Andy Carroll is reportedly undergoing gruelling double sessions of fitness work to get him back into shape ahead of the new Premier League season, according to reports.
Under the watchful new West Ham of new head of medical services Gary Lewin, the injury-plagued frontman – who won’t be fit for the start of the season – is undergoing a tough regime, pushing him to the absolute maximum with double training, fitness sessions and “punishing gym work” which is hoped will discover where he injury problems are coming from.
Undrafted rookie cornerback Randall Goforth tore his ACL in practice on July 28 during what appeared to be a contact injury. This is a season-ending injury and he will likely undergo ACL reconstruction surgery within the next few weeks.
The timeline to return to play following ACL reconstruction varies, especially if additional injuries occurred such as a meniscal tear or articular cartilage damage. Most professional athletes return to pre-injury levels between 9-12 months. Recovery is based on the athlete passing a battery of tests, which include evaluations of balance, strength, and hopping distance, as well as, performance on the field and position-specific testing.
I wrote previously on the research surrounding return to play following ACL injuries in the NFL. The finding showed that 63 percent of NFL players returned to play with an average time frame of approximately 11 months. Veteran players were more likely to return to competition at the same level than those with less professional experience. Being selected in the first four rounds of the NFL draft was highly predictive of return to play.
David Villa does not need to be working this hard. No one would blame the man who’s won pretty much everything there is to win — a World Cup, a European championship, multiple La Liga titles, the Champions League — and sits as the Spanish national team’s all-time leading goal scorer for taking a play off during a random midsummer game. But instead, there’s Villa, sprinting back into the defensive third to make a tackle, helping down-a-man New York City FC preserve a 2-1 lead against the Chicago Fire.
For Villa, the son of a coal miner, the extreme level of effort isn’t extraordinary. It’s simply how he’s supposed to act.
“I don’t know if I’m a talisman [for NYCFC],” says Villa, who was voted as the best player in MLS by a panel of ESPN FC experts. “I try to do my best every day always for the team, for the club. This is my job.”
When Kori Carter took the track for her opening heat in the 400-meter hurdles at the world track and field championships Monday, her coach, Edrick Floréal, sent her out with some untraditional instructions. Go as hard as you can out of the blocks, Floréal said, and then take a look around — or rather, up.
“My coach told me to get out the first six hurdles like it’s the final and then told me to be smart from there, check the screen so I knew where everyone was,” Carter said.
In ways large and small, the two huge screens inside London Stadium have become as much a part of the nightly action here as the runners wearing spikes. The monitors display the replays, the statistics and, most dramatically, the final results shortly after a tight finish, allowing runners huddled together on the track and gazing upward — chests heaving — to get clarity, and confirmation, from on high almost as soon as their races end.
… The Kent State case is also not a lone outlier. Oregon suspended head strength coach Irele Oderinde shortly after his arrival after multiple players were hospitalized during winter workouts. A CBS investigation in March found that Oderinde was certified only to supervise track workouts and that “[f]our industry experts totaling 100 years of experience said they didn’t consider Oderinde properly certified to be a football strength coach.”
Cases like these are what Bob Bowlsby had in mind when he announced at Big 12 media days the NCAA would investigate the certification and supervision processes of strength coaches.
“We’re going to spend some time looking at strength and conditioning coaches and how they come to be strength and conditioning coaches, what they can do, how they’re supervised and the like,” Bowlsby said last month. “I think that all it will do is, once again, make it a safer environment for student-athletes because, when you look at the catastrophic occurrences that are happening in the sport, the deaths are happening during conditioning and off-season practice. Very few of them are happening during the season, during contact, during regular preparation.”
The 2017 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) was hosted from July 21st to July 26th in Honolulu, Hawaii. This year’s conference accepted 783 papers out of 2,620 valid submissions, which included 215 long and short presentations and 3 parallel tracks. The conference attracted 127 sponsors with $859,000 in sponsorship funds, and close to 5,000 people attended, a significant improvement from just over a thousand a few years ago.
In this article, we will help you recap and walk through this carnival (coffee was great!). Let’s get started.
More than 50 million Americans suffer from sleep disorders, and diseases including Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s can also disrupt sleep. Diagnosing and monitoring these conditions usually requires attaching electrodes and a variety of other sensors to patients, which can further disrupt their sleep.
To make it easier to diagnose and study sleep problems, researchers at MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital have devised a new way to monitor sleep stages without sensors attached to the body. Their device uses an advanced artificial intelligence algorithm to analyze the radio signals around the person and translate those measurements into sleep stages: light, deep, or rapid eye movement (REM).
“Imagine if your Wi-Fi router knows when you are dreaming, and can monitor whether you are having enough deep sleep, which is necessary for memory consolidation,” says Dina Katabi, the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, who led the study. “Our vision is developing health sensors that will disappear into the background and capture physiological signals and important health metrics, without asking the user to change her behavior in any way.”
Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports from
Sports with high numbers of athletes and acute injuries are an important target for preventive actions at a national level. Both for the health of the athlete and to reduce costs associated with injury. The aim of the present study was to identify injuries where injury prevention should focus, in order to have major impact on decreasing acute injury rates at a national level. All athletes in the seven investigated sport federations (automobile sports, basketball, floorball, football (soccer), handball, ice hockey, and motor sports) were insured by the same insurance company. By using this insurance database, the incidence and proportion of acute injuries, and injuries leading to permanent medical impairment (PMI), at each body location, was calculated. Comparisons were made between sports, sex and age. In total, there were 84754 registered injuries during the study period (year 2006-2013). Athletes in team sports, except in male ice hockey, had the highest risk to sustain an injury and PMI in the lower limb. Females had higher risk of injury and PMI in the lower limb compared to males, in all sports except in ice hockey. This study recommends that injury prevention at national level should particularly focus on lower limb injuries. In ice hockey and motor sports head/neck and upper limb injuries also need attention.
At this moment, computer-generated skeletons are competing in a virtual race, running, hopping and jumping as far as they can before collapsing in an electronic heap. Meanwhile, in the real world, their coaches – teams of machine learning and artificial intelligence enthusiasts – are competing to see who can best train their skeletons to mimic those complex human movements. Perhaps the coaches are doing it for glory or prizes or fun, but the event’s creator has a serious end goal: making life better for kids with cerebral palsy.
Lukasz Kidziński, a postdoctoral fellow in bioengineering, dreamed up the contest as a way to better understand how people with cerebral palsy will respond to muscle-relaxing surgery. Often, doctors resort to surgery to improve a patient’s gait, but it doesn’t always work.
“The key question is how to predict how patients will walk after surgery,” said Kidziński. “That’s a big question, which is extremely difficult to approach.”
… “Every day, you never know what can happen,” the University of Louisville’s senior defensive tackle said. “You can come out and step on the grass the wrong way and twist your ankle. You can have a concussion by listening to music too loud. I heard a story about a coach who got a Gatorade bath and died (of pneumonia). You’re taking chances every day when you walk through those gates.”
In the wake of the recent study that detected chronic traumatic encephalopathy in the donated brains of 110 out of 111 former NFL players, parents and players must work harder to rationalize football’s risks. As neuropathologist Dr. Ann McKee told the New York Times in summarizing her findings: “It is no longer debatable whether or not there is a problem in football — there is a problem.”
They say an army marches on its stomach and the same could be said for an elite NFL team. The Dallas Cowboys have a new member in their ranks but he’s not responsible for tackling, running or throwing. Instead, Scott Senhert, Director of Sports Performance at the Cowboys, is tasked with the job of making sure his assets eat right and maintain a high performing diet.
The Conversation, Kelsey Erickson and Susan Backhouse from
… While on the surface reporting doping may seem straightforward, it rarely is. There are often multiple variables to consider – an athlete may share the same coach who is administering the banned substances, may be friends with the person, or may feel pressured (by other athletes) to remain quiet. Then there are the potential social consequences for the whistleblower – being shunned, bullied or discredited.
Despite the reluctance among athletes to report doping, the use of prohibited substances and methods arguably threatens the integrity of sport. And this is in part why anti-doping governing bodies worldwide are increasingly recognising the critical role that whistleblowers can play in disclosing doping behaviour.
… Food is fuel, after all, and a football player’s body is his temple. As such, it’s all about clean eating for today’s training camp attendees, who are better educated than ever before about the cause and effect of diet and nutrition.
So the cookies, notes executive chef Daniel Keeley, who oversees the preparation and serving of meals in the college dining hall operated by Parkhurst Dining Services, are really there for the coaches and ball boys.
“The players walk over and say, ‘Ooh,’ and then walk away,” he says.
… In a memo given to teams this week, the league outlined how it hopes to reduce the stresses of travel and give players a chance to recover more than in the past. This is a proactive measure aimed at both player safety and to reduce the number of games in which teams rest healthy players.
After a series of high-profile players didn’t play in major matchups last season, the new schedule protects key national television matchups to make sure teams aren’t playing on back-to-back nights.
Much of this is made possible by extending the season by one week, staring earlier in October. Also, for the first time, the players’ union is a part of the scheduling process to review possible problem areas.
So you like conflict? You crave deception and double-speak and plot twists and . . . heck, there are only so many more episodes of Game of Thrones remaining.
Consider as an alternative, then, the NFL, where we’re staring down at least five cutthroat training-camp quarterback battles in August, including in parts of the country where postseason ambitions are openly discussed in September. In Cleveland, coach Hue Jackson told reporters that Cody Kessler deserves “the chance to walk out there first” at camp ahead of Brock Osweiler and rookie DeShone Kizer—but Kizer already has observers talking about upheaval at the position. In White Sulphur Springs, W.Va., where Houston is holding camp, Bill O’Brien has simultaneously gushed about Tom Savage’s “really good training camp” and about Deshaun Watson’s being “way ahead of” any rookie QB he’s ever seen. In New York, the Jets are still figuring out whether they can put 2016 second-round pick Christian Hackenberg on the field ahead of Bryce Petty and veteran Josh McCown. In Denver, Vance Joseph has said it’d be “ideal” to decide between Trevor Siemian and Paxton Lynch by Week 3 of the preseason. And in Chicago, where everyone says veteran Mike Glennon will be the Week 1 starter, Mitch Trubisky, the second pick in the ’17 draft, is proving that he’s already got the hang of this Game of Thrones thing. “Mike’s the starter,” says Trubisky, future face of the franchise, “and I’m behind him all the way.” Mhm.