… “It was real different than I expected,” Flowers said. “Every team knew everything about you. Some went in-depth, some didn’t. Some even watched film with you, just trying to see how you think. I got a lot of positive feedback, and I got some things I want to work on.
“Now, I’m just looking forward to the combine.”
Flowers is one of five Oklahoma State players invited to the NFL Draft combine in Indianapolis, which begins with interviews and weigh-ins on Tuesday.
… “There was a soccer field, kind of, in our neighborhood but it wasn’t grass,” Gomes said. “It was like the goals didn’t have nets. It was a small field and my uncle, we lived in like the same neighborhood, and my uncle’s friends [would play] when I was little. I remember watching and being the ball girl and then me and my friends, we used to always play.”
And so Gomes played the game in the streets and on that dirt field in a pair of ill-fitting cleats, until life happene–or rather love happened. Gomes’ mother fell in love with an American missionary prompting a move to Utah when Gomes was 11. Initially, the move was intended to be temporary but wound up being permanent.
Unsurprisingly, there were numerous adjustments needed for Gomes to settle into the new environment, including, acclimating to a new culture, a new climate, making new friends, and being an ocean from her old friends and family back in Portugal. The biggest hardship of the move for the pre-teen by far was the language barrier.
SI.com, NCAA Basketball, Tom Crean with Jon Wertheim from
… Crean does not lead a sedentary life (witness his sideline demeanor) or an unexamined one, noting and underlining resonant passages in the books he devours. After a few days of idle time—and plotting a move from central Indiana to central Florida, so his 17-year-old son, Riley, could play baseball at IMG Academy—he grew restless. So he asked himself a series of questions. What was his own role in what had become a toxic work environment in Bloomington? Had he been too stubborn? Not stubborn enough? Did he delegate too much? Or had he micromanaged? What would he do differently next time?
On the second Sunday of his unemployment Crean attended a 76ers practice. Freed of responsibility, he could look and listen and watch how others performed in his line of work. “Something clicked,” as he put it, and this led to his embarking on…well, what exactly? Maybe a cross between a gap year and a traveling sports professional development seminar. As Crean puts it, “I want to become a better leader, a better manager, a better coach, a better man—by watching the best.” Here’s what he learned.
Many of us believe perfectionism is a positive. But researchers are finding that it is nothing short of dangerous, leading to a long list of health problems – and that it’s on the rise.
The brain’s role in endurance is, perhaps, the single most controversial topic in sports science. It’s not that anyone thinks the brain doesn’t matter. Everyone, right back to A. V. Hill and other pioneers of the “body as machine” view, has always understood that the race is not always to the swift—particularly if the swift make bad tactical decisions, pace themselves poorly, or simply are unwilling to suffer. In that view, the body sets the limits, and the brain dictates how close you get to those boundaries. But starting in the late 1990s, a South African physician and scientist named Tim Noakes began to argue that this picture is insufficiently radical—that it’s actually the brain alone that sets and enforces the seemingly physical limits we encounter during prolonged exercise. The claim has profound and surprising implications, and the extent to which it’s true or false remains one of the most volatile flashpoints in exercise physiology, two decades later.
The particular tone of the controversy has as much to do with Noakes himself—an instinctive iconoclast who has been clashing with his scientific peers more or less continuously for four decades now—as with his ideas. “Tim is probably his own worst enemy,” says Carl Foster, the director of the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse’s Human Performance Laboratory and a former president of the American College of Sports Medicine.
… Tore Ovrebo, Director of Elite Sports for the Norwegian Olympic Committee, started the debate when he told USA Today reporter filing a story on the country’s success that his countrymen were winners largely because they were not trained from birth to think about winning. In Norway, he explained, youth sports are used to encourage healthy socialization with child athletes and teams rarely ranked against each other and terms like first, second, and third relegated to the sidelines. Ovrebo claims that not competing from a young age encourages athletes to share tips with each other and commit to individual excellence, not dominance. Beyond that, Ovrebo says things like the country’s free healthcare and education help their uncompetitive social climate transcend sports entirely.
Conditioning is an important part of any youth sports program. Athletes benefit in practice and competition from being physically fit. Exercises, drills, and games can be used to achieve new levels of fitness and sport-specific skill development. Various types of running and strength training are part of an athlete’s overall development. Using running or any other type of exercise as a punishment, however, can negatively impact the overall strength of the athlete, coach, and team.
“Using punishment with a player who loses a match or makes too many ‘mistakes’ causes a player to be fearful and anxious and overly concerned with outcome,” said Dr. Anne Smith, Wimbledon champion and psychologist. “This is not the best way to coach. It indicates a deficiency in the coach’s ability to encourage, empathize, and communicate.”
BMC Sports Science, Medicine and Rehabilitation from
Background
Technological development and improvements in Wearable Physiological Monitoring devices, have facilitated the wireless and continuous field-based monitoring/capturing of physiologic measures in healthy, clinical or athletic populations. These devices have many applications for prevention and rehabilitation of musculoskeletal disorders, assuming reliable and valid data is collected. The purpose of this study was to appraise the quality and synthesize findings from published studies on psychometric properties of heart rate measurements taken with the Zephyr Bioharness device. Methods
We searched the Embase, Medline, PsycInfo, PuMed and Google Scholar databases to identify articles. Articles were appraised for quality using a structured clinical measurement specific appraisal tool. Two raters evaluated the quality and conducted data extraction. We extracted data on the reliability (intra-class correlation coefficients and standard error of measurement) and validity measures (Pearson/Spearman’s correlation coefficients) along with mean differences. Agreement parameters were summarised by the average biases and 95% limits of agreement. Results
A total of ten studies were included: quality ratings ranged from 54 to 92%. The intra-class correlation coefficients reported ranged from 0.85–0.98. The construct validity coefficients compared against gold standard calibrations or other commercially used devices, ranged from 0.74–0.99 and 0.67–0.98 respectively. Zephyr Bioharness agreement error ranged from − 4.81 (under-estimation) to 3.00 (over-estimation) beats per minute, with varying 95% limits of agreement, when compared with gold standard measures. Conclusion
Good to excellent quality evidence from ten studies suggested that the Zephyr Bioharness device can provide reliable and valid measurements of heart rate across multiple contexts, and that it displayed good agreements vs. gold standard comparators – supporting criterion validity. [full text]
The future of U.S. Soccer Coaching Education is underway in Kansas City. On February 22nd, the first official coaching course was completed with a group of Grassroots coaches earning their 9v9 In-Person License. On February 25th, a group of A-Senior candidates began a six-day journey at the state of the art facility. Built for coaches of all levels, the NDC will be central to the development of future coaches in the United States.
If you could design the wearable tech of your dreams for endurance training and performance, what primary data would you choose to display on the face of the device? Would it be heart rate? Heart rate variability? Cadence and stride length? Real-time pace? Mechanical power? Blood lactate level? VO2?
The possible choices are pretty much endless, and each of those options has pros and cons that provide fodder for spirited debate. But there’s another, less heralded pick that doesn’t get much attention—and according to a recent article in Frontiers in Physiology, it may trump them all. Well-known cycling expert Louis Passfield of the University of Kent’s Endurance Research Group, along with Italian researchers Andrea Nicolò and Carlo Massaroni, make the case for “respiratory frequency,” or breathing rate, which is simply how fast you’re panting.
The gist of the argument is that breathing rate offers a surprisingly accurate estimate of how hard you’re working—something more typically quantified by asking an athlete to subjectively rate their effort on a scale of 1 to 10 (or 6 to 20, an effort scale that is more often used for historical reasons).
As we grow older, our muscular function declines. A new study by researchers at Karolinska Institutet shows how an unexpectedly high number of mutations in the stem cells of muscles impair cell regeneration. This discovery may result in new medication to build stronger muscles even when in old age. The study is published in Nature Communications.
The shelves of drug-testing laboratories in dozens of countries are stocked with biological samples from the best athletes in the world, who deliver blood and urine for investigators to test for banned performance-enhancing substances. They’re a veritable gold mine for scientists looking to figure out what, exactly, makes an athlete at the highest level tick.
In one of the first-ever broad looks at the metabolic profiles of elite athletes, researchers at the Anti-Doping Laboratory in Qatar took advantage of that sample set. They wanted to tease out the differences between the biochemistry of power athletes, like weightlifters, and endurance athletes, like cross-country skiers. They published their results in the journal Sports Medicine in January.
Dozens of factors, both environmental and biological, go into the makeup of an elite athlete. “It’s such a complicated phenotype,” said Mohamed El-Rayess, lead author on the study. That’s why the team turned to metabolic analysis, which takes an in-depth look at the hundreds of substances that are formed as byproducts of reactions in the body. Metabolic profiles are impacted both by someone’s genetics, and by their activity and environment. That makes it a useful intermediary tool to learn about these athletes, El-Rayess said.
… In all my time writing about the different kinds of data visualization people and how data visualization is stuck in a conservative rut or might be choking itself professionally, I don’t think I’ve ever directly engaged with what, exactly, it is that I do.
I‘m always a little on edge when I get asked this question because normally a question like this comes from one of two sources: people looking to transition into the profession or people who work alongside the profession who want to better understand it. But in the case of data visualization, this kind of question also comes from people in the field who don’t believe that there is such a profession.
The San Francisco Giants sold out 530 straight games before their streak ended in July, and they feel obliged to put a competitive product on the field for all those die-hard ticket holders by the bay. Even in rough years, the Giants are committed to staying the course rather than selling off big-name assets, punting on contention and pacifying the fan base with prospects and sumptuous garlic fries at AT&T Park.
That approach failed to yield positive results in 2017, when the Giants finished last in the National League West for the first time since 2007. But the players who form the nucleus of the lineup and the heartbeat of the clubhouse are grateful for the opportunity to stay together and have a crack at redemption.
“I’m very happy to be a part of an organization that is doing that,” catcher Buster Posey said. “I thought about it when the Rays [designated] Corey Dickerson [for assignment] after he hit 27 homers. I’m glad I didn’t get drafted by the Rays.”