Jordan Reed bends over a metal garbage can, pauses ever so briefly and then unleashes a waterfall of vomit. He immediately grabs a 12-pound medicine ball, power walks over to a steel column and jumps up and down, over and over, repeatedly smacking the ball against the column with his arms fully extended. Then he walks back to the can and pukes again.
Dozens of pro athletes—mostly football and basketball players—drive along NE 24th Street, up Biscayne Bay from downtown Miami, until it dead-ends at the railroad tracks, bright graffiti splashed in the distance. They come to Legacy Fit gym looking for Manning Sumner, Auburn linebacker turned torturer of the stars. Reed, the 27-year-old Redskins tight end, sought out Sumner this offseason, and within three weeks the trainer had seen enough to deem his new client “as explosive and athletic as anybody I’ve ever worked with.”
Reed calls his vomit-inducing power walks a “standard” workout. But what he considers typical, even most elite athletes cannot fathom. For a man of Reed’s size—6′ 3″, 240 pounds—he doesn’t run so much as he glides, swallowing the gym’s turf field in long, graceful strides. He moves faster than some wideouts; he leaps as if boosted by springs; he pushes around 500-pound sleds like shopping carts. Although Reed didn’t play organized football until ninth grade, he has come to represent the future of pro football, both in records broken (numerous) and in concussions suffered (at least five; depends whom you ask).
… The story of Jorgensen’s gold medal victory was as much about her willingness to commit to excellence everyday for four years as it was her genetic gifts. “Gwen is an accountant by trade,” explains Turner. “So she was pretty certain about the investment needed and she committed to it 100 percent.”
The Preparation
In 2015 Jorgensen was able to compete on the Rio Olympic course as part of the World Triathlon Series. It was a vital opportunity to do course reconnaissance and determine what to focus on during the following year.
When one of the most decorated swimmers in masters history steps onto the starting block ahead of a race, she has her own unique visualization technique. “I tell myself that I’m swimming against 65-year-old women,” says Laura Val, who during her long and impressive career has set 355 world records—nine times more than a swimmer named Michael Phelps. The nurse and grandma just won another seven gold medals at this month’s FINA World Masters Championships in Budapest. “I guess I think that because I don’t feel like I’m actually a 65-year-old woman.”
“Laura doesn’t beat people in her age group,” says Vic Hecker, who coached Olympians as far back as the 1970s and now regularly coaches his Las Vegas, Nevada Masters teams to national acclaim. “She crucifies them.”
… After getting off of the highway, we get on to the main interstate connecting Boca Chica and Santo Domingo. There are few stoplights along the way. At the stoplights at which we stop, we will most likely be solicited by a pre-teen boy to purchase fruit, or let him wash our windshield. I wonder, would my parents have ever asked me to go out into the streets to sell fruit to make money for our family? My parent made me get a job at a movie theatre at the age of 15 and that was to help pay for the gas and insurance on the car that they bought me. (rough life)
What’s even more troublesome is that many times these kids are out working during normal school hours. Most of them only go to school half day. Education is not emphasized in the same way that it is in the United States. At the end of their education, there are two options for an overwhelming majority of the young men in this country. Work, or play baseball. The ‘lucky’ ones get a high school degree. Some aren’t that fortunate. At times, their parents may even discourage them from attending or finishing high school if the opportunity to play professional baseball is present. Some of the families don’t even view education as an option. Rather, they view their child’s baseball talent as their ‘only option’ to have financial stability. And unfortunately, sometimes the kids believe this as well. Even if they get signed by a team and get an opportunity to live out this dream, it’s not all sunshine and roses.
As we age, our muscles get smaller and lose their ability to move quickly and explosively. No athlete likes that statement! But the good news is that with the right training, you can fight age-related loss of athletic performance. With a basic understanding of muscle fibers and physiology, it’s possible to design an effective training program.
The NFL’s preseason structure could be improved. For the players’ sake. With limited time on the practice field and four long weeks of mundane exhibition games, they’re not getting the reps they need to prepare for the regular season.
Here’s what I would change to enhance the evaluation process while putting players in the best position to succeed:
The Portland Trail Blazers have named Jesse Elis as their Director of Player Health and Performance, it was announced today by President of Basketball Operations Neil Olshey.
Elis will lead all facets of the Trail Blazers medical staff to collaboratively provide preventative maintenance and rehabilitative health care to Trail Blazers players. He will work closely with the team’s athletic trainers, physicians, strength and conditioning specialists, nutritionists, psychologists and therapeutic specialists to integrate rehabilitative concepts into performance training.
Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports from
Grounded in the Cognitive Evaluation Theory, a mini-theory of Self-Determination Theory, this experimental field study sought to examine the impact of competence support of both coaches and athlete leaders on athletes’ competence satisfaction, intrinsic motivation, and subjective as well as objective performance. Male basketball players (N = 120) were allocated to groups of 5 players. These groups were then randomly assigned to a control group or to 1 of 3 experimental conditions. In these experimental conditions, either the coach, the athlete leader, or both provided motivational feedback to their team. The provision of motivational feedback by either the coach or the athlete leader was sufficient to increase athletes’ competence satisfaction, intrinsic motivation, and objective performance (i.e., enhanced execution time without a decrease in scoring percentage) relative to the control group. Interestingly, when both the coach and the athlete leader provided competence support, a surplus effect was observed on objective performance compared with when only the coach provided competence support. Furthermore, structural equation modeling revealed that players’ competence satisfaction mediated the relationship between the provided competence support and players’ intrinsic motivation, while a direct effect was observed on objective performance. In conclusion, the study findings indicate that also athlete leaders can adopt a motivating role, and that by doing so, their impact is as strong as the impact of the coach. Both coaches and athlete leaders can thus boost athletes’ objective performance and foster competence satisfaction, with the latter resulting in increased intrinsic motivation.
The debate among club soccer teammates started, as so many do, over a postgame beer. A few years ago, the squad’s goalkeeper was adamant that he ran about eight kilometers, or five miles, while defending the net; everyone else was dubious. As it happened, one of the players, Julien Moix, would become CEO of the Swiss company Advanced Sport Instrument, a startup that developed the GPS wearable FieldWiz. His club later wore the tracking devices and settled the goalkeeper’s suds-driven argument.
“In reality,” Moix said with a laugh, “it was like three kilometers.”
The technology behind Lausanne-based FieldWiz was developed by engineer Lionel Yersin, an avid paraglider who used the prototype for his outdoor adventures. The device that became FlyNet tracked his flights and helped identify thermal winds with its embedded pressure sensor. The core innovation has since been adapted to motorcycle racing and team sports.
Smartphone apps are a beautiful invention: From tracking your workouts to helping you meditate, they can make life a helluva lot easier and healthier. But they also collect a treasure trove of personal information. And despite increasing scrutiny of privacy practices, many apps still do whatever they please with that info.
“There’s really a big spectrum out there, [from] you effectively giving all of your data away to be used or sold to others, to [having] really strong protections on user privacy,” says Nicholas Evans, Ph.D., a bioethicist at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.
The level of privacy you can expect depends on what kind of phone you have, where you live and, yes, how careful you are. Example: Evans says Apple requires iPhone health apps to be reviewed for privacy issues before going into the app store—so there’s a layer of protection built in for users. But it’s really only for health apps that work with Apple’s built-in health app, says Evans. Stand-alone commercial tools and programs—think Fitbit, or Nike running apps—aren’t regulated as well, meaning they may be using your information in ways that you never anticipated.
… We are now in a transition phase to that next phase of wearables growth with far more compelling user experiences driven by deeper insights into what’s actually going on inside a person’s body. One of the best ways to measure how a body is responding to its environment is to measure heart rate and other biometrics, and one of the best ways to measure biometrics in wearables is with optical sensor systems using photoplethysmography (PPG). We’ve covered how optical heart rate monitoring works in the past, but it’s safe to say the reason you’re seeing many new wearables come to market with biometric technology is to achieve deeper insights into the body’s response to its activity level.
Physicians call it the 5,000-hour problem. If you have a common chronic condition such as cardiovascular disease or diabetes, the expert in charge of your health for almost all of your 5,000 waking hours annually is — you. And, frankly, you won’t always make the best choices.
“The behavior changes that are necessary to address chronic disease are much more in your hands than in the doctor’s,” points out Stacey Chang, executive director of the Design Institute for Health at Dell Medical School in Austin, Texas. “To cede that control to the doctor sometimes is actually counterproductive.”
With that in mind, a rapidly evolving set of new digital health tools is angling to help patients engage better with their own care. Wearable health monitors already on the market help to track heart rate, footsteps, or blood glucose levels; sophisticated home health sensors can report on weight and blood pressure; and phone apps can present key feedback and maybe even offer personalized advice.
The only problem: It has thus far proved very difficult to know what really works.
… Now, it is true that Dolgopolov did have some strapping just above his ankle, which could have signified some form of injury. However, he did also have that strapping on last week and it did not seem to affect him then. Even if it was a more serious issue, one has to wonder how anyone found out less than two hours before the match and was so confident that it was serious enough to push his price from 1.37 out to 3.15. That sort of move is almost unprecedented and, in this scenario, suggests that someone knew of an injury so severe that it almost certainly meant that Dolgopolov had very little chance of winning the match. And that they only found out this information less than two hours before the start.
An alternative is that the match was fixed. It would take relatively significant money to move the Pinnacle market by such a significant margin and for them to decide to take the market down. The fact that every major bookmaker decided to suspend betting before the match started indicates strong suspicions among those companies that are able to see the bets being placed. The fact that several decided to not offer the match in-running only emphasises this fact.
Though soccer players have assigned roles, it’s routine for players to swap positions during the course of a game, or even of a single play. Other players and most fans recognize when this occurs and now, thanks to new work on multi-agent imitation learning, so can a computer.
Researchers at Disney Research, the California Institute of Technology and STATS, a supplier of sports data, used deep learning techniques to develop an algorithm that can automatically recognize formations of teams when analyzing player tracking data.
“To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time an imitation learning approach has been applied to jointly learn cooperative multi-agent policies at large scale,” said Peter Carr, research scientist at Disney Research.
“How do Division I coaches find recruits?” is one of the most common questions we get. Before I launch into some of the key ways DI coaches identify top talent, understand that each coach, sport and even individual program approaches recruiting a little differently. Sports that make a lot of money for the school tend to have more resources to spend on recruiting and they often start out with a larger pool of recruits. On the other side, for some sports, coaches have a limited amount of resources and must be more targeted in their searches, because they are not able to go through all the various channels.
To get more insight into how Division I coaches find recruits, I talked to Ben Weiss of Zcruit. Weiss started his career working in recruiting for Northwestern Football. Since, he has created an analytical tool for college coaches to help them better understand how likely it is that a recruit will commit to their school. This technology is used by a growing number of DI football programs, most of which are the Power Five conferences. In other words, Weiss knows Division I recruiting backward and forwards.