The cavalry is coming; you just hope the village hasn’t burned down by then.
“I’m pushing as much as possible because I want to go play with my guys,” Zach LaVine told reporters Monday in his first formal media comments since training camp began last month. “I should be doing contact really soon. It all depends on (the team). I’m pushing them as hard as I can. I feel great. But at the end of the day we still gotta be careful.
“I’m doing everything I was doing before,” LaVine added. “I’m going to come back, play the same way. If I can go out there and play right now I would try it (dunking). That’s just me. I can still jump, I can still get up, take contact through the hoop. I’m getting ready to be used to that again. I’m pretty sure I can do contact, but we’ve got to stick to that schedule. Trying to as close to 100 percent as I can before I come back.’
… At the end of Dani Foxhoven’s second day and fourth practice with the Russian side FC Energiya Voronezh, she sits down in the grass. A wiry, upbeat brunette with a big grin, she’s feeling good—tired and good. The team is in Belek, Turkey for preseason and she has spent the past hour doing one-touch passes. She’s untying her laces when Vasilich, her 64-year-old coach, charges her, shouting in Russian. He leans down over her, grabs her by the earlobe, and yanks her to her feet. He does not let go of her ear. With his other hand, he open-hand slaps her across the face.
The team translator, a 24-year-old named Tanya whom the club found in the language department at the local university, comes running over. “He wants you to stand up!” she says, fretting and apologetic. “He says, ‘Women should not sit on the ground.’” She explains that sitting on the grass can affect a women’s fertility, that the cold ground is not good for her organs.
What’s the cost of an Olympic medal? Just ask Gail Emms, who actually won one: silver in badminton in Athens, and now finds herself penniless, desolate, struggling to put petrol in her car
Sometimes a player is so good at something—so dependable, so versatile, so influential—he can be punished for it. Tuesday night, with Isaiah Thomas out with a lingering hip injury and Derrick Rose down with an ankle sprain, LeBron James played point guard for the Cavaliers. He scored 34 points to go along with four rebounds and 13 assists, and the Cavs beat the rudderless Bulls, 119-112. James has had to do this before. In his first stint with Cleveland, he was officially listed as a point guard on February 3, 2005, in a blowout loss to the Heat. Unofficially, he ran the point during a particularly injury-plagued stretch of the 2009-10 season. “It’s not something I always want to do because running the point guard is like playing quarterback,” he said at the time. “I decided not to play quarterback in high school. I’d rather play wide receiver and get out in the open.”
Cleveland’s break-in-case-of-emergency point guard is the best player of his generation. He’d just rather not do it unless he has to. This is the LeBron story: You change the way people think about basketball, and then you have to adjust to the new reality you’ve created. This is something any true superstar has dealt with.
The National Hockey League (NHL) combine was designed to assess draft-eligible players based on body composition, speed, power, and strength. The importance of body composition in the battery of combine physical tests was investigated and differences in results based on position were explored. Thirty-seven elite male Canadian university hockey players (age = 22.86 +/- 1.55 years, weight = 87.21 +/- 6.52 kg, height = 181.69 +/- 6.19 cm) participated in the study at the beginning of their hockey season. All participants underwent physical testing (as outlined in the 2016 NHL combine) and one total body dual energy x-ray absorptiometry (DXA) scan to measure body composition. Partial correlations (controlling for weight) were used to explore the relationship among body composition measures (body fat percentage, visceral fat, BMI, lower lean tissue mass, upper lean tissue mass, upper fat mass, lower fat mass) with NHL fitness tests (bench press, pull-ups, grip strength, long jump, pro-agility, vertical jump, V[spacing dot above] O2max, and the Wingate Anaerobic Test). In 4 of the 6 strength/power tests (Wingate Anaerobic Test, long jump, bench press, and both grip strengths) lower and upper lean tissue mass explained significant amounts of variance. Although forwards and defensemen significantly differed in right grip strength and pro-agility left scores, they did not differ in regards to any body composition variables. Body composition has a significant influence on several combine-specific tests, which may help sport scientists and strength and conditioning coaches better tailor training programs to optimize performance in elite hockey players.
It has been suggested that strength training effects (i.e. neural or structural) vary, depending on the total repetitions performed and velocity loss in each training set. Purpose
The aim of this study is to compare the effects of two training programmes (i.e. one with loads that maximise power output and individualised repetitions, and the other following traditional power training). Methods
Twenty-five males were divided into three groups (optimum power [OP = 10], traditional training [TT = 9] and control group [CG = 6]). The training load used for OP was individualised using loads that maximised power output (41.7% ± 5.8 of one repetition maximum [1RM]) and repetitions at maximum power (4 to 9 repetitions, or ‘reps’). Volume (sets x repetitions) was the same for both experimental groups, while intensity for TT was that needed to perform only 50% of the maximum number of possible repetitions (i.e. 61.1%–66.6% of 1RM). The training programme ran over 11 weeks (2 sessions per week; 4–5 sets per session; 3-minute rests between sets), with pre-, intermediate and post-tests which included: anthropometry, 1RM, peak power output (PPO) with 30%, 40% and 50% of 1RM in the bench press throw, and salivary testosterone (ST) and cortisol (SC) concentrations. Rate of perceived exertion (RPE) and power output were recorded in all sessions. Results
Following the intermediate test, PPO was increased in the OP group for each load (10.9%–13.2%). Following the post-test, both experimental groups had increased 1RM (11.8%–13.8%) and PPO for each load (14.1%–19.6%). Significant decreases in PPO were found for the TT group during all sets (4.9%–15.4%), along with significantly higher RPE (37%). Conclusion
OP appears to be a more efficient method of training, with less neuromuscular fatigue and lower RPE. [full text]
The National Sleep Foundation recommends an average of eight hours of sleep per night for adults, but sleep scientist Matthew Walker says that too many people are falling short of the mark.
“Human beings are the only species that deliberately deprive themselves of sleep for no apparent gain,” Walker says. “Many people walk through their lives in an underslept state, not realizing it.”
Walker is the director of the Center for Human Sleep Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He points out that lack of sleep — defined as six hours or fewer — can have serious consequences. Sleep deficiency is associated with problems in concentration, memory and the immune system, and may even shorten life span. [audio, 38:20]
In recent decades we’ve seen the rise of an emerging interdisciplinary field that brings together neuroscientists and educators. As technologies like brain mapping and scanning continue to advance our understanding of the human brain, a sub-sector of experts are applying those findings to the classroom.
Instead of being based on traditional or individual assumptions about learning, education is beginning to be treated more like a science. The new discipline, neuroeducation, serves to apply the scientific method to curricula design and teaching strategies. This comes with attempts for a more objective understanding of learning that is based on evidence.
The New York Times, Well blog, Gretchen Reynolds from
… Almost uniformly, the men had been able to produce fewer watts and recall fewer words when they performed the muscular and mental tasks together.
But the falloff in physical functioning was much steeper than the mental slump. The rowers lost almost 13 percent of their power output, a decline that was about 30 percent greater than their loss in word recall after the combined session.
“Our proposed explanation for this finding is that they were both competing for the same resource,” which in this case was blood sugar for fuel, says Danny Longman, a postdoctoral research fellow at Cambridge who led the study.
One particularly frustrating element of the NHL’s low-scoring era is that teams will frequently go through random stretches during the regular season where they simply can’t buy a goal.
Skill can be a pretty strong equalizer, though. Teams loaded with individual shooting talent generally won’t stay down for too long. Teams who are starving for offence, with only a handful of guys who can create scoring chances on their own? Yeah, their streaks can be longer and more painful.
Shooting talent seems to be the topic du jour right now, especially in light of a series of teams with high expectations seeing their results wildly askew. Montreal and Edmonton are shooting under 4 per cent at 5-on-5 to start the year, which is astronomically low. You might rate Edmonton’s offence better than Montreal’s (I think everyone would), but neither of these teams is a 4 per cent shooting talent team.
Baseball Prospectus, Martin Alonso and Craig Goldstein from
… The Dodgers and Astros are two of baseball’s leading teams when it comes to analytics, and their similarities are represented a bit in how they’ve assembled their rosters. While the Astros squeezed in two more players via the draft, the Dodgers have one more player acquired from IFA and via trade, respectively. As with other rounds, the story here again appears to be the extent to which teams are relying on trades, as both teams have a plurality of their World Series roster brought in from other teams.
When it comes to payroll, well, there are no surprises there. The Dodgers have the more expensive payroll, shelling out $25 million more than the Astros to build their roster. The difference lies in that the Dodgers have spent, percentage-wise, more on their prospects and IFAs, while the Astros have leaned more on free agents.
… even though the 49ers, unlike the Colts and Broncos, found a way to score some points, rookie QB CJ Beathard was bruised and battered, resulting in a couple of strip sack fumbles against an average Cowboys pass rush that hounded him throughout the game.
There are countless other examples, but you didn’t come here for that. You came here for answers. Here are the four biggest reasons NFL offensive line play isn’t as good as it used to be.
1. College spread offenses emphasize speed over technique
In an age of unprecedented analytics across sports, it’s getting increasingly difficult for teams to hone in on untapped avenues for optimization. It’s possible, then, that the Golden State Warriors have reached final frontier of quantification by bringing in renowned UC-Berkeley Social Psychologist, Dacher Keltner, to consult with the coaching staff about on-court chemistry. … Last year, Keltner attended a couple of the Warriors’ practices to provide feedback on their nonverbal communication and, well, that worked out pretty well for them in the end. So we visited the UC Berkeley professor at his on-campus office to learn more about the power of friendly touching.
Nothing so blatantly illustrates where the power in modern baseball resides as the carousel of managerial firings that climaxed Thursday with the New York Yankees’ dismissal of Joe Girardi. General managers wield more control than ever, and they use it as a cudgel to install ideological analogs. When Girardi lost Brian Cashman, the Yankees’ GM, he lost his job.
The manager used to be the fulcrum of an organization, the decision maker whose compass guided the GM. The slow shift to a top-down management structure accelerated as front offices sodden with information saw managers more as conduits through whom they could deliver the knowledge gleaned from the quantitative analysis that serves as a backbone for modern baseball dogma.
And though Girardi was by no means averse to this, brandishing the most infamous binders outside of Mitt Romney’s, there is a truth to the GM-manager relationship: If any animus exists, it’s obvious who’s gone. Managers, in 2017, are as fungible as paper towels.
Maryland coach DJ Durkin will never concede that a game — let alone a season with nearly half a schedule left to be played — is lost before his Terps take the field. Still, as hard as it is for him to stomach, his Terps are in the midst of one of college football’s toughest rebuilding jobs.
A combination of the schedule his team has faced and the injuries his team has suffered, particularly at quarterback, has made it difficult for the Terps to get any consistent momentum in his second year running the program. Being a wannabe in the Big Ten East isn’t easy.