… “He’s an awesome dude,” explained linebacker Arthur Moats, Harrison’s teammate for three seasons. “But man, he does have that edge about him. When he’s here to work, he’s here to work. You don’t mess with him.”
When Moats joined the Steelers in 2014, he was a four-year pro and Harrison had just announced his (brief) retirement. “When I first met him, I wanted to go and say ‘What’s up? Congratulations!'” Moats said. “Even then, he still had that look like ‘you don’t just walk up on me.’
In September 1986, the late Dr. Frank Jobe performed a manual test on Nolan Ryan’s painful right elbow and determined that the pitcher needed Tommy John surgery, a procedure Jobe had pioneered more than a decade earlier.
Ryan said no—he was turning 40 that January and knew the expected recovery from an elbow-ligament replacement at that time was as long as 18 months. When the season ended Ryan simply went home, hoping his elbow would heal. On Dec. 15—Ryan still remembers the date—it suddenly stopped aching. During the following year, as he earned the second of his two National League ERA titles, he recalls Jobe telling him, “I think [the ligament] calcified over enough that it stabilized your elbow.’”
The self-healing that Ryan described in a recent interview is similar to what ailing Red Sox left-hander David Price, who spent the first two months of the 2017 season on the disabled list and returned to the DL on July 28, says he is experiencing. According to Dr. James Andrews, one of two physicians who examined Price in March, that self-healing is not entirely uncommon.
Saquon Barkley bobs his head to Drake’s “Started at the Bottom” as he stands over a barbell loaded to 380 pounds.
The Penn State running back takes a step back and adjusts his shorts before bending down and taking a firm grip on the bar with both hands. With his chin up, back flat and knees bent, Barkley tugs on the gray steel, searching for just the right amount of tension in his arms.
Up it goes.
Barkley uncoils, and then quickly dips under the weight and back into squat, slipping the bar under his chin and onto his deltoids. His quads bulging, Barkley stands up straight to complete the power clean. He drops the bar to the mat, takes a couple breaths and repeats the feat twice more with relative ease.
Fans were concerned when the U.S. women’s national team failed to win either of the tournaments staged on home soil this year, falling in successive games to France and England in March’s SheBelieves Cup and dropping a decision to Australia in last month’s Tournament of Nations.
That’s OK. Part of the plan.
With the next World Cup still two years away, U.S. head coach Jill Ellis and her staff have a team that’s in transition. After months of evaluation, it’s now on to determining the hierarchy around the field, the system that best fits the personnel, and the tactics that will enable the U.S. to successfully defend its 2015 World Cup title.
The current study compared sleep characteristics of youth soccer players (N = 12, 19 ± 1 years) with non-athletes (N =12, 23 ± 3 years) over a period of six nights using a wireless electroencephalogram sleep monitor. This device provided a breakdown of the participant’s sleep schedule, sleep latency, sleep duration and awakenings. Participant mean and SD were calculated across the six nights to form the between group comparisons (i.e., independent t-tests, Mann–Whitney–Wilcoxontests and effect sizes [ESs]). The youth soccer players displayed longer sleep durations than the non-athletes (+64 min; ES: 1.39; P < 0.05), which may relate to a later time of final awakening (+67 min; ES: 1.60; P < 0.05). This may have resulted from the timing of activities associated with the imposed soccer schedule, highlighting the importance of externally derived schedules in facilitating sleep quantity. Despite longer sleep durations, the youth soccer players displayed longer sleep latency (+10 min; ES: 1.00; P < 0.05), lowered sleep efficiency (−3%; ES: 1.09; P < 0.05) and higher intraindividual variability for both variables. Such factors suggest a greater prevalence of sleep disruption in youth soccer players, which may warrant the use of tailored sleep hygiene strategies.
Knee Surgery, Sports Traumatology, Arthroscopy journal from
Purpose
It is unknown how movement patterns that are learned carry over to the field. The objective was to determine whether training during a jump-landing task would transfer to lower extremity kinematics and kinetics during sidestep cutting. Methods
Forty healthy athletes were assigned to the verbal internal focus (IF, n = 10), verbal external focus (EF, n = 10), video (VI, n = 10) or control (CTRL, n = 10) group. A jump-landing task was performed as baseline followed by training blocks (TR1 and TR2) and a post-test. Group-specific instructions were given in TR1 and TR2. In addition, participants in the IF, EF and VI groups were free to ask for feedback after every jump during TR1 and TR2. Retention was tested after 1 week. Transfer of learned skill was determined by having participants perform a 45° unanticipated sidestep cutting task. 3D hip, knee and ankle kinematics and kinetics were the main outcome measures. Results
During sidestep cutting, the VI group showed greater hip flexion ROM compared to the EF and IF groups (p < 0.001). The EF (p < 0.036) and VI (p < 0.004) groups had greater knee flexion ROM compared to the IF group.
Conclusions
Improved jump-landing technique carried over to sidestep cutting when stimulating an external attentional focus combined with self-controlled feedback. Transfer to more sport-specific skills may demonstrate potential to reduce injuries on the field. Clinicians and practitioners are encouraged to apply instructions that stimulate an external focus of attention, of which visual instructions seem to be very powerful. [full text]
Earlier this summer, BT Sport was granted exclusive access to Bayer Leverkusen’s training ground to find out how technology is revolutionising pre-season preparation, title races and relegation battles.
… Adidas looks at Atlanta strategically. The company is expected to open a Speedfactory, a robot-powered assembly plant, later this year in Cherokee County. Adidas is also an exclusive partner of P3, a company that seeks to use sports-science technology to assess injuries in professional athletes before they occur. P3 will have a center at the Hawks’ new training center in Brookhaven.
“So we’ll really partner up with P3, knowing we have an athlete assessment (site) in this area, and really try to funnel a lot of the Georgia Tech athletes through that,” Murphy said.
While Under Armour initially was aggressive in its interest for Tech – Nike, perhaps having significant presence in the market with Georgia already on board, was not – Adidas became the leader through its aligned interests.
Stansbury recalled a meeting in the late spring with his team and Adidas executives. Stansbury chose to hold the meeting in Tech Square, a part of campus across the Downtown Connector that is home to startups, business incubators and innovation centers.
DuPont Advanced Materials (DuPont) have announced availability of its newest generation of stretchable electronic inks and films for smart clothing. The materials are being unveiled with a new brand identity – DuPont™ Intexar™ smart clothing technology. Intexar™ transforms ordinary fabrics into active, connected, intelligent garments that provide critical biometric data including heart rate, breathing rate, form awareness and muscle tension. Intexar™ offers superior stretch and comfort and is easily integrated into garments to make smart clothing.
“Every athlete – from professional to everyday – can benefit from smart clothing to help boost their performance; but it has to look good and feel good,” said Michael Burrows, global business manager, DuPont Advanced Materials. “Intexar™ is a game-changing technology and will truly move the needle in making smart garments as comfortable as regular fitness clothing.”
A new, electronic skin microsystem tracks heart rate, respiration, muscle movement and other health data, and wirelessly transmits it to a smartphone. The electronic skin offers several improvements over existing trackers, including greater flexibility, smaller size, and the ability to stick the self-adhesive patch — which is a very soft silicone about four centimeters (1.5 inches) in diameter — just about anywhere on the body.
The microsystem was developed by an international team led by Kyung-In Jang, a professor of robotics engineering at South Korea’s Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology, and John A. Rogers, the director of Northwestern University’s Center for Bio-Integrated Electronics. The team described the new device in the journal Nature Communications.
Yale University, Office of Cooperative Research from
Henry J. Binder, Professor Emeritus of and Senior Research Scientist in Medicine at Yale, didn’t set out to create a better Gatorade—but in looking for a means to help people suffering from dehydration to better absorb nutrients he may have done just that. “Dehydration in patients with diarrhea is due to large amounts of electrolyte and fluid loss stimulated by chloride secretion,” says Binder. He wanted to find a way to increase the body’s ability to retain fluids when it needed them most.
In order to rehydrate patients suffering from cholera, Binder and colleagues from Flinders University in Australia and Christian Medical College in India identified that short chain fatty acids enhance sodium and water absorption in the large intestine. Next, they needed to find a way to induce the body to produce these short chain fatty acids which are not in the diet. They found that resistant starch was key. Resistant starch does not break down in the small intestine but travels to the large intestine where bacteria ferments it to short-chain fatty acids resulting in an increase in sodium and fluid absorption. Cholera patients who ingested it had a marked improvement in rehydration (link is external). “Resistant starch did better than the World Health Organization’s oral rehydration solution by upwards of 35-50%,” Binder says.
The body is constantly using fuel to repair the muscle damage created in training and competing; this is how muscles grow and adapt to help increase strength as you develop as an athlete.
Having appropriate fuel present for muscles to use in training can help reduce muscle soreness and fatigue, which helps you back up for the next training session and perform at your best.
One meal alone cannot provide all the fuel needed to both recover from your last session and prepare you for the next training session you have. You need to consider each meal you have over a whole day as contributing to your training and performance, through continuous refuelling and repair, so energy is ultilised efficiently and effectively when the body needs it so you can reach your training goals.
… In exploring the evolution of nutritional science in sport, we examined how food in football has progressed since the days of counting calories and force-feeding players giant bowls of pasta. We also identified teams with a dietary advantage thanks to their culinary preparation during training and on matchdays and tried to quantify how much of a difference it makes.
Calories
A player’s energy reserves for 90 minutes are determined long before he laces up his boots and steps foot on the pitch. That assessment is based on a field of nutrition called bioenergetics, which is the study of the transformation of energy in living organisms—basically, how players take calories from the food they eat and convert them into energy. This is simply ensuring calories in equals calories out.
… “We provide teams with play-type coaching data,” [Mark] Silver told Excelle Sports. “Player tendency statistics is what we see most widely-used by teams. Each team is different, but we work usually with the front office, coaching, or the video coordinator.”
While advanced analytics are more readily available to teams than ever before, Silver sees it as something that is still growing.
“There are some teams that are a lot more focused and engaged, while others are still catching up and primarily using traditional data sets,” Silver said. “But it’s following a path of growth similar to the NBA. It can do a lot for teams in game planning and free agency.”
University of Colorado Boulder, CU Boulder Today from
Racial stereotypes affect the public’s perception of NFL quarterbacks and may, in some cases, become a self-fulfilling prophecy for black athletes, new CU Boulder research shows.
Two recently published studies authored by Patrick Ferrucci, an assistant professor in the College of Media, Communication and Information (CMCI), suggest that unconscious racial bias, propagated in part by sports media, still influences how the public views the quarterback position.
“We are all aware of the stereotypes that are out there in the discourse—it’s almost unavoidable,” said Ferrucci, who co-authored both studies with Edson Tandoc of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. “In these two studies, we were looking to see if people actually apply them, and the answer is yes.”