It took Jordan Morris almost 18 months to return to the US men’s national team picture, perhaps the hardest year and a half of his life.
Morris, 24, suffered a torn ACL last year with the Seattle Sounders during a Concacaf Champions League match in El Salvador against Santa Tecla. The injury saw the forward miss the entire 2018 MLS season and the long road to recovery brought heavy adversity to the 2016 MLS Rookie of the Year.
Speaking with reporters on Tuesday, Morris spoke about his time away from the game and how his return to form with his club earned him a call-up to Greg Berhalter’s squad ahead of Thursday’s friendly against Ecuador at Orlando City Stadium.
The party’s over for Rob Gronkowski. Then again, it might just be getting started.
The New England Patriots’ fun-loving, touchdown-spiking tight end announced Sunday that he is retiring from the NFL after nine mostly dominant, Super Bowl-filled seasons.
The four-time All-Pro posted his decision on Instagram , saying that a few months shy of his 30th birthday “it’s time to move forward and move forward with a big smile.”
… Minshew isn’t focused on what he did well a year ago. Instead, he’s spending copious amounts of time improving his weaknesses and preparing mentally for NFL. He asked every team he met with at the 2019 NFL Scouting Combine what he needed to do now to get better before the draft and has taken their suggestions to heart.
NFL teams were less concerned with Minshew’s arm strength than the media, saying he had “plenty of arm” and that he met the NFL threshold. Teams also said he makes up for not having the best arm in the draft with his ability to move progressions quickly. As such, the response Minshew constantly received when he asked how to improve involved him attacking the NFL learning curve early on.
“I want to be the most prepared when it comes to rookie mini-camp and going into training camp,” Minshew said. “Right now, I’m really focused on learning NFL defenses, NFL protection schemes as best as I can so I can help with that learning curve when it does come.
NFL teams have already seen everything they need to see from Missouri’s four-year starter. Still, it didn’t stop Lock and his coaches from painstakingly assembling a 54-play script to throw against air at Missouri’s pro day. How a pro day performance comes together. Plus, the latest on the Giants’ interest in Dwayne Haskins.
The ability to sprint is essential in the majority of team sports, including rugby, football, and basketball. But this ability is not developed in stable and controlled conditions: players are constantly subjected to variable demands, whether receiving, carrying, passing, hitting, or throwing the ball. Traditionally, athletes work on this aspect in the gym using “weights” in purely vertical conditions, but that has changed in recent years. Now, strength work adds challenges that contribute towards improving adaptability and with that, performance. However, to study the resulting variability, conventional linear measurements – such as acceleration – seem to fall short, especially since the data they can provide regarding these changes are quite limited.
Within the study of movement, a practice known as entropy analysis has gained popularity in recent years. This is a non-linear type of measurement that deals specifically with the variability or the “disorder” of a time series. Paradoxically, it has never been used to study strength training in team sports.
A team of researchers, including Jairo Vázquez, physical trainer for F.C. Barcelona, have developed a first-of-its-kind study that shows the ability of entropy measurements to capture variability in these types of exercises.
Lehigh University, The Brown and White student newspaper, Megan Klein from
… “It’s important to know that there is no linear or singular process,” said Dan Gusovsky, the Lehigh baseball team’s pitching coach. “Pitching coaches across the country have different thoughts and approaches. For different guys, that means different things.”
For Gusovsky, his approach is all about individualizing the development of the pitcher in terms of movement on and off the ball based on their strengths.
“The pitcher’s body is much like a car in that it will go as fast as its ability to stop,” Gusovsky said. “The lat muscle and labrum are like the decelerating muscles. The better we can strengthen and keep them congruent, the better we can keep those three groups maintained, bettering our ability to develop.”
In order to maintain those three areas, Gusovsky enforces a regimented “prehab” and recovery program that he says is essential in reducing lactic acid buildup.
Whether we’re seeking food, a promotion, or just a hug, humans crave reward and put considerable effort into to feeling the rush of pleasure that comes with it. But just as humans work to earn rewards, they sometimes work even harder to avoid pain or punishment.
In our brains, a group of structures called the reward system motivates us to seek pleasure. But another system also exists. Working to keep our pleasure-seeking in check, the anti-reward system is powered by a tiny, pea-sized part of our brains called the habenula. And, researchers are beginning to learn just how important it is for both motivation and mental health.
“It’s a very interesting part of the equation of human behavior that we don’t think about that often,” said Benjamin Ely, a neuroscience doctoral candidate at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. “We have a bias toward considering the positive motivations that drive people to perform activities, rather than the negative motivations that inhibit activities.”
Washington University in St. Louis, The Source from
Adult depression has long been associated with shrinkage of the hippocampus, a brain region that plays an important role in memory and response to stress. Now, new research from Washington University in St. Louis has linked participation in team sports to larger hippocampal volumes in children and less depression in boys ages 9 to 11.
“Our findings are important because they help illuminate the relationships between involvement in sports, volume of a particular brain region and depressive symptoms in kids as young as nine,” said Lisa Gorham, lead author of the study and a senior majoring in cognitive neuroscience in Arts & Sciences.
Brook Lopez strolled from the Fiserv Forum tunnel to the court ahead of a January game, stopped and furrowed his brow in confusion. Something was missing.
Where, he wondered, are our seats?
The plushy seats that are usually set up for Bucks players during home games had been replaced by folding chairs. These folding chairs were nice, sure, but the metal legs and double-stuffed cushions seen along the sidelines of most NBA arenas paled in comparison to the state-of-the-art bench seats Bucks players usually perch on during home games. Their chairs, he later learned, had been taken out temporarily for maintenance.
“I’m so glad to know they’re coming back,” Lopez said.
The concentration of dopamine in a patient’s blood can be an important biomarker for a variety of diseases, including certain cancers, depression, and Parkinson’s. Measuring dopamine in whole blood still requires a laboratory, making it slow and expensive and not always suited for things like screenings.
Scientists at the University of Central Florida have now developed a portable, enzyme-free dopamine detector that takes just a sample of blood and which provides in a matter of minutes. It is hoped that the technology will be available for point-of-care applications, potentially making dopamine a common parameter even in general practice offices.
Cepton Technologies’ Vista-Edge LiDAR Evaluation Kit is an edge-processing system combining the company’s Vista LiDAR sensor and the NVIDIA Jetson TX2 supercomputer on a module. Vista-Edge is described as a true plug-and-play device with all necessary software and tools pre-installed to view and analyze the LiDAR’s 3D point cloud of data. Users who buy the LiDAR Evaluation Kit will automatically be eligible to upgrade to the Perception Evaluation Kit when it becomes available later in 2019.
Carnitine, chromium, anabolic steroids: Athletes have experimented with a broad array of aids in pursuit of performance edge. A popular — if unglamorous — one today that seems safe and backed by solid data: the juice of beets, for the nitrates they contain.
Inorganic nitrate is added to cured and processed meats to extend their shelf life and give them their distinctive pink color. It’s also naturally found in spinach, arugula and beets. In the past decade, new evidence has suggested that the nitrate in these vegetables enhances athletic performance and may also increase cardiovascular health in old age.
The gastrointestinal tract contains trillions of microbes (collectively known as the gut microbiota) that play essential roles in host physiology and health. Studies from our group and others have demonstrated that exercise independently alters the composition and functional capacity of the gut microbiota. Here, we review what is known about the gut microbiota, how it is studied, and how it is influenced by exercise training and discuss the potential mechanisms and implications for human health and disease.
Ole Gunnar Solskjær’s Manchester United return has prompted debate about the qualities of former players as managers – and German academics may have an answer
… Since Stuart Sternberg’s group took over in late 2005, the Rays have been up to all kinds of things.
Typically designed to find an edge, develop an advantage or exploit an opportunity to compensate against significantly better-financed opponents. In essence, if you can’t out-spend them then out-think them.
Here are 10 of the more innovative things the Rays have tried: