… Lattimore and Kamara were both exceptional for the Saints last season en route to earning their rookie honors. Lattimore, a first-round pick, had five interceptions and did not allow a touchdown in coverage. Kamara, a third-round pick, gained 1,554 yards from scrimmage, scored 14 total touchdowns and set a new NFL record by averaging 7.7 yards on 200-plus touches (201).
Heading into 2018, both players expect to be better, and they discussed on Monday one reason to expect improvement.
Before players enter the NFL, they have to go through a grueling offseason. For three or four months, most players will train for the combine or their respective pro days, which means working out to impress on the 40-yard dash and other drills. Training for those athletic tests leaves less time to improve football technique.
… Only seven of England’s 23-man squad in Russia (Jordan Henderson, Trent Alexander-Arnold, Ruben Loftus-Cheek, Raheem Sterling, Phil Jones, Danny Wellbeck and Marcus Rashford) made debuts for Premier League clubs.
The rest began their careers lower down the football ladder, at places like Bury, Cheltenham and Stocksbridge Steels. Goalkeeper Jordan Pickford was one of three players (the others being Jamie Vardy and Jack Butland) to make their debuts in non-league.
Team Sky have taken the unprecedented step of releasing a cache of data to BBC Sport detailing Chris Froome’s diet, power output and heart-rate from the Briton’s victory in May’s Giro d’Italia.
On Monday, an anti-doping case against Froome was dropped by the UCI, cycling’s world governing body, following an investigation after more than the allowed level of legal asthma drug salbutamol was found in his urine during his Vuelta a Espana triumph in September 2017.
“I’m happy to share data to back up some of the performances we have done out on the roads,” four-time Tour de France champion Froome told BBC Sport.
I get asked all the time how a pitcher can improve his control and command on the mound; it’s a difficult question to answer. Pitching mechanics correlate highly with velocity and “stuff”, but not as much with strike-throwing and command, which is largely a mental and “feel” process.
How Do Some Pitchers Develop Good Control, While Others Do Not?
It’s a REALLY tough question to answer. It’s not just mechanics and it’s not just experience – more innings definitely helps, but there are pitchers with poor command all the way up the baseball mountain. Watch the video below to hear more about the process.
“Do one thing at a time” is a long way to say: focus. Remove distractions. Drop unneeded interfaces. Silence background chatter. Don’t multitask: it doesn’t work. Only focus on one lesson of one subject at a time. When we focus, we get more out of the energy we put into learning. Isolate and learn each idea, and then integrate the ideas to solve the problem.
Sports coaches are often under pressure to maximise the performance of their athletes and teams. With good intentions, they often turn to the latest hyped psychological techniques and ideas – many of which are not well supported by scientific evidence.
The following five techniques are widely used by sports coaches. None have robust evidence to back them up.
The development of fatigue elicits multiple adaptations from the neuromuscular system. Muscle synergies are common patterns of neuromuscular activation that have been proposed as the building blocks of human movement. We wanted to identify possible adaptations of muscle synergies to the development of fatigue in the upper limb. Recent studies have reported that synergy structure remains invariant during the development of fatigue, but these studies did not examine isolated synergies. We propose a novel approach to characterise synergy adaptations to fatigue by taking advantage of the spatial tuning of synergies. This approach allows improved identification of changes to individual synergies that might otherwise be confounded by changing contributions of overlapping synergies. To analyse upper limb synergies, we applied non-negative matrix factorization to 14 EMG signals from muscles of 11 participants performing isometric contractions. A preliminary multidirectional task was used to identify synergy directional tuning. A subsequent fatiguing task was designed to fatigue the participants in their synergies’ preferred directions. Both tasks provided virtual reality feedback of the applied force direction and magnitude, and were performed at 40% of each participant’s maximal voluntary force. Five epochs were analysed throughout the fatiguing task to identify progressive changes of EMG amplitude, median frequency, synergy structure, and activation coefficients. Three to four synergies were sufficient to account for the variability contained in the original data. Synergy structure was conserved with fatigue, but interestingly synergy activation coefficients decreased on average by 24.5% with fatigue development. EMG amplitude did not change systematically with fatigue, whereas EMG median frequency consistently decreased across all muscles. These results support the notion of a neuromuscular modular organisation as the building blocks of human movement, with adaptations to synergy recruitment occurring with fatigue. When synergy tuning properties are considered, the reduction of activation of muscle synergies may be a reliable marker to identify fatigue. [full text]
This study investigated the relationships between perceptions of coach autonomy support, basic psychological need satisfaction and the frequency at which youth soccer players engage in additional soccer activity outside of team sessions. We employed structural equation modelling to test a two-wave (T1 and T2) half-longitudinal study to see if basic psychological need satisfaction mediated the relationship between coach autonomy support and additional soccer activity across a competitive season. The sample consisted of 527 youth soccer players, aged 10–15 years. Results revealed moderate to strong temporal stability for autonomy, competence, relatedness and frequency of additional soccer activity. Furthermore, no support is offered for mediation as T1 coach autonomy support was not related to any of the three basic needs at T2 when accounting for their T1 levels. However, a positive relationship between T1 autonomy and T2 additional soccer activity emerged. This suggests that those who experience high levels of autonomy in the team setting at the start of the season report an increased frequency of additional activity at the end of the season. Results are discussed in light of the Self-Determination Theory and the Trans-Contextual Model.
This year CVPR (Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition) conference has accepted 900+ papers. This blog post has overview of some of them. Here you can find notes that we captured together with my amazing colleague Tingting Zhao.
Determination of lactate threshold (LT) is an important variable in improving cardiovascular endurance and performance. Unfortunately, monitoring LT during exercise uses a costly, invasive blood analysis. Recently, electromyography (EMG) has been deemed a potential method of monitoring exercise intensity and may provide a noninvasive technique to monitor lactate during exercise. The purpose of this investigation was to determine if wearable surface EMG technology, acquired from specialized compression shorts, could estimate the LT work rate during incremental cycling. Thirteen men (n = 9) and women (n = 4) completed a maximal exercise test on a cycle ergometer. Blood lactate was measured every minute, whereas EMG was recorded throughout at the site of the vastus lateralis. Lactate and EMG thresholds were calculated using the Dmax method and compared using a Wilcoxon matched-pairs signed-rank test. Results demonstrated no significant differences between lactate and EMG thresholds in regards to work output (p = 0.83), percent maximal heart rate (p = 0.13; Cohen’s d = 0.43), or percent peak oxygen consumption (p = 0.64; Cohen’s d = 0.09). This confirms that both lactate and EMG exhibit similar properties (i.e., increasing exponential values) during incremental exercise. A possible mechanism includes the rise in blood lactate concentration, which increases motor unit recruitment in an attempt to maintain proper cadence and force output during incremental exercise. Thus, a coincidental, exponential increase in EMG amplitude may occur. Therefore, wearable EMG compression gear may provide a viable field tool for monitoring training intensity and predicting LT work rates.
Newswise, American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine from
ACL injuries are one of the most common sports injuries affecting adolescent athletes, leading to lost playing time and high healthcare costs. Research presented today at the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine’s Annual Meeting in San Diego shows athletes who experience fatigue – tested on a standardized assessment – demonstrated increased risk of ACL injury. The study is the first to measure the direct impact of fatigue on injury risk in the adolescent population.
“We studied 85 athletes at an average age of 15.4 years, and found 44.7% showed an increased injury risk after high-intensity aerobic activity,” noted lead author Mohsin S. Fidai, MD, from Henry Ford Health System in Detroit. “Additionally, 68% of those studied were identified as having a medium- or high-risk for injury following the activity, as compared to 44% at baseline.”
PLOS One; E. F. Myers J. S. Parrott, P. Splett, M. Chung, D. Handu from
Purpose
This retrospective cross-sectional study aimed to identify opportunities for improvement in food and nutrition research by examining risk of bias (ROB) domains. Methods
Ratings were extracted from critical appraisal records for 5675 studies used in systematic reviews conducted by three organizations. Variables were as follows: ROB domains defined by the Cochrane Collaboration (Selection, Performance, Detection, Attrition, and Reporting), publication year, research type (intervention or observation) and specific design, funder, and overall quality rating (positive, neutral, or negative). Appraisal instrument questions were mapped to ROB domains. The kappa statistic was used to determine consistency when multiple ROB ratings were available. Binary logistic regression and multinomial logistic regression were used to predict overall quality and ROB domains. Findings
Studies represented a wide variety of research topics (clinical nutrition, food safety, dietary patterns, and dietary supplements) among 15 different research designs with a balance of intervention (49%) and observation (51%) types, published between 1930 and 2015 (64% between 2000–2009). Duplicate ratings (10%) were consistent (κ = 0.86–0.94). Selection and Performance domain criteria were least likely to be met (57.9% to 60.1%). Selection, Detection, and Performance ROB ratings predicted neutral or negative quality compared to positive quality (p<0.001). Funder, year, and research design were significant predictors of ROB. Some sources of funding predicted increased ROB (p<0.001) for Selection (interventional: industry only and none/not reported; observational: other only and none/not reported) and Reporting (observational: university only and other only). Reduced ROB was predicted by combined and other-only funding for intervention research (p<0.005). Performance ROB domain ratings started significantly improving in 2000; others improved after 1990 (p<0.001). Research designs with higher ROB were nonrandomized intervention and time series designs compared to RCT and prospective cohort designs respectively (p<0.001).
Conclusions
Opportunities for improvement in food and nutrition research are in the Selection, Performance, and Detection ROB domains. [full text]
… Common wisdom holds that, in a must-win situation, a team will dig deep and come up with something extra. That may be true, but the exertion doesn’t necessarily translate into winning. Yair Galily, a sports psychologist at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, in Israel, and his postdoc Elia Morgulev, analyzed three decades of playoff performances among N.B.A. teams and found that teams did worse in must-win situations than when the stakes were low or were equal for both teams.
… What Can Countries Do to Improve National Team Performance?
Obviously, having a good coach, a good camp, and building team spirit have big effects on performance. But many of the socio-economic factors that influence team success are pretty firmly fixed. You can’t change your weather or your footballing tradition. But there are two elements in the model that countries can change.
First, the size of the talent pool can be expanded by encouraging more youngsters to play football, and identifying the most promising talents (I know, Matthew Syed is going to kill me again.) And that is exactly what Iceland have done to very good effect, as England found out when Iceland knocked them out of the Euros in 2016. Second, national federations could assist more players to gain skills abroad, though that of course is not without its risks to the domestic game. And there are other more innovative solutions. Iceland overcame its weather disadvantage by building indoor pitches. The Philippines’ improvement was based on stretching their definition of nationality quite considerably, not a tactic everyone would want to copy, but they also employed good foreign coaches.