Noah Syndergaard draws an imaginary line from his armpit down the right side of his body.
“Your lat is a huge muscle that goes from under here, all the way down your back,” he says, explaining how it interacts with his hips and his leg muscles. Syndergaard is speaking about what he learned last season, after a lat tear torpedoed what was supposed to be one of the best years of his career. He is talking about hip flexibility and t-spine mobility, the types of things that prompt trainer Eric Cressey to call him “a little bit of a nerd.”
… “The hardest part is just not playing – getting ready every day, doing everything else, but not playing,” Giles said. “I have to pack the same, pretty much. I might pack more blazers than anybody else because I know I’m not going to play.”
But he’s working on changing that, inching toward getting his body – most importantly, the knees that have undergone three operations in four years – ready to finally take the court with each repetitive motion.
Few could blame the North Carolina native, twice the top-rated high school player in the nation, if he’d vent in frustration at his current circumstances or ponder hypothetical what-if scenarios, but his upbeat demeanor never dissipates.
“Because I know that my time is coming,” he said. “It’s not like I’m (thinking), ‘I might not play. I might not do this or do that.’ I know it’s about just me working and getting better. I have to look at it like it’s only getting me ready for when my time really comes.”
The discovery and development of a potential multi-million pound footballer is never smooth or straightforward.
But for professional clubs, finding a young gem who can go on to be a star player, or alternatively be sold at great profit, is good business.
That is particularly true in an era when financial fair play rules across Europe are encouraging clubs to balance the books and nurture home-grown talent.
At Spurs, Harry Kane was valued earlier this year at £172m – not bad for a player who was signed as a teenager for no fee.
That is why top Premier League clubs in England are increasingly using data both to try and discover young players, and also to help develop their playing and physical progress from a young age.
Damion Lee has twice suffered an injury that is known to shorten — or even end — careers.
While at Drexel University, Lee missed most of his junior season after tearing the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) in his right knee in December 2013. Just 16 games into his professional career in January 2017, Lee tore the ACL in his left knee and was released by the G League’s Maine Red Claws.
Successfully returning from one ACL tear is difficult enough, as the recovery process can last upward of one year — Lee had to endure that process twice. Despite the long odds, Lee said he was never deterred from his goal of playing in the NBA.
… The workload they have, even for those with great assistant coaches and video staff, is unending. They have to make a hundred decisions every day: when to practice, and how long. How to try and guard LeBron James or Kevin Durant or James Harden (and with whom). Patting one guy on the back while kicking another in the behind. Working with the general manager (if they’re lucky and don’t have a bad relationship with their boss). Media demands in the morning, afternoon and night. Handling irate agents who want more playing time and shots for their clients; looking at their team and their opponents on tape, over and over and over.
… If you could do only one thing right in your training as an endurance athlete, what should it be? In other words, what is the single most beneficial training practice you could employ as an endurance athlete seeking improved performance? And if you were already doing this one thing, what then is the next most impactful method you could incorporate?
If we were to pursue this line of questioning all the way through to the end, we would end up with a sort of hierarchy of endurance training needs. How useful that would be! Well, guess what? This hierarchy already exists, created by one of my very favorite sports scientists, Stephen Seiler, who drew upon his encyclopedic knowledge of research on endurance training practices to perform the exercise I just described. With a nod to Abraham Maslow’s famous hierarchy of psychological needs, Seiler’s Hierarchy of Endurance Training Needs ranks eight fundamental training practices in order of proven impact. If there’s a more helpful tool for understanding the big picture of endurance training, I haven’t seen it. So, let’s go through the hierarchy (see Seiler’s own graphical summary at the end of this post):
Bad sleep habits in children begin earlier than many experts assume. That’s the takeaway from a new study led by McGill University researchers. The findings suggest that official sleep guidelines for young school children should be revisited – and that parents ought to maintain firm bedtime rules throughout children’s primary-school years.
The researchers studied the sleep patterns of children aged six to 11 years old, and found that those aged 8-11 increasingly showed the unhealthy patterns usually associated with adolescence: delayed bedtimes, inconsistent schedules, and sleep deprivation. Such patterns have been shown to impair children’s physical and mental health, as well as academic performance.
“Our findings contradict the prevailing assumption that sleep patterns remain largely unchanged during the school-age period, from six to 13 years old,” says Reut Gruber, an associate professor in McGill’s Department of Psychiatry and lead author of the study.
… While Federer and Nadal were dominating once more, their biggest rivals decided to follow the examples they had set. Djokovic, Andy Murray, Stan Wawrinka and Kei Nishikori all sat out the US Open and missed the entire fall season. All had medical reasons for doing so. Djokovic had the elbow problem, Murray was dealing with a hip injury, Wawrinka needed knee surgery and Nishikori had a torn tendon in his wrist.
All were also at the age when tennis bodies begin to give out. Murray, Djokovic and Wawrinka are all over 30, and Nishikori is in his late 20s. While they were involuntarily sidelined, they no doubt figured that what worked so well for Federer and Nadal would work for them, too.
Not so. Murray ended up having surgery and won’t be back until late spring at the earliest. Wawrinka, after a brief return, is sidelined again because of his knee. Nishikori skipped the Australian to give his wrist more time to strengthen and sat out Indian Wells. So did Nadal, who after his spectacular 2017 is hobbled once again by an injury, this time to his leg, a continuation of the boom-and-bust cycle that has characterized his career.
The first pieces of the brain’s “inner GPS” started coming to light in 1970. In the laboratories of University College London, John O’Keefe and his student Jonathan Dostrovsky recorded the electrical activity of neurons in the hippocampus of freely moving rats. They found a group of neurons that increased their activity only when a rat found itself in a particular location.1 They called them “place cells.”
Building on these early findings, O’Keefe and his colleague Lynn Nadel proposed that the hippocampus contains an invariant representation of space that does not depend on mood or desire. They called this representation the “cognitive map.”2 In their view, all of the brain’s place cells together represent the entirety of an animal’s environment, and whichever place cell is active indicates its current location. In other words, the hippocampus is like a GPS. It tells you where you are on a map and that map remains the same whether you are hungry and looking for food or sleepy and looking for a bed. O’Keefe and Nadel suggested that the absolute position represented in the hippocampal place cells provides a mental framework that can be used by an animal to find its way in any situation—be that to find food or a bed.
There is increasing demand from the public for direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic tests, and the US Food and Drug Administration limits the type of health-related claims DTC tests can market. Some DTC companies provide raw genotyping data to customers if requested, and these raw data may include variants occurring in genes recommended by the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics to be reported as incidental/secondary findings. The purpose of this study was to review the outcome of requests for clinical confirmation of DTC results that were received by our laboratory and to analyze variant classification concordance. Methods
We identified 49 patient samples received for further testing that had previously identified genetic variants reported in DTC raw data. For each case identified, information pertaining to the outcome of clinical confirmation testing as well as classification of the DTC variant was collected and analyzed. Results
Our analyses indicated that 40% of variants in a variety of genes reported in DTC raw data were false positives. In addition, some variants designated with the “increased risk” classification in DTC raw data or by a third-party interpretation service were classified as benign at Ambry Genetics as well as several other clinical laboratories, and are noted to be common variants in publicly available population frequency databases. Conclusion
Our results demonstrate the importance of confirming DTC raw data variants in a clinical laboratory that is well versed in both complex variant detection and classification.
PLOS One; Adriano Marques de Almeida, Paulo Roberto Santos Silva, André Pedrinelli, Arnaldo J. Hernandez from
Although anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) reconstruction is considered a successful procedure in restoring knee stability, few studies have addressed the issue of aerobic capacity after ACL surgery. Soccer players need technical, tactical and physical skills to succeed, such as good knee function and aerobic capacity. Our purpose is to evaluate aerobic fitness in ACL injured professional football players and six months after ACL reconstruction compared to a control group. Twenty athletes with ACL injury were evaluated and underwent ACL reconstruction with hamstrings autograft, and were compared to twenty healthy professional soccer players. The methods used to evaluate aerobic fitness were maximum oxygen uptake (VO2max) and ventilatory thresholds with a treadmill protocol, before and six months after surgery, compared to a control group. Knee function questionnaires, isokinetic strength testing and body composition evaluation were also performed. Results: Median ACL-injured patients age was 21 years old, and controls 20.5 years old. (n.s.). Preoperative VO2max in the ACL injured group was 45.2 ± 4.3 mL/kg/min, postoperative 48.9 ± 3.8 mL/kg/min and controls 56.9 ± 4.2 mL/kg/min. (p< .001 in all comparisons). Body composition evaluation was similar in all situations. Knee function questionnaires and quadriceps peak torque deficit improved after surgery but were significantly lower compared to controls. Conclusion: Aerobic fitness is significantly reduced in professional soccer players with ACL injury, and six months of rehabilitation was not enough to restore aerobic function after ACL reconstruction, compared to non-injured players of the same level.
… Investigators believe what they uncovered was a trafficker who sat at the center of one of the broadest sports doping networks in American history, with tendrils that extended to Europe and Asia. In one year, he shipped parcels containing performance-enhancing drugs to more than 8,000 people, they determined. His substance of choice was peptides, a newly popular (though banned) substance among athletes that is essentially a building block for protein.
His clientele included a dozen pro football players and coaches; pro baseball players and a major league batting coach; and top track and field athletes. There were Olympians and potential Olympians, from discus throwers to sprinters to pole-vaulters to weight lifters to wrestlers.
Investigators assembled what they considered a hay pile of incriminating evidence: surveillance video of the man making the shipments; invoices and payment receipts; email messages; and testimony from several athletes who purchased drugs from him that corroborated the nature of his business.
Yet the dealer has not faced criminal charges. He distributed drugs that inhabit a hazy gray zone. Prosecutors generally treat the possession of peptides, which are illegal without a medical prescription, as a misdemeanor.
… Sources told ESPN that Curry was seen leaving the practice facility on Saturday with a limp and carrying a “Game Ready” hot and cold therapy system for his knee. But people close to Curry said he’s in good spirits and determined to come back at full strength during the playoffs.
Golden State is in somewhat familiar territory. Last season, Durant was sidelined for just over five weeks with an MCL sprain in his left knee that was injured when teammate Zaza Pachulia inadvertently rammed his head into Durant’s knee while falling to the hardwood. Durant was able to return with three games remaining in the regular season and found his rhythm prior to facing the Warriors’ first-round opponent, the Portland Trail Blazers.
“We’ve been through this,” Warriors head coach Steve Kerr said after practice Saturday. “We know the formula.”
Sportsnet How is the team better now than at the end of 2017?
Mark Shapiro Ross (Atkins) and our baseball operations group acknowledged that last year the combination of challenges in depth and versatility along with a mature position-player club created some weaknesses for us. This year, we’ve got more depth, we’ve got more versatility and that, in combination with the progression of our own players leads all of us to feel like we’re in a much better spot to handle what lies ahead and some of the unknowns.
SN In the past you’ve said an ideal roster is balanced between players at the beginning of their careers, in the middle and the end. Is there an ideal way for you to allocate dollars across the roster?
MS Building a baseball team is not an intellectual exercise. So much of the answer is dependent on situation and circumstance. You never know where your best players are going to be. You’re excited to have those guys and always want to pay those guys top dollar, so if your greatest player is Josh Donaldson, than I would say we should pay $23 million to our third baseman at whatever age. So, the answer is to build the best team possible in an efficient, flexible way that allows you to adjust to the things that lie ahead. But there is no formula.
The first game of the 2013 baseball season was in Houston, hosted by an Astros team that had finished in last place the previous year and was going to finish in last place again. It was nationally televised — the Astros had just moved from the National League to the American, earning them baseball’s showcase time slot — and in the sixth inning the booth called down to ESPN’s Buster Olney for an interview with GM Jeff Luhnow.
“I’ve heard from some of your peers,” Olney said, “that the Astros probably are the purest form of implementation of statistical data. Tell me, in a nutshell, what your philosophy is.”
“Well, it’s pretty simple,” Luhnow began …
What do you think Luhnow said? What, in a nutshell, was the Astros’ “pretty simple” philosophy? When, two years later, ESPN’s analytics report named the Philadelphia 76ers the most analytical team in any major sport, what do you think made GM Sam Hinkie “the NBA’s most ardent analytics master”? After the NFL’s Cleveland Browns hired Moneyball superstar Paul DePodesta to be chief strategy officer, how would you define the strategy he has been chief of? What holds these three exemplars of “pure” analytics together?