I am done with testimonials from professional athletes. I’ve spent the last year and a half reporting and writing a book about exercise recovery1, and what I’ve learned is that advice from elite athletes is often cluttered with pseudoscientific explanations for their stupendous results. The problem is that gifted athletes don’t necessarily know how they got that way. Or, in the words of David Epstein, author of “The Sports Gene,” “Just because you’re a bird doesn’t mean you’re an ornithologist.”
Not just because they stick up like a telephone pole on the horizon, but also because they help us envision our lives as part of something bigger… the bigger picture of who we are, who we want to become.
Enter the Believe Journal. First published by you and Ro (Roisin McGettigan-Dumas) about five years ago, it provides one of the best frameworks I’ve found – for both inspiring running goals, and tracking them along the way.
In celebration of its role in so many of our lives, I wanted to check in with Lauren, and ask her some deeper questions on each point from one of my favorite pages.
It’s that time of the year again: NFL award time! And you’ve found what I believe to be the most unique award compilation that you will come across this post-season.
If you’re new here, let me enlighten you as to why and how this list is compiled. First of all, I believe the players who possess the most attuned and adaptable of movement skill toolboxes should be recognized for the work that it goes into crafting those dynamics. As you will notice, there are times that those skills translate into the player being a NFL statistical leader at their position, and other times it does not (hence the blog’s name, ‘Beyond the Stats’). Because of this, our list is based on hours upon hours of my movement analysis during film study to determine the players who I feel are deserving of being considered the game’s best movers at each position.
Many studies have shown that self-controlled feedback is beneficial for learning motor tasks, and that learners prefer to receive feedback after supposedly good trials. However, to date all studies conducted on self-controlled learning have used individual tasks and mainly relatively simple skills. Therefore, the aim of this study was to examine self-controlled feedback on tactical skills in small-sided soccer games. Highly talented youth soccer players were assigned to a self-control or yoked group and received video feedback on their offensive performance in 3 vs. 2 small-sided games. The results showed that the self-control group requested feedback mostly after good trials, that is, after they scored a goal. In addition, the perceived performance of the self-control group was higher on feedback than on no-feedback trials. Analyses of the conversations around the video feedback revealed that the players and coach discussed good and poor elements of performance and how to improve it. Although the coach had a major role in these conversations, the players of the self-control group spoke more and showed more initiative compared to the yoked group. The results revealed no significant beneficial effect of self-controlled feedback on performance as judged by the coach. Overall, the findings suggest that in such a complex situation as small-sided soccer games, self-controlled feedback is used both to confirm correct performance elements and to determine and correct errors, and that self-controlled learning stimulates the involvement of the learner in the learning process.
How do you differentiate between each individual’s learning experience within your group? No single player’s experience is the same. In this article, Reed Maltbie discusses how you can ensure that you understand the needs of every player in your group.
In December of 2015, new Georgia coach Kirby Smart met with his team for the first time. He held his fingers one inch apart, explaining how close they’d been under former coach Mark Richt to playing at the highest levels of football. Smart promised the Bulldogs he’d teach them how to traverse that inch, the gulf between excellent and elite, that Georgia’s teams could never quite navigate.
Two years later, Smart has won an SEC title, secured the nation’s No. 1 recruiting class and has the No. 3 Bulldogs in the College Football Playoff semifinal against No. 2 Oklahoma on Monday. Georgia had always recruited well, consistently made top-tier bowls and been competitive in the SEC. But Smart figuring out that final inch has pushed the program into a new paradigm, staring down his old boss, Alabama coach Nick Saban, faster than anyone could have anticipated.
A deep dive into Smart’s recruiting infrastructure – his spin on Saban’s fabled “Process” – illuminates just how Smart has nudged Georgia into the highest echelon of college football.
Brenton Sullivan wants to help high-school athletes find the right college, and he’s taking a page out of online social networking’s playbook to do it.
A former walk-on baseball player at USC, Sullivan co-founded FieldLevel nearly a decade ago. Now located in Solana Beach, the company has developed an online social networking platform for young athletes, high school/club coaches and college coaches.
While details of Carson Wentz’s knee operation and its aftermath remain a mystery, shrouded by HIPAA restrictions as well as by the NFL’s obsession for secrecy, his surgeon’s identity makes it likely no cutting-edge technique has been ignored.
Dr. James Bradley, a former Penn State football co-captain who repaired the Eagles quarterback’s torn ACL earlier this month in Pittsburgh, has long been an advocate of innovative strategies when treating NFL stars.
“I believe to be an orthopedic physician there is a burden of craft to the patient that requires you to stay up to date on new medical advances,” he said recently.
Leeds have confirmed that they have agreed a partnership with Qatari based sports organisation Aspire Academy in a bid to help their development at academy and youth level.
The Whites revealed on Wednesday via both their official Twitter account and website that the deal had officially been signed between the two parties, with a view to handing the club a major boost for their future stars.
A diet of fiber-rich foods, such as fruits and vegetables, reduces the risk of developing diabetes, heart disease and arthritis. Indeed, the evidence for fiber’s benefits extends beyond any particular ailment: Eating more fiber seems to lower people’s mortality rate, whatever the cause.
That’s why experts are always saying how good dietary fiber is for us. But while the benefits are clear, it’s not so clear why fiber is so great. “It’s an easy question to ask and a hard one to really answer,” said Fredrik Bäckhed, a biologist at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.
He and other scientists are running experiments that are yielding some important new clues about fiber’s role in human health. Their research indicates that fiber doesn’t deliver many of its benefits directly to our bodies.
Instead, the fiber we eat feeds billions of bacteria in our guts. Keeping them happy means our intestines and immune systems remain in good working order.
In order to digest food, we need to bathe it in enzymes that break down its molecules. Those molecular fragments then pass through the gut wall and are absorbed in our intestines.
Doctors have long suspected sugar is not simply a source of excess calories but a fundamental cause of obesity and type 2 diabetes. Gary Taubes argues we must do more to discourage consumption while we improve our understanding of sugar’s role
Which Little Guy will the Cavaliers get? Thomas has defied the odds plenty of times, but overcoming a hip injury and returning to the heights of last season could be his toughest challenge yet.
The road to the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, runs through Norwich, a hilly and wooded family-oriented farming community tucked between Interstates 89 and 91 in rural Vermont. With a main street lined with white clapboard colonial buildings and a landmark steepled church, Norwich could be a set designer’s rendering of a tiny New England village.
Yet despite its apparent ordinariness, Norwich is home to a probabilities puzzle for the statistics students at Dartmouth College, less than two miles away as the hermit thrush flies.
This town of roughly 3,000 residents has accounted for three Olympic medals, and, since 1984, has put an athlete on all but one United States Winter Olympics team. It has also sent two athletes to the Summer Olympics. In all, Norwich has produced 11 Olympians — an even dozen if you count the snowboarder Kevin Pearce, and the townspeople would never dream of overlooking Pearce, who sustained a career-ending head injury a little more than a month before the 2010 Winter Olympics, where he was expected to contend for a gold medal.
The College Football Playoff will eventually expand to eight teams within the length of the current contract and be worth at least $10 billion, former CBS Sports president Neal Pilson predicted in a conversation with CBS Sports this week.
Pilson was reacting, in part, to the regionalized nature of Monday’s CFP National Championship between No. 2 Georgia and No. 4 Alabama.
“I think, from a television point of view, any sports executive would tell you he would prefer a team from the different part of the country,” said Pilson, now a longtime sports media consultant.
A big gap in our knowledge today is the relationship between what players do and what scouts see. To what extent are the two domains complementary? How do they differ? How much do they overlap?
In a recent paper Luca Pappalardo found that the performance ratings given by sports journalists are largely dependent on a few highly salient performance metrics like goals scored, shots saved and so on. He showed that the ratings depend on a few memorable incidents and that more subtle features of the performance are unimportant. (He called this effect the noticeability heuristic.)
At first blush, this finding has some uncomfortable implications for the scouting process. The dataset was quite extensive and the analysis first-rate, and in fact Pappalardo was able to construct a machine learning algorithm that predicted journalist ratings quite accurately. If his algorithm works for club scouts as well as journalists, there would seem to be very little need for scouts at all.