Victor Vázquez was on quite the run of form. Entering Toronto FC’s match against the New York Red Bulls on Sunday, the Catalan had either scored or assisted seven of the Reds’ previous 10 goals.
But after a streak of 10 consecutive starts, Vázquez is back on the physio’s table. First plagued by a nerve problem in his back early in the campaign, the playmaker recently has been managing a quad issue. Both he and defender Gregory van der Wiel (Achilles) did not train Friday, instead seeing the team’s medical staff for maintenance work that Reds coach Greg Vanney said included platelet-rich plasma injections. It was thought they would still be in contention to feature against the Red Bulls.
But neither ended up in the squad for the 1-0 loss — and now Vázquez is dealing with swelling in his knee, too.
“We are trying to manage the swelling,” Vanney said. “While that’s going on, he doesn’t have full range of motion and you can’t put a guy out there that doesn’t feel like he’s free to move right now. He’s just not available, unfortunately.”
… Williams said it was “a little frustrating” that she received a “missed test” designation because the tester showed up unannounced.
According to the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency guidelines, athletes are required to let the agency know of their whereabouts for a one-hour period of the athlete’s choosing every day, even when not competing. An athlete will receive a “missed test” rating for unavailability during the window.
Drug testers can make unannounced visits outside of that one-hour window, but if the athlete is not available they will not receive a “missed test” designation. Each athlete gets three “missed tests” before they receive a doping rule violation.
“How is it I’m getting tested five times? I’m OK with that. Literally verbatim I said: ‘I’m going with that, as long as everyone is being treated equally. That’s all I care about,’” she added.
… So, they get the same number of pitches in the zone; they swing at the same number of pitches in the zone, and they chase the same number of pitches out of the zone; and when they swing, they make contact at the same rates. You’ll identify those as the basic building blocks of a strikeout or a walk.
And yet, Trout has the highest unintentional walk rate in baseball; Betts ranks around 40th. (Intentional walks are excluded from all stats in this article.) And Betts has the 12th-lowest strikeout rate in baseball, while Trout is around 75th. Despite getting the same number of strikes, swinging at the same number of pitches, and making contact on the same number of swings, Trout walks 50 percent more often than Betts and strikes out 50 percent more often. What in the world?
The answers to this mystery show some of the nuances of how each player approaches a count, and how each player’s count rhythm (to make up a phrase) can defy the broad generalities we draw about a player’s approach from their overall plate discipline stats. (Trout takes more pitches with two strikes, for example; Betts chases more often with three balls.) More significantly, they show how much foul balls, of all dumb things, matter.
Team GB alpine ski coach Jai Geyer has been using Firstbeat Sports Individual to help monitor the recovery of Olympic skier Dave Ryding throughout the most recent season. This included the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang where Ryding finished 9th, Team GB’s best alpine skiing result in 30 years and just half a second outside the medals. We caught up with Geyer to see how he has used Firstbeat, and the impact it has had.
The margins between success and failure in elite sport are incredibly thin. Across the world, and in every sport, coaches put together meticulous training plans to help athletes be at their best when it matters most. But, with professional athletes training for only 25 hours-per-week on average, that leaves a lot of time – 147 hours each week to be exact – where decisions and choices can impact things like stress levels, recovery and, ultimately, performance.
… Sleep is complicated and multi-dimensional. As it relates to performance and wellness, it’s a massive contributor to both. Long gone are the days where people on the world’s stage say “I’m proud I’m only getting 6 hours of sleep a night.” Admitting that you’re getting below average sleep is like raising your hand to announce “Hey everyone, I just want to let you know that I’m completely functioning at a substandard level.”
Eventually, your brain either lowers the standards of what’s possible for you, or it just shuts you down.
University of Southern California, Viterbi School of Engineering from
Want to be a good team player? Take a break. It may improve not only your own performance but the chances of your team winning overall, says a new study by a team of USC computer scientists.
Researchers from USC Viterbi’s Information Sciences Institute (ISI) crunched data from thousands of players in a popular online video game to analyze individual performance in teams over time. They also examined the impact of expertise on performance and other factors influencing player behavior, such as continuing to play versus ending the session.
“We’re trying to understand what drives certain patterns of behavior in real social environments and online gaming allows us to study this question from different perspectives in a natural setting,” said the study’s lead author Anna Sapienza, an ISI postdoctoral research associate.
Participation in sports offers both short-term and long-term physical and psychosocial benefits for children and adolescents. However, an overemphasis on competitive success in youth sports may limit the benefits of participation, and could increase the risk of injury, burnout, and disengagement from physical activity. The National Basketball Association and USA Basketball recently assembled a group of leading experts to share their applied research and practices to address these issues. This review includes the group’s analysis of the existing body of research regarding youth sports participation and the related health, performance, and psychosocial outcomes. Based upon this, age-specific recommendations for basketball participation are provided that aim to promote a healthy and positive experience for youth basketball players. [full text]
Sleep is a topic we’ve covered in depth before as it relates to hormones, learning, performance, health, rehabilitation, injuries, and fatigue. Bottom line: sleep is extremely important. However, this concept is common sense is it not? If we have covered sleep in such depth previously, why do we still need to address? Well, because we as a species are poor sleepers.
Here at Sparta we recently held our first annual Silicon Valley Health and Performance Summit featuring speakers looking to optimize human performance. We were lucky enough to have sleep expert Dr. Cheri Mah give an excellent presentation on the impact of sleep, body clock, and travel on performance. Dr. Mah has worked with athletes and teams in all major sports and has been putting out a ton of great research around sleep leading to many high performers re-evaluating their sleep needs and habits.
… An international team of researchers, led by Achim Kramer of the Institute of Medical Immunology (IMI) at the Charité University of Medicine in Berlin, has been able to identify biomarkers in the blood that are tantamount to characteristic features of the internal clock. First, the scientists measured the activity of all 20,000 genes in a given type of blood cell from multiple subjects over the period of one day. Using computer algorithms, the researchers were able to isolate 12 genes that reliably display the internal clock.
With this new circadian clock blood test, the biomarkers of a single blood sample can provide information as to whether you are an evening or morning person, even if you are being woken up by an alarm clock early in the morning in dissonance with your biological rhythm.
Jurgen Klopp, the coach of Liverpool FC, believes that the media can help the England’s men’s football team at the 2018 World Cup by reducing the pressure “a notch or two”. He told journalists to “maybe take the numbers 1966 [when England last won the trophy] off your computer keyboards for the summer and let this team write their own history and memories”.
Klopp is on to something here. Research conducted by the BBC found that the English media is more negative than that of other countries, with 9% of articles deemed critical of particular players, or England’s chances at the World Cup.
But reducing pressure a notch or two is easier said than done. Football is rife with pressure filled language. It seems as though every other day there are headlines about “must win” games and “terrible” performances that leave managers and players “devastated”. But this kind of language is nonsense.
The AF CyberWorx team will hold a hackathon July 11 – 13 at Catalyst Campus in downtown Colorado Springs. The hackathon will bring together a diversity of people from both industry and military to develop tools which improve the Air Force’s physical training program by incorporating smart and cloud technologies.
“We’re using this event to fast-track technological innovation to improve the warfighter experience with maintaining and tracking physical fitness and readiness,” said Lt Col Cynthia Brothers, Director of Strategic Engagement for AF CyberWorx.
In conjunction with the hackathon, the Center for Technology, Research, and Commercialization is offering a $1000 participation incentive for each team. Further, and at their sole discretion, C-TRAC is authorized to select two hackathon teams to receive a maximum $20,000 collaboration incentive.
The validity and reliability of global positioning technology (GPS) for measuring the physical demands of various
sports have been questioned (1,2,3). Court-based sports are characterized by rapid changes in direction within a confined space (4,5,6,7). Thus, one would expect lower quality of GPS
data compared to field sports (8,9,10).
Away from the Olympic pool and its exhilarating sounds of splashing, clapping, and whistle-blowing, swimmer Michael Phelps was living a separate life.
Despite racking up 28 Olympic medals — an unparalleled achievement that made him the most recognized Olympian in US history — Phelps was fighting powerful episodes of depression that led him to contemplate taking his own life.
“I straight wanted to die,” Phelps told CNN’s David Axelrod on a recent episode of The Axe Files podcast.
Phelps’ personal struggle with depression and suicidal thinking spurred him to join the board of a 23-year-old company called Medibio. The group has a bold goal: to create a tool that can detect mental illness objectively, without relying on mercurial measures like questionnaires.
Dermira, a Silicon Valley firm, won FDA approval for a wipe to treat excessive under-arm sweating, clinically known as primary axillary hyperhidrosis. The cloth contains glycopyrronium, an anticholinergic.
Several meta-analyses have been published on the effectiveness of anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury prevention training programs to reduce ACL injury risk, with various degrees of risk reduction reported. The purpose of this research was to perform a systematic review and meta-analysis of overlapping meta-analyses evaluating the effectiveness of ACL injury prevention training programs so as to summarize the amount of reduction in risk for all ACL and non-contact ACL injuries into a single source, and determine if there were sex differences in the relative efficacy of ACL injury prevention training programs. Five databases (Medline, PubMed, Embase, CINAHL, and Cochrane) were searched to identify meta-analyses that evaluated the effectiveness of ACL injury prevention training programs on ACL injury risk. ACL injury data were extracted and the results from each meta-analysis were combined using a summary meta-analysis based on odds ratios (OR). Eight meta-analyses met eligibility criteria. Six of the eight only included data for female athletes. Summary meta-analysis showed an overall 50% reduction (OR = 0.5 [0.41-0.59]; I2 = 15%) in the risk of all ACL injuries in all athletes and a 67% reduction (OR = 0.33 [0.27-0.41]; I2 = 15%) for non-contact ACL injuries in females. This paper combines all previous meta-analyses into a single source and shows conclusive evidence that ACL injury prevention programs reduce the risk of all ACL injuries by half in all athletes and non-contact ACL injuries by two-thirds in female athletes. There is insufficient data to make conclusions as to the effectiveness of ACL injury prevention programs in male athletes.
A ripple of excitement lapped the football world last February when the FDA approved a blood test that could be used to detect concussion. At last an accurate tool had arisen beyond the cursory and subjective functional tests commonly administered after a player takes a blow to the head. Better yet, the objective clinical feedback could eliminate the need for radiation-exposing CT in at least a third of the cases for which head scans likely would have been ordered, according to champions of the new diagnostic test, known as the Banyon Brain Trauma Indicator. The test works by measuring two brain-specific protein markers that appear rapidly in the blood at elevated levels following a traumatic brain injury (TBI).
Not so fast, came the blowback from medical experts and clinicians who routinely handle concussed patients. Those markers are absent in the vast majority of individuals with concussions.
“The test is not really to diagnose concussions, but rather it’s a decision-making tool to indicate whether or not someone needs a CT scan after a head injury,” explains Mark Halstead, MD, director of the Sports Concussion Clinic at Washington University Medical Center in St. Louis.
As we all know, the Return-to-Play (RTP) is certainly one of the most important stages during a sports’ rehabilitation, but still the one with less guidelines or evidence to support the decision making.
Hamstring muscle injuries are the most frequent injury in football, thus, knowing how to deal with them during the RTP stage is of significant importance for medical departments that work with football players.
A wise RTP program with smart clinical criteria, progressions and targets to achieve might be a game-changer in what concerns hamstring injuries rehabilitations’ outcomes. In the recent years, the development and usage of GPS technology has been helping sports and medical professionals to understand the demands of football and individual players itself, being able to specifically build-up their fitness in the field until the previous level before injury. Nowadays with the GPS technology, field rehabilitations can be done faster and safer once we can now determine with high accuracy the internal and external loads applied to the injured player in rehabilitation, and be sure he is being able to cope with the demands for his position/game style/previous personal physical performance.
However, those technologies are still not available for the most of the medical departments because, although it can had a significant benefit for injury prevention and rehabilitation, those systems are still pricey, and so, not available for most professionals.
A new Indiana law requires school coaches to undergo training for heat-related medical issues. The measure’s author says it’s the “last piece of the puzzle” to help coaches protect student athletes’ health.
Rep. Ron Bacon (R-Chandler) is a respiratory therapist and a former school coach. In the last few years, he’s helped put into law training requirements for concussions and cardiac arrest. Bacon says this year’s bill ensures coaches have the training and education to recognize and prevent heat exhaustion.
“You can’t just push kids ‘til they drop. You need to look at what they’re doing and are they hydrating correctly and how to manage that,” Bacon says.
Winning athletes love to bite their medals and smile for the cameras as they hold their trophies aloft, but their teeth may actually be holding them back.
Around half of Britain’s elite sports men and women have dental problems bad enough to affect their performance, according to a study published on Thursday.
The NFL has warned teams that 11-on-11 training camp drills were largely responsible for last year’s spike in preseason concussions, an important data point as coaches finalize practice schedules for this summer’s practices.
The league has stopped short of banning full-squad drills, which coaches consider essential to preparing for the contact that occurs during regular-season games. But NFL data showed that preseason concussions in 2017 increased by 73 percent, from 26 in 2016 to 45. Most of them occurred during full-team drills during the opening weeks of camp, before preseason games began.
Each team has received a customized data report describing how and when preseason concussions occurred in their camps last season, compared to the rest of the league. Jeff Miller, the NFL’s executive vice president of health and safety initiatives, said Friday that he hopes the data “will inform what clubs do” when camps open. Miller said the league hopes to replicate its success in addressing a similar issue after the 2014 season. In 2015, camp concussions dropped by 33 percent.
About 15% of the U.S. high school population — 2.5 million students — self-reported having at least one concussion related to sports or physical activity over a 1-year period, according to the CDC.
This prevalence is higher than emergency department estimates (622.5 visits per 100,000 population ages 10-14 ) and athletic trainer reports (1.8 per 100 high school and college athletes for an average season), according to the CDC’s Lara DePadilla, PhD, and co-authors.
“Emergency department data miss concussions treated elsewhere, and athletic trainer reports miss concussions sustained outside of school-based sports; both sources miss medically untreated concussions,” the researchers wrote in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
At the recent National Athletic Trainers’ Association’s (NATA) 69th Clinical Symposia & AT Expo, held in New Orleans between June 26 and June 28, 2018, one of the new studies presented suggests that studying dual-task gait after a concussion can shed light on future injury risk.
To study dual-task gait outcomes, David Howell, Ph.D., ATC and colleagues evaluated 41 athletes within the first 21 days of concussion and again when they were deemed clinically recovered. The study protocol included a symptom inventory and instrumented dual-task gait evaluation, where they walked and completed a cognitive task (months backward, serial 7s backward, or spelling words backwards) while wearing an instrumented sensor system.
And then approximately one year post-concussion, they were asked to report any acute sport-related injury since returning to sports.
According to the data, the group who went on to sustain an acute injury (n=15; 38%) demonstrated significant average walking speed dual-task cost worsening across time (p = 0.005). In contrast, the group who did not sustain an injury walked with similar dual-task cost values at both time points (p = 0.45). In addition, symptoms improved for all participants (p = 0.78).
Gatorade Zero, a thirst quencher without sugar or carbs, hit stores around the country this week. It comes in orange, lemon lime, and glacier cherry, and is priced in line with the brand’s classic sports drink.
The new drink is a tacit admission that the heyday of sugary sports drinks is winding down.
Want to improve your skills on the field? Working out and practice will only get you so far. To boost your performance, try taking a closer look at the food on your plate.
“Baseball and softball are fast-paced games that require strength, power, speed, quick judgment and fast reaction time. Nutrition and hydration really matter for performance,” said Julia Bell, MS, RD, LDN, a performance dietitian at Inova Sports Performance powered by EXOS. Inova is the official sports medicine partner of the Washington Nationals. Inova Sports Performance powered by EXOS offers performance training and nutrition services for individual athletes and teams.
For athletes, food is more than a meal. “It’s not just a hamburger or a salad. What you put in your body affects how you play and how you recover for your next training session or game.”
What do you need to know to protect your bones? For all the details, read our interview with Bess Dawson-Hughes, director of the Bone Metabolism Laboratory at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University in Boston and a professor of medicine at Tufts.
What do you need to eat to protect your bones? Enough protein, fruits and vegetables, vitamin D, and, of course, calcium.
Staying a healthy weight can be a challenge, and knowing what weight is healthy for you can be too. Most people rely on the body mass index, or BMI, which is a measure of our weight in relation to our height.
Many experts have criticised this fairly limited measure of the health of our weight, yet it still remains the most popular way for most people to judge a healthy weight.
We asked five experts if the BMI is a good indicator of a healthy weight.
… One of the perceiving shortcomings was the U.S. structure of bringing players through the college system. The criticism, so the argument goes, was that players were losing some of the critical, 18-21 development years, languishing in the college ranks.
On the other hand, countries more established in the soccer hierarchy, were developing these players in clubs during the years such players would otherwise be at university.
Kylian Mbappe, who just scored two goals in France’s 4-3 victory a few hours ago, is 19 and ½ years of age. He’ll be 20 in December. If he were born in the U.S., would he be playing for an internationally renowned club (he currently plays for Paris San Germain)? Or would he be getting ready to play in his junior year at oh, I don’t know, . . . Stanford or Virginia?
The expert conducting a review into the death of a Maryland football player will have access to every written and electronic document relating to the incident, Terrapins athletic director Damon Evans told CBS Sports.
Hall of fame trainer Rod Walters has been hired to review the June 13 death of offensive lineman Jordan McNair.
“He’ll look at us from top to bottom,” Evans said while making an appearance this week at the annual National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics convention at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center.
“We’re giving him everything we have written. Then he will review that but also he will come to campus and meet with people individually who were involved in the prior process.”
Behind the scenes at the Senior Bowl weigh-in, the moment of truth is at hand. It’s just after dawn on a Tuesday in late January, and already the massive South Exhibit Hall of the Mobile Convention Center in Alabama is packed with NFL personnel types, clipboards at the ready. Meanwhile, on the other side of the pageant-style stage, players are pacing around in the dark, in various stages of undress, when Titans scout Mike Boni pokes his head through the curtains to offer instructions about one of the most bizarre yet necessary events in sports.
As he speaks, the players try not to stare at the shiny metal carpenter’s square in Boni’s right hand. But they know that this simple tool Boni picked up for $6.99 at an Ace Hardware has measured the height of every NFL prospect since 2012 — and, unlike the players, it never lies. To be fair, yes, Boni has turned the carpenter’s square on himself. “Six-two,” he blurts proudly. But then, before the words have even left his mouth, Boni holds up a finger to wait, catching even himself in the kind of ubiquitous fib that this event was meant to combat. OK, well, he’s not exactly 6-foot-2, he confesses. He’s “six oh one seven,” scout-speak for 6-foot-1, which amounts to a difference of about half the thickness of your phone.
Boni is a stickler. And when it comes to extracting the truth from elite athletes about their height and weight, well, you have to be.
In the hyper-data era of sports, we are hurtling toward absolute precision and mathematical certainty, where we can gleefully quantify grand mysteries such as a third-string fullback’s fourth-quarter red zone yards after contact in temperatures above and below 55 degrees. Yet it is something of a delightful, rebellious quirk that the first critical bit of data we learn about elite athletes — their height and weight — is still, more often than not, a complete and utter fabrication.
… The emphasis Pep Guardiola and other top managers place on crisp goalkeeping distribution both reflects and influences soccer’s increasingly holistic view of the position. Though keepers will always have a need for them, simple boots up the field have steadily drifted out of style over the past decade or two.
“For sure, it’s changing,” said former MLS and USMNT goalkeeper Zach Thornton, now a coach at DC United. “I don’t want to date myself, but [when] I played in high school, you played it back to the goalie and he could pick it up with his hands…. There’s more emphasis [today] on using the ‘keeper in possession and building out of the back, for sure. When I was a player, there wasn’t any type of passing – I had to do it on my own, before or after practice.”
Today, Brazil’s #1 Alisson is one of the most highly-sought-after players in the world, slapped with a price tag of $80 million or more by AS Roma in large part due to his passing and comfort on the ball.
SB Nation, Beyond the Boxscore blog, Matt Provenzano from
For a league that has seen fastball velocity grow exponentially, it has also seen fastball percentage go down, for a simple, banal reason: fastballs aren’t as valuable as other pitches.
Look through the weighted pitch values on FanGraphs, and you’ll see that sliders and curves consistently rate about a half run per hundred pitches better than fastballs, and that has held steady even as the percentage of fastballs has decreased. This goes against the theory that off-speed was only valuable because of contrasting with a fastball; no, it’s just valuable because it’s hard to hit.
This has benefited quite a few teams. The Yankees had a FanGraphs piece devoted to them earlier in the year on how their fastball percentage dropped not only faster than the league, but also faster than expected based on their own priors. The Astros just won a World Series on that exact philosophy as well.
The Pirates, on the other hand, are a completely different story:
Germany losing to Mexico and South Korea. Brazil only able to score in stoppage-time against Costa Rica. Argentina held by Iceland and thumped by Croatia. Spain struggling against Iran and needing a goal in added time to avoid defeat against Morocco. England needing an injury-time winner against Tunisia. Belgium going two goals down against Japan and only going through via the last kick of the game.
Part of the reason this World Cup has been so appealing is the upsets, but have there been more than in previous editions? If so, why?
The answer to the first question is yes, though not by a huge margin. I used the FIFA rankings to determine a favorite and an underdog for each match through the round of 16’s conclusion in the past three World Cups.
The Washington Post, Wonkblog, Christopher Ingraham from
Among the nine indicators we analyzed, the biggest predictor of weekly physical activity at the state level was money: Residents of states with bigger median incomes were more likely to get out and exercise than people in low-income states.
[Calories and macros and BMI don’t count. Here are the numbers that really matter.]
We uncovered some surprises in the data, too. Heavy drinking is slightly correlated with more physical activity, believe it or not. Warmer temperatures are linked to less exercise. And other characteristics of the physical environment, such as daily sunshine and mild winters, don’t actually seem to matter much.