Injured Baltimore quarterback Joe Flacco plans to be ready for Week 1, but he’s taking a much longer view: he says the Ravens need to get back to the playoffs this season and return to their winning ways
… “Sometimes in training we will just watch him,” said a former midfield partner Zheng Zhi, formerly of Celtic and Charlton Athletic. “He is a second ahead of everyone else.” Perhaps that is why he has time to advise and help the younger players at Guangzhou. Zheng added last week that Paulinho will be sorely missed but wished him well in his new adventure, sentiments that most fans in China share. The pain of parting may be mutual. On plenty of occasions Paulinho spoke of his satisfaction with life in China, on and off the pitch, and working with the protective arm of Scolari around his shoulders, a man who also knows something about leaving London with a reduced reputation.
Under Scolari, the 29-year-old became the perfect overseas signing, bringing power and authority to Guangzhou and the ability to dictate tempo and drive forward. In all he played 95 games – impressive in just over two years – and scored 25 goals, some of which were truly spectacular.
“The only way to get better is by doing things you’re not currently good at.”
Srinivas Rao is the host and founder of popular podcast, “Unmistakable Creative,” where he has interviewed over five hundred creative people. Award-winning podcaster David Burkus recently hosted him on Radio Free Leader to talk about why working toward professional success isn’t so different from surfing, and why you need such a gritty attitude for both.
Yeah, that’s what it says on his title, right there on the screen. So technically yes, he’s a strength coach, hired to Georgia from Marshall University. He must have been good there—His football players, living in Huntington, West Virginia, the fattest town in America, were not visibly wheezing after every play.
What kind of strength coach? The kind who shaves his head? With a goatee or without?
He’s the kind who shaves his head, but doesn’t have a goatee.
… There’s no doubt that in recent years the quality of coaching methods and coach education has improved vastly to what used to happen in years gone by. And with the emergence of the youth modules from the FA there is a real sense of progress being made at youth level with the development of young players. It’s helping to develop a new generation of players who are creative, expressive, positive and who enjoy playing football. This hasn’t always been the case and many young players have suffered because of poor and negative coaching experiences.
Yet for all these positives, there’s a worrying trend I’m seeing emerge in regards to how the development of technique is viewed and the influence this is having on the development of young players.
For high school student Simão Silva, visiting a biology lab at Harvard was just part of his summer school curriculum. What the 17-year-old Cristo Rey High School student didn’t plan on this summer was receiving practical lessons about the human body and biochemistry.
After his Harvard experience, the student athlete is now focusing on how to improve his running technique, and is even talking about how to become a biochemist. Silva credits Harvard Professor Daniel Lieberman, Edwin M. Lerner II Professor of Biological Sciences, for teaching him about the mechanics of running.
“I went running a few days later and what [Lieberman] had talked about really made me think and notice what I was doing,” said Silva, who is a wrestler, boxes, runs track, and plays soccer.
Pete Carroll isn’t the only football decision-maker obsessed with sport psychology anymore. The Falcons, Colts, and 49ers have all also embraced mindfulness training—and their experiences could impact the culture-building dynamic of a league long resistant to change.
Orlando Brown quickly learned to love the players’ lounge in Oklahoma’s newly completed facility behind Owen Field’s south end zone, with its couches, televisions, healthy snacks and even a barber’s chair available to players.
But what if Brown wasn’t a college junior, and instead on campus for a recruiting visit?
His attention would be fixated elsewhere in that case, he said, on the 30,000 square-foot speed and strength facility.
“I mean, I understood that coming to college, basically the majority of your time — I mean we practice — but the majority of the time you spend grinding is on the turf field, in the indoor facilities, in the weight room, things like that,” Brown said.
… One of the earlier criticisms of the original product was that they could have opened up their product and their metrics to broadcast to running watches. The most obvious way to a mass market was over ANT+ to Garmin running/tri watches Yet my opinion was that what they had was pretty good for the purpose they intended…ie more advanced runners or coaches looking at detailed gait metrics.
WELL. Rather than making a U-turn or a left-turn they seem to have made the RIGHT turn. They now produce a power metric (in beta at launch) and they support Garmin CIQ and write their pre-existing metrics to the FIT files.This means that ALL their data will show in Garmin Connect BUT it also means that the likes of SPORTTRACKS and GOLDENCHEETAH should ‘just work’ with these new metrics as those platforms support the extensible FIT file format. Presumably TP and others are the same.
Basically you get to look at DUAL-SIDED RUNNING POWER IN REAL TIME – PLUS lots of cool stuff
… Freelap USA: Sports thermography is decades old, but very few teams use it. Some of the concerns are with the reliability and validity of the data from cameras, as well as poor procedures. Can you shed more light on the way imaging requires both the right equipment and a controlled setting?
Javier Arnaiz Lastras: During the past 15 years, technology in general has evolved. For instance, mobile phones went from VGA cameras and poor resolutions of less than two megapixels (MP) to the most recent ones above 10MP. The same thing happened with infrared thermography (IRT) in terms of resolution, passing from cameras of less than 0.1MP to the most recent ones of 1MP. Higher resolution means more data points in the same area as compared to low resolution. Each pixel has its own temperature information and the greater the number of pixels, the more temperature information inside a thermogram (thermal image).
In addition to resolution, sensitivity is a must. Sensitivity is the difference in temperature detected by the camera. Specialists in sports IRT should take into account the level of asymmetry that needs to be quantified with differences of 0.1ºC on the human body.
Advances in technology and availability of ample venture capital are combining to produce a growing array of new medical diagnostics. New biomarkers are being identified to predict or detect a wide range of diseases, and new devices are being developed continuously to monitor biological parameters—often connecting with mobile devices to provide user friendly updates of health status (m-health). One vision is that these new diagnostics will transform medicine from treating disease to promoting health, from being reactive to being proactive, and from being general to being personal.1 Another vision is less sanguine—that new diagnostics will warrant a warning of their downsides.
Efforts to detect disease early can always be accompanied by unintended harms. These include false alarms and indeterminate findings that can worry patients, drive more testing, increase clinical workload, and distract clinicians from more important work. Overdiagnosis can lead to unnecessary treatments. Promotional campaigns will necessarily need to get people concerned about disease and indicate that the path …
AMSTAT, JSM 2017; Peter John De Chavez et al. from
Consuming a sports drink is an important part of an athlete’s regimen for the provision of carbohydrate and replacement of fluid and electrolytes lost during physical activity. However, sports beverages have ingredients that may impact gastro-intestinal (GI) comfort among athletes who consume them, which in turn may impact the sensory perception of the said beverages during exercise. Hence, it is important to establish the relationship between sensory perception and GI comfort as it provides insights such as: (1) comparison of hydration products relative to the sensory and GI endpoints, and (2) the manner by which GI comfort drives sensory and hedonic perception of the said products by athletes. Establishing this relationship is not straight-forward because of several data issues: e.g., multi-collinear endpoints describing sensory perception and GI comfort, and a small number of treatments relative to the number of endpoints. This study explores multivariate modeling and mapping techniques that allow us to obtain the aforementioned insights from data with constraints on multi-collinearity and small treatment size.
… Perhaps the clearest shift in this regard: The league did its best to ensure that ABC will not be left showing the Warriors without Steph Curry, Kevin Durant or the Dubs’ other stars. Golden State, the NBA’s most televised team2, played five games on ABC last season, with four of those matchups being part of a back-to-back set.3 But this year, Golden State is slated to play six games on ABC with none of those being part of a back-to-back.
More broadly, league officials were able to reduce each club’s number of back-to-back showings by beginning the season a week earlier than usual. The average team will now play just over 14 back-to-backs over the course of the season, down from 16 last season. And for the first time in league history, no team will be forced to play four games in a five-night span.