SB Nation, Sounder at Heart blog, Jeremiah Oshan from
… Morris clearly spent a lot of that time doing more than simply getting healthy. He also seemed to study the game and work on his own weak spots. It was similar to the way Luke Skywalker showed up in “Return of the Jedi” as a full-fledged master, clearly matured from the guy who got his hand chopped off in “Empire Strikes Back.” … I don’t know that Morris’ first-ever home brace will propel him to a breakout season. What I do know is that this version of Jordan Morris feels quite a bit different than the one we saw struggling to find himself in 2017. Hurt or not, Morris never looked particularly confident that year and was often limited to relying on his physical talents, rather than his soccer skills. This version seemed to have a better sense of where he needed to be and where his teammates wanted to go.
… Dean is a big cornerback at 6-foot-1, 206 pounds and was a star at Auburn after suffering three knee injuries dating back to his days in high school. He was originally medically disqualified after signing with Ohio State, but sought a release from the school and received a second doctor’s opinion: Dr. James Andrews. Long story made short: he was cleared by the renowned knee surgeon and finished his career as an All-SEC corner at Auburn.
Dean’s time is the second-fastest at the NFL Combine in two years. Washington’s John Ross ran what is now the combine record with a time of 4.22 seconds in 2017.
… He is attempting to corral his new basketball life on a glaringly naked public stage. The injury he incurred last season, a foot so gruesomely distorted that his teammates had to turn away, continues to bedevil him, both physically and mentally, even as he diligently works to put it behind him.
That recovery process, Hayward told ESPN, includes the assistance of a mental health counselor to help navigate the mental gymnastics of returning to “normal” — whatever that means. Working with the counselor to navigate those gymnastics has been a major step in Hayward’s healing that he concedes took some time for him to reconcile.
“It’s hard,” Hayward said. “It’s embarrassing. You want to be the guy that says, ‘I’m strong. I don’t need any help.'”
Research question Does the Nordic hamstring exercise (NHE) prevent hamstring injuries when included as part of an injury prevention intervention?
Design Systematic review and meta-analysis.
Eligibility criteria for selecting studies We considered the population to be any athletes participating in any sporting activity, the intervention to be the NHE, the comparison to be usual training or other prevention programmes, which did not include the NHE, and the outcome to be the incidence or rate of hamstring injuries.
Analysis The effect of including the NHE in injury prevention programmes compared with controls on hamstring injuries was assessed in 15 studies that reported the incidence across different sports and age groups in both women and men.
Data sources MEDLINE via PubMed, CINAHL via Ebsco, and OpenGrey.
Results There is a reduction in the overall injury risk ratio of 0.49 (95% CI 0.32 to 0.74, p=0.0008) in favour of programmes including the NHE. Secondary analyses when pooling the eight randomised control studies demonstrated a small increase in the overall injury risk ratio 0.52 (95% CI 0.32 to 0.85, p=0.0008), still in favour of the NHE. Additionally, when studies with a high risk of bias were removed (n=8), there is an increase of 0.06 in the risk ratio to 0.55 (95% CI 0.34 to 0.89, p=0.006).
Conclusions Programmes that include the NHE reduce hamstring injuries by up to 51%. The NHE essentially halves the rate of hamstring injuries across multiple sports in different athletes.
… The big question is what happens when you slack off from the gym. Scientists initially thought that the number of nuclei would decrease as your muscle cells shrink, and there was some evidence that seemed to suggest that nuclei were indeed succumbing to “programmed cell death” as muscles atrophied. But a series of careful mouse experiments a decade ago by Norwegian physiologist Kristian Gundersen contradicted this idea: when mice stopped exercising, their muscle shrank by as much as 50 percent, but the number of nuclei stayed exactly the same.
Microsoft Research Asia and University of Science and Technology of China have jointly released a new human pose estimation model which has set records on three COCO benchmarks. The neural network “HRNet” features a distinctive parallel structure that can maintain high-resolution representations throughout the entire representative process.
HRNet (High Resolution Network) model has outperformed all existing methods on Keypoint Detection, Multi-Person Pose Estimation and Pose Estimation tasks in the COCO dataset. The project research paper has been accepted by CVPR 2019.
… Q: Your panel today talked a lot about keeping new forms of medical data private. What are your thoughts about that?
A: These are things the union thinks about a lot. I have an interesting perspective because I’m [familiar with] both sides of the issue. As a former player I worry a lot about safeguarding the data. At the same time I know how valuable the data can be, in terms of predicting and preventing injury … as I talked about in the panel, becoming your own innovation lab, if you will. So I’m coming at it from that standpoint, but I’m also coming at it from the labor standpoint. I want to protect the players, make sure there’s no misuse of the data.
The data has value. There’s no doubt. It has value from a player development perpective, from an evaluation perspective, from a commercial perspective. It’s here, it’s coming, and there’s no stopping it; it’s just too valuable. But the instututions need to be strong, the agreements [over its use] need to be strong, and it’s just something we have to keep working through for quite a long time.
… Neff doesn’t approach smart devices as a Luddite or even that much of an alarmist; she bought first-generation Fitbit when they were brand new and virtually unknown (all of five years ago!). She approaches them as a sociologist, “looking at the practices of people who use digital devices to monitor, map and measure different aspects of their life.”
Many people with and without activity trackers feel they already track their lives – through a tally they keep in their head. Think of the item of clothing – say those ‘skinny jeans’ – you wear when you feel you’re particularly slim. “One of the things that motivated us in thinking about the book were these qualitative measures that help people understand their lives and give them a sense of tracking that is more empowering in some ways.” And one of the findings is that a low-common-denominator approach to the devices can prevent people from really taking control, or customizing the collection, of their own data. “For too many people,” Neff says, “they can’t access and control their own data on the devices in order to begin to frame the next question.” [audio, 19:45]
… “Right now, using wearable technology to collect scientific data out in the real world is the wild, wild west. There are no established rules,” Ferber says, noting that current wearable technologies don’t provide any context to the data they collect.
Wearable technology says a few things about what you did on any given day — for example, how many steps you took and what your heart rate was — but doesn’t explain what the data actually means. “It forces you to draw conclusions about how you did.”
There is a thin, red line between training hard and too hard. Dr Josephine Perry considers which side of the fence an athlete could be on
Being focused, dedicated, hard-working, diligent and making the sacrifices needed to improve could quite easily be a coach describing an athlete with an ideal attitude toward their athletics. It could also be a psychologist diagnosing exercise addiction.
It is a thin line to walk, especially if you take your athletics really seriously, put in lots of time and effort, feel guilty for missing training or aimless on rest days. You may be a dedicated athlete doing ‘whatever it takes’ to succeed. But, if doing whatever it takes pushes you into conflict with friends or family, and what you’re sacrificing is more than physically or mentally healthy, you may have crossed the line from dedicated to addicted.
I distinctly remember walking into the locker room and seeing him hunched over, his headphones on, staring into his phone. He looked joyless. Here was this 20-year-old kid who was already being talked about as one of the biggest draft busts ever.
… There’s probably nothing wrong with the Chicago Cubs that a baseball game or two wouldn’t solve. You know, a little less talk, a little less cynicism, a lot more balls in play. That they seem to be a club in transition, or on the verge of it, or on the verge of the verge of it, is, perhaps, the nature of the game anymore.
Their manager – that’d be Maddon – is in his lame-duck season. They’re on a new pitching coach. And another new hitting coach. The single offseason news conference of note was held so the team owner could explain his father, and the news out of that was the owner’s revelation, likely in jest, but still, “We don’t have any more [money.]” That got some play. They have an infielder on double-secret probation. They had a local columnist provide a how-to guide for switching allegiances, for becoming a White Sox fan. And then PECOTA weighed in with a projected 79-83 record, which came with last place in the NL Central, which was posted in the clubhouse.
“I didn’t do that,” Maddon said. “I’m not a bulletin board guy. I’m a T-shirt guy.”
In 73,000 scouting reports, there are bound to be a few misses. And in our unprecedented look at a Cincinnati Reds database, we unearthed a handful of players who either overperformed or fell short of their big league projections. We spoke to them to find out why.
… The push-pull between old and new remains, as American Olympian Meghan Duggan talked about how useful she finds biometric data for her workouts and recoveries, while also believing in gut-feel, in-the-moment decision-making on the bench during a crucial game.
Intriguingly, Chris Boucher, a data analyst and vice-president sports development, analytics and hockey operations for Sportlogiq, Duggan and Kirk Goldsberry, an ESPN basketball analyst and sports analytics professor at the University of Texas, all felt part of the resistance to data-driven analysis is a communications problem.
Athletes become skeptical of information when it’s presented in an inaccessible manner, while organizations often lack the inter-disciplinary resources to properly leverage the data they collect and process.
… The deep connections that people nurture underlie important political and economic establishments as well, Jackson said. For example, financial markets have become so intertwined – with central players larger than ever – that when Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008, it triggered a recession worldwide. One risky financial move is all it takes to spread financial distress across the network.
Here, Jackson talks to Stanford News Service about how human networks can explain many important phenomena, from financial crises to disparities across groups, consequences of school segregation, social immobility and more.