… Brady’s MVP-caliber year sparked a question to New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick recently about other productive seasons authored by 40-year-old quarterbacks, with names such as Brett Favre, Warren Moon and Vinny Testaverde mentioned as part of the query. Belichick highlighted Testaverde because of his firsthand experience coaching him at three different points of his career, the final time coming in 2006 with the Patriots when Testaverde was 43 and signed midseason as the No. 3 option.
“In the end, it comes down to this is a production business, so it doesn’t matter whether you’re 22, 32, 42,” said Belichick, who has long held Testaverde in high regard, citing his uncommon athleticism even at the latter stages of his career. “If you’re not productive, you’re probably not long for the league. If you’re productive, there’s a place.”
Leroy Sane has been one of the stars of the Premier League season so far and is likely to be a key figure in the Manchester derby on Sunday. But how did he become so good?
In talking to those who nurtured him at Schalke, Adam Bate retraces Sane’s steps to discover a tale of good genes, great talent and an appetite to improve… if he is pushed.
… Given his age and the heavy minutes James has played since coming to the NBA at age 18, including extended playoff runs with trips to the NBA Finals each of the past seven years, his ability to stave off a decline in play has been improbable. Has James managed to break the aging curve that governs most NBA players?
The best season of quarterback Josh McCown’s career has come to an abrupt and painful end.
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He will miss the Jets’ final three games with a broken left hand that will require surgery.
“It’s big for him and it’s big for us because he’s been leading us all year offensively,” Coach Todd Bowles said Monday during a conference call.
Josh McCown has embraced the misery, welcomed the torment and finally understood the meaning behind all the intense pain inflicted by people taking care of his 38-year-old body.
With friends like this, who needs angry defensive linemen paid to snap him in half?
McCown’s success in the twilight of his career can be traced to his team of trainers, chiropractors and masseuses loaded with innovative ideas to keep him rolling along. The Jets quarterback is having the best year of his life thanks, in part, to an around-the-clock plan designed to stiff-arm Father Time for just a little while longer.
“I just think it’s vital,” McCown told the Daily News about his body maintenance routine. “I didn’t know how much I believed in it until I put myself through it this year. I really feel like it’s helped me a ton.”
Self-organisation was a key process discussed at the Complex Systems in Sports Congress at Camp Nou in Barcelona. PDP’s James Vaughan discusses the importance of understanding and observing self-organisation with video and reflections from Barcelona and Sweden.
“If you want people to do the right thing, make it easy.”
That is the simplest possible summary of Nudge (UK) (US) by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler. We are all fallible creatures, and so benevolent policymakers need to make sure that the path of least resistance goes to a happy destination. It is a simple but important idea, and deservedly influential: Mr Sunstein became a senior adviser to President Obama, while Mr Thaler is this year’s winner of the Nobel memorial prize in economics.
Policy wonks have nudged people to sign up for organ donation, to increase their pension contributions — and even insulate their homes by coupling home insulation with an attic-decluttering service. All we have to do is make it easy for people to do the right thing.
But what if you want people to do the wrong thing?
You’re in your car, heading for an intersection. The light turns yellow, so you decide to hit the gas. Then you see a police car.
Almost instantly, you know that stomping on the accelerator is a big mistake. But there’s a good chance you’ll do it anyway, says Susan Courtney, a professor in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University.
That’s because as one area of your brain is recognizing that police car, other areas have already begun carrying out your original plan to accelerate. “Even if you haven’t actually started moving your foot, your brain has already initiated that plan,” Courtney says.
New York based startup deCervo uses neuroimaging to understand the science behind decision-making in sports. The technology is currently being used to evaluate baseball players based on how quickly their brains identify and react to pitches.
Commonly performed during an incremental test to exhaustion, maximal oxygen uptake (V̇O2max) assessment has become a recurring practice in clinical and experimental settings. To validate the test, several criteria were proposed. In this context, the plateau in oxygen uptake (V̇O2) is inconsistent in its frequency, reducing its usefulness as a robust method to determine “true” V̇O2max. Moreover, secondary criteria previously suggested, such as expiratory exchange ratios or percentages of maximal heart rate, are highly dependent on protocol design and often are achieved at V̇O2 percentages well below V̇O2max. Thus, an alternative method termed verification phase was proposed. Currently, it is clear that the verification phase can be a practical and sensitive method to confirm V̇O2max; however, procedures to conduct it are not standardized across the literature and no previous research tried to summarize how it has been employed. Therefore, in this review the knowledge on the verification phase was updated, while suggestions on how it can be performed (e.g. intensity, duration, recovery) were provided according to population and protocol design. Future studies should focus to identify a verification protocol feasible for different populations and to compare square-wave and multistage verification phases. Additionally, studies assessing verification phases in different patient populations are still warranted. [full text]
If you follow professional runners on Instagram (yep, that’s us), you might notice a strange migratory effect occurring at various points throughout the year. Photos feature mountain vistas, and, for athletes who train in the United State, places like Colorado Springs, Flagstaff, and Albuquerque. What these cities have in common is that they are all over 5,000 ft. above sea level. At a very basic level, as you go higher and higher above sea level, the less available oxygen there is in the air. So when you’re breathing hard while running, there’s less oxygen getting to your muscles at high altitude than there is at sea level.
In order to make up for that lack, your body creates more red blood cells in order to beef up the system that delivers the oxygen to your cells. This natural process to increase in red blood cell production is what banned substances such as EPO try to recreate.
… “We realized that teams just don’t have the time nor resources,” to collect and maximize these data sets, said John Pollard, Vice President of Business Development for Zebra Sports. He cited the common practice of having a team staffer count snaps or passes during practice, a task the vendor’s system automates and adds accuracy to.
Zebra offers a dashboard and a suite of apps that process and present raw data in ways that help team make intelligent decisions about more than practices. Source: Zebra Technologies.
By using player tracking technology and more to address the challenge of addressing player health, well-being and performance, Zebra’s practice system has won it a following among individual NFL teams of which Pollard claims a third are already customers.
The practice system uses real-time data from RFID- tagged footballs from Wilson, can pass data to a suite of applications, and has already been integrated with the powerful Athlete Management System (AMS) from Kinduct. The latter is used by roughly half of the NFL clubs that use the Zebra practice system, according to Pollard.
At the NHL’s most recent ownership meetings, commissioner Gary Bettman revealed plans for a league-wide player and puck tracking system that, importantly, will be non-invasive and not require skaters to wear any transmitting chips as they did during a trial at the 2016 World Cup of Hockey.
Bettman acknowledged that more research and development work is needed to cater such a system to the specific needs of hockey but said the hope is to have an operational program in place for the 2019-20 season or even the Stanley Cup playoffs at the end of the 2018-19.
“We’re in the process of working with some technology companies to invent technology that doesn’t currently exist, because it’s more complicated to do this than in any of the other sports for a whole host of reasons which relate to the attributes of our games, the physical contact, the sticks, the speed and everything else,” Bettman said, according to NHL.com. “But we’re committed to doing it and we’re investing a fair amount of money to do it.”
A sport-specific data team at Canadian Tire has been working with summer and winter sports federations to gain the critical advantages in training and preparation