On Monday, Jarome Iginla officially retires as a Calgary Flame. Five years ago, his actual playing time with the team was coming to an end. Sportsnet travelled to Calgary to profile the greatest Flame of all time in those final days. The result was this story, about a man who loves to sing.
… A mile away from Chickie and Pete’s, the O‑line meeting room at the NovaCare Complex is undergoing offseason construction: ceiling tiles have been stripped, the lights shut off; rows of black rolling chairs are strewn about. But the most important feature remains: a whiteboard on which the bespectacled Stoutland had scribbled, in green dryerase marker, HUNGRY DOGS RUN FASTER.
When Stoutland left Alabama to join the Eagles in 2013, he was a my-way-or-the-highway hardass. Then he read It’s Your Ship, a book of management techniques by Capt. Michael Abrashoff, a former Navy commander. Suddenly Eagles linemen were being encouraged to interrupt meetings, disagree about techniques and suggest strategy changes. “I don’t want robots in here,” Stoutland told them. “You might know even more than I know.”
A line must operate like synchronized swimmers, he preached, because one errant movement can disrupt the entire routine. But everyone takes a different path toward making that happen. Johnson is the class clown.
When the Eagles won Super Bowl LII, often lost in the narrative is how the team won it all with five of its best players sidelined with injuries. We get an inside look at how Carson Wentz, Jason Peters, Jordan Hicks, Darren Sproles and Chris Maragos bonded together through their recovery process.
… “I remember the old days. I remember the old, old cafeteria, which was way back over there,” the Packers quarterback says in a quiet moment Friday, pointing to the east side of Lambeau. “I don’t even know what’s over there now. It was a tiny room, and we had soda machines, we had ice cream bars all over the place, and we had these milkshakes at night that were enormous, which I loved.
“The eating habits in 2005 were different than 2018.”
Rodgers was different then, too. He’s 34 now. He has 13 NFL seasons, 10 as Green Bay’s starter, under his belt. And maybe if he turned 35 during the 2005 season, rather than the 2018 season, he’d be looking at his quarterbacking mortality the same way Joe Montana (retired at 38), Dan Marino (38), Jim Kelly (36), John Elway (38) or Troy Aikman (34) did a generation ago. But it’s a different time. The math has changed, and Rodgers sees himself as a beneficiary.
It took a commitment on Rogers’s part. After the 2015 season he underwent arthroscopic knee surgery to take care of a lingering issue. After that he looked for ways to get out in front of the pain he’d experienced. It started with a simple fix, one that cost him his milkshakes.
… How the soon-to-be-41-year-old Brady ultimately found it in 2018, which he talked about Saturday, has been overlooked because of how the news conference ended when a reporter asked whether he had a reaction to those who have linked his personal trainer, Alex Guerrero, to wide receiver Julian Edelman’s four-game suspension for violating the NFL’s performance-enhancing substance policy.
There was one point, in particular, that Brady seemed to want to stress: He loves football as much as ever. And now the final stretch of his career has become all about how he can continue to play while also being the husband and dad he feels his children — ages 11, 8 and 5 — need.
“Football is very, very important to me. It always has been, and I love being out here with my teammates,” Brady said Saturday. “As you get older, you have different responsibilities, and I think that’s just part of life. Everyone’s got to deal with those responsibilities differently and what works for them. Football is a huge part of my life.”
Every year, a big offseason topic in Nebraska focuses on Wisconsin and how the Badgers use many pieces of what made the Huskers great at one time. Even coach Scott Frost mentioned it at Big Ten Media Days in Chicago last week, noting Wisconsin athletic director Barry Alvarez’s role in that. Alvarez, who played linebacker at Nebraska from 1965 to 1967, is known for implementing the “Nebraska formula.”
The formula Frost wants to bring back to in Lincoln is essentially the exact formula that Wisconsin currently uses.
“Coach Osborne had the formula figured out,” Frost said. “We used to build it from within by developing players better than anybody else. We went out and recruited good players that were hungry and had upside and got to work in the best strength and conditioning program in the country, with the best nutrition program in the country.”
Looking spefically at Wisconsin’s strength and conditioning program and what makes it so different, Badgers players have plenty of thoughts on the matter. D’Cota Dixon, Wisconsin’s fourth leading tackler last season, came to Madison with the mentality needed to thrive in the Badgers’ program. He also gives a lot of credit to Wisconsin’s strength staff.
… Players need to be alert, adaptable and inventive, because they’re the ones in the centre of the storm and, therefore, must determine what needs to be done.
So thank goodness, over a period of time and with the influence of sporting people, educationalists and a very good friend of mine called Kevin Roberts, my life swung round full circle and I came back to my street games approach.
These influences challenged and disrupted my thinking and behaviour. I learned to break free of status quo thinking. Positive challenge and disruption leads to improving change. We all need it.
From battling stomach bugs to figuring out where to find deionized water, carrying out a scientific expedition in the Andes is no small feat. “We ended up using pressure cookers to sterilize our research equipment,” said former CSU student Catherine Le. “I learned that you need to be creative and adaptive in field research.”
Le was part of a large research team that spent 16 days atop Mount Chacaltaya in Bolivia (elevation 17,785 feet) carrying out one of the most comprehensive studies ever done on how the human body adjusts to high altitude. The AltitudeOmics Project, funded in part by the Department of Defense and the National Institutes of Health, involved 25 researchers from nine universities and six countries.
“When you put it all together, no other study of high-altitude biology comes close to this project in terms of scientific scope or the amount of people involved,” said Adam Chicco, an associate professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences who led the portion of the study on how muscle metabolism responds to low oxygen in the blood. “It required a lot of teamwork, special planning, flexibility and improvisation.” Chicco’s results were recently published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry.
In casual conversation, the “biological clock” is often referred to when starting a family but officially, our biological clocks, or our circadian rhythms, are how our bodies know when to go to sleep at night and when to wake up in the morning. With a few notable exceptions (hospital staff comes to mind, as does the populous of those in far Nordic countries), most of us live lives in which we work at day and sleep at night, loosely following the rise and setting of the sun. However, as any insomniac can tell you, it’s also super easy for our circadian rhythms to go off-kilter.
When they are off, is it possible to reboot our biological clocks? And if so, how should we go about doing it?
Though one McGill University study found a form of steroids might do the trick, a more recent study proves a weekend in the wild might work just as well, if not better. Scientists discovered that the human melatonin rhythm (melatonin is a hormone that helps control your sleep/wake cycles) adapts to short summer and long winter nights when living in a natural light-dark cycle — something that was long assumed but never officially proven.
Practicing sport at the highest level is typically accompanied by several stressors and restrictions on personal life. Elite athletes’ lifestyle delivers a significant challenge to sleep, due to both the physiological and psychological demands, and the training and competition schedules. Inter-individual variability of sleep patterns (e.g., sleep requirements, chronotype) may have important implications not only for recovery and training schedules but also for the choice of measures to possibly improve sleep. This article provides a review of the current available literature regarding the variability of sleep among elite athletes and factors possibly responsible for this phenomenon. We also provide methodological approaches to better address the inter-individual variability of sleep in future studies with elite athletes. There is currently little scientific evidence supporting a specific influence of one particular type of sport on sleep; sleep disorders may be, however, more common in strength/power and contact sports. Sleep behavior may notably vary depending on the athlete’s typical daily schedule. The specificity of training and competition schedules possibly accounts for the single most influential factor leading to inconsistency in sleep among elite athletes (e.g., “social jet lag”). Additionally, athletes are affected by extensive exposure to electric light and evening use of electronic media devices. Therefore, the influence of ordinary sleep, poor sleep, and extended sleep as important additional contributors to training load should be studied. Future experimental studies on sleep and elite sport performance should systematically report the seasonal phase. Boarding conditions may provide a good option to standardize as many variables as possible without the inconvenience of laboratory. The use of interdisciplinary mixed-method approaches should be encouraged in future studies on sleep and elite sport. Finally, high inter- and intra-individual variability in the athletes’ sleep characteristics suggests a need for providing individual responses in addition to group means. [full text]
International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance from
The National Basketball Association (NBA) has an extremely demanding competition schedule, requiring its athletes to compete in 82 regular-season games over a 6-mo period (~ 3.4 games/wk). Despite the demanding schedule and high value of athletes, there is little public information on the specific game and training demands required to compete in the NBA. While provisions in the NBA collective bargaining agreement allow for research designed to improve player health and broaden medical knowledge, such information is sparse in the available literature. In relation to the physical demands of the NBA, the current lack of information likely results from multiple factors including limited understanding of (basketball-related) emerging technologies, impact of specific league rules, and steps taken to protect players in the age of Big Data. This article explores current limitations in describing specific game/training demands in the NBA and provides perspectives on how some of these challenges may be overcome. The authors propose that future collaborations between league entities, NBA clubs, commercial partners, and outside research institutions will enhance understanding of the physical demands in the NBA (and other health- and performance-related areas). More detailed understanding of physical demands (eg, games, practices, travel) and other health-related areas can augment player-centered decision making, leading to enhanced player care, increased availability, and improved physical performance.
NCAA, Champion Magazine, David Morrow as told to Brian Burnsed from
… I was a very aggressive defenseman. Back then, the only options you had for a defense shaft — a 6-foot-long stick — were wood, which was very heavy, or aluminum, which was really soft. Every time you checked somebody, your stick would bend. So as a defenseman, your stick always had these S-curves in it. You’re constantly trying to straighten it out, but your stick was always out of balance.
Dad and I had a project that we were working on at his shop with guys from Penn who started a company that created the first synthetic snowshoe. Their snowshoes were bending too much, and they said they needed to look at alternative materials. We brought in all kinds of high-strength aluminum and titanium. So the titanium was there for a completely different application, but when it came time to solve the stick problem, my dad said, “Why don’t we try the titanium?”
This was in April of 1992, my junior year, and we were going into the national playoffs. He made samples and sent them to me. I brought it into practice and Coach T goes, “What the hell is that?” I said, “It’s a new shaft. It’s really light, really strong, and you can really whale on guys. Can I use it?” By the end of practice, other guys wanted to use it, too, so we made more for our team.
University of Cincinnati and Eccrine Systems‘ Jason Heikenfeld discussed sweat-based biometric monitoring at ApplySci’s recent Wearable Tech + Digital Health + Neurotech conference at Stanford.
Pass rushers are faster, stronger, and better than ever before, while quarterbacks are getting rid of the ball quicker than in any previous era. Players, coaches, and analysts take us inside the high-speed battle that defines the modern NFL.
At last year’s World Track and Field Championships in London, researchers had 49 high-speed cameras rigged up in the stadium and out on the marathon course for a massive biomechanics study led by a team at Leeds Beckett University. If you’ve ever wondered about the nuances of hammer throwing—should you spin three, four, or five times before releasing your projectile?—then the recent release of detailed reports on 38 individual events will be a treasure trove for you.
Among those reports are some interesting nuggets on the best distance runners in the world. During the marathons, which were run on a four-loop road course, the researchers used a four-camera setup to watch for subtle changes in each runner’s stride, foot strike, joint angles, and so on as they fatigued. During track races like the 10,000 meters, they analyzed the pacing of each runner in 100-meter intervals throughout the race in addition to collecting biomechanical data.