Pursuing a career in Europe probably kept the U.S. midfielder out of the last World Cup. As she returns to Paris on Sunday, those same choices have put her front and center in this one.
… “Feeling good,” Gurley said Tuesday at the team’s training facility, as he stood at a podium and responded to more questions from reporters for the first time since April.
It has been more than four months since Gurley was last seen running with a football, when the Rams’ offense stalled in a 13-3 loss to the New England Patriots in Super Bowl LIII. He did not participate in practices during the offseason program and it could be at least another six weeks until Gurley engages in football activities, when the Rams open training camp on July 27.
Variations of “feeling good” and “feeling fine” have been Gurley’s — and the Rams’ — go-to line when asked about his knee, which kept him sidelined the final two games of the regular season.
An already-physical sport reaches a new level in the postseason, and more and more players are left wounded and hampered the longer the playoffs go.
On Friday, two days after their season came to a screeching halt with a Game 7 loss to the St. Louis Blues, the Bruins gave some insight into just how banged up they were.
Brian McCormick, Playmakers Basketball Development League from
… None of this is to suggest that Klay’s injury was preventable. Every injury is multi-factorial; between the hamstring, the fatigue from 5 straight seasons going to the finals, the pressure of the situation, fatigue that that was usually around the time that he’d be on the bench, the contact, the landing, a less than perfect take-off, bad luck, etc., there are many potential explanations.
Instead, this is to highlight the limitations of most jump training and ACL prevention programs because most adhere to a biomechanics-based model that attempts to reduce possible techniques into the singular ideal technique, despite the game demanding more and greater techniques. As long as we adhere to the biomechanics-based models, we short-change our athletes, and they become more susceptible to injury, especially sub-elite athletes who lack the strength and experience of an athlete like Klay Thompson.
As far as Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll is concerned, the next six weeks of the offseason will be the difference between wins and losses during the regular season.
“This is an extraordinarily competitive time,” Carroll said of his message to players ahead of the upcoming break. “So many things can happen. Guys can go south on you, they can get better, changes can occur right now, and we’re really trying to be focused about. We’ve helped them create a plan for their offseason to make sure that they’re coordinated, organized, and they’ll max this out. One of the big issues — I think this is a big issue that the league just has to live with — is that when you take breaks, you become more vulnerable to getting hurt when you come back. Because the adaptation (to the offseason break) doesn’t always match up to the action of an NFL training camp. So we’re real concerned about that.”
This investigation assessed the impact of three cognitively demanding tasks on cognitive performance, subjective, and physiological indicators of mental fatigue. Following familiarization, participants completed four testing sessions, separated by 48 h. During each session, participants watched a 45-min emotionally neutral documentary (control) or completed one of the following computer tasks: Psychomotor Vigilance Task (PVT); AX-Continuous Performance Test (AX-CPT); or Stroop Task. Mental fatigue was assessed before and at regular periods for 60 min following the 45-min treatments. Cognitive performance was assessed using 3-min PVT, and task performance. Subjective assessments were conducted using the Brunel Mood Scale, and visual analog scales (VAS). Physiological indicators of mental fatigue included electroencephalography (EEG), and heart rate variability (HRV). Subjective ratings of mental fatigue increased from pre to 0-min post in all-treatments, but not the documentary (p < 0.05). Subjective fatigue (VAS) remained higher (p < 0.05) than pretreatment values for 20-, 50-, and 60-min following the PVT, Stroop, and AX-CPT respectively. The cognitively demanding tasks had unclear effects on 3-min PVT, EEG, and HRV assessments. Tasks requiring response inhibition appear to induce fatigue for longer durations than a simple vigilance task. Simple VAS appear to be the most practical method for assessing mental fatigue.
Willamette student and dancer Monya Maleki found ballet helped football players’ performance. Now, the team is adding weekly ballet classes to its training schedule in the fall.
… Tuesday’s conference welcomed attendees and participants that were eager to learn about the global sports ecosystem to the historic Johan Cruuff Arena and included a three-track agenda focused on Teams & Leagues, Fans, Brands & Engagement, and Sports Technology & Data Science. Guests had the opportunity to hear from global industry leaders who would discuss new opportunities and innovations that are improving data collection, fan experience, and athletic performance and training.
Though hosted at a football stadium, the focus was primarily on the role of technology and innovation across sports ranging from topics such as stadiums of the future, innovations in sports such as Paralympics, Golf, Cycling and Volleyball to name a few. Football was covered as well of course with the Head of Innovation at the KNVB (Royal Dutch Football Association) even including infographics from SportsTechX in their presentation!
… Inside the Raptors’ practice facility, the OVO Athletic Centre, is a data-powered “war room.” The space is filled with interactive touchscreens that pull in data from a number of sources: official NBA league data, internal recruitment and scouting data, and player data. Since 2016, the Raptors have been using this location, and the associated cloud-based platform that supports it, to find and evaluate potential recruits.
On the back end is IBM Sports Insights, a product launched in 2016 that IBM built in tandem with the Raptors. With a data visualization tool that funnels mass quantities of unstructured data types, from video to social media to biometrics, the Raptors front office can capture a more complete view of a player.
The system yields a more complete view of a player than typical box scores might give. How they fit into a particular system of offense. How they’ll react to a particular style of coaching. Even how to best train an athlete to help them prevent injury. A feature called Tradeoff Analytics helps weigh the pros and cons of talent decisions.
University of British Columbia, UBC Okangan News from
Forget the smart watch. Bring on the smart shirt.
Researchers at UBC Okanagan’s School of Engineering have developed a low-cost sensor that can be interlaced into textiles and composite materials. While the research is still new, the sensor may pave the way for smart clothing that can monitor human movement.
The embedded microscopic sensor is able to recognize local motion through the stretching of the woven yarns that are treated with graphene nanoplatelets that can read the body’s activity, explains Engineering Professor Mina Hoorfar.
“Microscopic sensors are changing the way we monitor machines and humans,” says Hoorfar, lead researcher at the Advanced Thermo-Fluidic Lab at UBC’s Okanagan campus. “Combining the shrinking of technology along with improved accuracy, the future is very bright in this area.”
CU Boulder, through its research and Athletic Department practices, is recognized as a national leader for student-athlete health and wellness programs, a panel of university experts told the University of Colorado Board of Regents on Thursday.
“We come to work every day with student-athlete safety and wellness at the forefront of what we do,” said Athletic Director Rick George, who moderated the panel.
In recent years, the Athletic Department has expanded programming for mental health services, nutrition, career development, sports medicine and strength and conditioning. For example, with additional staffing, mental health counselors now see around 35 student-athletes a week. About three-quarters of student-athletes take advantage of this service during their time at CU.
Professionals in Nutrition for Exercise and Sport (PINES) from
Caffeine is a popular, legal, cheap and effective enhancer of sports performance. These features, along with increasing subjective perceptions of alertness, have made caffeine a core ingredient of many pre-workout supplements (PWS). PWS are a relatively new (popularity increased considerably in previous 10 years) class of multi-ingredient dietary supplements promoted to assist with training.
Caffeine’s influence on human health has received considerable scientific attention and this work has generally identified it as a safe substance. However, adverse side effects have been noted at intakes >400mg·day-1. As such, international agencies promote single doses of caffeine <200mg and daily consumption of <400mg for healthy adults (excluding pregnant women). In addition, caffeine’s ergogenic potential has been demonstrated to fall within these safe limits (i.e. 0.5-4.0 mg·kg-1of bodyweight·day-1).
Caffeine content is not commonly stated on the nutrition information panels of PWS. However, according to those that do specify an amount, PWS typically contain ~100-300 mg of caffeine·serve-1.
Caffeine is a performance enhancing drug. If you’ve been following my articles over the last couple of years, you’ll no doubt be aware of that, because I write about it a lot. Athletes, of course, know that caffeine has the potential to enhance their performance, which is why many of them consume it prior to training and competition. Additionally, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) know that caffeine is a performance enhancing drug and are, rightly, concerned about the abuse of caffeine in sport.
… Last summer, United reached a breaking point in terms of how they sign new players. The club was working to finalize a short list of transfer targets by the end of February 2018, but it was still a work in progress at the end of the season because Mourinho decided a new central defender should be a priority. Names of players who had not been properly assessed or scouted were suggested in meetings without warning, while players who had been appropriately vetted, with mountains of data gathered over several years, were dismissed out of hand.
It was the beginning of a breakdown in communication between Mourinho and Woodward that ended with the Portuguese coach being dismissed in December. His replacement, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, is heading into another crucial summer but supporters waiting for wholesale changes to the way the club is run are still doing just that. Waiting.
If Man United tread water much longer, the danger is that instead of making up ground on Manchester City and Liverpool at the top of the Premier League, they will be surpassed by ambitious, upwardly mobile clubs like Wolves, Leicester and Everton. It is something Solskjaer has already warned of.
… I want to take a step back to talk about analytics and race. It seems to me that they are two somewhat separate issues, and I am curious if you think of them as somewhat separate. The first is what the increasing reliance on analytics will mean for a sport, or for the people who work in a sport. And the second is whether the analytics are telling us something valuable about whether your team, or my team, or someone else’s team, can actually win at the sport.
I think that what you say is correct. Now, I do think that the analytics serve a great value, if for no other reason than the statistics that we most commonly use cannot serve nearly as much value as people think they do. What they are, however, is simple. And they are easy for people to understand.
We are a society that is generally afraid of math, and we’re particularly afraid of math at high levels. If you’ve ever had to try to teach anybody anything related to math and that person thought they weren’t good at it, they just shut down on it. If someone isn’t good at English, they don’t stop speaking English. And so, as a result, I do feel like there are people—some of them are former players, some of them are just observers of the game—who reject some of these statistics when, in reality, most of the stuff we’re talking about isn’t really that complex. Like, at least in terms of what the public gets with analytics. A lot of that stuff is just changing the denominator, using rates instead of using raw numbers.
