… Fast forward to present day San Ramon, California, and here I am. Right now, I’m living in a house with four other NFL draft hopefuls — Zaycoven Henderson from Texas A&M, Henry Mondeaux from Oregon, Jordan Veasy from Cal, and Andrew Caskin from William & Mary. We come from schools thousands of miles apart, we have no prior relationships with one another, yet we all share a common goal. We all want to fulfill that childhood dream of playing in the National Football League.
Every morning we meet up with 10 other guys on the same mission as us and we work to improve our performances on a set of speed and agility drills that will ultimately increase or decrease our value in the eyes of an NFL franchise. Our trainer, coach David Spitz at CalStrength, has been through this process with plenty of guys before. Kiko Alonzo, Zach Ertz, Austin Hooper, and many other pro ballers trusted Spitz during this pivotal training period. We’ve all been molded by our respective college weightlifting programs and it’s fascinating to see how coach works with our strengths and weaknesses. Some guys are strong and stiff while others are flexible and mobile. After a couple of weeks everybody is strong, flexible, mobile, and explosive.
On November 5th, right after halftime against the Hawks, I had a panic attack.
It came out of nowhere. I’d never had one before. I didn’t even know if they were real. But it was real — as real as a broken hand or a sprained ankle. Since that day, almost everything about the way I think about my mental health has changed.
I’ve never been comfortable sharing much about myself. I turned 29 in September and for pretty much 29 years of my life I have been protective about anything and everything in my inner life. I was comfortable talking about basketball — but that came natural. It was much harder to share personal stuff, and looking back now I know I could have really benefited from having someone to talk to over the years. But I didn’t share — not to my family, not to my best friends, not in public. Today, I’ve realized I need to change that. I want to share some of my thoughts about my panic attack and what’s happened since. If you’re suffering silently like I was, then you know how it can feel like nobody really gets it. Partly, I want to do it for me, but mostly, I want to do it because people don’t talk about mental health enough. And men and boys are probably the farthest behind.
Just a few days before his oft-stated deadline for making a decision, Browns left tackle legend Joe Thomas still doesn’t know whether he’ll try to play the 12th and final season on his contract or retire.
“It’s difficult,” Thomas said at the Annual Mike Cleary Northeastern Ohio Chapter of the National Football Foundation Scholar-Athlete Awards Banquet at La Centre in Westlake.
“It’s a little like, I remember being in high school and deciding what college you want to go to. One day you wake up, and you’re thinking, ‘I want to go to Notre dame.’ The next day, ‘I think I want to go to Wisconsin.’ You’ve got to kind of really make sure you spend your time and come up with the right decision.”
Any MLS coach will tell you they structure their six-week preseason to ensure their players are fit and ready for the season opener.
Real Salt Lake coach Mike Petke said there’s no way to structure preseason perfectly either, but, regardless, he was pleased with how his players competed for 90 minutes against an FC Dallas team that already had two CONCACAF Champions League games under its belt before the season opener.
“From a standpoint of, if you put everything together for the Dallas game, where they are as far as their CCL games and being a little bit more fit and how we wanted to approach the game, overall I’m happy with the performance,” said Petke, whose team earned a 1-1 result in Dallas.
Loud music blares inside the clubhouse and several players gather to watch an intense battle during another round of the team’s pingpong tournament.
There’s a different vibe surrounding the Philadelphia Phillies this spring.
New manager Gabe Kapler has brought a new-school philosophy, a ton of energy and plenty of positivity to an organization that needed revitalization after five straight losing seasons.
“He’s the man,” shortstop J.P. Crawford said. “He’s the reason why this clubhouse is like this. He makes everyone feel comfortable and everyone wants to fight for him. He cares so much about us and that translates to us wanting to play for him and win for him and it’s great to have a manager like that.”
Spirited yells filled the chilly morning air as UCLA football players sprinted into orderly rows on the practice field to stretch, their legs and arms moving in unison with military-style precision.
Over the next two hours, there would be no rest for the cheery.
Coach Chip Kelly’s first spring practice guiding the Bruins featured plays that were run quickly, often with only a handful of seconds between snaps. Multiple sets of players worked separately on the same field. There was more repetition than inside an autoworkers plant.
“High energy, fast tempo,” safety Adarius Pickett said Tuesday when asked what it felt like.
Discovery Magazine, D-brief, Nathaniel Scharping from
Is it better to be lucky or good? Well, it’s a trick question — you actually need both if you want to be successful.
In an admittedly simplistic model, researchers from Italy’s University of Catania, looked at whether talented individuals or those blessed with luck rose to the top. Though they found it took a bit of both, the distribution wasn’t even. The most successful people weren’t the most talented — they were simply the luckiest.
My journey in the NFL is no different than most players–we strive to compete at the highest level for as long as possible. To be able to perform week in and week out, recovery is critical.
Recovery protocols differ widely from player to player. We each create our own ecosystems of people and processes that we believe make us feel and play better. When rookies enter the league, the smart ones go around to the veterans and ask for tips on what they do take care of their bodies.
Saunas, steam rooms, hot/cold tubs, cryotherapy, acupuncture, massage, shock therapy, neurofeedback, electro-stimulation, cranial sacral therapy, chiropractic, and transcranial photobiomodulation are just a few of the less crazy recovery techniques you might observe in an NFL locker room.
I recently spoke with two of my former teammates, tight end Luke Willson and guard Richie Incognito, on methods they use to recover throughout the grueling NFL season (and offseason as well). Here are five key takeaways that can benefit athletes of all levels:
Do you sleep more in winter? Do you find that your eating and exercise habits also vary with the seasons? Many people, and even animals and plants, experience slight changes in their daily habits in different seasons. According to recent research on the seasonality of sleep, this is more than a coincidence: In fact, our bodies are primed to make the most out of each part of the year.
With sensors that can collect data on body movements, heart rate, blood pressure and other metrics, the list of health trackers that go beyond activity trackers like Fitbits gets longer each year.
“There’s definitely an explosion of these things,” says Dr. Joseph Kvedar, the vice president for connected health at Partners HealthCare in Boston, and an associate professor of dermatology at Harvard Medical School.
Some of these devices will lead to a better health care system, Kvedar predicts, with cheaper, more efficient care. But that will take separating useful devices and data from superfluous ones — no easy task. And not everyone believes the changes that personal health trackers are bringing will be good. The clinical accuracy and privacy of many devices remain unproved. [audio, 3:05]
The National Association of Speed and Explosion (NASE) Inc. from
Effectiveness of a wireless Sensor Insole in measuring vertically directed ground reaction force (GRF) during the sprinting action: The availability of a device to accurately measure the amount and direction of force applied to the ground with each step during the sprinting action would be major breakthrough. The specific training programs and exercises that increase GRF, decrease ground contact time (GCT), and improve speed in short sprints could then be accurately identified. The technology to develop these sensors is available and researchers are now experimenting with various devices and protocols. An abstract of a study by Nagahara and Morin (2018), who tested one type of shoe insole sensor, follows.
From inside a lab at the University of Pittsburgh to a local Dunkin Donuts shop and finally to Major League Baseball, it’s been a quite the sports technology adventure for Diamond Kinetics.
The Pittsburgh-based startup launched in 2013, initially using technology to properly fit amateur baseball players with the correct bat. That idea evolved over the past five years as Diamond Kinetics developed bat sensors to help analyze a batter’s swing. The product is used by more than 15 MLB teams and 52 NCAA programs, in addition to thousands of younger players.
The latest chapter began this week as the company announced its latest innovation, PitchTracker, a smart baseball that measures velocity, spin rate, extension, time-to-the-plate, timing delivery and reach back to release, giving pitchers previously unknown information about their throwing mechanics. It uses the same sensor technology Diamond Kinetics developed for batters, but now it’s embedded inside of a baseball for pitchers.
… No Heyward, no Stanton — and no David Price, either. Price, the former Cy Young Award winner, turned down the Cardinals’ nine-figure offer in free agency to sign with Boston before the 2016 season. The wisdom of those deals is beside the point; the Cardinals, known for winning, kept coming in second.
“You get beat up for that,” Mozeliak said. “I think in our case, we’re going to continue to try. Obviously we won’t bat a thousand. There’s going to be people that tell us no. But we still think this is a very exciting place to play, and we still think this team’s going to be very competitive.”
The Cardinals usually are. Only 12 major league teams had winning records last season: the 10 playoff teams, plus the Milwaukee Brewers (86-76) and the Cardinals (83-79). It was the Cardinals’ 10th consecutive season with a winning record, an active streak exceeded only by the Yankees, who have 25.
Marcus Mariota’s athleticism and playmaking ability are what sets him apart from most quarterbacks, and the Tennessee Titans will spend this offseason figuring out how to maximize that skillset without risking his health.
“We have an idea of what plays he may end up running and what plays he may end up handing it off and throwing. We’ve got to be smart, and he’s got to be smart,” Titans head coach Mike Vrabel said. “How much are we going to use him to run the ball? How much harm is he going to put himself in? The risk-reward of when he does run with the football.”
The Titans believe they can unleash Mariota without necessarily putting him in more harm.
A few weeks ago, as I dialed in to the fourth of five hour-long conference calls scheduled that Tuesday at my place of regular employment, I began to wonder idly how major-league teams and executives conducted their own sorts of correspondence. These are important people, I reasoned. Surely, they live lives of glamour and fascination, removed from such mundane tasks. Surely, they don’t dial into five hour-long conference calls every Tuesday.
And it’s true: they don’t do that. Over the past few weeks, I’ve asked multiple senior MLB executives a series of questions about how, in the most basic and concrete sense, they talk with their colleagues around the game. It turns out that, generally speaking, they live lives very far removed from glamour and fascination, and the way they communicate is basically the same way you and I do. It turns out that they text. A lot.
“It’s funny,” said one senior AL executive. “I don’t know why we even go to the Winter Meetings anymore. It’s the most ridiculous thing in the world — we’re all sitting there in the same hotel, and everybody’s texting each other.”