… For Houston Dash players Haley Hanson, Sofia Huerta and Veronica Latsko, “healthy” isn’t a buzzword — it’s how they live.
Whether it’s waking up and chugging water, getting in extra work after an intensive team practice or cutting out meat altogether, the young women make sure their decisions on and off the field go toward the greater goal of being the best athletes, and human beings, they can be.
In celebration of the 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup, our hometown players shared a typical day of eating, exercise and recovery and advice for nonathletes who would like to live healthier lifestyles.
… Starting on April 19, the rate at which Trout saw sliders (as a percentage of all pitches seen, and as measured by Pitch Info) rose from 8.7% over the 15 games preceding that date to an astonishing 30.9% over the 15 games preceding May 11. That’s the highest such number ever observed during Trout’s eight-season career. No other period even comes close. Over the course of his career, in fact, Trout has seen sliders less than half as often (15.0%) as he did over that 15-game stretch at the beginning of May.
To some extent, this is a consequence of the schedule. Slider use is up league-wide again this year, to 18.4% from last year’s 16.9%, and from 13.7% just five years ago.
… “I told the players I think this is the hardest route to a final a team has probably ever taken in terms of level of competition,” Ellis told a news conference.
“But they find a way and I attribute that to the mental strength of the culture, the environment, the history of the nation and I think they are vetted in pressure and you saw that tonight.
“It’s resolve and it’s fantastic — games where you have to have that… it’s the World Cup finals, it’s not Sunday soccer. As a coach you rely on players having that mental capacity and that’s through creating a coaching environment that makes it as competitive.”
Des will be providing an insight to the Physical Development Framework he has developed and implemented with his team over the last four years at the Arsenal academy. The talk will provide attendees a detailed insight to the programme and processes in place at the Academy including; the development of facilities; building and developing a sport science team; the Physical Development Framework levels; player-coach relationship; application of various screening tools; tackling flexibility and mobility issues around PHV; strength training progressions – A 4 level system; speed and power development; integrated conditioning; sports medicine and injury reports & monitoring. [video, 2:27]
Student-athletes in America should have an easier journey to success after the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC) Collegiate Advisory Council (CAC) introduced legislative plans to provide more structure.
The idea of the CAC reforms are aimed at athletes competing at both collegiate and international level in a bid to enhance solidarity between the collegiate landscape and the Olympic and Paralympic Movements.
“While we have the best collegiate athletics system in the world, our elite national team student-athletes are feeling pressure to choose between their Olympic and Paralympic dreams, and their education,” Kevin White, vice-president and director of athletics at Duke University, said.
Frontiers in Sports and Active Living journal, provisionally accepted from
Although there is an extensive literature about talent development, the lack of data pertaining to females is problematic. Indeed, the gender data gap can be seen in practically all domains including sport and exercise medicine. Evidence-based practice is the systematic reviewing of the best evidence in order to make informed choices about practice. Unfortunately, it may be that the data collected in sport is typically about male experiences, and not female; a rather unfortunate omission given that approximately half of the population is made up of women. When female athletes are underrepresented in research there are issues when making inferences about data collected in male dominated research domains to inform practice and policy for female athletes. In parallel, female sport participation is continually increasing worldwide. Recognising the importance of evidence-based practice in driving policy and practice, and reflecting the gender data gap that is a consistent feature of (almost) all other domains, we were interested in examining whether a gender data gap exists in talent development research. The results suggest that a gender data gap exists in talent development research across all topics. Youth athlete development pathways may be failing to recognise the development requirements of females, particularly where female sports may be borrowing systems that are perceived to work for their male counterparts. In order to ensure robust evidence based practice in female youth sport there is a need to increase the visibility of female athletes in talent development literature.
UCHealth SportsMed Clinic in Steamboat Springs is now partnering with Physimax to help skiiers and other athletes optimize recovery time from injuries quicker while improving performance at the same time.
Physimax’s video-capture equipment gathers data that measures how an athlete moves during training exercises. Should a patient sustain an injury, this data is then utilized during rehabilitation to show practitioners how the athlete is progressing with therapy and return to their sport.
Purpose: The purpose of this study was to assess the interchangeability of position tracking metrics obtained using global positioning systems (GPS) versus those obtained by a semi-automatic high definition (HD) optical camera system.
Methods: Data was collected from a cohort of 29 elite football players (age: 23.1 ± 5.1 years, height: 180.4 ± 5.8 cm, mass: 74.6 ± 6.7 kg) in four matches played in four different stadiums. In two matches 10 Hz GPS (GPS-1, StatSports, Belfast, UK) were used, while in the other two matches augmented 10 Hz GPS (GPS-2, StatSports, Belfast, UK) were used. All four matches were analysed concomitantly using six semi-automated HD motion cameras sampling at 25 Hz (TRACAB, Chyronhego, New York, USA).
Results: Mean bias was between 6% and 10% for GPS-1 and 1–4% for GPS-2, respectively. No proportional bias was found (p > 0.184). The SEE within calibration functions (expressed in % to mean) was between 5% and 22% for GPS-1 and 4–14% for GPS-2. While some significant differences existed between GPS-1 and TRACAB (total distance and high-speed), positional tracking variables were highly correlated between GPS-1, GPS-2 and TRACAB (r2> 0.92) with GPS-2 displaying stronger correlations (> r2 = 0.96).
Conclusion: In the present study augmented GPS technology (GPS-2) and the TRACAB camera system provided interchangeable measures of positional tracking metrics to allow concurrent assessment and monitoring of training and competition in football players. However, we recommend practitioners evaluate their own systems to identify where errors exist, calculate and apply the regression equations to confidently interchange data.
Detecting and assessing an individual’s gait can be important for medical diagnostic purposes and for developing and guiding follow-on rehabilitation protocols. Thus, an accurate, objective gait classification system has the potential to facilitate earlier diagnosis and improved clinical decision-making. Systems using smart garments represent an emerging technology for physical activity assessment and that may be relevant for gait classification. The objective of this study was to assess the accuracy of one such system – comprised of commercial instrumented socks and a custom instrument shirt – for differentiating among normal gait and four distinct simulated gait abnormalities. Eleven participants completed an experiment in which they completed several gait trails on a single day. Gait types were classified using diverse modeling approaches (K-nearest neighbors, linear discriminant analyses, support vector machines, and artificial neural networks). High classification accuracy could be obtained, both when classification models were developed and tested using data from each participant separately and grouped together, particularly using the k-nearest neighbor method (>98% accuracy). Some gaits were more often “confused” with other gaits, especially when they shared underlying kinematic aspects. These results support the potential of using “smart” garments for detecting and identifying abnormal gaits, and for future implementation in diagnosis and rehabilitation.
Irish sports tech company Orreco, whose backers include golfer Graeme McDowell, has signed a “significant” multi-year contract with one of the leading basketball teams in the US.
The Galway-headquartered start-up has agreed a deal with the Atlanta Hawks to provide the NBA side with its bio-analytical services.
Orreco, which recently raised €1.3 million in a funding round led by US VC firm True Ventures, uses machine learning and data analytics to monitor the health of athletes, helping to accelerate recovery and prolong careers.
The company profiles athletes based on biomarkers in the blood, and then feeds the information into machine-learning programmes that can optimise training conditions, including identifying optimal sleep patterns, the best diet, training intensity and duration.
More recent research has indicated what we orthopedic surgeons have often seen in our practice: women are 2 to 9 times more likely than men to have certain kinds of knee problems. Generally, knee injuries are very common, especially for anyone who plays sports, and they can affect any of the ligaments, tendons, cartilage, menisci, or bones surrounding the knee joint. The complexity of the knee joint and the fact that it is a weight-bearing joint add to its fragility and tendency for injury. Female athletes specifically hold an average of 3.5 times the risk of injuring their ACL, a strong elastic band that stabilizes the knee and one of the most formidable injuries in the sports world. ACL tears can have serious consequences and are often seen as “season-ending” injuries as full rehabilitation can take as long as 6-9 months and may result in the athlete being unable to play at the prior skill and intensity levels, which can be psychologically tough on the player. Alongside developing gold standards for treating these injuries, our focus is also aimed at preventing them before they happen. To do this, we have to understand WHY female knees are getting injured at higher rates than those of their male counterparts.
In studying what makes women more susceptible, researchers have surmised that anatomy, hormones, and technique may be to blame.
There’s never been a worse time to be a relief pitcher than in 2019. This season will be remembered for its absurd home run totals, but bullpens have been historically bad too. Will the pendulum swing back toward starting pitching soon?
… Free agency wasn’t even 24 hours old and more than $1 billion had been committed to point guards, led by the $196 million extension that Damian Lillard will be signing with Portland, the reported $170 million extension for Jamal Murray in Denver and the $141 million deals for Kyrie Irving and Kemba Walker.
There’s never been an offseason in NBA history where point guards have gotten that much, and there’s still plenty more left to be signed.
… questions remain about England’s methods under Neville.
The England boss has drawn praise for introducing a more attractive brand of football since he was appointed 18 months ago. It hasn’t always been convincing in France, but he has said his style is “non-negotiable”, citing it as one of the key components of growing the game in England.
The problem is whether England are good enough to successfully play that way yet and if it was the right choice against the US.
Former American goalkeeper Hope Solo had warned before the match that her compatriots would lap it up and England should go more direct. Once the US went ahead, they were happy to defend, let England have the ball and showed little sign of relinquishing their lead.
At half-time, BBC Sport pundit Dion Dublin said: “Phil wants to play in a certain way, but he needs to be brave enough to say ‘not this time’.”