Todd Helton now regularly drives his two daughters to school or other activities back home in Tennessee, a huge life change for Colorado’s former All-Star first baseman.
He had no idea walking away from baseball would be such a daunting and overwhelming adjustment. The daily routine that had become part of his DNA — the bantering, the batting practice, the games — replaced by chauffeuring kids, helping around the house and some golf.
“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” Helton said. “I’ve been a baseball player since I could walk, always knew I was going to be a baseball player.”
As he talks on the phone, he’s watching the Houston Rockets take on the Toronto Raptors. For White, it’s a look at what might have been, and a cold-cup-of-coffee reminder of what was.
On one side: Raptors star DeMar DeRozan, the player whose recent disclosure of bouts with depression helped embolden other players to come forward and reignited a conversation about mental health in the NBA. On the other: the Rockets, the team that drafted White, a 6-foot-8, 270-pound point forward who won Big 12 Player of the Year honors at Iowa State, and whose widely publicized generalized anxiety disorder became a battleground during his brief time in the NBA.
“I mean, [expletive], it doesn’t get no more ironic than that,” White said with a laugh. “I mean, you couldn’t even write this [expletive] up. It’s ludicrous.”
With just nine games to go in one of the most difficult seasons of his career, Dirk Nowitzki gave his strongest indication yet that he plans to return to the Dallas Mavericks in 2018-19 for his 21st N.B.A. campaign.
“As of now, I’m planning to come back,” Nowitzki said in an interview with The New York Times this week. “I feel great. I’ve only missed one game all season. I signed a two-year contract because I wanted to play two more years. And here we are.”
An official decision on whether to invoke the 2018-19 player option on the two-year, $10 million contract he signed in July 2017 will not be made until the off-season. First, Nowitzki plans to step away from the game next month, huddle with his wife, Jessica, and his longtime German shooting coach and adviser, Holger Geschwindner, about the future, and undergo a thorough examination of his health.
A postseason medical evaluation of Teddy Bridgewater’s left knee revealed concerns, according to Vikings coach Mike Zimmer.
Speaking to reporters at the head coaches breakfast during the annual NFL owners meetings in Orlando, Zimmer was asked for his perspective on the health of the former Vikings quarterback and what he witnessed after Bridgewater returned to practice this past November.
“The reports I’d get back from the medical people weren’t as positive as I was about it,” Zimmer said. “That’s kind of how it came down is that his knee wasn’t as … he still has some recovery to do. When I watched him in practice, he moved well, I didn’t see limitations, but, from what I was told, there was some.”
… A 2018 systematic review from Bonnar et al. (2018) examined the evidence behind interventions to improve sleep to aid performance and recovery. They included 10 studies with a total of 218 participants from various sports. Sleep interventions were divided into 3 broad categories; Sleep extension and napping, sleep hygiene and post-exercise recovery strategies.
Of these 3 categories the evidence indicates that sleep extension had the most beneficial effects on subsequent performance. For example, Mah et al. (2011) showed multiple performance benefits from extending sleep and aiming for a minimum of 10 hours in bed each night. The basketball players in this study improved sprint speed, shooting accuracy, fatigue levels and mental well-being. Bonnar et al.’s findings suggest a minimum of 1 week of increased sleep duration leads to improvements on a range of performance measures among sleep deprived athletes. Day time napping may also help to extend sleep and reduce the effects of sleep deprivation (Bird 2013).
For many years, we were told that if we wanted to properly build our base fitness, we needed to spend 12 to 16 weeks riding long, steady, low-intensity miles to strengthen our aerobic systems, so they could eventually handle harder training rides and races. Well, this method works great if it’s your job to get up and ride your bike four to six hours a day, but for the rest of us without many free hours, a schedule-friendly method called polarized training presents a practical way to build endurance on a time budget.
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As the name implies, polarized training emphasizes the opposite ends of the training spectrum, so in any given week you do both really hard efforts and easy aerobic rides: the best of both worlds. It’s a bit controversial (polarizing?) in a sports science community used to half-day base slogs, but it’s backed by a body of sound research.
“Ultimately, your ‘base’ comes down to your mitochondrial capacity,” says exercise physiologist Paul Laursen, Ph.D., of the training service lab PlewsandProf. “Research shows that while longer, lower-intensity exercise increases the number of mitochondria in your cells, high-intensity training makes those mitochondria more powerful.” (Some studies show high-intensity exercise performed regularly can stimulate the production of mitochondria, too.)
… College coaches from across the country say it’s the same mantra being preached to many of their best players. College soccer has dramatically changed in the past three years as more and more players choose to forgo the college experience in favor of a pro career. In response, a powerful group of college coaches wants the NCAA to make a radical change to the college game. “College soccer is the laughingstock of the soccer world now,” said Sasho Cirovski, Williamson’s coach at Maryland.
If the NCAA doesn’t do something soon, Cirovski warns, “it will kill our sport.”
When you really think about it, “because it’s there” is not a very satisfying answer. That was the motivation George Mallory famously offered to a New York Times reporter in 1923 before heading off on his tragic third attempt to climb Mount Everest. Of course, Mallory had some reasonable incentives, too—reaching the highest point in the world for the first time, eternal fame, and so on. People who’ve followed in his footsteps also have their reasons. Even today, Everest summiters earn decent bragging rights.
But none of that explains why many of us head anonymously into the mountains or run midpack marathons—or, for that matter, do Sudoku puzzles or buy hard-to-assemble Swedish furniture. That’s the riddle that a new paper in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, by University of Toronto psychologist Michael Inzlicht and colleagues from Brown and Carnegie Mellon, explores. According to the prevailing models of cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and economics, we’re wired to minimize effort whenever possible. But sometimes, Inzlicht and his colleagues argue, we value experiences and outcomes precisely because they’re hard, not in spite of that. That difficulty can add value, a surprise they call the effort paradox.
MuscleSound, a Denver-based performance and health technology company, recently launched its new MuscleHealth assessment cycles.
These new assessment cycles, according to a press release, will equip MuscleSound providers with a custom step-by-step guide to help clients reach their individual goals through a series of continuous scan sessions. And MuscleSound end users will be able to get real-time results to help them achieve their individual goals, whether it is readiness, rehab and recovery, body composition, nutrition, muscle size, data collection or event preparation. They will also receive recommendations on when to re-check their progress.
… The Galway-based company – with offices in London and Los Angeles – count NASA, NBA franchises, Major League Baseball, Formula One drivers, Major-winning golfers and over 35 Olympic medallists among their clients. But a Newcastle United shirt hangs on the wall of the offices where they employ a team of specialists in applied physiology, clinical nutrition, performance nutrition and sports medicine that includes 16 PhDs and some of the leading thinkers in led by Professor John Newell in partnership with the Insight centre for analytics
It is the Magpies who, as “early adopters”, Dr. Moore can’t speak highly enough of for the way they have embraced technology which could transform the sport forever.
“Our company is a combination of sports science and data science – that’s how we created Orreco,” he explains.
“The idea was about optimising training response and individualising them, which has an application in a lot of sports. Dr. Catterson was an early adopter. He looked at the preliminary evidence base that we had and got us involved as he built his program from the ground up.”
Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise journal from
Purpose Exercise is associated with altered gut microbial composition, but studies have not investigated whether the gut microbiota and associated metabolites are modulated by exercise training in humans. We explored the impact of 6 wk of endurance exercise on the composition, functional capacity, and metabolic output of the gut microbiota in lean and obese adults with multiple-day dietary controls before outcome variable collection.
Methods Thirty-two lean (n = 18 [9 female]) and obese (n = 14 [11 female]), previously sedentary subjects participated in 6 wk of supervised, endurance-based exercise training (3 d·wk−1) that progressed from 30 to 60 min·d−1 and from moderate (60% of HR reserve) to vigorous intensity (75% HR reserve). Subsequently, participants returned to a sedentary lifestyle activity for a 6-wk washout period. Fecal samples were collected before and after 6 wk of exercise, as well as after the sedentary washout period, with 3-d dietary controls in place before each collection.
Results β-diversity analysis revealed that exercise-induced alterations of the gut microbiota were dependent on obesity status. Exercise increased fecal concentrations of short-chain fatty acids in lean, but not obese, participants. Exercise-induced shifts in metabolic output of the microbiota paralleled changes in bacterial genes and taxa capable of short-chain fatty acid production. Lastly, exercise-induced changes in the microbiota were largely reversed once exercise training ceased.
Conclusion These findings suggest that exercise training induces compositional and functional changes in the human gut microbiota that are dependent on obesity status, independent of diet and contingent on the sustainment of exercise.
When we think of performance enhancing substances, our knee-jerk reaction is to think of steroids and the other substances explicitly prohibited by Major League Baseball. It’s easy to conflate performance enhancing substances with the prohibited substances lists, but these are two unrelated groups. There are a number of supplements which do not fall under the umbrella of prohibited substances, but might be considered performance enhancing substances.
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Supplements claim to do everything from enhancing focus and increasing endurance, to aiding recovery and preventing injury. While there isn’t a lot of rigorous scientific evidence to support these broad claims, there is just enough research to fuel this multi-billion dollar industry, and supplements are becoming increasingly popular with baseball players. They may not carry the threat of an 80-game suspension, but these supplements can pose risks to players’ health, especially for minor league players without significant financial means.
The marketing of dietary supplements is highly dependent upon the timeframe in which a consumer expects to see results.
… To his right, on a whiteboard written in enormous red block letters, were those fateful words: “Final Four!” Around the room, players repeated the team motto: “No finish lines.”
But looking past the exclamation points, past the catch phrases, past the hugs and high-fives and tears of joy, there was a team that earned its trip to the Final Four. There was K-State coach Bruce Weber, sitting at a podium inside the bowels of Philips Arena afterward, making sense of a good old-fashioned beatdown.
Weber spoke about how physical Loyola was, how the Ramblers “iced” the Wildcats’ ball screens, how they switched on everything.
… Clearly, Dressel has improved dramatically just in the past year short course. Let’s see how his new top times convert to long course using SwimSwam’s real time converter. I’m using his age of 21 – yes he’s still only 21! – in the conversions. To reference exactly how bonkers these times are, I’ve included the current world records as well for reference.
… The PITCHf/x cameras began tracking each pitch at 50 feet from home plate (an underestimate of release distance), taking 20 images through the ball’s flight to find a best-fit trajectory. Trackman captures an awe-inspiring thousands of measurements per second, tracing a pitch’s entire journey from the pitcher’s hand to the catcher’s glove. With these cutting-edge radar systems in place at all 30 parks, one would think more precise pitch data would be reported, with fewer of the error issues presented by PITCHf/x.
But a month after the transition, one study showed the opposite. In April 2017, FiveThirtyEight’s Rob Arthur wrote that Statcast was having more trouble than PITCHf/x did accurately determining pitch location and movement. That analysis presented a good early look at the new system’s pitch-tracking problems, but there are more stones to unturn. What was the magnitude of the errors throughout the 2017 season? How accurate were the pitch velocities tracked by Statcast last year? Does a full-year look at the 2017 season reveal smaller biases than the April estimates? And to what extent did offsets change within each park?