Anyone accomplished enough to coach a major-league team typically has a non-negotiable: an imperative that coach’s players either abide by or risk not playing.
For instance, if you didn’t get back on defense for former Charlotte Hornets coach Steve Clifford, you were in deep trouble. Loafing in the initial seconds after the opponent rebounded the ball got you benched, if not traded.
The non-negotiable for Clifford’s successor, James Borrego, is ball movement. If you hold the ball inordinately long before driving, shooting or passing, you’re in trouble when the Hornets open training camp in Chapel Hill Sept. 25.
… After that August postpractice instruction had finished, Carroll was asked about the new-look secondary that was once the face of Seattle’s defense.
“We’re in a creation mode with these guys more than we’re in kind of a maintenance mode that you would be with guys that you’ve had before,” he told ESPN. “Once guys have played with us, they establish habits and things, and then we need to adjust them and hone their skill. This is more like the creation part of it.
More and more NBA players are turning their workouts (and summer highlight reels) over to private skill trainers. With the help of social media, some trainers are using the exposure to become entrepreneurs, newsmakers, and even celebrities in their own right.
The way Paul Fabritz sees it from his perch among the NBA’s elite trainers, James Harden’s MVP award was two seasons overdue: “He kind of got snubbed.”
Forgive Fabritz if he’s not wholly objective. The Houston Rockets’ Harden is one of more than 20 NBA players, including Philadelphia’s Joel Embiid, Orlando’s Mo Bamba and Brooklyn’s Shabazz Napier employing Fabritz as a “personal performance trainer.”
They’ve come flocking to Anaheim for Fabritz’s basketball-specific approach, attracted by testimonials from their peers or what they’ve seen on social media.
Fabritz’s Instagram story is about a guy who, through years of obsessive study, hard work and basketball jonesing, has established himself as an innovator capable of helping the world’s top players recover, improve and extend their careers. He’s the trainer with the formula that helped – if only “a little,” he says – Harden lay claim to the most-valuable mantle.
“The feedback that all the clients give is, ‘This training is so different from what I’ve ever experienced,’” said Ashley Powell, Fabritz’s fiancee, who helped found PJF Fitness and serves as its chief financial officer. “That the program design does matter, and the person leading the training matters.”
Kenya’s Eliud Kipchoge finished the Berlin Marathon in 2hr 1min 39sec on Sunday but advances in shoe technology, carbohydrate drinks and mindsets may close the gap further
The treatment of numerous diseases could be improved if the blood concentration of disease-relevant metabolites could be monitored at the point-of-care (POC), ideally even by the patient. A team of scientists led by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg and the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne has now introduced a biosensor for the accurate quantification of metabolites in small blood samples obtained from a simple finger prick. This biosensor could become an important tool for the diagnosis and management of various diseases.
Dopamine, a signaling molecule used throughout the brain, plays a major role in regulating our mood, as well as controlling movement. Many disorders, including Parkinson’s disease, depression, and schizophrenia, are linked to dopamine deficiencies.
MIT neuroscientists have now devised a way to measure dopamine in the brain for more than a year, which they believe will help them to learn much more about its role in both healthy and diseased brains.
“Despite all that is known about dopamine as a crucial signaling molecule in the brain, implicated in neurologic and neuropsychiatric conditions as well as our abilty to learn, it has been impossible to monitor changes in the online release of dopamine over time periods long enough to relate these to clinical conditions,” says Ann Graybiel, an MIT Institute Professor, a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and one of the senior authors of the study.
PLAYR, the world’s first SmartCoach wearable system is now available in the U.S. market. Catapult Sports, the maker of SmartCoach, enjoyed a successful launch of the product in Europe earlier this year. PLAYR’s unrivaled technology, which combines the latest GPS technology with personalized sports science advice, will provide competitive club soccer players with the insight and tools to train, prepare, recover and play just like the world’s elite.
PLAYR is an advanced tracking system that records up to 1,200 movements per second, making it the only soccer wearable system that combines GPS heat maps – showing sprint, distance and speed data – with a unique real-time SmartCoach app, created in partnership with the help of Premier League performance specialists.
Virginian-Pilot, Philadelphia Inquirer, Tom Avril from
… Arsh Dhanota, a sports medicine physician in the University of Pennsylvania health system who was not involved in the review, cautioned that the amounts of recovery time varied widely among the eight studies, making a firm conclusion difficult. Still, he said, pure oxygen might help.
“We can’t say definitively, but there appears to be a positive effect,” said Dhanota, director of Penn Medicine’s Regenerative Sports Medicine Program.
David Gealt, a sports medicine physician at the Cooper Bone and Joint Institute in South Jersey, is unconvinced.
“The only place where it may give you some benefit is if you’re playing in Mile High Stadium in Denver,” where the air is thinner, he said. “If you’re playing down in Philadelphia, it’s not a big deal.”
MEXICO CITY – SITTING ATOP A SMALL, wooden fence, the rancher surveys his surroundings. The cows gather in the shade, escaping the hot Central Mexico sun. They feed on a mixture of cornhusks, hay and other organic scraps.
The rancher is coy as he describes his work. These cows are “clean” he says, but hypothetically, he adds with a wink, they can all be “dirty” — thus his request for anonymity. Inside the barn, he opens an empty drawer and a hidden compartment reveals a bag filled with a white powder. “Here’s the cocaine,” he says cracking a smile.
The white powder is actually clenbuterol, a potent drug that, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, is often abused by bodybuilders and other athletes for its ability to increase lean muscle mass and reduce body fat. It is illegal for human use in most of the world, including Mexico. However, it is used commonly on farms here, administered to livestock to produce the same physical effects.
The civil war in global anti-doping has intensified further after the World Anti-Doping Agency was accused by 13 major anti-doping agencies – including the UK and US – of “moving the goalposts” and “sending a message to the world that doping is tolerated” over its willingness to strike a deal with Russia.
In an extraordinary attack the 13 agencies also said they were “dismayed” by Wada’s behaviour. They further insisted that Wada must postpone Thursday’s decision to reinstate the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (Rusada) because the Russians had not met Wada’s open roadmap to return.
Nicole Sapstead, the chief executive of UK Anti-Doping, said the response highlighted the gravity of the situation. “This is a defining moment,” she told the Guardian. “The roadmap for Rusada’s return was agreed through a proper process by Wada, yet at zero hour they have changed it. It is pretty much sticking two fingers up at the athletes and the organisations that work tirelessly on their behalf. I am deeply troubled by the way it has been handled. To me it looks dodgy.”
There’s a new fuel with measurable performance gains being used in top-level road racing, or so the recent rumour rattling around cycling has gone. Well now we can confirm it, the fuel is ketone ester and seven out of the 22 teams in this year’s Tour de France used it. We don’t know which teams, the company who developed the product commercially are contractually unable to tell us, but performance gains are such that you only have to look at the front of the peloton to guess.
This is next-level stuff, a quantum leap in endurance fuelling commercialized by a Silicon Valley biotech company called HVMN. They approached us with news of an up-coming hour record attempt they are involved in. But more of that later, first let’s look at this new fuel.
HVMN’s ketone ester, consumed as a drink, is the result of more than 15 years of research by DARPA, the research arm of the United States army; the NIH, the US government agency responsible for biomedical and public health research, and Oxford University. Research was initially funded by the US military to the tune of 60-million dollars. HVMN’s customers include the US Department of Defence, NFL teams and world champions in boxing and MMA.
… NATA President Tory Lindley believes the NCAA will adopt a standardized injury/availability report before the 2019 football season, and his group advocates two releases per week.
“If you wait until Friday,” Lindley said by telephone, “that leaves the vultures circling all week.”
Lindley is the head athletic trainer at Northwestern, but NATA’s proposed reforms would go beyond Evanston and the Big Ten, affecting all 130 FBS schools.
After Nikolas Cruz killed 17 students and teachers and wounded 17 others early this year at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, President Donald Trump had a theory about the underlying causes. “I’m hearing more and more people say the level of violence on video games is really shaping young people’s thoughts,” he tweeted.
He wasn’t the only one to make the connection. Claims about a link to violence in movies and games surface after almost every mass shooting, and it’s easy to see why, once you watch someone kill hundreds of anonymous enemies with automatic weapons and trench bombs in the bestselling game Call of Duty, or murder innocent drivers in the wildly popular Grand Theft Auto. Cruz reportedly loved such games: “It was kill, kill, kill, blow up something, and kill some more, all day,” a former neighbor told The Miami Herald.
Yet the hundreds of scientific studies that have explored whether media violence can lead to aggressive thoughts and actions have produced conflicting results. That’s why scientists have resorted to meta-analyses, studies that collect all the evidence about a sc