It’s been assumed that Celtics forward Gordon Hayward is on track for a return at the start of next season. And in an update on his blog, Hayward explained that while he’s still in line to be ready, it wasn’t without a recent “complication.”
According to Hayward, the issue derived from insertions that doctors made during the initial surgery when he fractured his tibia and dislocated his ankle on opening night in 2017.
“I recently had surgery to remove the plate and screws that were put in my ankle after I broke it in the opener,” Hayward wrote. “It’s not something we were expecting to be a part of this recovery process, but I’m happy to report that I’ll be back out there resuming rehab soon, with my sights set firmly on being back to my usual self for the start of next season.”
In his final two years as Clemson’s starting quarterback, Deshaun Watson won 28 games and a national championship. Still, there were those who doubted he would flourish in the NFL without changing his style.
Watson insisted there was no need, and in an abbreviated rookie season with the Houston Texans, he proved it. But now, coming off his second ACL surgery (on a different knee) in three years, Watson is hearing the same advice.
His answer? Not a chance.
“Injuries are going to happen,” said Watson, in town for the Colonial All-Pro Football Camp at William and Mary. “I’ve dealt with this injury before as a freshman. And I played the same way I did the year before.
… “He was very lucky to be able to learn in the major leagues how to fail,” said Austin Nola, his brother and a New Orleans Baby Cakes catcher.
So he worked with his coaches and learned how to pitch more with his lower body to put less strain on his arm. Then came a lower back strain during an otherwise solid 2017 season.
He got together with his personal trainer and massage therapist Jay Manda, a Baton Rouge resident who has been training Aaron and Austin for five years. He flies in to Philadelphia every two weeks for five-day stretches. They did research on what kind of weightlifting a baseball player should do. They eliminated high-risk activities.
The term periodization refers to the practice of dividing the training process into distinct phases, each of which is defined by a specific purpose and made up of workouts that are intended to fulfill its purpose. Simply put, an athlete who practices periodization does different things at different points in the training cycle, whereas an athlete who does not periodize his training does the same thing week in and week out.
To put an analogy on it, an athlete who practices periodization is like a farmer, whereas an athlete who does not is like a factory worker. What sort of work does a farmer do? It depends entirely on when you visit the farm. In one season you may find him planting, in another administering pesticides, and in yet another harvesting. No matter when you visit the assembly line, however, you will find the factory worker putting screws in widgets.
Athletes Acceleration Sports Performance Training, Mike Boyle from
… Two Theories about Elite Fast-Twitch Athletes
I’d like to propose two theories about these elite, fast-twitch athletes that I have never read in the conventional literature.
1-The elite fast-twitch athlete may be “overpowered”. The powerful nervous system that makes them so fast and so explosive also gives them the capability to overwhelm their own muscles. These are guys with a nervous system capable of producing extremely powerful muscular contractions. Cumulative fatigue and dehydration can be deadly to these guys.
2-Perhaps the well-developed neurological system that makes these athletes exceptional at their sport also causes them to perceive much more pain and discomfort than the average player. Perhaps the exceptional neurological system that allows them to run and jump with ease also contains a curse. These gifted players, who are often perceived as soft, actually seem to have very well developed neural regulation that gauges their ability to compete. Often, they will simply say something like “no, I can’t do that yet”. When they do, pay attention. They will usually be right.
The soccer academy that produced Hirving Lozano, a star known as Chucky who scored a critical goal for Mexico at the World Cup, aims to ramp up the development of young players like him.
A growth mindset is the belief that intellectual abilities are not fixed, but can be developed. Do students who are taught a growth mindset earn higher grades and test scores?
Brooke Macnamara and her colleagues, who conducted a meta-analysis of growth mindset interventions, found that when students were taught a growth mindset, they showed significantly higher achievement. But Macnamara believes that the effects of these programs or interventions, while statistically significant, are too small to be practically meaningful.
My colleagues and I, along with educational evaluation experts, economists and the World Bank, disagree.
You’re probably thinking that of course I would say the effects of growth mindset intervention are meaningful since my research is what led to their creation.
Yet our disagreement with Macnamara rests on exactly what one considers to be a meaningful effect size for an educational intervention. An effect size is a way to standardize treatment benefits across very different outcomes, like test scores and grade point averages.
Scientists are closer to understanding how the brain works by using a tiny, flexible, needle-like probe that can measure how different areas communicate with one another.
When Damien Johnson was a player, video analysis meant having to watch an entire game as punishment for a defeat.
“A post-match review generally came after you’d got thumped 5-0,” remembers the 39-year-old, who made more than 300 senior appearances for clubs including Birmingham and Blackburn and won 56 caps for Northern Ireland.
“It wasn’t clips, either; it was usually the whole 90-minute video on a Sunday morning. It was generally a punishment and you’d wonder what you were actually getting out of it.”
Now, video is a crucial tool for Johnson to empower his Blackburn Under-23 players, getting them to think about both their own performances and those of the team as a whole. He places as much emphasis on the analysis sessions as he does his work with the players on the pitch.
Sure, Rachel Dawson knew that GPS could tell athletes how far they had gone.
But she had no idea that it could also show how fast an athlete accelerates or decelerates, or how far or high they jump.
“I knew nothing,” the senior kinesiology major said.
That’s just a sampling of what she’s learned in “Sports Science & Athlete Monitoring,” a new three-week course taught by David Bell, an assistant professor of kinesiology at the UW–Madison and the director of the Wisconsin Injury in Sport Laboratory.
Ankle sprains are common injuries in sports, however it is unclear whether they are more likely to occur in a specific period of a sporting game. OBJECTIVES:
To systematically review the literature investigating when in a match ankle sprains most likely occurred. EVIDENCE ACQUISITION:
The databases CINAHL, EMBASE, MEDLINE and SPORTDiscus were searched up to August 2016, with no restriction of date or language. The search targeted studies that presented data on the time of occurrence of ankle sprains during sports matches. Data from included studies were analysed as percentage of ankle sprain occurrence by half time and by quarters. Meta-analyses were run using a random effects model. The Quality Assessment Tool for Quantitative Studies was used to assess the article’s quality. EVIDENCE SYNTHESIS:
The searches identified 1,142 studies and eight were included in this review. Five hundred ankle sprains were reported during follow up time that ranged from 1 to 15 years, in five different sports (soccer, rugby, futsal, American football and Gaelic football). The meta-analyses including all eight studies showed that the proportion of ankle sprains during the first half (0.44, 95%CI from 0.38 to 0.50) was smaller than the second half (0.56, 95%CI from 0.50 to 0.62). For the analyses by quarters, the proportion of ankle sprains in 1st quarter (0.14, 95%CI 0.09 to 0.19) was considerably smaller than 2nd (0.28, 95%CI 0.24 to 0.32), 3rd quarter (0.25, 95%CI 0.17 to 0.34) and 4th (0.29, 95%CI 0.22 to 0.36). CONCLUSION:
The results of this review indicate that ankle sprains are more likely to occur later in the game during the second half or during the latter minutes of the first half.
In November 2017, FIFA’s general secretary, Fatma Samoura, said that “from the information we have, we cannot talk about widespread doping in football in Russia.” The president of FIFA, Gianni Infantino, sitting with Vitaly Mutko, head of the Russian Football Union, went even further: “Professional players in top teams play 50 or 60 matches every year. They are tested, I don’t know how many times every year. If you would have a serious doping issue in football this would be known by now, whether in Russia or any other country in the world.”
This all sounds very reassuring. It also lacks any shred of credibility.
For starters, Mutko was Russia’s sports minister. Dick Pound, founder of the World Anti-Doping Agency, who headed the independent commission that uncovered Russia’s doping scandal in 2016 — which got the country banned from the 2018 Winter Olympics — said it was “not possible” for Mutko to have been unaware of the doping program and “if he was aware of it, then he was complicit in it.” Grigory Rodchenkov, the former head of the Russian anti-doping agency who is now in a witness protection program in the United States after blowing the whistle on Mutko and state-sponsored Russian doping, told the Associated Press that “Mutko had ordered him to ‘avoid any scandal’ relating to Russian football players by making them immune from doping-control tests.”
Mexico’s mantra for this World Cup is “No Excuses,” and that includes no complaining about the menu.
The team brought two tons of food to Russia, along with everything necessary to make their players’ favorites, including traditional tacos, cheesy quesadillas and, of course, their hot salsas.
When Colombian manager Juan Carlos Osorio took over the Mexico team in 2015, he gathered a staff that includes a mental coach, a kinesiology specialist, a recovery expert and nutritionist Beatriz Boullosa.
“Professor Osorio says it all the time, there are no excuses here, he’s a man that makes his decisions based on hard facts and he has opened the chance for every one of us in our respective areas to give something to the national team”, Boullosa told The Associated Press.
… In February 2018, Luhnow took a break from spring training to sit down with McKinsey’s Aaron De Smet and Allen Webb and discuss his views on both how the Astros used data to move from last to first and what it will take to continue winning as more and more baseball teams join an analytics arms race that has already gone far beyond statistics and data mining and is starting to integrate artificial intelligence.
The Quarterly: What were the analytics strengths and weaknesses for the Astros when you joined them in 2011?
Jeff Luhnow: There really was not any focus on analytics at all. It was a traditional scouting organization. The Astros had done a nice job of scouting and developing some really good players—players like Dallas Keuchel, George Springer, and José Altuve, who were in the system when I took over. But in terms of the analytic capabilities of the organization, if I were to rank it, Houston would have been in the bottom five for sure.
… While everyone at Turf Moor has to embrace the experience of a Europa League campaign, having worked hard to get closest to the top six, this is something of an acid test.
The Clarets are 4/1 to repeat their top 10 finish in the Premier League in 2018-19, with the only saving grace being their current squad had minimal involvement at the World Cup in Russia.
Nick Pope warmed the England bench as Gareth Southgate’s third-choice keeper, so Iceland winger Johann Berg Gudmundsson was the only Burnley player to turn out at the tournament.
A well-rested squad notwithstanding, Dyche has to get his team ready to navigate Europa League qualifying more than two weeks before their Premier League opener on the south coast at Southampton.