… Jon Sanderson, the team’s strength and conditioning coach, has witnessed Beilein’s adjustment to the latest hoops technology.
When the former Ohio State and Ohio University player left a similar position at Clemson to work for Beilein nearly a decade ago, he started tracking how hard the Wolverines were exerting themselves in practices and workouts.
“When I first presented him with data back then, Coach didn’t receive it very well and was irritated when I offered an idea to make a change,” Sanderson recalled. “Now in 2018, he uses the data I present to him 100 percent to make decisions such as how hard to practice. He has evolved as a coach.
Educators in Britain, after decades spent in a collective effort to minimize risk, are now, cautiously, getting into the business of providing it.
Four years ago, for instance, teachers at the Richmond Avenue Primary and Nursery School looked critically around their campus and set about, as one of them put it, “bringing in risk.”
Out went the plastic playhouses and in came the dicey stuff: stacks of two-by-fours, crates and loose bricks. The schoolyard got a mud pit, a tire swing, log stumps and workbenches with hammers and saws.
“We thought, how can we bring that element of risk into your everyday environment?” said Leah Morris, who manages the early years program at the school in Shoeburyness in southeast Britain. “We were looking at, O.K., so we’ve got a sand pit, what can we add to the sand pit to make it more risky?”
To get faster, you have to run faster…right? Not necessarily. Though speedwork is a highly-effective way to shave seconds off your splits, it’s not the only way. For many runners, speedwork is a one-way ticket to the injured reserve, as bones, muscles and joints struggle to meet the demands of such high-intensity training.
The alternative? Hill running. The concept is summed up nicely by Olympic marathoner Frank Shorter, who famously said “hills are speedwork in disguise.” The adage leaves some runners understandably skeptical; after all, most people slow down significantly on inclines. To run slow to get faster sounds too good to be true. But ask any successful runner how they break through a plateau to get a PR, and they’ll likely credit hill work. As it turns out, your body goes through a series of adjustments as the terrain shifts up, which makes your run splits go down – way down.
Monitoring training and recovery are essential for exercise programming. Athletes can validly assess training load (TL) via the session rating of perceived exertion (SRPE) technique. However, it is unclear if coaches can successfully use this model. PURPOSE:
This study compared coach and athlete perceptions of effort and recovery and evaluated the efficacy of perceptually-based TL monitoring. METHODS:
Participants included 56 athletes (Women’s volleyball, soccer, and basketball and Men’s basketball) and their coaches (n = 4). Perceived recovery was estimated via the Perceived Recovery Status scale. TL scores were calculated using the Edward’s HR method and by multiplying SRPE by duration. Coaches provided an intended SRPE (SRPE-CI) before practice. SRPE was independently estimated by coaches (SRPE-CO) and athletes (SRPE-A) ∼15-20 minutes post-practice. Paired t-tests and Pearson correlations were applied to make comparisons (α ≤ 0.05). RESULTS:
SRPE-CI, SRPE-CO, SRPE-A TLs were strongly correlated with Edwards’ HR-based TLs (R = 0.74, 0.73, and 0.76, respectively). SRPE-CI (5.5 ± 1.9) and SRPE-CO (5.0 ± 1.9) was higher than SRPE-A (4.5 ± 1.9). Coaches estimated recovery (RPR-C) higher than athletes (RPR-A) (7.1 ± 1.3 vs 5.8 ± 1.6). CONCLUSIONS:
TL estimates were strongly correlated with Edwards’ TL regardless of information source (coach or athlete) or time point (SRPE-CI TL or SRPE-CO TL). Results suggest coaches’ perceptions validly indicated TL. Coaches’ perceptions provide parallel information (correlated strongly with Edwards TL), but not identical information (demonstrated by differences in SRPE) as athlete perceptions. Differences in perceived recovery indicate coaches overestimate recovery when compared to athletes’ perceptions.
People should be getting two and a half hours sleep a night more than the current recommendation, if our chimp and baboon cousins are anything to go by.
A large comparison of primate sleep patterns found most species get between nine and 15 hours shut-eye a day, while humans average just seven.
Archaeology reveals that humans started wearing clothes some 170,000 years ago, very close to the second-to-last ice age. Even now, though, most modern humans wear clothes that are only barely different from those earliest garments. But that’s about to change as flexible electronics are increasingly woven into what are being called “smart fabrics.”
Many of these are already available for purchase, such as leggings that provide gentle vibrations for easier yoga, T-shirts that track player performance and sports bras that monitor heart rate. Smart fabrics have potentially promising uses in health care (measuring patients’ heart rate and blood pressure), defense (monitoring soldiers’ health and activity levels), cars (adjusting seat temperatures to make passengers more comfortable) and even smart cities (letting signs communicate with passersby).
Ideally, the electronic components of these garments – sensors, antennas to transmit data and batteries to supply power – will be small, flexible and largely unnoticed by their wearers. That’s true today for sensors, many of which are even machine-washable. But most antennas and batteries are rigid and not waterproof, so they need to be detached from the clothing before washing it.
My work at the ElectroScience Laboratory of the Ohio State University aims to make antennas and power sources that are equally flexible and washable. Specifically, we’re embroidering electronics directly into fabrics using conductive threads, which we call “e-threads.”
Lopec, the trade fair for printed electronics, brings one of the most exciting technologies of the future to Messe München. Lopec opened its doors from 14 to 15 March. The congress lasts one day longer, from 13 to 15 March.
Here, printed electronics are used in a T-shirt.
There are also many fields of application for printed electronics in the sports sector. For example, printed thermo, moisture or heart rate sensors can be used in sports textiles. Parts from printed electronics can also be used for wearables. At the Lopec (Large-area, Organic & Printed Electronics Convention) the complete value-added chain of this future-oriented technology will be presented.
The AliveCor KardiaBand, a sensor compatible with the Apple Watch, can detect dangerous levels of potassium in blood with 94 percent accuracy. Though the US Food and Drug Administration has not yet approved KardiaBand for this purpose, it’s an interesting step forward considering that, right now, the condition is usually caught using invasive blood tests that use needles.
The KardiaBand by AliveCor is a sensor that snaps into a slot on the watchband. The user touches the sensor, which then takes a reading of the electrical activity of the heart, called an electrocardiogram (EKG). This reading can reveal abnormal heart rhythm and atrial fibrillation (AFib), and the sensor sends the information to an app. Yesterday, at the American College of Cardiology conference in Florida, AliveCor CEO Vic Gundotra presented research done with the Mayo Clinic showing that the same technology can detect too-high levels of potassium in the blood, called hyperkalemia.
Hyperkalemia can be caused by, among other things, diabetes, dehydration, and chronic kidney disease. It can lead to kidney and heart failure and in general doesn’t cause obvious symptoms — meaning you could have the condition and not know it.
… Bone is a living tissue that constantly renews itself. “Your skeleton is completely new every 10 years,” says Dr. Deal.
In childhood and adolescence, bone buildup outpaces bone removal, or loss.
In your early 20s, the density of minerals in your bones peaks. Your bone mass may stabilize or start slowly declining as bone loss overtakes bone buildup.
JAMA, The JAMA Network, Viewpoint; JoAnn E. Manson and Shari S. Bassuk from
Dietary supplementation is approximately a $30 billion industry in the United States, with more than 90 000 products on the market. In recent national surveys, 52% of US adults reported use of at least 1 supplement product, and 10% reported use of at least 4 such products.1 Vitamins and minerals are among the most popular supplements and are taken by 48% and 39% of adults, respectively, typically to maintain health and prevent disease.
… While the front of the pop-up is designed to show off the wide variety of Gatorade products, the back is all about introducing SXSW attendees to how the brand is using technology to help athletes hone their skills. Overall, the whole activation is aimed at showing people that Gatorade is more than just a hydration company.
“The G-Store SXSW pop-up is a way for us to showcase how broad the Gatorade product portfolio really is—hydration, energy, recovery, endurance products and more—with a twist. While the retail shop spotlights innovative ways Gatorade is fueling athletes, the stockroom is a competitive playground that showcases how evolving technology is fueling athletes training,” Gina Hardy, head of consumer and athlete engagement for Gatorade, said.
Tucked away in the back of the pop-up, Gatorade set up a number of tech-driven programs that are designed with athletes in mind. There’s a station for basketball players where the Handles Hero machine uses Lazer 900 to dish out ball-handling drills. The Handless Hero is used by several NBA teams as a training tool that tracks how closely the player is dribbling to the moves that are being depicted on the screen in front of them.
College Baseball Scouting Network, Desi Druschel and Rick Heller from
The turn of the last century marked a significant change in the way baseball is analyzed. Upon its 2003 publishing, Michael Lewis’ Moneyball revolutionized the way small-market clubs could leverage data, instead of relying on traditional player development and scouting methods to field a competitive team in a sport with no salary cap.
Fast-forward ten years, and the full scale “Sabermetric Revolution” of baseball has become not simply a suggestion or a hypothetical, but a requirement. In 2011, the Chicago Cubs and Houston Astros cleaned house in their front offices and hired data-driven general managers to revamp those teams. Another few years later, and the Cubs and Astros broke long historical droughts with World Series titles. Small market clubs from the A’s, to even the New York Yankees now employ analytics departments that use advanced technical systems, among other things, to collect data, which has become the lifeblood of understanding and thriving as a baseball team in the 21st century.
In the last few seasons, this data-driven approach has trickled down to the college game. Many college programs now employ advanced tools and ample use of video to develop and coach players, have their own analytics (staffed by student managers or development personnel) and coaches that encourage deployment of data and advanced systems. This description applies to the Iowa Hawkeye baseball program.
Fansided, Reviewing the Brew blog, Curt Hanke from
… Everything that [David] Stearns has done, where to spend capital, how much to invest in and utilize the farm system, the duration of contracts (both term and amount), is guided by a ruthless devotion to employing best practices across every function of baseball operations, including data and analytics. Even just the phrase “best practices” in the context of a baseball team makes eyes roll among many purists. The national pastime polluted with management principles and business jargon? For shame.
From a roster perspective, this has meant a bias against big names for the Brewers, and for wringing as much talent as possible from each individual dollar. In other words, Stearns’ approach has been to speak softly and carry a big bench.
This penchant for data has flowed all the way down to the Miller Park scoreboard, where batting averages were replaced with “OPS”. This sabermetric baseball statistic combines on-base percentage and slugging average. While OPS is admittedly a mathematical MacGyver if ever there was one, it has not only gained momentum among the Numerati, but actually correlates better with run production than most other batting statistics.
… Bills GM Brandon Beane and head coach Sean McDermott made a firm commitment to further developing the analytic side of their football operation this offseason.
Hiring Luis Guilamo, who was already working for the team as an outside consultant over the past year, was the first step. They will steadily build out a department that will not only compile the mountains of data, but compartmentalize and present it in a way for Beane, McDermott and the rest of the front office to easily digest and apply as they see fit.
“I’ve seen what analytics can do,” Beane told Buffalobills.com. “There are a lot of data points, from GPS, to all the data you get from various statistical sites that track where every player is. Some of it is as simple as compiling the data. We know there are millions of numbers. Now we have someone weeding things out for us and we tell them what we want to see.”
A 40-yard strip of turf steals the show every year at the NFL Scouting Combine, but the real dash takes place in the bowels of Lucas Oil Stadium.
That’s where medical staffs from all 32 clubs conduct thorough evaluations of more than 300 prospects they have never examined before.
“Obviously in this sport, there are a lot of injuries and a lot of injury history, so it’s an important part of what we do,” said Dr. Scott Rodeo, the Giants’ head team physician and sports medicine surgeon at Hospital for Special Surgery. “[We’re] trying to carefully evaluate their injuries, their histories, we can do imaging studies, so it’s a big part of what we do here.”