… Already one of, if not the, most physically fit individuals in a league overcrowded by the most athletic specimens on earth, Butler dedicated his summer to figuring out a way to get into even more ridiculous shape—the better to handle one of the NBA’s toughest workloads. (According to NBA.com, he ran more miles per game than all but two other players during 2016-17, and led the entire league in each of the previous two seasons.)
“The man, simply, is addicted to working,” says Butler’s personal skills trainer Chris Johnson.
… “I am honestly not thinking about it being the last one,” Toni Nadal said. “I’m not in the beyond. I’m entirely in the present right now, very happy to be in the final and that Rafael is in another final. I’m not thinking about not being here next year. I’ll think about it next year when I’m in Majorca. Nostalgia is for then, not for now.”
Toni and Rafael have been a pair like no other in the modern game. Toni was Rafael’s first teacher, giving him his first lesson at age 3 on the Spanish island of Majorca that the Nadals still call home. Toni has remained Rafael’s mentor for the last 28 years as Rafael has become one of the greatest tennis players of all time.
For the first time in his seven-year career – all with the Ravens – linebacker Albert McClellan will miss a season because of injury after tearing the ACL in his knee during training camp. McClellan, who already underwent surgery and is using crutches to maneuver around the team’s practice facility in Owings Mills, said he is using the extra time on his hands to go back to school, per se.
“I’m still a student of the game,” he said Wednesday. “I’m still here learning the ins and outs of everything. I’m still trying to find a way to get better mentally. It’s just another test and another opportunity for me to grow.”
Ravens with Florida ties concerned about impending arrival of Hurricane Irma
The loss of McClellan, 31, was a blow for the Ravens, which has relied on McClellan’s versatility since he joined the organization as an undrafted rookie in 2010.
Kansas City RB Kareem Hunt’s 246 total yards last night vs. New England were the most in NFL history by a rookie in week 1. A very impressive performance from Toledo’s former 3 star prospect. Hunt had 2 scholarship offers from Power 5 conference college football teams coming out of high school.
While Hunt wasn’t a highly touted high school prospect, he definitely exhibited elite athleticism based on Tracking Football’s Player Athletic Index score. Hunt’s 4.7/5.0 PAI score ranked 3rd out of all 26 RBs drafted in the 2017 NFL Draft. Of the 7 RBs that scored above 4.0, Hunt is the only one that played at a non-Power 5 conference school.
For nearly two decades Nick Littlehales has been advising athletes on why it’s not as simple as getting eight hours per night – it’s in fact quite the opposite
Most of us are familiar with the energy drain that sets in around 2:00 p.m. or so. Whether you call it a lunch coma or the midday blues, it’s a brain zapping dullness that leaves you staring blankly at your monitor and thinking an afternoon run to Starbucks might not be a bad idea.
A new study gives us another way to explain the drain, and it’s all about rewards — specifically, the brain’s focus on seeking rewards, which fuels our motivation, goes on hiatus around midday.
… A new, zoomed-out approach attempts to make sense of the large-scale changes that enable learning. By studying the shifting interactions between many different brain regions over time, scientists are beginning to grasp how the brain takes in new information and holds onto it.
These kinds of studies rely on powerful math. Brain scientists are co-opting approaches developed in other network-based sciences, borrowing tools that reveal in precise, numerical terms the shape and function of the neural pathways that shift as human brains learn.
“When you’re learning, it doesn’t just require a change in activity in a single region,” says Danielle Bassett, a network neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania. “It really requires many different regions to be involved.” Her holistic approach asks, “what’s actually happening in your brain while you’re learning?” Bassett is charging ahead to both define this new field of “network neuroscience” and push its boundaries.
… According to a series of newer findings, our levels of self-control are not so much a budget we have to eke out, but a renewable resource that can be powered up as we go along. “Instead of thinking of willpower as the amount of petrol in a car… think of it as the car’s battery,” says Krishna Savani at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. “The more you drive, the more the battery gets charged, and the longer it will last.”
In this view, your powers of concentration are only limited if you think they are. It raises the intriguing possibility that, if we can get into the right mindset, superhuman powers of motivation and self-control could be ours for the taking.
… How to best prepare the player you hope will win the starting job at the sport’s most important position while that player is still on another campus? They’re cramming to learn a new system — and there’s no book on how best to teach it. That’s in part because the trend is still young, but also because each situation has many variables.
Two years ago, Oregon replaced Heisman Trophy winner Marcus Mariota with Vernon Adams, who transferred as a graduate from FCS-level Eastern Washington. When Adams finally joined the Oregon team in August 2015, he spent early mornings huddled up with then-offensive coordinator Scott Frost, studying the elementary principles of the Ducks’ offense.
What happens in the brain when we feel pain? In this guest post, Carlo Vittorio Cannistraci explains how his team explored the wiring of the brain with the help of network science tools in a recent article published in Applied Network Science.
A small Torrance engineering company has partnered with a Brea bicycle helmet manufacturer to win the top prize of $500,000 in an NFL-sponsored competition aimed at developing new technology to reduce concussions and other brain injuries from repeated impacts.
University of Texas professor Shalini Prasad has developed an adhesive sensor that measures diabetes-associated compounds in small amounts of sweat.
Blood glucose levels, cortisol and interleukin-6 are detected in perspiration for one week with full signal integrity. The device uses ambient sweat, created by the body with out stimulation.
… In relation to professional players of the English Premier League (EPL), the author recently observed (in a companion paper) self-reported mean daily carbohydrate (CHO) intakes of 4.2 and 6.4 g.kg-1 body mass on training days and match days, respectively (Anderson et al., 2017). On this basis, the authors, therefore, suggested that elite players potentially under-consume CHO when compared with those guidelines that are considered optimal to promote muscle glycogen storage (Burke et al., 2011). Nonetheless, in order to provide more informative dietary guidelines (as opposed to total daily energy intake per se), there is also the definitive need to quantify the daily “distribution” of energy and macronutrient intakes.
Therefore the authors have looked at protein and fat as well as CHO in this study. They also looked at the importance of timing.
A business empire hinges on the answer to that question. The NFL employs thousands of people and is expected to pull in $14 billion in revenue this year, between ticket sales, merchandising, sponsorships, and massive TV-rights deals. Commissioner Roger Goodell has said he wants that number to reach $25 billion within a decade. College football is also a colossus, with ESPN paying $7.3 billion over 12 years for the rights to televise just seven bowl games a year. But the real economic impact comes from the many ancillary businesses that surround the sport. Fantasy football is estimated to be worth billions annually, and ESPN and other networks rake in billions from subscriptions and advertising. Athletic apparel companies like Nike and Adidas invest millions in licensing and sponsorship agreements with the NFL and NCAA, not to mention the endorsement deals for individual players.
In the near term, industry analysts see few signs of football Armageddon. (Boxing, another sport known for its brutality, saw its popularity wane, but only gradually, over the course of decades.) But there may be some soft spots in the league’s armor. For starters, TV ratings for NFL games dipped 9% last year. While that decline could have various causes, there’s no equivocation over what’s driving a rash of early NFL player retirements. From promising San Francisco 49ers rookie linebacker Chris Borland in 2015, to 26-year-old Baltimore Ravens offensive lineman John Urschel just days after the Boston CTE report, more players are hanging up their cleats over fears of long-term brain damage. In January, Heisman Trophy–winner Bo Jackson told USA Today he would never have played if he’d known the risks, adding, “There’s no way I would ever allow my kids to play football today.”
In the 1980 US Open final, John McEnroe recorded 50 winners, six aces and six double faults while saving six of 11 break points to beat Bjorn Borg in five sets for his second New York title.
Today, those same metrics still dominate, the ones most oft-cited when breaking down a match. In an era of Sabermetrics and an increasing reliance on analytics in sports, tennis is still judged as it was some 40 years ago. But that may be changing.
Dr. Paul Lubbers, Senior Director of Coaching Education and Sports Science with the USTA, is one of the select few who can see behind the curtain. In his role with Player Development, Lubbers has access to the USTA’s database from Hawk-Eye, the industry-leading ball-tracking technology behind tennis’ challenge system that debuted in 2002. Lubbers said Hawk-Eye has amassed a treasure trove of data from years of tour-level matches, which he described as incredibly rich and productive.
“The goal is to provide meaningful information, derived from data, to help coaches make decisions,” he said of his work.