just eight games, told the Boston Herald that he has made a full-fledged commitment to work with Tom Brady’s TB12 Sports Therapy Center.
Gronkowski has done so in the past, but the difference this year is his 100 percent commitment level, according to those close to him.
When the Duluth Amateur Hockey Association (DAHA) noticed its registration numbers starting to decline – particularly at the Peewee levels – from 2009-2012, this historic hockey community decided to make a radical change.
DAHA decided to eliminate its Squirt A traveling hockey program.
That’s right: no more traveling “A” Squirts for Duluth, a rule enacted starting with the 2012-13 season. Instead of selecting the best players from each of the unique Duluth community programs and forming a traveling “A” team, all Squirts stay and play at the “B” level for their neighborhoods.
It has been 10 years since the introduction of the U.S. Soccer Developmental Academy program. Replacing the previous Super Y-League model, the Developmental Academy’s shift of focus to heightened training and more competitive games has been vital. It was supposed to persuade the best young American and Canadian talent to remain at domestic academies rather than leave for clubs abroad.
While it’s nearly impossible to assume that all bright talents will avoid the lures of Europe and beyond, the DA program has been crucial for the growth of the sport in the United States and Canada. Some players, like Christian Pulisic, Ethan Horvath and Emerson Hyndman, have used their time in the DA program to parlay better youth games into moves to bigger leagues.
However, there are a large number of success stories among players who have entered MLS. The league is able to sign players from its academies thanks to the Homegrown Rule (founded soon after in 2008). From Juan Agudelo to Gyasi Zardes, these homegrown players have made their mark on the league, helping MLS begin to shed the “retirement league” moniker and rebrand it as a league of choice for young American talent.
… There are two premises that lead Cerf to believe personal company is the most important factor for long-term satisfaction.
The first is that decision-making is tiring. A great deal of research has found that humans have a limited amount of mental energy to devote to making choices. Picking our clothes, where to eat, what to eat when we get there, what music to listen to, whether it should actually be a podcast, and what to do in our free time all demand our brains to exert that energy on a daily basis.
(Cerf has actually made it a personal policy to always pick the second menu item on the list of specials when he’s out to eat, for just that reason.)
The second premise is that humans falsely believe they are in full control of their happiness by making those choices.
… attention is so hard to pin down, that even certain contemporary researchers have thrown up their hands and decided that perhaps attention as it’s currently defined cannot be studied (4). Nevertheless, most cognitive psychologists do agree that attention is an important concept to teach their students. One important aspect of attention is the idea that going back and forth between two different tasks involves switch costs that decrease efficiency and slow down reaction speeds in both tasks (5).
In this blog post, I’m going to describe a very simple yet powerful demonstration of task switching costs. This is a demonstration that students can take part in alone, in pairs, in groups of three, or as a class with one student volunteering to be the “case study” that the rest of the class observes. In this demonstration, students are invited to time themselves performing two separate tasks, and then attempting to switch back and forth between the two tasks.
Football officials watching slow-motion clips or drivers changing from motorways to 30mph zones could be unconsciously mis-judging speed – and the person’s motivations – because their perceptions of ‘normal’ have been altered.
Vision science researchers tested whether exposure to slow-motion footage of people either running in a marathon or walking would alter their perception of real-life movement, and found that after viewing the footage for a short while, participants judged normal-speed playback as too fast, and it had to be slowed down in order to appear ‘normal’.
The opposite effect occurred after viewing fast movements, meaning that judgements of speed are unconsciously influenced by previously viewed speeds. Vision scientists said the so-called ‘adaptation effect’ is down to a person’s own perceived ‘norms’ about how fast something would usually move being altered by relatively short periods of exposure to different speeds.
PLOS One; Gregory D. M. Potter, Janet E. Cade, Laura J. Hardie from
Ever more evidence associates short sleep with increased risk of metabolic diseases such as obesity, which may be related to a predisposition to non-homeostatic eating. Few studies have concurrently determined associations between sleep duration and objective measures of metabolic health as well as sleep duration and diet, however. We therefore analyzed associations between sleep duration, diet and metabolic health markers in UK adults, assessing associations between sleep duration and 1) adiposity, 2) selected metabolic health markers and 3) diet, using National Diet and Nutrition Survey data. Adults (n = 1,615, age 19–65 years, 57.1% female) completed questions about sleep duration and 3 to 4 days of food diaries. Blood pressure and waist circumference were recorded. Fasting blood lipids, glucose, glycated haemoglobin (HbA1c), thyroid hormones, and high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (CRP) were measured in a subset of participants. We used regression analyses to explore associations between sleep duration and outcomes. After adjustment for age, ethnicity, sex, smoking, and socioeconomic status, sleep duration was negatively associated with body mass index (-0.46 kg/m2 per hour, 95% CI -0.69 to -0.24 kg/m2, p < 0.001) and waist circumference (-0.9 cm per hour, 95% CI -1.5 to -0.3cm, p = 0.004), and positively associated with high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (0.03 mmol/L per hour, 95% CI 0.00 to 0.05, p = 0.03). Sleep duration tended to be positively associated with free thyroxine levels and negatively associated with HbA1c and CRP (p = 0.09 to 0.10). Contrary to our hypothesis, sleep duration was not associated with any dietary measures (p ≥ 0.14). Together, our findings show that short-sleeping UK adults are more likely to have obesity, a disease with many comorbidities. [full text]
Vanderbilt University, Research News @ Vanderbilt from
Imagine slipping into a jacket, shirt or skirt that powers your cell phone, fitness tracker and other personal electronic devices as you walk, wave and even when you are sitting down.
A new, ultrathin energy harvesting system developed at Vanderbilt University’s Nanomaterials and Energy Devices Laboratory has the potential to do just that. Based on battery technology and made from layers of black phosphorus that are only a few atoms thick, the new device generates small amounts of electricity when it is bent or pressed even at the extremely low frequencies characteristic of human motion.
The Pac-12 has funded a research project that could help teams evaluate a low-cost motion capture technology option used to assess the injury risk and readiness of rehabilitating college athletes in their return to action.
The University of Washington in studying injury prevention will focus on evaluating Microsoft Kinect’s simple motion capture technology as a viable option to measure abnormal joint movements and help facilitate safe return to sports at a lower cost than standard systems such as Vicon.
The study will compare the functional movement data in healthy volunteers using Kinect and Vicon to see if the low-cost option can be used to determine when student-athletes can return from injury or surgery.
NIH, National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering from
NIBIB-funded researchers have developed a revolutionary 3D printer that paves the way for direct printing of biomedical devices onto human skin. The printer builds flexible electronic sensors that measure pressure. They’re expected to improve sensation in prosthetic hands and surgical robotic arms.
“Imagine putting your arm under a printer and printing a device or sensor. You don’t need a microfabrication center, you don’t need a doctor. This is the future of 3D printing and electronics,” says lead study author Michael McAlpine, Ph.D., a 2017 recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) and the Benjamin Mayhugh Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Minnesota.
We are a virtual Engineering team within Microsoft. Over the past few years, we’ve been working on a variety of sports projects. Two years ago we started working in a more concerted effort on the Sports Performance Platform (SPP)–a platform that enables professional and amateur teams to collect and analyze sports data in an aggregated way and build predictive analytical reports from this data.
Recently, at the Hashtag Sports conference we launched the Sports Performance Platform–as a partner-led effort.
Knee injuries and chronic disorders, such as arthritis, affect millions of Americans leading to missed workdays and reduced quality of life. Currently, after an initial diagnosis, there are few quantitative technologies available to provide sensitive sub-clinical feedback to patients regarding improvements or setbacks to their knee health status; instead, most assessments are qualitative, relying on patient-reported symptoms, performance during functional tests, and physical examinations. Recent advances have been made with wearable technologies for assessing the health status of the knee (and potentially other joints) with the goal of facilitating personalized rehabilitation of injuries and care for chronic conditions. This review describes our progress in developing wearable sensing technologies that enable quantitative physiological measurements and interpretation of knee health status. Our sensing system enables longitudinal quantitative measurements of knee sounds, swelling, and activity context during clinical and field situations. Importantly, we leverage machine-learning algorithms to fuse the low-level signal and feature data of the measured time series waveforms into higher-level metrics of joint health. This paper summarizes the engineering validation, baseline physiological experiments, and human subject studies – both cross-sectional and longitudinal – that demonstrate the efficacy of using such systems for robust knee joint health assessment. We envision our sensor system complementing and advancing current practices to reduce joint re-injury risk, to optimize rehabilitation recovery time for a quicker return to activity, and to reduce health care costs.
… “Springbok provides athletic professionals with information they can’t get anywhere else,” said Joe Hart, an assistant professor of kinesiology at UVa’s Curry School of Education. “It tells you exactly which portion of each muscle is bigger or smaller than normal, and how that relates to performance.”
Springbok uses cutting-edge MRI technology to create 3-D renderings of every muscle in an athlete’s legs. Its software compares the size of each muscle with the average for their overall body size. Muscles that are smaller than average appear as red, average-sized muscles show up as yellow and muscles that are larger than normal appear as blue.
“We are learning about muscle volume patterns that are important to running fast, jumping high, being nimble and recovering from injury,” said Craig Meyer, a professor of biomedical engineering and radiology at UVa.
The two-a-day football practices that coaches once used to toughen up their teams and cram for the start of the season are going the way of tear-away jerseys and the wishbone formation.
As part of its efforts to increase safety, the NCAA approved a plan this year that prevents teams from holding multiple practices with contact in a single day.
The move has forced plenty of schools to alter their practice calendar, with many teams opening their preseason as early as this week. Officials don’t mind if it causes a few logistical headaches as long as it reduces the head injuries that had become all too common this time of year.