Canadiens coach Claude Julien insists he wasn’t punishing veteran forward Andrew Shaw or sending a message by making him a healthy scratch the last two games.
“There was no message sent to him that way more than I saw a guy who missed eight months, came back, practised twice (before the season started),” Julien said after the Canadiens practised Wednesday morning in Brossard. “We thought enough of him to put him in the lineup to start the season because that’s the kind of player he is. Gave him a chance to find his game. He got sick, came back and just hasn’t quite found his stride yet. So what I asked him to do is to really work hard in practice, see if you can’t find that half a step that I think he’s missing.”
Michael Bradley had just played his second game in as many days, his third game in seven. After playing a substitute’s role in the USMNT’s 1-1 draw with Peru in Connecticut on Tuesday night, he’d caught a plane south and met up with his Toronto FC teammates for a Wednesday MLS visit to DC United at Audi Field on October 17.
He captained the Reds and went all 90 in a narrow 1-0 loss, TFC’s 17th of a dispiriting league season that ended outside the playoff places, 11 months after they won every trophy within their reach. Bradley looked exhausted, and understandably so. Perhaps less physically than mentally, given the extreme highs and lows that have marked his last couple of years for both club and country.
“I was excited to play,” he said when asked in a quiet locker room by reporters about his hectic 48 hours on the Eastern Seaboard. “Excited to play. I love to play. When you take all the other – when you peel away all of the BS, all the trophies, wins, losses, ups, downs, when you take all that away, I can’t speak for anybody else but I do this because I love the game. I love to play. So obviously given that I only played a few minutes last night, it seemed like a given that I was going to get here this morning and get ready to play.”
… The ACL tear is so routinely overcome in sports anymore, we treat it like an ankle sprain or hamstring pull. But that’s not real life, especially not for a 6-foot-6, 325-pound man. And if he’s being honest, real life may have had a hand in his predicament. Certainly, Conklin believes, it had something to do with his dip from 2016 to 2017. From All-Pro as a rookie to very good in his second season.
“I don’t think I played quite as well,” Conklin said of last season, which ended with the injury in the Titans’ playoff loss at New England. “I think I was too heavy, honestly, I don’t think I was moving as well. There were just some times where I put myself in hard situations just because I couldn’t move and get to the right place…
American Journal of Sports Science and Medicine from
Background: Health-related fitness tests measure one of five different traits: cardiorespiratory endurance, muscular strength, muscular endurance, body composition, and flexibility. To assess an individual on all five traits can be costly and time consuming. Thus, it would be useful to the fitness practitioner if one single test could be used as a proxy for overall fitness. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to employ multivariate data analyses to examine the ability of the vertical jump (VJ) to predict health-related fitness performance. Methods: This study used data from college students who completed both ten different health-related fitness tests and the VJ assessment. Three body composition measures were used: percent body fat (PBF, %), body mass index (BMI, kg/m2), and waist circumference (WC, cm). Four muscular fitness measures were used: 1RM bench press (BP, lb), 1RM leg press (LP, lb), maximal push-up repetition (PU, #), and flexed arm hang time (FAH, sec). Two cardiorespiratory endurance measures were used: maximal oxygen consumption (VO2, ml/kg/min) and physical activity rating score (PAR, 0 thru 10). One flexibility measure was used: sit-and-reach (SNR, cm). The countermovement vertical jump (VJ, in) was used as the single predictor variable and participants were categorized into high or low VJ groups using the sex-specific median. Results: Male-specific multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) results showed that VJ significantly predicts the linear combination of body composition (λ=0.85, F=4.8, p=.004), muscular fitness (λ=0.66, F=10.4, p<.001), and cardiorespiratory endurance (λ=0.85, F=7.3, p=.001). Female-specific MANOVA results also showed that VJ significantly predicts the linear combination of body composition (λ=0.43, F=17.6, p<.001), muscular fitness (λ=0.41, F=14.1, p<.001), and cardiorespiratory endurance (λ=0.61, F=13.0, p<.001). Univariate ANOVA models showed that VJ significantly predicts flexibility (F=5.0, p=.028) in males only. Overall fitness MANOVA models showed that VJ significantly predicts the linear combination of all ten fitness scores in both males (λ=0.61, F=4.8, p<.001) and females (λ=0.33, F=6.8, p<.001). Conclusion: Results from this study indicate that VJ is a valid predictor of health-related fitness performance in college students. [full text]
This study examined the impact of night matches on the sleep/wake behavior of elite soccer players participating in the UEFA Champions League and French Ligue 1. A mixed method approach was used, combining objective sleep assessment with wrist activity monitors, and a survey to ascertain the sleep complaints after night matches (kick off after 18:00 hours). Most players (90%) indicated worse sleep in the nights after evening matches than after training days. Objective time in bed (-01:39 hours; effect size [ES] = 1.7; p < 0.001) and total sleep time (-01:32 hours; ES = 1.4; p < 0.001) were both lower after night matches than after training days. Night matches had a marked influence on sleep quantity later that night, both objectively and subjectively. The survey revealed that players may not have appropriate methods for better managing their sleep after night matches. It is yet to be determined whether players may benefit from individualized sleep interventions in these circumstances.
As the old proverb goes, “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.” But where does that will come from, and how can we strengthen in? The answer may lie in one’s self-confidence. A recent study finds that the key to improving willpower is to simply believe you have it in abundance to begin with.
Researchers at the University of Illinois found that anyone can say they have the willpower to do something, but whether or not they really believe it — and just how much willpower a person believes he or she has — makes all the difference in the world.
Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise journal from
Introduction Ground reaction forces (GRF) during load carriage differ from unloaded walking. Methods to quantify peak vertical GRF (pGRFvert) of Soldiers walking with loads outside of a laboratory are needed to study GRF during operationally relevant tasks.
Purpose Develop a statistically based model to predict pGRFvert during loaded walking from ActiGraph GT3X+ activity monitor (AM) vertical acceleration.
Methods Fifteen male Soldiers (25.4 ± 5.3 yr, 85.8 ± 9.2 kg, 1.79 ± 9.3 m) wore an ActiGraph GT3X+ AM over their right hip. Six walking trials (0.67–1.58 m·s−1) with four loads (no load, 15, 27, 46 kg) and two types of footwear (athletic shoes and combat boots) were completed on an instrumented force plate treadmill. Average peak vertical AM acceleration (pACCvert) and pGRFvert were used to develop a regression equation to predict pGRFvert. The model was validated using a leave-one-subject-out approach. Root mean square error (RMSE) and average absolute percent difference (AAPD) between actual and predicted pGRFvert were determined. pGRFvert was also predicted for two novel data sets and AAPD and RMSE calculated.
Results The final equation to predict pGRFvert included pACCvert, body mass, carried load mass, and pACCvert-carried load mass interaction. Cross-validation resulted in an AAPD of 4.0% ± 2.7% and an RMSE of 69.5 N for leave-one-subject-out and an AAPD of 5.5% ± 3.9% and an RMSE of 78.7 N for the two novel data sets.
Conclusion A statistically based equation developed to predict pGRFvert from ActiGraph GT3X+ AM acceleration proved to be accurate to within 4% for Soldiers carrying loads while walking. This equation provides a means to predict GRF without a force plate.
Star-shaped brain cells called astrocytes appear to play an essential role in sleep, a new study by scientists from the Washington State University Sleep and Performance Research Center confirms.
Published today in PLOS Genetics, their study shows that astrocytes communicate to neurons to regulate sleep time in fruit flies and suggests it may do the same in mammals, including humans.
This research has opened up new avenues to understanding how sleep works inside the brain, which may eventually help scientists answer the elusive question of why we sleep.
Post and Courier (Charleston, SC), Grace Raynor from
Amari Rodgers’ cell phone only had 7 percent battery power remaining, just enough juice to scroll through the pages of his home screen and locate his new favorite app — one he’s been using on a nightly basis for several weeks.
Clemson’s wide receiver and punt returner had been trying to verbalize just how Headspace, a world-wide application that guides users through self meditation, works to help calm him down before bedtime. But after a few minutes of trying to explain it, Rodgers decided a visual show-and-tell might be a little more enlightening. So he went straight to the source.
“It’s this,” he said, pointing to his screen as Headspace opened up. “I click on it and then there are different categories and you can click on a different one every night and do it.
The key to building bigger muscles – and to staying happy, healthy and young, if you believe the conventional wisdom – is to unleash a torrent of hormones. Design your exercise program to maximize the release of testosterone, growth hormone and other related molecules, and you’ll be ripped in no time – or so we’re told.
But a new study from researchers at McMaster University undercuts this picture, finding that the hormone surge triggered by exercise has no impact on how much muscle you gain over time. Instead, what matters is how sensitive your muscles are to hormonal signals, a finding that may explain why some people put on muscle much more easily than others.
Yoel Fink stands under an unassuming LED ceiling lamp wearing what appears to be just an ordinary baseball cap. “Do you hear it?” he asks. Semiconductor technology within the fibers of the hat is converting the audio encoded in light pulses to electrical pulses, he explains, and those pulses are then converted to sound. “This is one of the first examples of an advanced fabric. It looks like an ordinary hat but it’s really a sophisticated optical communication system.”
Fink and his team are shaping a new destiny for fabrics. Clothing as a communications system: A hat that picks up light transmissions and converts them to sound can hold life-saving potential. “Think about pedestrian safety and self-driving cars. Tremendous investments are going into cars. How about the pedestrians? Do we as pedestrians or bikers get to know if the car has detected us?” Fink asks. “With fabric optical communications your baseball cap can not only alert a car to your presence but importantly let you know if the car detected you. Fabrics for the self-driving future.”
A team of researchers, led by Sheng Xu and graduate student Chonghe Wang, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, decided to merge ultrasound technology with wearables. Their prototype wearable ultrasound patch consists of a thin sheet of silicone polymer with elastic qualities. The sheet is patterned with a visible array of small electronic parts connected by lightweight, spring-shaped copper wires that can stretch, bend, and twist without breaking.
Then there is the customized software. It allows continuous monitoring of central blood pressure based on the ultrasound readout. Each peak and valley reading in the blood pressure real-time measurement, called a waveform, represents the heart’s normal activity. Any hiccup in the blood pressure waveform can be used to indicate a problem, such as an irregular heartbeat or impending heart failure.
Dr Martin O’Reilly of the University College Dublin (UCD) School of Public Health, Physiotherapy and Sports Science, and the Insight Centre for Data Analytics started working in his current field after completing an undergraduate placement at Shimmer Research in 2013.
The following year, he undertook a PhD in how wearable sensors could augment strength and conditioning training. His subsequent PhD work has been published in 18 peer-reviewed papers and he will be a principal investigator for a planned start-up called Output Sports, which aims to develop sports technology that is cost-effective, scientifically valid and user-centric.
… Rest has become the most talked about NBA league-wide issue related to performance over the past five years. There are sleep studies and studies on the impact of flying, and injury correlational studies and hyperbaric chambers and sleep therapists and the whole thing. And all of it’s valid, all of it is backed by credible, substantial science.
So this is not at all a discussion of whether or not rest affects performance. It absolutely, objectively does, no matter how much Jeff Van Gundy complains about the idea. However, what gets lost is that the rest factor is absolutely 100% already baked into the line.
To Bet Labs!
The following chart shows against the spread performance for home teams with at least two days of rest vs. teams on the second game of a back to back (or as we call it, SEGABABA, a phrase coined by Spurs blog Pounding The Rock).
To estimate the current incidence and location of injury in English professional football. Design
Prospective cohort study conducted over one competitive season (2015/16). Setting
Professional football players competing in the English Football League and National Conference. Participants
243 players from 10 squads (24.3 ± 4.21 per squad). Main Outcome Measure
Injury incidence, training and match exposure were collected in accordance with the international consensus statement on football injury epidemiology. Results
473 injuries were reported. The estimated incidence of injury was, 9.11 injuries/1000h of football related activity. There was a higher incidence of injury during match play (24.29/1000h) compared to training (6.84/1000 hours). The thigh was the most common site of injury (31.7%), muscle strains accounted for 41.2% of all injuries. The hamstrings were the most frequently strained muscle group, accounting for 39.5% of all muscle strains and 16.3% of all injuries. Moderate severity injuries (8-28 days) were the most common (44.2%). Conclusions
Incidence of injury has increased over the last 16 years with muscle strains remaining the most prevalent injury. The hamstrings remain the most commonly injured muscle group.