Johnson became famous for his Yoga regimen, the way he’s taken care of himself and his ability to make difficult shots seem easy. It was about a decade ago when Johnson realized the key to longevity, stopped the late night runs to McDonald’s and became a workout warrior.
That, and a playing style not predicated on athleticism, became the lynchpin to Johnson’s success. The game never moves too fast for him. And an improved knowledge of Utah’s offense, he figures to play a key role for a team looking to make their second consecutive postseason.
“He’s someone who’s been great in the league for a long time,” Jazz forward Thabo Sefolosha said. “He’s very crafty, he can shoot the ball from anywhere and score from anywhere. I’m happy he’s on my team.”
The best player on the baseball team pitches and bats fourth. Not on a Little League team. Not on a high school team. On a professional team that plays at this country’s highest level.
Shohei Ohtani has the kind of extraordinary talent that could change the sport. He’s done it here, and he soon could do it in the major leagues, all the while maintaining the innocence of a boy playing a kids’ game despite the scrutiny and pressure he faces as Japan’s most-popular athlete.
He is a physical specimen — 6-foot-4, 215 pounds — yet at 23, his frame is nowhere near as developed as the Nippon-Ham Fighters pitcher who wore jersey No. 11 before him, Dodgers right-hander Yu Darvish.
… I recently had the chance to catch up with Roll from his home in Calabasas, California. Here are the principles that allow him to continue reaching his peak.
Pursue Joy
Training and racing bring me joy. It’s pure and simple. I love ramping up and immersing myself in the day-to-day grind that is required to prepare for a big event. It makes me feel tremendously alive. Athleticism is a big part of my personality, character, and constitution—and the lessons I learn in sport inform how I do other things in my life.
… for Rose, a player who has rarely tried to conform or concern himself with what anyone thinks, it all makes sense. After a humbling, injury-infused fall in Chicago, and dropping another precipitous notch in New York, Rose has entered a different type of rehabilitation, the kind that has nothing to do with his physical health. Rose had to stop playing “revenge basketball” because anger was never becoming for him. And in Cleveland – with the most unlikely partnership with LeBron James, as part of a roster that would’ve destroyed the competition six years ago – Rose has found comfort in a career reboot.
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“I’m happy, man. I’m happy,” Rose, 29, told The Vertical about his third team in three years. “Being here, having a chance to show what I still have, to show what I’ve been working on this offseason – not even this offseason. I think I was hooping my ass off last season, too. But the losing overshadows everything. You get overlooked. The only thing I was missing was this stage. Coming here, playing on TV 40-something times a year, I think that takes care of that. I just wanted a chance. That’s it.”
WHEN LANDON DONOVAN STROLLED TO THE STAGE at StubHub Center in Carson, California, in August and unveiled what would become one of the biggest stories of the year in North American soccer, it didn’t exactly come as breaking news.
Donovan’s teammates on the LA Galaxy knew it was coming. The good friends he’d made through decades of playing soccer knew it, too, and so did the media members who somehow managed to mute their gasps in the audience. In fact, just about anyone who’d followed the past 18 months of Donovan’s career could have reasonably expected he would retire after this year, his 15th as a professional soccer player.
What Donovan said that day offered a candid glimpse into a mind that had matured and changed greatly even in just the past two years, perhaps one of the most tumultuous stretches of his career. The end result of all that transpired in that time – career burnout following the 2012 MLS Cup, a curious but cathartic trip to Cambodia, his fallout with United States national team head coach Jurgen Klinsmann and his eventual snub from the 2014 World Cup team – left him tethered to his career but not enjoying it, playing at times out of obligation, and dispassionate about his day-to-day life.
Even though sprint times can give us a reflection of an athlete’s speed ability, the truth is that these times won’t always tell us how fast an athlete can move. In physics, the kinematic quality of velocity, specifically when observed as a scalar quantity, is the truest measure of speed as it relates to a body in motion.
The magnitude of velocity is a scalar quantity and is expressed as distance over time. Technically speaking, any unit of distance over any unit of time can be used (e.g., miles per hour, feet per second, kilometers per minute, etc.), but the unit that is used in the metric system (and most commonly found in sport science) is meters per second (m/s).
… Since taking over the Broncos in January, Joseph has not-so-subtly scattered his aphorisms throughout the team’s practice facility, many of which were collected along his coaching stops over the years. They’re dictums as much as motivators, so when players returned from their bye week to begin their 12-game stretch, awaiting them, too, were the new shirts.
“The message to our team is to do more. We want more effort, more focus, more detail and more commitment,” Joseph said. “That’s our message. As we move through this season — hopefully with success — as we have success, we want to do more to keep our edge, so to speak.
“That’s our message after the bye: Let’s do more than what we did in the first quarter.”
… Third person self-talk was neither taxing nor required much brain power—at least not more than a standard pep talk. “Nowhere in either study did we see brain activation related to effort for attention or thinking or planning,” says Moser.
Is there some kind of magic in self-talk? What makes it more useful than r first person self-talk? The problem with first person cheering is the use of words such as ‘I’ and ‘me.’ “Those words are completely tied to your ‘self’, whereas your name creates a little bit of psychological distance because it refers to lots of people,” says Moser. “There are Jasons in TV and movies. That little bit of psychological distance from myself to make it look as though I’m thinking about somebody else.” That’s why third person reflections can quickly provide perspective, and also encourage solutions.
Moser also clarifies that self-talk isn’t merely a pep talk designed to make us feel good. Instead, we can note the situation and experience it from beginning to end.
… how can strength coaches make good decisions regarding the use of sports science, if experts are hard to find? We asked Connolly and Ryan Smyth, a strength coach for the Anaheim Ducks, to participate in a roundtable discussion on the topic. Smyth helped the Ducks reach the NHL conference finals earlier this year, and he operates The Park Sports Facility, a sports performance technology and integration consulting firm in Whitby, Ontario, Canada.
In the following conversation, we discuss how to implement sports science, which tools are most effective, and how to make the data meaningful. We’ll also offer some definitions along the way.
What’s a good place to get started with technology?
Connolly: The best approach is to work backward. Ask yourself, what are we trying to solve? What problem are we trying to fix? From there, you need to figure out the best ways to measure what you are trying to solve and how technology could help.
The video game developer will become an official partner of the Premier League outfit, and will be given access to the first team squad in order to use its 3D scanning systems to capture facial and physical player data which will be included in the company’s PES 2018 game.
Konami will also benefit from extensive licensing and promotional rights, including access to the club’s social media platforms and tickets to home games at the Emirates Stadium. The agreement prolongs a partnership which first began ahead of the 2016/17 season.
About a decade ago, when Eric Castien was writing a history of Real Madrid soccer stars, he asked scouts and coaches what defined the greats. “They all pointed to their head and said, ‘It’s in between the ears, something complex, maybe even magic,’ ” the Dutch journalist and entrepreneur recalls. Could they be more specific? Not really.
Castien went looking. In 2012 he met Ilja Sligte, an assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam and a rising star in cognitive neuroscience. Two years later the pair founded BrainsFirst BV (originally called SportsQ), an Amsterdam startup that promises to identify the world’s next soccer superstars. Although there’s no peer-reviewed data to support it, the company claims its neuroscience games can identify natural affinities for the sport that may not be immediately obvious. A scrawny, inexperienced player, for example, may have a working memory and spatial awareness on par with Lionel Messi’s. The goal, says Sligte: “Match cognitive supply and demand.”
With the rise of autonomous vehicles, smart video surveillance, facial detection and various people counting applications, fast and accurate object detection systems are rising in demand. These systems involve not only recognizing and classifying every object in an image, but localizing each one by drawing the appropriate bounding box around it. This makes object detection a significantly harder task than its traditional computer vision predecessor, image classification.
Fortunately, however, the most successful approaches to object detection are currently extensions of image classification models.
The song says a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, but an Iowa State University scientist has published new research suggesting a spoonful of oil makes vegetables more nutritious.
A new study led by Wendy White, an associate professor of food science and human nutrition, shows that eating salad with added fat in the form of soybean oil promotes the absorption of eight different micronutrients that promote human health. Conversely, eating the same salad without the added oil lessens the likelihood that the body will absorb the nutrients.
Put 100 runners around a pre-race dinner table, and they won’t agree on much. Training talk may cause shouting matches; shoe talk could cause friends to come to blows over terms like “drop” and “stack height.” But one thing most would agree on is what to eat—a big pasta buffet.
Pasta has earned its vaunted place at pre-race meals everywhere because of its impact on glycogen. You have probably heard the term “glycogen” bandied about before, and you may have even used it yourself when ordering your pre-race meal.
I know that when I order at restaurants, I am implicitly saying, “I’ll have the large glycogen pizza, please, with a side of glycogen breadsticks.” But what is glycogen, and how can you use it to avoid the dreaded bonk?
… Several of those players have swapped the Eredivisie for the Premier League in recent times and then left with their limitations exposed, which has not been ignored in the post-mortem of Dutch football. Among recruitment circles, there is a general distrust of any young wonder to emerge from the Dutch top-flight given previous experiences with players who struggled to adapt to their new surroundings. Why is this? One theory points out that the Eredivisie is a slower league, played at a more deliberate pace and thus totally out of tune with the cutting edge of modern football.
This is reflected in the dwindling number of Dutch managers working outside of the country. Once revered, Holland’s coaching is now bordering on irrelevance, with only Ronald Koeman at Everton and Peter Bosz at Borussia Dortmund managing in Europe’s five major leagues. Frank de Boer was sacked by Crystal Palace last month amid uncertainty that his patient, possession-based style of play suited neither his players or the Premier League. Likewise, Van Gaal was unceremoniously but correctly dismissed by Manchester United last year after fans became tired of his ‘philosophy’.