The Steelers converted a 6-foot-9 former Army Ranger into their starting left tackle. Next, they might try to convert a 6-8 rugby player from Australia into another offensive lineman.
Jordan Mailata, a 21-year old who has never played American football, is visiting with the Steelers Tuesday.
The end of the NBA regular season can often look like a game of musical chairs. Teams destined for the lottery (and even some playoff ones) often spend the final few months bringing in a host of new faces or exiled vets to kick the tires and see if they’re worth a roster spot. Most times, a these players complete their 10-contract cycles and head back to the G League or the end of another NBA roster. But sometimes, they turn into Trey Burke.
For the New York Knicks, finding Burke at the end of a season in which they’re missing the playoffs has been a slightly uplifting consolation prize. In 34 games with the Knicks, Burke is set to smash career marks in nearly every advanced stat from True Shooting Percentage (Hi KD!) to VORP (Value Over Replacement Player). Though it’s hardly the type of thing to turnaround a moribund Knicks franchise, it’s been fun for fans to see a once-promising former lottery pick revive his flagging career.
Yet amid all the sentiment, a deeper, less fun but equally important question emerges when players like Burke, Brandon Jennings or MarShon Brooks all resurface showcasing a drastic change in their abilities: Is this end-of-the-season cameo a harbinger of true improvement or a mirage obscuring the same flawed athlete that couldn’t keep a place in the league?
… Today, ahead of her appearance in Monday’s Boston Marathon, I asked Linden, an outspoken anti-doping advocate, if she was supportive of Ritzenhin joining the Hansons-Brooks team.
“Not especially,” Linden said, noting that she was not consulted on the decision and found out about it on Twitter. “It’s hard to say ‘It’s hard to get excited about these performances when you’re under investigation’ but the same thing’s happening in your house. But my name’s not on the jersey. We can talk ‘team, team, team,’ but ultimately two guys (Keith and Kevin Hanson) make the decisions. It’s not really my call. And hopefully it all works out and no lines were crossed, but until that’s kind of cleared, [I] can’t be super supportive…
“It puts me in a tough spot. It’s hard to be vocal about anti-doping when someone can say, ‘But what about you? What about this?’”
… At least three Broncos head coaches since 1990 — Dan Reeves, John Fox and Gary Kubiak — have dealt with heart issues. Former Nuggets coach Dan Issel acknowledged that health concerns played a role when he resigned in 1995. And George Karl battled cancer, at two different points, while coaching the Nuggets.
At the heart of the struggle for coaches are long hours, high pressure, stress and sleep deprivation. Not getting enough sleep can cause far-reaching health problems and is at the root of the health issues for Lue, who was scheduled to attend Cleveland’s game Friday as a spectator. There is still be no timeline set for his return to coaching.
“The frequent travel is disruptive for a lot of different things, but the idea of sleep and the way frequent travel disrupts sleep is really problematic,” said Travis Heath, a clinical psychologist and professor at Metro State University who previously worked in the front offices of several NBA teams. “You can’t bank sleep. You can’t sleep two hours today and then go, ‘Oh, I’ll sleep 16 hours tomorrow and it will come out in the wash. Sleep doesn’t work that way. You lose sleep and you’ve lost it.”
So far this season, Chris Owings’ swing has looked the same as always. The quick hands. The modest leg kick. The right foot that takes a step back upon impact. The difference this year with the Diamondbacks’ super utility man’s swing is how often he is employing it.
Since arriving in rookie ball in 2009, just days after his 18th birthday, Owings has had a hyper-aggressive approach at the plate. It’s been swing first, ask questions later. And given his natural ability to produce hard contact, this worked well enough to get him to the majors.
But he thinks that aggressiveness had a way of working against him. Too often, he said, he got himself out by swinging at the wrong pitches. He’s hoping a more refined approach this year can help him take another step in his development. And he thinks he might have found the right approach to help him do that – an approach many of his teammates also have embraced.
Most people think that the human spine is one of evolution’s great flaws. After all, around 80% of adults suffer from lower-back pain. What more evidence do you need? The truth is, the spine is a robust structure. We’re just using it incorrectly.
Everybody “knows” that you put your back out if you lift objects that are too heavy. As a result, many workplaces have introduced lifting training and ergonomic equipment, such as hoists, in an effort to reduce back injuries.
The common advice from lifting training is to avoid heavy lifting where possible. However, research has shown that such training is largely ineffective at reducing back pain and back injury. It seems that a different approach is needed.
Human tissue needs to be exposed to loads to become strong – and the spine is a good example of this. Regular loading prepares the joints, muscle and ligaments for normal tasks. Nobody would expect to run a marathon without preparing the body for such loading, so it seems logical that to be able to lift a weight requires exposure to that activity.
… this week the Revolution turned a few heads across the youth scene with the announcement of two new initiatives. The intent is to connect with a wider cross-section of the sprawling New England soccer scene and raise the level of both the club and its community. It might even prove to be a milestone marker for the country as a whole, and from an unexpected source.
On one front, New England will crank up talent development programs in mostly urban areas in and around Boston. Aiming to build bridges in underserved communities where poverty and lack of access are a one-two punch to aspiring young talent, these no-cost “Regional Development Schools” are a means to give those players exposure in front of Revs coaches as well as high-level training environments.
The second prong is a new scholarship program for the Revolution’s youth affiliate clubs, or “Academy Alliance Partners.” This will award grants to those clubs that develop players who go on to sign Homegrown deals with the Revs. That’s both tangible and symbolic for those who lay the critical groundwork for growing future pros.
Behind head coach Jim Curtin and technical director Earnie Stewart, the Philadelphia Union have made a heavy push with giving significant minutes to young players. The latest two to join the push are the current U.S. U-20 duo of Matthew Real and Anthony Fontana who have progressed through the team’s academy together.
… Despite hearing their coaches yelling at them about being gritty and leaving it all out on the floor, despite the players themselves talking about effort in their post-game chat, the players don’t actually play to their full capacity. But, it’s not entirely their fault. Their bodies and brains won’t let them. You see, the brain is a powerful thing. If we look at how fatigue actually works, our body limits us from pushing to our max in order to protect itself. So a sprinter can never fully utilize every fast twitch fiber in his legs to propel him forward. If he did, he might run faster, but he might actually rip his leg apart.
This isn’t just theoretical. Researchers have shown that the muscles always have more. Take a person and put them through a grueling exercise, perhaps an all out 30-second bike, and the athlete will report that their quads are toast. Run an electrode to the muscle, shock it, and the muscle still functions, producing a contraction showing that the muscle itself can still fire and has more to give.
When it comes to how the brain and body handle fatigue, it’s almost as if we have an algorithm in our brain taking in all of the sensory information telling us how tired we are and comparing it to how much energy we have left to give. Think of it as our car comparing the gas left in the tank with our current rate of miles per gallon of gas used to understand how far we can drive before we run out of fuel. But there’s another piece to the puzzle, how much risk is involved, what’s the reward and level of importance.
Our brain weighs that complicated gas mileage algorithm with how important the task is. Should we pull over when the projected miles left is five, or should we push on beyond when the tank reaches zero?
TWO papers with starkly contradictory conclusions, published three weeks apart, have reignited debate about whether adult human brains can grow new neurons. For over a century, neuroscientists believed brains have acquired all the neurons they will ever have shortly after birth. But research over the past two decades has questioned this, producing evidence that new neurons are indeed generated in the adults of several species, people included. The matter is of more than just theoretical concern. Understanding how neurons are generated might lead to new ways of dealing with cognitive decline in ageing, neurodegenerative disease and even depression.
The conflicting studies both involved inspecting post-mortem brain samples using a technique called immunostaining. The first to press, by Arturo Alverez-Buylla and Shawn Sorrells of the University of California, San Francisco, was published on March 15th in Nature. It claims that neurogenesis happens rarely, if at all, in adults. The other, by Maura Boldrini and René Hen at Columbia University, was published on April 5th in Cell Stem Cell. It claims neurogenesis persists through adulthood at a largely unchanged rate.
If you want to take a good stroll down memory lane, new research suggests you’d better get out of that chair more often.
In a first-of-its-kind study, researchers have found that in people middle-aged and older, a brain structure that is key to learning and memory is plumpest in those who spend the most time standing up and moving. At every age, prolonged sitters show less thickness in the medial temporal lobe and the subregions that make it up, the study found.
It all came together at the University of Pittsburgh’s Innovation Institute this week as experts from throughout the university collaborated during the school’s first Performance Innovation Tournament.
“Bringing the researchers and athletics together on such a project is unique in the history of Pitt,” says Innovation Institute Program Manager Jennifer Ireland. In fact, she says, this may be the first time any university has merged their sports prowess and research talent for one goal.
The tournament united researchers across disciplines ranging from sports medicine to neuroscience. Teams collaborated to create solutions that address performance issues like preventing concussions and other sports-related injuries and recovering quickly from rigorous activity.
Mitochondrial Biology and Experimental Therapeutics journal from
It is well established that physical exercise imposes increased levels of mechanical and metabolic stress to the human organism, altering the homeostasis and stimulating the inherent ability of tissues to structurally and functionally adapt to cope with the inflicted challenges. These adaptations usually result in an increased resistance against the harmful effects characterizing senescence as well as those associated with disease conditions. These include muscle myopathies, cardiac dysfunction induced by ischaemia-reperfusion, obesity, diabetes or toxicants exposure, liver and neurodegenerative diseases. In fact, exercise may directly alter cellular energy status or increase mechanical load in contractile tissues, such as skeletal and cardiac muscles, and may also indirectly induce an endocrine-like effect through the release of distinct molecules by striated muscles, which may exert consequent stimulation in non-contractile tissues, such as brain, liver or adipocytes. Mitochondrial remodelling is among the most important mechanisms targeted by exercise that contribute to the mentioned protective phenotype. The powerful influence of exercise in mitochondrial physiology include favourable changes in bioenergetics and substrate utilization, alterations in redox homeostasis, changes in network dynamics through biogenesis, fusion and fission mechanisms, an important involvement in the control of cellular death mechanisms as well as influence in cell signalling, autophagy-related renewal and quality control processes. The present review analyses the effects of exercise in the modulation of mitochondrial physiology, examining distinct proposed mechanisms targeting mitochondria and potentially responsible tissue boosting and consequent defect rescuing. The emerging role of epigenetic-based contribution to these cross-tolerance effects is also addressed.