Duncan Keith, 35, is a three-time Stanley Cup champion and Conn Smythe Trophy winner, who recently played his 1,000th professional hockey game, all with the Chicago Blackhawks. A small-town guy at heart, he splits his time between Chicago and Penticton, British Columbia, where he grew up.
He took a moment out of his punishing National Hockey League season (his 14th!) to share his workout and wellness secrets, and why he is obsessed with infrared therapy lights.
… Messi isn’t as fitness-heavy as his former La Liga rival Cristiano Ronaldo, who is known for his rigorous exercising regime. Still, however, he does have to follow some regular workout plan under the supervision of his coaches.
According to Pinata, the Argentine’s workouts revolve mainly around making sure his body is up to speed – literally. He focuses on maximising his agility before each matchday and working on his linear speed.
Simone Biles, four-times world champion, winner of three individual Olympic gold medals and arguably one of the greatest gymnasts of all time, is 4ft 8in, but this is not how she appears when in flight. In the hangar-like space of the World Champions Center, a gym complex in a suburb of Houston, Texas, she stands at the end of a padded runway. All morning, Biles has been hanging out with squad gymnasts, some as young as six, who are already training full-time at the facility and are so accustomed to seeing Biles, says her mother, they barely look twice. (Occasionally, says Biles, “We’ll have a new kid come in and just stare. Other than that, it’s normal.”) For her part, Biles trains with the off‑hand style of the preternaturally talented, that almost louche kind of grace you see in top tennis players knocking up or sprinters stretching before a race, and behind which lies extraordinary powers. And then she starts running.
Last year, Biles returned to gymnastics after 12 months off and she is still adjusting to the demands of her schedule. After the training session, we sit in the office that overlooks the vast floor of the gym, Biles with a tracksuit thrown over her leotard, and talk about what it is like to be 21 and at the top of her game, the pressures of being the best in the world and just how Biles knows where she is when she’s airborne.
Nathan Chen’s morning had been hectic, but now he finally had a moment to relax. He flipped open his laptop and started scanning the headlines of The Yale Daily News as his fellow classmates filled the 400-seat auditorium for an abnormal psychology lecture.
Chen’s gaze settled on an article about a classmate, Sophie Ascheim, the executive producer of “Period. End of Sentence,” which three days earlier had won an Oscar in the documentary short category. Ascheim, a member of Chen’s residential college, was already back on campus; he had seen her that morning as they were rushing off to class.
“People do crazy impressive things here,” Chen said. “Then they come back and they’re normal.”
… As I slowly untangle the web I created for myself in order to sustain a 10-year professional career, I realize more and more the price I paid for “chasing my dream.” The constant emotional drain and energy expenditure goes much further than the time on the field or in team meetings, even. We are professional athletes, but above that, we are human beings. I thought I had created a path for myself that defied the logic of human existence. I could push and maximize and push some more and never look back. But the truth is, while pro athletes may defy logic in their performance, what happens inside us is very logical.
We certainly keep the secret of our full sacrifice hidden from the public. We hide it from our colleagues, and we even hide it from ourselves. And while it’s still a mystery to me how to untangle the web it’s created, what I know for certain is that this secret sacrifice is worth every second.
… Like any fad that tries to sell shortcuts to biology, or any approach in life that claims to shortcut hard work, what the current iteration of biohackers is mostly selling is untested (or “It worked for me!”) health advice that is supposed to upend science. Trying these things tends to result in wasted money and time at best.
Still, there’s value in a sense of control over our own physiology in times when the outside world can seem uncontrollable. So to offer those same benefits in addition to actual biological benefit, here are my top biohacks. Unlike the biohacks that the other gurus are out there selling, these are all-natural. I call them—and I insist on the capitalization here—NATURAL BIOHACKS.
These hacks appear in no particular order because they are all extremely potent. If you’ve got all of them mastered and you still feel compelled to invest in other forms of body-self-optimization, Godspeed. I’ve never met anyone who has.
Standing at the 20-yard line at the Everest Indoor Training Center on Wednesday, Jim Zorn was right in the middle of the action during the most anticipated part of the most anticipated Pro Day of the year — Kyler Murray’s throwing exhibition Wednesday.
Zorn, the one-time head coach of the Washington Redskins, has spent much of the last month working with Murray to prepare him for this moment.
And Murray came through in a big way, completing 61 of his 67 passes and showing quickness with his release, accuracy and the ability to throw the deep ball.
How do neural circuits hold on to an idea even though individual neurons only fire within milliseconds after stimulation? So-called attractor dynamics may explain memory-related activity.
… The major differences in performance between elite and non-elite players has primarily focused on acceleration of the players center of mass. The ice provides a unique environment in which the coefficient of friction is low ranging between .003-.007(Garrett & Kirkendall, 2000). This environment precludes anteroposterior force production (Budarick et al., 2018; Shell et al., 2017). In order to overcome inertia and accelerate, strength is needed to create pressure between the ice and the skate blade. Researchers have found significant differences between off-ice lower body strength tests and acceleration ability. Elite players could jump significantly further in the single leg broad jump than lower caliber players (Budarick et al., 2018; Shell et al., 2017; Upjohn et al., 2008). It appears that higher levels of strength may differentiate elite from non-elite skaters.
The aim of the present study was to evaluate the consequence of implementing a Nordic Hamstring exercise (NHE) protocol during the first 15 to 17 weeks of the season to assess the effect on sprinting and NHE strength (NHEs) in professional football players. The study examined 50 healthy male professional football players (age 18.8±0.8yr; height 176.8±6.9cm; weight 71.3±5.7kg) belonging to 3 of the reserve squads of three Spanish La-Liga clubs divided in 2 intervention teams [Nordic-Group1 (NG-1) and Nordic-Group2 (NG-2, extensive experience in NHE)] and 1 team as a control-group (CG). NHEs and linear sprint (T5, T10, T20-m) were evaluated at the beginning of the season and at the end of an intervention period of conditioning and football training, supplemented with a NHE protocol (24 sessions for NG-1 and 22 sessions for NG-2) or without using the NHE at all (CG). Sprint times were substantially improved in all groups (ES from -2.24±0.75 to -0.60±0.37). NHEs was enhanced absolute and relative to body-mass only in NG-1 after the training period (ES from 0.84±0.32 to 0.74±0.26), while in the NG-2 there were only improvements in average NHEs relative to body-mass (ES = 0.39±0.36). The improvements in T20-m were substantially greater in NG-2 vs. NG-1, and there were no differences in sprint performance changes between NG-1 and CG. Changes in sprinting performance and NHEs were unrelated. NHEs was largely correlated with the body-mass of the players. Results indicate that the improvements in sprint are not dependent on the NHEs changes, with no relationships between NHEs and sprint performance, and between sprint changes and changes in NHEs.
Making a revolutionary biosensor takes blood, sweat and tears.
And saliva, naturally.
University of Cincinnati professor Jason Heikenfeld examined the potential of these and other biofluids to test human health with tiny, portable sensors for the journal Nature Biotechnology.
Heikenfeld develops wearable technology in his Novel Device Lab in UC’s College of Engineering and Applied Science. His lab last year created the world’s first continuous-testing device that samples sweat as effectively as blood but in a noninvasive way and over many hours.
“Ultimately, technological advances in wearables are constrained by human biology itself,” the study said.
Ever hear the expression, “Nobody really knows anything when it comes to concussions?” It explains the murky recovery timelines, inconsistent symptoms from patient to patient and growing list of long-term effects suffered years after head trauma.
But what if that could change and we could no longer feel in the dark about concussions? The results of a revolutionary study published by a team of Canadian and U.S. researchers in Brain: A Journal of Neurology outline a unique way to monitor brain activity in the moments after someone sustains a concussion. Working on the technology since 2012, the researchers have unlocked a completely different method to conduct in-game protocol for hockey or dozens of other sports. The work was the result of collaboration between neuroscientists from the Health and Technology District in Surrey, B.C., and the Mayo Clinic Sports Medicine Center in Rochester, Minn.
As a researcher who has studied how young athletes get admitted to college, I don’t see a major difference between this admission fraud case and how many wealthy families can buy their children’s way into elite colleges through “back” and “side” doors.
In my research, I show how most intercollegiate sports are fed by wildly expensive “pay to play” youth sports pipelines. These pipelines systematically exclude lower income families. It takes money to attend so-called “showcase tournaments” to get in front of recruiters.
In many ways, then, those ensnared in the current criminal case – which alleges that they paid for their children to get spots on the sports teams of big name schools – couldn’t have succeeded if the college admissions process wasn’t already biased toward wealthier families.
Union head Tony Clark lauded the Toronto Blue Jays on Monday for giving minor league players a 50 percent raise, and he hopes other clubs do the same.
Representatives from the players’ association visited the Blue Jays spring training camp a day after The Athletic reported the team planned to boost pay for all minor leaguers, some making as little as $1,100 a month during the five-month season. By comparison, the major league minimum is $555,000 per year, and the top players make over $30 million annually.