… Yet here he is, regularly arriving at the Florida Panthers’ training facility even before coach Bob Boughner on most mornings, spending more time getting ready for his daily workout than most people do on their actual workouts, not partaking in any hobbies during the season because he wants nothing to take away from his focus, still seeking any tiny way to make himself just a little better in net. His save percentage, in a season when he turned 39, was higher than the one when he turned 29. Or the one when he turned 19, for that matter.
Luongo is still driven, primarily for one reason — he’s never hoisted the Stanley Cup, the grail he wants most.
“He just prepares better than anybody I’ve ever seen at that position and that age,” Boughner said. “He’s just such a pro.”
… Let’s focus on his average offensive speed, which was 3.83 miles per hour in 41 games. (And 3.80 before he had surgery in late January.) During the 2016-17 season, Wall’s average offensive speed was 4.07 miles per hour. In 2015-16, it was 4.43. In 2014-15, it was 4.39. And in 2013-14, it was 4.48. There are myriad reasons why any player’s average speed might fluctuate from year to year—injuries, surrounding personnel, and playing style, to name a few—and the data provided by NBA.com doesn’t nearly go deep enough to form any conclusion either way.
But for someone who harnesses this edge to buff out the aforementioned smudges in his game; who isn’t built to dominate the same way without unleashing his greatest strength as often as he once did—Wall may already be on an alarming track.
Speed is hardly the determinant when it comes to any high-usage player’s ultimate impact. In the same way LeBron James and James Harden are tracked as two of the slowest players in the league, both are still able to accelerate and explode in ways that make their opponents cower. They’re also heavier, stronger, and more powerful than Wall.
It was the onset of spring training in 2015, Andrew Friedman’s first as the Los Angeles Dodgers’ president of baseball operations. “Player plan” meetings — basically, an analytics session with players, coaches and executives — were being held. They were mostly for the rookies, but accomplished veterans were included so the message would resonate.
The focus turned to Clayton Kershaw, fresh off winning an MVP award and widely considered darn near impeccable. A member of the Dodgers’ front office brought up the consistently low swing rate on Kershaw’s curveball and began talking about how the three-time Cy Young Award winner could use it as a way to get back into counts. Then Friedman heard a recognizable voice in a tone he hadn’t yet experienced.
“Never gonna happen,” Kershaw spat.
Up until then, Friedman had exchanged only pleasantries with Kershaw. He seemed friendly. Warm, even.
“That,” Friedman said, “was my first indoctrination into Dominant Pitcher Clayton Kershaw.”
Less than a year ago, Tobin Heath lamented that being injured was the “worst thing in the whole entire world.”
Now healthy, the midfielder for the Portland Thorns and the U.S. national team looks like she’s having the time of her life.
“I feel like it’s been nice for me to be out on the field for a while now,” she said. “I always try to get better and better and improve my game. I never feel like I’ve reached it. I’m also in a great place to find my best form here in Portland. I’m supported by amazing people, so I get the freedom to be able to grow and improve as a player because of the people around me.”
Much praise has been heaped upon Liverpool defender Joe Gomez this past week. Ex-Arsenal and England defender Martin Keown claimed the 21-year-old “has everything in his game,” while former Chelsea and Ireland striker Tony Cascarino suggested the Liverpool youngster should be given Kyle Walker’s England spot.
Garth Crooks went a step further, hailing him as “the nearest thing I’ve seen to Bobby Moore in years”. The former Tottenham man is often prone to hyperbole, but that was silly even for him. Gomez is a young lad with a big future, but comparisons with a World Cup-winning captain and the best defender England has ever produced aren’t particularly helpful.
Still, Gomez deserves every accolade that comes his way because even at such a young age he’s been through a lot. Since joining Liverpool from Charlton Athletic as a raw 18-year-old, it has been a series of ups and downs for the Londoner.
Injuries can play such a defining role in the outcome of a footballer’s career, and Gomez has experienced both sides of it. He has suffered himself due to long-term injuries, but he has also benefitted from the misfortune of others.
Sports Medicine Research: In the Lab & In the Field, Kris Fayock from
Take Home Message: A professional athlete with 6 or 7 days rest between soccer matches may be less likely to have a muscular injury during a match than a player with 3 or fewer days between matches.
Over the years, Thomas Gronnemark has encountered pretty much every conceivable reaction to his work.
He has known some players who have laughed at the idea. He has found others who think his job is “weird.” He has met many, too, who are willing to listen, happy to explore any possible route to improvement. Only very occasionally, though, has he run into someone who has met someone like him before.
Gronnemark is, to the best of his knowledge, the only specialist throw-in coach working in professional soccer. For the last 12 years, he has trained top-level teams in his native Denmark, Germany and, as of this year, England, running sessions for players who have spent their lives honing and fine-tuning every aspect of their craft. Every aspect, that is, apart from throw-ins.
In “99 percent of cases,” Gronnemark said, not only have professional soccer players never practiced throw-ins, it has never even occurred to them that they might.
… In its latest “Mic’d Up” video, featuring Hudy, you can get a pretty decent glimpse at how Hudy uses technology to aid her training.
There’s not an exercise or movement the Jayhawks do in the weight room or during training sessions that is without a reason behind it. And all of their efforts and output is tracked by technology, both in real time and over time, so the players can see, in black and white numbers, where they need to put their efforts and track the improvement they have made.
Using the latest training technology is something Hudy has made a staple of her program for years now. And it has always been important to her to stay in tune with the best equipment and software for training college athletes.
bioRxiv; Meret Branscheidt, Panagiotis Kassavetis, Davis Rogers, Martin A Lindquist, Pablo Celnik from
Fatigue due to physical exertion is a ubiquitous phenomenon in everyday life and especially common in a range of neurological diseases. While the effect of fatigue on limiting skill execution are well known, its influence on learning new skills is unclear. This is of particular interest as it is common practice to train athletes, musicians or perform rehabilitation exercises up to and beyond a point of fatigue. In a series of experiments, we describe how fatigue impairs motor skill learning beyond its effects on task execution. The negative effects on learning are evidenced by impaired task acquisition on subsequent practice days even in the absence of fatigue. Further, we found that this effect is in part mediated centrally and can be alleviated by altering motor cortex function. Thus, the common practice of training while, or beyond, fatigue levels should be carefully reconsidered, since this affects overall long-term skill learning.
As more metrics become readily available for use in sport performance, we’ve seen baseball go through changes on and off the field, both strategically and developmentally. In Driveline’s never ending quest to optimize player development, one metric that we’ve started to investigate is brain activity measured through an electroencephalogram (EEG) device. While there are still some challenges with measuring neural biomarkers in movement science, measuring brain activity in sports is gaining traction as wearable EEG devices have become more practical for sports research.
YOUNG footballers would become better players if coaches spent more time training them to scan the field and less on focusing on the ball.
New research by sports experts at the universities of Chichester, Portsmouth, and Limerick suggests reading the game should be taught to players from a young age, in tandem with ball skills, rather than as an advanced ability. The study, published in Psychology of Sport and Exercise, found that players who incorporated scanning into their play were likely to improve their awareness, decision-making, and the quality and/or speed of their technical actions.
… Proteus’ patented 3D resistance (like aquatic therapy on land) is designed to provide high muscle activation with less strain and tissue damage, while powerful software provides advanced data analytics including first-ever muscle performance data in 3D space and time—to transform into a virtual physical therapist or trainer.
In some ways, Strava is a very much like any social media platform, albeit with a slightly narrower focus than most. Founded as an online portal for bicycling enthusiasts in 2009, Strava it bills itself as “the social network for athletes,” has taken in $70 million in funding and has “tens of millions of active users,” according to CEO James Quarles.
It is getting very serious about the larger social media play and the ecosystem it hopes to build around it. Quarles is new to his job, having come on board last spring, but he is not new to social media. Before taking over as CEO at Strava, Qualres ran business operations at Instagram, and before that he was at Facebook.
With new leadership, Strava is pushing past its historical capacities — helping athletes track and share data about their workouts with other enthusiasts — and thinking bigger about the entire fitness journey it is attempting to go on with its customers.
It is an effort that is making an impact, particularly in the niche community it serves. According to one InTheBlack reviewer, among exercise enthusiasts who run, swim and bike, Strava isn’t just the place users go to log their athletic activities — it is where they goes to verify they exist.
The electronic pill went down easier than expected.
A few gulps of water washed it down, drowning the beginnings of the thought, “What the hell am I getting into?”
There was plenty of time to consider that — six hours, exactly — as the pill wriggled its way into my lower intestine, where the LSU sports scientists could get an accurate read of my core temperature.
Nathan Lemoine greeted me in the training room on a Sunday during preseason camp. In his left hand, he held a device the size of a small brick.
Lemoine is the athletic training staff’s sports science research associate — a position funded nearly a year ago by the LSU Health Sciences Center in New Orleans to bolster the ongoing medical studies within LSU athletics.
Within the past two years, the LSU athletic training staff has formed partnerships with local hospitals and the U.S. Department of Defense, and the Tiger Athletic Foundation set up a separate funding account in July 2017 so people could specifically donate to the staff’s research projects.
As a first-round draft pick from Brigham Young University, Shawn Bradley caused a hubbub during the 1993 NBA draft. That is because he was 7′ 6″ tall.
That’s five inches taller than Shaquille O’Neal, the NBA superstar drafted the year earlier. Bradley could touch the rim without lifting his feet.
Now researchers who have had a look at Bradley’s DNA say they figured out why he’s so tall.
According to a team at Brigham Young University, Bradley doesn’t have some unusual mutation or a pituitary gland disorder like Andre the Giant.
Instead, he seems to have won the jump ball of genetic luck, inheriting a combination of entirely normal genetic variations that, in combination, helped make him taller than 99.99999 percent of people.