The words had blindsided him like a body check and now Ryan Kesler was melting down, struggling to digest what he had heard. Realistic expectations … long-term conversation … life after hockey … Silence filled the surgeon’s office. Tears rushed from his eyes. “Wait, what?” Kesler finally croaked in disbelief. “You just want me to stop playing?”
No one would have blamed the veteran Anaheim Ducks center for walking away. After all, his body often couldn’t even manage that. It had been eight whole months since Dr. Marc Philippon performed an arthroscopic procedure on Kesler’s ailing right hip, yet each step still caused agony. Exiting the team bus took extra effort. Running around the beach with his children was a non-starter. Earlier that afternoon at The Steadman Clinic in Vail, Colo., Philippon had asked Kesler to describe where it hurt. “I’ll show you,” Kesler said, proceeding to limp along the hall until, inevitably, the joint bit and his leg buckled.
But stop altogether? Quit? This had been the furthest thing from Kesler’s mind when he flew to meet Philippon—accompanied by his wife Andrea, team physical therapist Kevin Taylor, and personal physical therapist David Bradley—during a schedule break in late February 2018. He wanted solutions. Or, at least, possible treatment options to help survive the rest of the season, his 13th in the NHL.
… While there is no magic in volume, there is magic in intensity. September, October, November, December: During these four months, the Flex girls prioritize soccer and are on the pitch with a ball at their feet at least three days a week, and in many cases, considerably more. With high sports IQs and solid foundations of speed, explosiveness, mobility, and coordination, the ramped-up fall schedule leads to dramatic technical and tactical improvements.
As opposed to incremental gains over a calendar year, that intense regular season period is electric—the players rapidly become more connected to each other and to the ball, the spark of those connections builds confidence, confidence builds momentum, momentum inspires passion, and passion begets peak performance. When the Flex girls take the field at kickoff, they are clearly not a group of girls out playing yet another ho-hum Saturday game in an endless string of Saturdays—they are, instead, unleashed.
During our debut year in 2017/2018, after peaking through the league season and reaching the final of our first post-season tournament in December, the Flex team won our second tournament over the first weekend of January, knocking off an A-level team from the host club in the process (at that time we were classified a C team).
Is multisport participation impossible at a competitive level? No. Hoisting that tournament trophy, the girls realized they could raise their game and compete against anybody.
In Beyond the Pancakes, we dive inside the minds of coaches and athletes, getting a first hand look at why they do the things they do, and where their minds are pointed on the compass of evolution as a swimmer.
New research shows how the depth of sleep can impact our brain’s ability to efficiently wash away waste and toxic proteins. Because sleep often becomes increasingly lighter and more disrupted as we become older, the study reinforces and potentially explains the links between aging, sleep deprivation, and heightened risk for Alzheimer’s disease.
“Sleep is critical to the function of the brain’s waste removal system and this study shows that the deeper the sleep the better,” said Maiken Nedergaard, M.D., D.M.Sc., co-director of the Center for Translational Neuromedicine at the University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC) and lead author of the study. “These findings also add to the increasingly clear evidence that quality of sleep or sleep deprivation can predict the onset of Alzheimer’s and dementia.”
Ice hockey is a fast and demanding game. It is played by many but very few can elevate their game to a phenomenal level consistently. At every level of hockey high expectations, focus on outcomes, and stress on and of the ice can affect performance negatively. However, when we see the players who are performing at their best game in game out there seems to be something different about them. They’re creative, inspired, and engaged. They perform great plays at high speed and they make amazing saves that end up making the highlight reels.
Many refer to the state required for these moments as the “zone”. Anyone who has played the game knows what it feels like to be in the zone, but what does it take to get there? It often begins with the desire and willingness to show up as the best version of themselves. These athletes set the intention of playing at their best and then go do it.
The aim of this study was to develop a quick and simple screening procedure for evaluating the return on investment provided by injury prevention programmes in professional football. Injury prevention in sport has usually been considered in isolation of other management responsibilities, and interventions are published irrespective of whether their impact is worthwhile and irrespective of the return on players’ time investment in the programme. This approach is naive from a business perspective and is not an approach normally adopted by commercial organisations. Methods
In professional football, the overwhelming cost associated with implementing an injury prevention programme is the players’ time commitment, and the major benefit is the players’ increased availability, achieved through the reduction in the number of injuries. A comparison of these time-based costs and benefits provides the basis for the evaluation process presented. Results
Applying the evaluation process to a number of published injury prevention programmes recommended for football demonstrates that they are unlikely to provide an adequate return on investment. Conclusions
Researchers should focus on developing injury prevention programmes that provide an adequate return on players’ time investment, otherwise there is no incentive for clubs to implement the programmes. Reporting that an injury prevention programme produces a statistically significant reduction in the incidence of injury, for example, is insufficient information. Injury prevention programmes should focus on ‘at risk’ players to increase the return on investment, and researchers should evaluate and report on the utility of prevention programmes within the intended sports setting.
The aim of this study was to prospectively analyse the relationship between workloads and injury in elite football academy players. Elite football academy players (n = 122) from under-19 (U19) and under-21 (U21) of a professional football team competing in UEFA European Cups were followed during 5 seasons. Injuries were collected and absolute workload and workload ratios (4-weeks, 3-weeks, 2-weeks and week-to-week) calculated using a rolling days method with the help of the session Rate of Perceived Exertion. There was no association between absolute workload or workload ratio with the injury incidence in the U19. In the U21, the level of cumulative absolute workloads during 3-weeks (RR = 1.39, p = 0.026) and during 4-weeks (RR = 1.40, p = 0.019) were associated with an increase in injury. There was no association between workload ratio and injury in U21. The significant link between high cumulated 3-weeks and 4 weeks workloads and injury in U21 confirmed the requirement to monitor the internal subjective workload in U21 in order to prevent injury. Further studies exploring the relationships between workload and injury are required in football academy.
… As published in ACS Nano, the process developed by the team based at the National Graphene Institute has the potential produce tonnes of conductive graphene-based yarn, using existing textile machineries and without adding to production costs.
In addition to producing the yarn in large quantities, they are washable, flexible, inexpensive and biodegradable.
Such sensors could be integrated to either a self-powered RFID or low-powered Bluetooth to send data wirelessly to mobile device.
I’ve spent the past seven years working in soccer/football analytics, and one complaint that I often hear is that so much work is only visible behind closed doors. Another is that analytics hasn’t gone mainstream. I think these two things are connected. So for me, it’s time to bring analytics out into the open, and that’s why NYA has launched smarterscout.com, where basic membership (smarterscout Lite) is free.
Right now smarterscout is in beta, and we’ll be adding plenty of features in the coming months. But we wanted to get an early version of the site online because, to be honest, we were having so much fun using it.
Karl Mayer is stepping up its activities in synergistically linking the textile sector with new technologies, and has launched a new platform, which can be found at www.Textile-Makerspace.com.
The aim of Textile Makerspace is to bring together innovations from both areas. In this case, with its specialist expertise and networks, Karl Mayer sees itself as an intermediary and instigator. “The Textile Makerspace should make space for trying things out, for developing, and for innovative thinking – in the textile industry as a whole, but also in other sectors. In this case, the main focus is on exchange and interaction. We want to make contact, exchange knowledge and use synergies – in other words, we want to build our own community,” explained Michael Kieren, one of the initiators of Textile Makerspace.
The aim is to come up with new developments, some of which have already been set in motion. Smart textiles, wearables and 3D-printed garments have already been at the focus of trade fairs and other events for some time now. Karl Mayer started development work in this field last year with Textile Circuit.
Current Opinion in Biomedical Engineering journal from
Connected wearable biosensors are a critical part of athletic performance analysis, injury and recovery time assessment, and hydration analytics, enabling elite athletes, trainers, and coaches to characterize the daily demands of sports. However, existing classes of wearable biosensors are constrained to a few body locations and tend to limit mobility due to their bulky size and weight. Recent advances in soft and stretchable skin-interfaced wearable sensors capable of real-time physiological monitoring and in situ sweat collection provide capabilities for real-time continuous motion, physiology, and biochemical analysis in an imperceptible mode from any location on the body. This review presents an overview of the latest developments in skin-interfaced wearable sensor technologies with an emphasis on soft materials and stretchable designs most suitable in sports. We conclude with a summary of unresolved challenges, opportunities, and future directions facing the field of sports science and analytics. [full text]
… He used an example of a free-agent signing a couple of years back — a player who originally failed to get owner Jeffrey Lurie’s approval based on more traditional analysis.
“When we started the process with this free agent and went over his age and his background, Jeffery is like, ‘This doesn’t make a lot of sense. Why are we doing that?’ And I said, ‘Here’s what we think from an analytical perspective, here’s what we think from a value cap/cash perspective, and here’s our scouting perspective. Let me send you all the information, let’s get back on the phone, because this is what I’m looking at. And we got back on the phone and he said, ‘Not only am I in favor of this, but this seems like a great value.’
“For him to change his tune based on those three pieces of information, to me that’s the kind of person I want to work for — somebody who can get this information, look at it and make a decision based on that and not just stick to the decision he had before. And that’s kind of how we do business: Let’s make really good bets.
… Created by Bill Barnwell and introduced in Pro Football Prospectus and ESPN Insider back in 2008, Speed Score is one of Football Outsiders’ metrics for evaluating running back prospects. It’s built on the simple idea that smaller backs tend to run faster than larger backs, so we should be more impressed by a 4.5-second 40-yard dash from a 220-pound back than the same clock reading from a 170-pound back. As such, Speed Score incorporates a back’s official time in the 40-yard dash with his weight to produce a measure of his speed given his size using this formula: (Weight * 200)/(40 time^4)
The average running back who makes it to the NFL will have a Speed Score around 100, with most running back prospects falling between 85 and 110.
Speed Score measures speed in the context of strength and power. It doesn’t measure agility, receiving ability, or any of the other aspects related to the position. It does not claim that a larger player with a higher 40 time is somehow faster than a smaller player with a lower 40 time thanks to the power of exponentiation. Speed Score is useful because it’s beneficial for a running back to be both fast and large.