… “We are excited to launch Project Podium with a roster of ideal athletes we believe have the potential to meet the long-term goals we have set for the program,” Parker Spencer said. “I have really enjoyed getting to know each of them and their families through the recruitment process. I know we have not only great athletes on our team, but guys with great character and a strong work ethic that will create the team culture we will need to meet the goals we have set for 2024 and 2028.”
“I am very pleased with the exceptional quality of the team that Parker has recruited to launch the Project Podium program at ASU,” Cliff English said. “I believe we have some of the best American talent assembled here on this young team, and now the stage is set to develop them into world-class athletes leading up to 2024 and 2028.”
… “I had a backup catcher say, ‘Hey, you just should sprint in and throw it as hard as you can because this might be your last outing ever. You might get released,’ ” Hughes said. “So I said, ‘All right, let’s do it, man.’ I started sprinting in and I started throwing 4 mph harder.”
Two months later and he was pitching in the big leagues.
Sprinting from the bullpen, Hughes is loose when arrives at the mound. His heart rate is higher.
“It was just out of a desire to be more physical on the mound,” Hughes said. “That’s what it was. I needed to be more physical because I wasn’t getting the most out of myself. I think it helped. It definitely raised my velocity.”
Dallas Morning News, SportsDay blog, Evan Grant from
Sometimes, the seemingly illogical makes all the sense in the world.
It just takes awhile to get there.
Start here: The Rangers are trying to build a strong starting pitching foundation, because any attempt at rebuilding will fail without one. Their first steps: Having their most prized young pitchers not pitch. In fact, they are doing just about everything except pitching. The Rangers call it their “de-load” program. It is about acclimation, education and, they hope, injury prevention.
If you are a regular disciple of Speed Endurance. Com then you already know the importance of increasing maximum speed in order to improve an athlete’s “Speed Reserve”. It may come as a surprise to many runners but high volume distance training does not improve maximum running velocity. Maximum and near maximum velocity sprint work is an effective tool to boost max speed, and so is explosive/ reactive strength training which utilizes movements that mimic various parts of the running gait. In addition, it has been shown that maximal strength training can improve running velocity as well.
In fact, research has shown that maximal speed is highly predictive of endurance performance. This involves increasing both stride rate and stride length through specific training. High velocity sprint work, weight training and jump training can provide this specific training.
The Developmental Academy (DA) is the highest tier of youth soccer in the United States. It was started by U.S. Soccer in 2007 and is based on the philosophy of “increased training, less total games, and more meaningful games using international rules of competition.”13Almost every MLS team has a developmental academy playing in this league, and the remainder of the 74 teams in the league are comprised of the biggest youth soccer clubs from around the country. The season is nearly year-round, with short breaks during December and June-July.
Even among other developmental academies, we have a unique situation with the Real Salt Lake Developmental Academy. It is a full-time residential academy, with the players living together in dorms and attending Real Salt Lake Academy High School. The dorms are a 5-minute walk from the high school, and the school is attached to the training facility. It is about as professional of an environment as you can get in amateur athletics.
… During a recent Child Health Research Institute talk by pediatric cardiologist Daniel Bernstein, MD, I learned the importance of taking a closer look at mitochondria. He discussed an imaging program he and colleagues use to look at the differences between individual mitochondrion to better understand their behavior within cells.
Scientist Giovanni Fajardo, MD, who works in the Bernstein lab, explained that the computer program, in conjunction with fluorescent tagging, allows the researchers to examine mitochondrial function in individual live mouse cardiac cells, as well as in individual mitochondrion within a single heart cell (where mitochondria make up about a third of the cell’s volume by weight, Bernstein said), in real-time.
Bernstein explained that the imaging method allows them to see “small, temporal, but important changes in mitochondrial dynamics during stress [chemically induced to simulate exercise or cardiac injury] that aren’t shown in the standard approach.”
Instant blood pressure (IBP) is a top-selling yet inaccurate blood pressure (BP)-measuring app that underreports elevated BP. Its iTunes app store user ratings and reviews were generally positive. Whether underreporting of elevated BP improves user experience is unknown. Participants enrolled at five clinics estimated their BP, measured their BP with IBP, then completed a user experience survey. Participants were grouped based on how their IBP BP measurements compared to their estimated BP (IBP Lower, IBP Similar, or IBP Higher). Logistic regressions compared odds of rating “agree” or “strongly agree” on survey questions by group. Most participants enjoyed using the app. In the adjusted model, IBP Higher had significantly lower proportions reporting enjoyment and motivation to check BP in the future than IBP Similar. All three groups were comparable in perceived accuracy of IBP and most participants perceived it to be accurate. However, user enjoyment and likelihood of future BP monitoring were negatively associated with higher-than-expected reported systolic BP. These data suggest reassuring app results from an inaccurate BP-measuring app may have improved user experience, which may have led to more positive user reviews and greater sales. Systematic underreporting of elevated BPs may have been a contributor to the app’s success. Further studies are needed to confirm whether falsely reassuring output from other mobile health apps improve user experience and drives uptake.
… re.flex uses two motion detection sensors that are connected to a mobile app. The solution enables patients to finish their last stage of the physical rehabilitation at home, under the physiotherapist’s supervision. All they have to do in order to get it started is place the sensors on the injured leg and follow the app.
With a complex movement algorithm, re.flex sensors are able to generate a unique and accurate 3D real-time visualization, that comes along with a database of video exercises, that allows patients to better understand the movements and get immediate feedback.
A two-way communication system is also available in the app for the times when the patients have urgent questions or the physiotherapist needs to intervene.
Johann Hari’s experience with depression is something of a lightning rod within mental health circles. Some cheer his nuanced views of the disorder, grateful for a take on mental health that emphasizes the impacts of environment and experience. Others argue that the British journalist is too dismissive of medication. “Is everything Johann Hari knows about depression wrong?” reads a headline that ran in a U.K. newspaper.
The extreme reactions to the best-selling author of Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression—and the Unexpected Solutions also speak to the binary way people tend to view mental illness and mental health. You either have it or you don’t.
Nearly 50 percent of people in the U.S. will experience a mental health disorder at some point in life. Every single person, every day, passes through the continuum that is mental health, from building resilience to dealing with challenges such as anxiety and depression to recovering from trauma to living with severe disorders that need constant medical care.
Last week, HealthDay News (and many other news sites) covered a study from The Lancet Psychiatry looking at the association between exercise and depression. People who said they exercised tended to report fewer days of poor mental health compared to those who said they didn’t exercise, according to the study.
That finding was unfortunately misreported as showing that “exercise really can chase away the blues, to a point.” Why was this misleading? The observational study wasn’t capable of showing cause and effect (or, as statisticians might say, that it wasn’t a “causal” relationship).
It’s the classic chicken-or-egg dilemma. We don’t know, for example, if exercise led to better mental health or better mental health led people to exercise. It’s feasible that both are true, too.
Even though the data set had 1.2 million people, observational findings like these–that can only detect patterns–are reversed all the time when a true experimental, randomized controlled trial (RCT) is conducted. Just last week we wrote about this happening when savvy researchers used both an observational study and an RCT to study workplace wellness programs. While observational data showed the workplace wellness programs got employees to exercise more, the RCT found that wasn’t the case.
That’s not to say there’s isn’t some RCT evidence indicating positive effects of exercise on mental health. There is.
Trillions of tiny microbes and bacteria live in your gut, each with their own set of genes. These gut microbes can have both beneficial and harmful effects on your health, from protecting you against inflammation to causing life-threatening infections. To keep out pathogens yet encourage the growth of beneficial microbes, scientists have been trying to find ways to target specific microbial genes.
Katherine Pollard, PhD, is one of these scientists. Her team at the Gladstone Institutes is interested in better understanding how microbes colonize the gut. They want to identify the genes that help microbes pass through the stomach’s harsh environment and survive in the lower gastrointestinal tract.
“Until now, this has not been an easy feat,” explains Pollard, senior investigator and director of the Gladstone Institute of Data Science and Biotechnology. “Most microbes in the gut have evolved from related species, so they share many common genes. It’s difficult to single out the genes that actually influence a microbe’s ability to survive in the gut environment.”
A new study published in the scientific journal PLOS Computational Biology led by Patrick Bradley, a postdoctoral scholar in the Pollard lab, found a new approach to identify the genes that may be important to help microbes live successfully in the human gut.
Milk used to be simple. Your local dairy, say Berkeley Farms, delivered it to your doorstep.
But now we are faced with an unfathomable array: nonfat, low-fat or whole milk? Almond, soy, rice, hemp or oat milk? From goats or cows? With or without lactase? Raw or pasteurized? Plain or flavored? There’s even an ongoing controversy over which of these drinks can be called milk.
To sort through the confusion, I spoke with Stanford nutrition scientist Christopher Gardner, PhD. He is working to clear up some of the biggest misconceptions we have about milk.
Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise journal from
Leucine metabolites, α-hydroxyisocaproic acid (α-HICA) and β-hydroxy-β-methylbutyrate (calcium, HMB-Ca and free acid, HMB-FA), have been proposed to augment resistance training-induced changes in body composition and performance.
PURPOSE We aimed to conduct a double-blind randomized controlled pragmatic trial to evaluate the effects of off-the-shelf leucine metabolite supplements of α-HICA, HMB-FA and HMB-Ca, on resistance training-induced changes in muscle thickness, and performance.
METHODS Forty men were randomly assigned to receive α-HICA (n=10, fat-free mass [FFM]=62.0 ± 7.1 kg), HMB-FA (n=11, FFM=62.7 ± 10.5 kg), HMB-Ca (n=9, FFM=65.6 ± 10.1 kg), or placebo (PLA; n=10, FFM=64.2 ± 5.7 kg). The training program consisted of whole body thrice weekly resistance training for 8wk (7 exercises/session, 3–4 sets per session, at 70-80% 1RM). Skeletal muscle thickness by ultrasound, performance measures, and blood measures (creatine kinase [CK], insulin-like growth factor 1 [IGF-1], growth hormone [GH], cortisol and total testosterone) were evaluated at baseline and at the end of weeks 4 and 8.
RESULTS Time-dependent changes were observed for muscle thickness (p < 0.001), 1RM bench press and squat (p < 0.001), Wingate peak power (p = 0.02), countermovement jump height (p = 0.03), power (p = 0.006), CK, IGF-1, GH, and cortisol (all p <0.001). No significant between-group or time-by-group interactions were observed.
CONCLUSION No leucine metabolite resulted in any ergogenic effects on any outcome variable. Supplementation with leucine metabolites – α-HICA, HMB-FA, or HMB-Ca – is not a supplementation strategy that improves muscle growth and strength development in young adult men.
… I’ve pitched since I was 8 years old, including the last 7 years in pro baseball. The resounding commonality between good hitters — at any level — is that they’re better at selecting pitches that give them a higher probability of hitting hard. Pick only the fastballs down the middle and leave everything else.
And that appears to be exactly what Mike Trout does, right? To hit .632 in 0–0 counts is absurd, and really all he’s doing is narrowing his focus so much that the only pitches exist to him are pitches in the exact location he wants. When he gets them, he smashes them. When they’re not there, he takes them. That’s simple, but it’s not easy to do.
Most hitters think it’s their pitch, then realize it’s off-speed or not in the location they initially thought.
… Swimmers, though, somehow seem to escape that endurance/speed/size trade-off, according to a new study published in July in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, which for the first time closely examines the morphology of a large group of world-class swimmers and runners. Its findings provide evidence that while there is a body type associated with success in each sport’s various distances, in swimming that body type is consistently the same.
For the research, three anthropologists with an interest in human physical performance gathered publicly available biometric data about the male and female swimmers and runners at the 2012 Summer Olympic Games in London. The information included each athlete’s height, weight and competitive events. (The researchers focused on freestyle swimming races, for the sake of simplicity.) The scientists used that info to calculate each athlete’s body mass index; differences between the B.M.I.s presumably would indicate differences in musculature, because competitors at their level do not carry much fat.
The resulting graphs plotting B.M.I.s and events looked quite different by sport. In running, B.M.I.s dropped precipitously as event distances increased. Two-hundred-meter runners were considerably more massive than marathoners. But there was no similar drop among swimmers. Those contesting the 50-meter freestyle shared a similar body mass with those swimming the two-hour, 10,000-meter open-water marathon.