… Unfortunately, with this book, Brady joins the club of diet gurus selling pseudoscience and woo about the body and nutrition. There’s no evidence that following Brady’s diet will turn his readers into “sustained peak performers” or do the specific things Brady claims — like rebalance the body’s pH level. (Your lungs and kidneys do that.) And while it may be true that the diet helps Brady stay strong and healthy, it’s probably not working for the reasons he suggests.
… In [Dakari] Johnson’s telling, everyone had a part in helping him develop. “My uncles, they’d beat up on me,” he said. “That created the love because I wanted to compete. From my mom, what I learned was patience.” Around his sophomore year, he said, everyone “started faking injuries, started coming up with excuses” to get out of playing against him.
He also had his “big cousin,” Michael Murray, to fend off. Murray played at Coppin State and now plays professionally in Spain. “He’s the one I was honestly trying to catch up to my whole life,” Johnson said.
I am Dr. Izumi Tabata, a professor at Ritsumeikan University Graduate School of Sport and Health Science in Japan. More than 20 years ago, I reported that high-intensity interval training (HIIT) improves aerobic and anaerobic energy releasing capacity in this research article. Thereafter, this protocol was termed “Tabata Training” and has become popular among the fitness community. AMA! [39 comments]
Towards the end of Kyle Edmund’s breakout performance at the Australian Open, his coach Fredrik Rosengren was asked about his great leap forward. The British No 2’s improved serve and fitness had helped, the Swede acknowledged – but there was something else, too. “You have to believe you can do it in tough situations,” said Rosengren, who stressed that Edmund now had the “mindset” to go deep into grand slams.
Belief. Mind over matter. Taming your inner chimp. Hang around elite sports people long enough and you will hear multiple variations on the theme. The race to run a sub-two-hour marathon, for instance, is sometimes framed as much in terms of psychology as physiology and technology.
Of course, if it was that easy to trick our minds into running much faster, or making the latter stages of major tournaments, we would all be doing it. That said, how the brain affects performance is increasingly a major battleground in sports science, as Endure, a fascinating new book by the scientist and writer Alex Hutchinson, makes clear.
MIT News, Picower Institute for Learning and Memory from
We categorize pretty much everything we see, and remarkably, we often achieve that feat whether the items look patently similar — such as Fuji and McIntosh apples — or they share a more abstract similarity — such as a screwdriver and a drill. A new study at MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory explains how.
“Categorization is a fundamental cognitive mechanism,” says Earl Miller, the Picower Professor in MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. “It’s the way the brain learns to generalize. If your brain didn’t have this ability, you’d be overwhelmed by details of the sensory world. Every time you experienced something, if it was in different lighting or at a different angle, your brain would treat it as a brand new thing.”
Recognizing the movement of increased patient engagement in healthcare, Vital USA Inc. has teamed up with the Partners Connected Health team to validate its Vital Moto Mod health and wellness device, a 5-in-1 integrated vital sign monitoring platform. Paired with a smartphone, the Vital Moto Mod works with the HIPAA-compliant Vital App to measure, monitor and track heart rate, respiratory rate, oxygen saturation (SpO2), non-contact core body temperature and blood pressure, all within three minutes.
“We have learned that frictionless technologies for biometric data collection from patients is key in fostering their engagement with digital products,” said Kamal Jethwani, MD, MPH, Senior Director, Partners Connected Health Innovation. “This product streamlines the vitals measurement process, replacing five discreet devices with one, and we are going to validate that this product is changing digital vitals collection from patients.”
Contemporary cardiac and heart rate monitoring devices capture physiological signals using optical and electrode-based sensors. However, these devices generally lack the form factor and mechanical flexibility necessary for use in ambulatory and home environments. Here, we report an ultrathin (~1 mm average thickness) and highly flexible wearable cardiac sensor (WiSP) designed to be minimal in cost (disposable), light weight (1.2 g), water resistant, and capable of wireless energy harvesting. Theoretical analyses of system-level bending mechanics show the advantages of WiSP’s flexible electronics, soft encapsulation layers and bioadhesives, enabling intimate skin coupling. A clinical feasibility study conducted in atrial fibrillation patients demonstrates that the WiSP device effectively measures cardiac signals matching the Holter monitor, and is more comfortable. WiSP’s physical attributes and performance results demonstrate its utility for monitoring cardiac signals during daily activity, exertion and sleep, with implications for home-based care. [full text]
Engineers from Cornell and Honeywell Aerospace have demonstrated a new method for remotely vaporizing electronics into thin air, giving devices the ability to vanish – along with their valuable data – if they were to get into the wrong hands.
This unique ability to self-destruct is at the heart of an emerging technology known as transient electronics, in which key portions of a circuit, or the whole circuit itself, can discreetly disintegrate or dissolve. And because no harmful byproducts are released upon vaporization, engineers envision biomedical and environmental applications along with data protection.
Attempts to establish a biomarker reflecting individual player load in intermittent sports such as football have failed so far. Increases in circulating DNA (cfDNA) have been demonstrated in various endurance sports settings. While it has been proposed that cfDNA could be a suitable marker for player load in intermittent sports, the effects on cfDNA of repeated sprinting as an essential feature in intermittent sports are unknown. For the first time, we assessed both alterations of cfDNA due to repeated maximal sprints and due to a professional football game. Methods
Nine participants were subjected to a standardised sprint training session with cross-over design of five maximal sprints of 40 meters with either “short” (1 minute) or “long” pauses (5 minutes). Capillary cfDNA and lactate were measured after every sprint and venous cfDNA before and after each series of sprints. Moreover, capillary cfDNA and lactate values were taken in 23 professional football players before and after incremental exercise testing, during the course of a training week at rest (baseline) and in all 17 enrolled players following a season game. Results
Lactate and venous cfDNA increased more pronounced during “short” compared to “long” (1.4-fold, p = 0.032 and 1.7-fold, p = 0.016) and cfDNA correlated significantly with lactate (r = 0.69; p<0.001). Incremental exercise testing increased cfDNA 7.0-fold (p<0.001). The season game increased cfDNA 22.7-fold (p<0.0001), while lactate showed a 2.0-fold (p = 0.09) increase compared to baseline. Fold-changes in cfDNA correlated with distance covered during game (spearman’s r = 0.87, p = 0.0012), while no correlation between lactate and the tracking data could be found.
Discussion
We show for the first time that cfDNA could be an objective marker for distance covered in elite intermittent sports. In contrast to the potential of more established blood-based markers like IL-6, CK, or CRP, cfDNA shows by far the strongest fold-change and a high correlation with a particular load related aspect in professional football.
Was it the avocado ice cream? The electrolytes? The gallons of water he consumes daily?
Nope. It was the tape, a big hunk of black tape, that helped Tom Brady play in the AFC championship game despite a cut on his passing hand that required 12 stitches. It might have looked like electrical tape, but this was something called KT Tape, a kinesiology tape designed to relieve pain and support muscles, tendons and ligaments, rather than his line of dietary products that came through in the clutch.
How it came to rest on the golden hand of the NFL’s best quarterback involves a bit of luck as well as Brady’s friendship and relationship with his famous orthopedic surgeon.
… in statistical projections I have run in the past found that the number of minutes played in a player’s rookie campaign is associated with more improvement in the future, even controlling for their per 40 minute production. But, there’s no way to tell if playing more is causing the player to improve. It is possible some rookies are playing more because either the coaches are picking up on cues from practice that they have more potential, or that the organization is more invested in them overall. It is perhaps somewhat telling that the biggest predictor of rookie time on the floor is simply where they were picked in the draft.
But, of course, neither Giles or Fultz would be the first player to redshirt his rookie year. Hell, Fultz wouldn’t be the first, or the second or even third player to redshirt on the Sixers in this decade. Overall, I was able to find eight first rounders since 2002 who had an injur- related redshirt, or near redshirt, in what would have been their rookie year and went on to complete the next year. The near redshirt players included were on the court for sixteen or fewer games before suffering an injury.
The interesting thing about these injury redshirts is that it forms something of a natural experiment with the decision to log court time being taken out of the team’s hands.
… Though not everything was the same, and anyone who suggests Belichick had a lifetime ticket on the legend track — and, five championships later, there are many — is forgetting the hostile chants and the police cars and the stealth departures to flee from an angry Cleveland.
But first, yes, there were hints that Belichick would indeed become Belichick, even when he was just another 39-year-old man finding himself in a new job. Back then, he had no proven system beyond what he had studied under his father, a scout, and experienced under Bill Parcells, a coach and mentor of some acclaim. “Do your job” wasn’t yet a rallying cry of accountability or the title of documentaries; it was a crude state of mind that inspired some of Belichick’s assistants and turned a few others against him.
“We were handcuffed — let’s put it that way,” said Gary Tranquill, who coached the Browns’ quarterbacks for three seasons before deciding, after Cleveland went 7-9 in 1993, he’d had enough of his stubborn boss and quit. “I didn’t have any fun coaching there. It’s as simple as that.”
… Cousins was coming off the best stretch of his career, but looking at his minutes totals, it was also perhaps the most taxing. On Monday’s phenomenal 44-point, 23-rebound, 10-assist performance in the double-overtime win over the Chicago Bulls, the 6’11”, 270-pound center played a career-high 52 minutes. No player on either team played more than 47 minutes. Cousins tied for the highest total that any player has clocked in a game this season (along with Russell Westbrook and Ben Simmons).
Cousins was clearly gassed after the game.
“My strength coach had the nerve to ask me, do I want to lift after this game? I almost lost it,” Cousins told the Associated Press’ Brett Martel after the game. “If I had some energy, we would have fought.”
The Major League Baseball Players Association is investigating whether to file grievances against the Miami Marlins and Pittsburgh Pirates for circumventing rules in the collective-bargaining agreement that call for teams to put revenue-sharing dollars back into baseball operations, sources familiar with the situation told Yahoo Sports.
An offseason in which both teams have dumped star players piqued the interest of the players’ union, particularly as both teams receive in excess of $50 million from the program that redistributes money from higher-revenue to lower-revenue teams. The union has targeted both teams in the past, coming to an agreement with the Marlins to increase spending in 2010 and looking into the Pirates’ spending habits.
The potential grievances come during an offseason in which a frozen free-agent market has left players confused and emboldened teams to dig in and seek bargains. Neither the Marlins nor the Pirates have bothered to participate, not signing one major league free agent with spring training less than three weeks away.