… “The best part of hitting?” he asks. “You have control of what you’re doing. You’re in the box. It’s your box. I love hitting. You put in all the time and practice to go out there and put up good numbers, and it’s just so fun. I enjoy it so much. I don’t know … Guys on base get me excited.”
“Hold on,” I tell him. “The pitcher is the one in control. He’s got the baseball. He’s the one who knows where it’s going, how fast it’s going, how it’s spinning … You can only react to what he does.”
“I flip it,” he says, smiling in recognition of his own preposterousness. “Because you know your zone. I think if you give the pitcher anything it just gives them an advantage and an edge. So you have to just go in that box and own it. Think positive, and it’s yours.”
Serena Williams is into the Wimbledon final. Stop and let that breathe for a moment. Really soak in the improbability of what the 23-time Grand Slam champion has accomplished so far this tournament. Yes, Wimbledon is a Slam she has won seven times and one where she hasn’t dropped a match since 2014. Sure, she was playing in her 11th Wimbledon semifinal and was 29-5 in Grand Slam semis before walking onto Centre Court to play world No. 13 Julia Goerges on Thursday. But there is no statistic fantastic enough to convey the implausibility of the outcome — a 6-2, 6-4 win over Goerges that at once felt predetermined, yet unthinkable just a short time ago.
“This was not inevitable for me,” Williams said after the match, which took 70 minutes to complete. “I had a difficult birth, multiple surgeries, I almost didn’t make it. There was a time I could barely walk to my mailbox. It’s such a pleasure and a joy [to be in the final] because less than a year ago, I was going through so much.”
Wide receiver Julio Jones skipped the Atlanta Falcons’ entire offseason program, including the three days of mandatory minicamp. But he is working with teammates at quarterback Matt Ryan’s passing camp.
Ryan has annually gathered Atlanta’s receivers for a few days of work between the end of the NFL team’s offseason program and the start of training camp.
When England take on Colombia this evening, their players will be trying to stay out of the red and in the blue.
Gareth Southgate and his players use a principle called ‘red head, blue head,’ which was developed by a Twickenham-based company called Gazing Performance. The New Zealand All Blacks – who had previously been labelled chokers – hired Gazing in 2010 and went on to win two Rugby World Cups.
Red head is distracted, anxious, stressed. If you want to see a working example of this, re-watch England’s capitulation against minnows Iceland at Euro 2016.
… What exactly does it mean to be mentally tired? What’s actually happening in your brain? Proposing an answer to these riddles is the challenge that a new paper in Sports Medicine, from a team at the University of Canberra led by Kristy Martin, takes on.
The basic hypothesis that Martin and her colleagues present (drawing on a suggestion from 2014) is that mental fatigue results from the accumulation of a brain chemical called adenosine. In this picture, sustained cognitive activity burns up glucose, particularly in certain regions of the brain associated with “effortful mental processes,” such as the anterior cingulate cortex. This temporary and localized fuel shortage triggers a rise in adenosine levels, which in turn blocks the release of neurotransmitters like dopamine. The result is a rise in perception of effort and a decrease in motivation—in other words, a feeling of mental fatigue.
… there’s a crucial difference between technological and endurance sports domains, which is that endurance methods operate on the human body, which is not a piece of technology. Although (contrary to what many people believe) our species does continue to evolve, it is a very slow process compared to advancements smartphone features and robotic surgery techniques. For this reason, the optimal methods of maximizing endurance performance cannot just keep getting better. Once the best ways to train and fuel the human body for distance racing have been discovered, it is impossible to improve upon them further until and unless the human body changes enough for different methods to become optimal.
For example, in the 1950s, New Zealand running coach Arthur Lydiard discovered that a training system combining very large amounts of low-intensity work with small amounts of high-intensity work was more effective than any training system that had been tried previously.
The precise timing and tempo of maturation varies between
individuals, hence, it is important to consider chronological age and maturity status separately.(6) Failure to do so
exposes applied practitioners and coaches to the risk of unfairly judging young players’ abilities. Since assessments of
movement quality are widely used within professional soccer,
a greater understanding of the influence physical maturity has
on this attribute may help applied practitioners better interpret the results.
Last month I attended Vern Gambetta’s GAIN conference in Houston, Texas. A great mix of practical sessions, seminars and informal idea sharing, it is my annual chance to take time out and immerse myself in learning.
I shall be sharing some of the ideas and insights learnt this year. The act reviewing what happened and disseminating that into a hopefully useful blog post is part of my ongoing learning.
Today I start with Peter Weyand’s second seminar which was a great overview of the scientific process and how things stand in this millennium.
Alex Gibney’s new ESPN+ docuseries explores the moral implications of high-tech in sports.
Elite athletes are the superheroes of the flesh-and-blood world: Their herculean speed, strength and mind control capabilities compel billions of sports fans across the world. But what price would you pay to barrel through your physiological limits and be the very best among your peers?
With Enhanced, ESPN+’s fascinating — though constrained — six-part docuseries, 30 for 30 veteran Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Zero Days) contends with the moral implications of how technology, neuroscience and data mining continue to advance human performance. In doing so, he uncovers a multifaceted “pay to play” industrial ecology where athletes forfeit their bio data and bodily autonomy in exchange for a flicker of glory.
As it turns out, biology may not, in fact, be destiny. Each episode, led by a different director, focuses on a unique segment of the trade seeking to propel athletes forward. In “Skill,” experts use the age-old nature vs. nurture framework to parse out the intricacies of developing talent. “Algorithm Wars” exposes the dystopian underbelly of competitive sports analytics, while “Mind Gurus” explores the psychospiritual culture of brain-training. Episodes “Power,” “Endurance” and “Recovery” investigate the ethics of performance-enhancing substances, from steroids and human growth hormones to blood treatments and hydrogel carbo drinks.
Wearables are the most personal devices we own, and we consistently grant them access to private health information, location data and more. Sometimes we sync up our Facebook with them, and other times we give them to our kids. So naturally, we have to take privacy and security with them seriously.
vpnMentor, a website dedicated to reliable and honest tips for VPNs, has commissioned a report from CI4S Limited, which provides cyber intelligence and related tech to companies, to dig into the security and privacy levels of three wearables: the Modius Headband, Digitsole Warm Insoles and Ivy Health Kids Thermometer.
However, the report only assessed the risks of the devices and companion apps when synced to an Android phone running 8.0 Oreo. The report found that Digitsole doesn’t implement authentication when pairing over Bluetooth, which it says means an attacker within range could hijack the Warm Insoles and send them commands to do things like change the temperature.
… Dr Kai Yang, a Principal Research Fellow in the Smart Electronic Materials and Systems (SEMS) research group, has been awarded a £600,000 Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Fellowship to expand practical research that could help mitigate the pain generated by the common healthcare condition. … She says, “The Fellowship will allow me to build on my previous research into developing cutting-edge electronic textiles for wearable therapeutics, where dry electrodes printed on everyday clothing fabric can deliver a small electrical current to interfere with the pain signals and stimulate the release of the body’s natural endorphins easing the pain.
… [Mike] Malone, at that moment, was filling out paperwork in advance of a free health screening set up Thursday and Friday by the National Basketball Coaches Association [NBCA]. It was a new program at Summer League this year that the NBCA intends to provide annually for head and assistant coaches, a benefit of membership in a profession that almost necessitates it.
“During the season, there’s ups and downs with your health,” Minnesota assistant coach Andy Greer said after his screening and results review was over. “I don’t take care of myself as well as I should. In the offseason, I try to get caught up and make sure that no damage is done.”
It’s always in the back of your mind. Stress can do a lot of damage, and this job is a very stressful job.
Problem is, the NBA offseason has been getting shorter while the season seems to get longer.
Craig Counsell spent time as a special assistant to then-GM Doug Melvin before taking over as the manager of the Milwaukee Brewers in May 2015. That experience has proven to be valuable. Gifted with a deeper understanding of what goes on behind the scenes, the cerebral former infielder can better go about the job of leading a team on the field — not so much in terms of the Xs and Os, but rather the ability to see the big picture.
That doesn’t mean strategic decisions, or the statistical probabilities that go with them, don’t matter. They matter a lot, and Counsell approaches them with care. Even so, knowing that something has a slightly better than 50/50 chance to work doesn’t mean it’s an obvious choice. One can embrace analytics — which Counsell certainly does — and still let the gut play a role.
… The US junior success is in part the result of the US Tennis Association (USTA) centralising its player development programme in the past ten years or so in Florida, according to Patrick McEnroe, who headed up the programme between 2008 and 2014.
When he first took the job, America’s most talented junior players “were sort of scattered around the country,” said McEnroe, younger brother of three-time Wimbledon champion John McEnroe.
“Our goal was always to try and raise the level of coaching, but also to try and get the best players together,” he explained. “It raised the bar a little bit. It forced everybody else that was coaching young kids to raise their game.”
Almost everything that moved in the stadium at last year’s IAAF World Championships in London was recorded by 49 high speed cameras and has now been measured and analysed as part of the largest biomechanical study in the sport’s history.
Today, the IAAF, in partnership with Leeds Beckett University, has released the results of this unique project at the IAAF Coaches Conference in Tampere.
After 12 months of intensive work, Leeds Beckett has produced 38 in-depth reports on the specific events that make up the track and field program, revealing fascinating details about the performances of the world’s best athletes.