… “Deena [Kastor] pulled me aside and said, ‘This is the difference between anything in marathon training. This rep is marathon training. Just get it in,’” Pappas recalled of her conversation with the American women’s record-holder in the marathon.
“She said, ‘You can do this, but this is where you get all the gains. It’s [the interval] in there and you’re going to create it by doing it.’”
… The 35-year-old San Jose forward enters the weekend with 142 goals, three shy of Donovan’s record. The Earthquakes provide regular “Wondo Watch” updates reminding everyone of where their star and captain stands.
“It’s kind of one of those things it’s pretty cool but for me right now it’s just kind of a number,” Wondolowski said after a recent practice at Avaya Stadium. “It’s pretty amazing to be mentioned with Landon. It’s good to be relevant in that sense but other than that I’ve kind of been more concentrating on this year trying to get some wins.”
The 35-year-old San Jose Earthquakes forward has 142 goals and is closing in on Donovan’s MLS career mark of 145. The Quakes provide regular “Wondo Watch” updates reminding everyone of where their star and captain stands in his pursuit.
… After just two months of being exposed to the Leafs operation, Ennis is reporting big gains in mobility at the outset of camp. He’s worked with the rehab specialist, sports science and performance director and been on the treatment table virtually every day.
“I feel like their staff is so advanced that they were able to kind of pinpoint certain things that maybe were hindering me that I had kind of just dealt with in the past as though it was always going to be there,” he said. “So they were able to loosen up my hips and groins that maybe were limiting me before. I feel like my quickness is there. I feel like I’m ready to roll.”
… Speaking exclusively to TGG from his home in the United States, Norman said football still needed to upgrade its approach to strength and conditioning.
“From an S&C standpoint, football does not have a strong culture,” he said. “It’s getting much better, but still has a long way to go.
“Research has divided it between fitness, which is cardio based, and S&C. A lot of people, even to this day, say you don’t need to train weights, you just need to run.
“You totally need to do that though. What a lot of people don’t get is that strength doesn’t equal size. If you are pound for pound as strong as possible, then the energy it takes to do the same step is less and there is less metabolic consequence to do those steps.
…This is not the only study to have found that the old adage, “There’s more than one way to skin a cat,” seems to apply to periodization in endurance training. Another was conducted by Stephen Seiler and his Norwegian colleagues and published in 2016. This experiment involved a subject pool of 63 cyclists who were also separated into three groups that periodized their high-intensity training in different ways over 12 weeks. One group started with longer intervals and moved toward shorter, faster intervals, a second group did the opposite, and a third group mixed them all together. All three groups improved by equal amounts, and the researchers concluded, “This study suggests that organizing different interval sessions in a specific periodized mesocycle order or in a mixed distribution during a 12-wk training period has little or no effect on training adaptation when the overall training load is the same.”
As surprising as these findings may be to some, they jibe with my experience as a coach. What I have observed is that the one thing a training program must do over the course of time is get harder. And it doesn’t much matter how it gets harder provided certain rules are respected
Courier & Press, Indianapolis Star, Jordan Guskey from
J-Shun Harris II knows what you were thinking when he raced into the end zone Saturday against Ball State for his third career punt return touchdown.
He knows you thought about his three anterior cruciate ligament tears. He knows — more than anyone would ever want to — the toll each injury took and the long road to recovery he endured each time. He knows, because at one point — if only for a moment — he’d also doubted his eventual return, while IU football coach Tom Allen and others were uncertain whether or not Harris would ever play again.
The NHL players shuffled into the private room, unsure about what was happening next. Sixteen strong, the group had arrived from an afternoon round of golf to dinner at a high-end Italian restaurant outside Tampa, near the posh resort where everyone was staying during this week of workouts in late August. Sipping coffees around a U-shaped table, the players faced a 60-inch television; the restaurant’s A/V setup proved insufficient, so the flatscreen had been hastily purchased at Best Buy for that night’s activity, a mysterious event that had appeared on their schedules as, simply:
At the front stood Darryl Belfry, a player development consultant for the Toronto Maple Leafs whose annual camp has become an invite-only hive of top talent: Toronto’s Auston Matthews, Boston’s Charlie McAvoy, Detroit’s Dylan Larkin, and Philadelphia’s Claude Giroux and Shayne Gostisbehere were all in attendance this year, testing themselves against one another before reporting to their respective teams for the season. So too was Chicago’s Patrick Kane, the former Hart Trophy winner and reason why Belfry had dubbed this gathering, at least to himself, The 88 Summit.
Times Free Press (Chattanooga, TN), David Cobb from
… The same eagerness that helped land Fitzgerald his big break at South Carolina paid off again. It impressed Pruitt, who once showed up at the door of a high school coach he wanted to work for.
“I knew that based off just that meeting, his desire to be there, he was a guy that we wanted in the program,” Pruitt said at a Nashville signing-day celebration this past winter.
Fitzgerald started his strength coaching career as a volunteer at NCAA Division III Catholic University before taking an assistant strength and conditioning position at Maryland. He said he and his wife dreamed about him making enough money to one day buy a house.
But simply being cheap and available — and aggressive — landed him in the SEC, where he finds himself again a decade later as the league’s highest-paid strength coach.
FC Barcelona are one of the most successful domestic football teams of all time. Some believe that one of the key ingredients of their success, across all levels of the club, is the unique philosophy and training methods employed by the array of coaches – from academy level up.
Now, for the first time, our new research may provide some insight into the training methodology and, potentially, the secrets of the club’s success. These “secrets” could be closely associated with the theories put forward by coach Paco Seirul·lo and how they link with cutting edge sports science.
The research was undertaken by three staff members of FC Barcelona’s Sports Performance Department, Andres Martin-Garcia, Antonio Gomez Diaz and Francesc Cos Morera. I was invited to be a consultant, alongside David Casamichana from the Universidad Europea del Atlántico.
Together, we used state of the art tracking technology throughout the 2015-16 season to monitor physical exertion of players during training and matches. The methodology across each training day was detailed meticulously to illustrate how the players were prepared for upcoming games and to potentially capture information into why this method seems to work so well.
Seattle Mariners General Manager Jerry Dipoto is not only tasked with taking his team up the standings of MLB’s American League, he is also overseeing an organization-wide paradigm shift in high performance.
Encouraging children “to help,” rather than asking them to “be helpers,” can instill persistence as they work to fulfill daily tasks that are difficult to complete, finds a new psychology study.
The research, conducted by a team of New York University scientists, suggests that using verbs to talk about actions with children, such as encouraging them to help, read, and paint, may help lead to more resilience following the setbacks that they inevitably experience rather than using nouns to talk about identities—for example, asking them to be helpers, readers, or artists.
The results run somewhat counter to those of a 2014 study that showed asking children to “be helpers” instead of “to help” subsequently led them to help more.
For many sports, club teams have become the primary focus for student-athletes looking to get recruited and score a roster spot on a college team. There are a few reasons for this, one being the elevated level of play and another being the schedule, which tends to line up with the time that college coaches are out of season and have more time to recruit. And while for some sports it has become downright essential to play on a club team, there are still many benefits to be had from competing on a high school team, even for club-focused sports. Coaches can help communicate these points to athletes and families to help them enjoy a more well-rounded experience, and I’ve included some here.
The sci-fi dream of wearable communication technology that enhances human perception is closer to becoming a reality thanks to a collaboration between Cambridge University and Nokia Bell Labs.
Launched yesterday (Tuesday), the new Centre for Mobile, Wearable Systems and Augmented Intelligence will be based in Cambridge’s world-leading Department of Computer Science and Technology.
It will advance state-of-the-art mobile systems, security, new materials, and artificial intelligence (AI) to address one of the main human needs – the ability to communicate better with each other.
In partnership with Your Ideas Are Terrible, Georgia Tech Athletics presents The Sports Innovation Challenge, a free 24-hour hackathon focused on innovation in sports and athletics.
During the challenge, teams will build new products or services to fix an existing problem, all within a day. Participants will pitch their final projects to a panel of school and community leaders to win prize bundles full of tech goodies including VR headsets, drones, video games, DraftKings gift cards, game tickets, and a spot in the CREATE-X’s Startup Launch program (which includes $20,000 in seed investment). Participants keep the IP of anything they build.
This month, two of baseball’s promising young pitchers—Shohei Ohtani of the Angels and Michael Kopech of the White Sox—learned that they will likely need Tommy John surgery due to torn ulnar collateral ligaments in their throwing arms. While Ohtani remains in the Angels’ lineup as a hitter, Kopech’s debut season is over after fewer than 15 innings.
In the 2018 Bill James Handbook, Sports Info Solutions added Tommy John surgery information for every pitcher who appeared in MLB in 2017, including surgery dates. This information will be updated for every 2018 pitcher in the upcoming 2019 Bill James Handbook as well. Did you know that several pitchers have undergone multiple Tommy John surgeries? For example, Oakland A’s reliever Shawn Kelley has had two surgeries—the first in 2003 and the second in 2010.
More than 25 percent of the league’s pitchers in 2018 have undergone Tommy John surgery at some point in time. That’s a surprisingly high figure, demonstrating how common the procedure is, as well as how pitchers have been successfully able to pitch in the majors after the surgery.