… “He’s got a live arm, he’s extremely accurate on the run, he’s got touch,” Mayock told The MMQB after the workout. “He missed a couple of throws on the sideline, but at the end of the day he’s very accurate and it seems like the thing he’s working on hardest is his footwork, which he needs.”
But the workout wouldn’t sway evaluators either way, Mayock says. The real work on Mayfield was being done in private meetings and in conversations with folks around the facility who interacted with him every day for four years. “I think people look at his attitude and say we can embrace that, and he can be the face of our franchise,” Mayock says. “Other teams say there’s some immaturity there. He’s a polarizing figure. You either really, really like him, or your really don’t.”
Mayfield said the best thing he heard during his pro day came in a private conversation with an evaluator he won’t name. “He told me to keep being myself,” Mayfield says.
… So a simple question is asked of him. Why is he here?
“I think it’s part of being a professional,” Daniels said. “I think it’s something these young guys will learn. To survive in this league, even if you’re a lottery pick, you always have to be working on your game, tuning it up.”
Adhering to that regimen isn’t easy. The playoffs – and any hope of a respectable season – vanished long ago for the Suns. It’s a slog now, one city to the next, one loss to the next. Inspiration can be hard to find.
Tony Strudwick, Manchester United’s long-standing Head of Performance and one of the leading figures in sport science in this country, has joined Ryan Giggs’ Wales backroom staff.
The appointment is a major coup for Giggs, who was appointed Wales boss in January. Strudwick has worked with United since 2007 and was part of Sir Alex Ferguson’s inner circle at the club.
Haley Archuleta had the finish to her prep soccer career mapped out. The Gonzaga commit and most of her Real Colorado teammates were planning to again play for the program’s Elite Clubs National League team and for their high schools this spring. As the seniors who had already earned Division I scholarships, there wasn’t much left for them to prove.
But Archuleta, one of the leading scorers on Arapahoe’s Class 5A state runner-up team last year, didn’t get a say in the matter.
As a result of the launch of the U.S. Soccer Girls Development Academy, which is in its inaugural season, Archuleta and more than 70 of the best varsity players throughout Colorado were forced to pick between participating for their high school team or their club team that was under the academy’s jurisdiction.
What’s followed has been a siphoning of talent from the best high school teams, and the Girls Development Academy’s rigid participation rules have created a wide divide between U.S. Soccer and its grassroots stakeholders on a nationwide scale.
… “The only way you actually get an opportunity to work on it is when you are going through things that aren’t necessarily going your way,” he said following the morning shootaround at UCLA. “We are getting better. We are getting stronger from this. And I truly believe that we’ll find the benefits of going through these kinds of games and the emotions.”
Moments such as these, Spoelstra said, could sow payoffs in the playoffs.
“It’s a lot of teaching points,” he said, “not only schematically, but also from a focus standpoint, attention to detail and emotional stability.
International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance from
Time–motion analysis is a valuable data-collection technique used to quantify the physical match performance of elite soccer players. For over 40 years researchers have adopted a ‘traditional’ approach when evaluating match demands by simply reporting the distance covered or time spent along a motion continuum of walking through to sprinting. This methodology quantifies physical metrics in isolation without integrating other factors and this ultimately leads to a one-dimensional insight into match performance. Thus, this commentary proposes a novel ‘integrated’ approach that focuses on a sensitive physical metric such as high-intensity running but contextualizes this in relation to key tactical activities for each position and collectively for the team. In the example presented, the ‘integrated’ model clearly unveils the unique high-intensity profile that exists due to distinct tactical roles, rather than one-dimensional ‘blind’ distances produced by ‘traditional’ models. Intuitively this innovative concept may aid the coaches understanding of the physical performance in relation to the tactical roles and instructions given to the players. Additionally, it will enable practitioners to more effectively translate match metrics into training and testing protocols. This innovative model may well aid advances in other team sports that incorporate similar intermittent movements with tactical purpose. Evidence of the merits and application of this new concept are needed before the scientific community accepts this model as it may well add complexity to an area that conceivably needs simplicity.
For more than 20 years, Stanford’s Jamie Zeitzer, PhD, has been studying the things that get in the way of a good night’s rest. Now, he’s turning his attention to some of the most fundamental questions in the field of sleep research.
“I finally reached the point in my career where I’m asking the questions I probably should have asked when I started,” Zeitzer joked as he began his presentation on recent advancements in sleep monitoring at this month’s Precision Health and Integrated Diagnostics seminar held at Stanford.
“What exactly is sleep?” Zeitzer asked the audience, giving them a taste of the kind of questions his research now addresses.
“We know what sleep is, but we cannot define it well,” Zeitzer explained. Part of the problem is, he said, “there are many things you can do to measure sleep, but most of them are completely artificial and are based on 1950s tech… Newer tech is in the pipeline, but it’s still not the best way to measure sleep, particularly in the context of precision health.”
… Patel, who is a part of the world’s first-ever behavioral design team in a health system, says the study data suggests that the design and framing of incentives are crucial in persuading people to be more active. Access to the technology and financial incentives alone, he concluded, may not be enough.
“One challenge is most of these incentives are designed under the standard economic approach: ‘You lose weight, be active, get your metric screening, then we’ll pay you. We won’t give you cash; it’ll come as a deduction in your health insurance premium, which you’ll never see because it’s tied to your bi-weekly paycheck and shunted to your bank account through direct deposit,’” Patel says. “It’s hidden; it’s delayed. These are all things we know from behavioral economics are not very motivating to people.”
… “We have a medical records system where, for every one hour cumulatively I spend with a patient, I spend two hours charting on this computer and another hour at night further dealing with the inbox related to all of this,” Verghese said.
Some may wonder if the personal touch is still needed, Verghese said. He argued that it is. People can assess a situation in ways that computers cannot, thus avoiding potential medical errors, particularly in the most seriously ill patients, he said. Additionally, the relationship between a doctor and a patient is fundamentally human: an individual providing care to another individual at their most vulnerable.
“The ritual of the exam, when performed well, it really seals the physician-patient relationship,” he said. “It localizes the illness, not on a lab report somewhere, not in an image somewhere, but on one’s body.”
For young adults, technology often substitutes for in-person interaction, but that doesn’t necessarily make the communication less meaningful, said Stanford linguist Sarah Ogilvie, PhD. She spoke of an undergraduate who decided to skip in-person lectures and watch them online at an accelerated speed in order to pay better attention.
“They are forced to concentrate to try and follow what the lecturer is saying and they are no longer distracted by their social media, which they say is the big distraction when they go to a physical lecture,” Ogilvie said.
… “Everything considered, all the above, he was a very, very quick recovery,” Dr. Wichman said.
Here’s a little perspective for Wisconsin sports fans. Adrian Peterson of the rival Vikings was considered a medical marvel when he returned to the gridiron eight-and-a-half months after his ACL tear. The Bucks’ Jabari Parker, rightly so, took almost a full year in coming back from his second tear in three seasons.
“Jimmy got back to playing professional hockey at five months. He counted it out. Five months, three weeks and some change, or something like that,” Dr. Wichman said.
So how did Oligny do it? And what can future patients, pro athlete or not, take from his recovery? First of all, there’s the procedure. Dr. Wichman used a piece of Oligny’s hamstring to replace the frayed ligament.
Two weeks after he twice crashed into an outfield wall, Clint Frazier could not keep the names of his cats — Papi and Phoenix — straight. He gave up driving to work at times because his depth perception was off. And when he swung a bat, his head became muddled.
“Foggy,” Frazier said last week when asked to describe how he felt. “It’s the word of the day.”
The symptoms did not change the prescription for the young Yankees outfielder: keep on swinging, running and throwing, and get back on the exercise bike, which he estimated riding 30 miles in the previous week.
“I’m killing it on the bike,” he said.
Such a recovery program is a reflection of how rapidly knowledge of brain injuries is increasing and how treatments for athletes are evolving.
… It’s true that caffeine’s power as a performance booster is uniquely well-supported by a big pile of well-designed scientific studies. There’s even a whole book about its athletic applications, written by some of the most respected sports nutrition researchers in the world. Study after study shows that caffeine enhances performance, particularly in endurance events, by a few percent—on average.
But a few years ago, researchers started to look more closely at the individual variability in response to caffeine. Every study has some more or less random scatter in its results: If the average improvement is 3 percent, some people might actually get 6 percent better, while others don’t improve at all. But not all scatter is random. A few years ago, evidence started to emerge that some people were consistently more likely to benefit from caffeine than others, and some might actually get slower after taking caffeine, based on their genetic profile. The biggest study to date on this topic has just been published in Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, and the results are striking.
The World Anti-Doping Agency plans to use artificial intelligence in its fight against doping, Olivier Niggli, the organisation’s director general has exclusively revealed to i.
“We’re having discussions on artificial intelligence going forward. There’s a lot of promising things,” Niggli said.
Wada will launch a call for pilot artificial intelligence projects in the coming weeks, as it intensifies attempts to use the technology.
Over the past few decades, genetic research has revealed two deep truths about people. The first is that all humans are closely related—more closely related than all chimps, even though there are many more humans around today. Everyone has the same collection of genes, but with the exception of identical twins, everyone has slightly different versions of some of them. Studies of this genetic diversity have allowed scientists to reconstruct a kind of family tree of human populations. That has revealed the second deep truth: In a very real sense, all people alive today are Africans.
Our species, Homo sapiens, evolved in Africa—no one is sure of the exact time or place. The most recent fossil find, from Morocco, suggests that anatomically modern human features began appearing as long as 300,000 years ago. For the next 200,000 years or so, we remained in Africa, but already during that period, groups began to move to different parts of the continent and become isolated from one another—in effect founding new populations.
