… Budinger, though, is the first N.B.A. player to pursue pro beach volleyball full-time on two established tours. And here’s the thing about Budinger: he is really good, maybe good enough to star for the United States at the Olympics in two-man beach volleyball, an especially brutal form of the game.
“You can bring out the best athletes in the world and we will absolutely destroy them because the skill base is so important,” said Casey Patterson, a 2016 Olympian and Budinger’s current teammate. “Chase has that history of indoor, and he played a position where those skills were necessary to be an influential player.”
Budinger, who was an outside hitter in indoor, has become part of an age-old trend among elite athletes, who occasionally try to transfer their skills from one sport to another. Bob Hayes won two gold medals in track and then went on to win a Super Bowl ring. Eric Heiden won five gold medals in speedskating then competed in the Tour de France.
The 49ers quarterback missed most of 2018 with an ACL tear. He talks about his rehabilitation, watching film with Mike Shanahan, what he learned playing behind Tom Brady, and how excited he is to team up with George Kittle.
Until relatively recently, sports scientists simply applied the research they had done with male athletes to female ones. In fact, according to research scientist Georgie Bruinvels, it is only since the 1990s that it has been “appreciated that women are different”. There is still a long way to go. In 2014, researchers looked at sports studies published between 2011 and 2013; where performance was concerned, once they removed one study that heavily skewed the result, they found that just 3% of participants were women.
One particular growing area of interest is the impact of menstrual cycle and hormones on female sports performance – and this is where Bruinvels specialises. This week, the Times reported that after, advising the World Cup-winning US women’s football team, she is in talks to work with British female tennis players.
future of medicine? Andrew F. Leuchter, MD, is a Professor of Psychiatry at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA. He also is Director of the Neuromodulation Division and a Senior Research Scientist at the Semel Institute. Dr. Leuchter is a graduate of Stanford University and the Baylor College of Medicine who joined the UCLA faculty in 1986. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community.
Last Sunday, Rose Lavelle scored the goal that confirmed the United States’ Women’s World Cup triumph. On Monday, her period began.
Lavelle’s coaches knew this because, in France, the American team deployed an unprecedented programme to minimise the adverse performance impact of the menstrual cycle. In their search for marginal gains, the team contracted an expert consultant to provide research-based insight on the next frontier in sports science.
“One emerging issue in women’s sport is the menstrual cycle and its impact on performance, player health and injury risk,” explains Dawn Scott, the USWNT’s fitness coach, exclusively to The Telegraph. “I’ve known about these effects, the research, for a long time – but working with 23 players, I had always struggled to know how to accurately monitor that and how to individualise strategies for players.”
… Significant changes have been made at under-23 level and Solskjær has shown how he values the pathway from there into the first team by taking the 18-year-old midfielders James Garner and Angel Gomes and the forwards Mason Greenwood (17) and Tahith Chong (19) on the pre-season tour of Australia, Singapore and China.
They will continue their development in an under-23 set-up to which Neil Wood was appointed in July as the lead coach, assisted by Quinton Fortune and with the head of academy, Nicky Butt, having greater involvement as part of a restructure.
Carnegie Mellon University, Mellon College of Science from
We’ve all heard the saying that individuals learn at their own pace. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have developed an automated, robotic training device that allows mice to learn at their leisure. The technology stands to further neuroscience research by allowing researchers to train animals under more natural conditions and identify mechanisms of circuit rewiring that occur during learning.
A research team led by Carnegie Mellon neuroscientist Alison Barth has used the automated technology to identify new, previously unidentified pathways activated when the brain rewires its circuits in response to experience. Their findings are published online in Neuron.
Barth’s lab focuses on understanding the process by which cortical circuits receive sensory information and adapt to it in order to learn. Understanding the algorithm that underlies the changes in the brain’s learning circuitry will have important implications for creating engineered systems that use deep learning and artificial intelligence.
The identification of the initial contact (IC) and toe off (TO) events are crucial components of running gait analyses. To evaluate running gait in real-world settings, robust gait event detection algorithms that are based on signals from wearable sensors are needed. In this study, algorithms for identifying gait events were developed for accelerometers that were placed on the foot and low back and validated against a gold standard force plate gait event detection method. These algorithms were automated to enable the processing of large quantities of data by accommodating variability in running patterns. An evaluation of the accuracy of the algorithms was done by comparing the magnitude and variability of the difference between the back and foot methods in different running conditions, including different speeds, foot strike patterns, and outdoor running surfaces. The results show the magnitude and variability of the back-foot difference was consistent across running conditions, suggesting that the gait event detection algorithms can be used in a variety of settings. As wearable technology allows for running gait analyses to move outside of the laboratory, the use of automated accelerometer-based gait event detection methods may be helpful in the real-time evaluation of running patterns in real world conditions. [full text]
Saucony-sponsored Ward doesn’t want to be at a racing disadvantage against the Nike Vaporfly 4%, so he’s fighting back with laboratory testing and statistical analysis.
A team of scientists are seeking to kick-start a wearable technology revolution by creating flexible fibres and adding acids from red wine.
Extracting tannic acid from red wine, coffee or black tea, led a team of scientists from The University of Manchester to develop much more durable and flexible wearable devices. The addition of tannins improved mechanical properties of materials such as cotton to develop wearable sensors for rehabilitation monitoring, drastically increasing the devices lifespan.
The team have developed wearable devices such as capacitive breath sensors and artificial hands for extreme conditions by improving the durability of flexible sensors. Previously, wearable technology has been subject to fail after repeated bending and folding which can interrupt the conductivity of such devices due to tiny micro cracks. Improving this could open the door to more long-lasting integrated technology.
The National Basketball Association (NBA) has gained an equity stake in mobile artificial intelligence (AI) developer NEX Team as part of a strategic partnership that will see the league leverage machine learning to search for new basketball talent.
The agreement will give the NBA access to technology created by US-based company, including the use of its mobile app HomeCourt, which uses AI to measure player skills development and will form part of the NBA’s global youth basketball initiatives.
… Michael Ormsbee, a professor of nutrition, food and exercise sciences at Florida State University, has been researching eating before bed for nearly a decade — and he’s certain that there still isn’t enough evidence to prove that late-night snacking causes weight gain.
There is “this dichotomy between what [everyone’s been saying] and what I saw athletes doing: eating late at night and still having abs,” says Ormsbee. “It really depends what you’re eating, and how much.”
His research has found that a small amount of protein — he used around 200 calories-worth of cottage cheese in one study — 30 minutes before bed will have no effect on a person’s metabolism.
Google AI Blog, Karol Kurach and Olivier Bachem from
… we are happy to announce the release of the Google Research Football Environment, a novel RL environment where agents aim to master the world’s most popular sport—football. Modeled after popular football video games, the Football Environment provides a physics based 3D football simulation where agents control either one or all football players on their team, learn how to pass between them, and manage to overcome their opponent’s defense in order to score goals. The Football Environment provides several crucial components: a highly-optimized game engine, a demanding set of research problems called Football Benchmarks, as well as the Football Academy, a set of progressively harder RL scenarios.
… P3 staffers learned that the player had no cartilage in that knee — at all. It had completely worn out. “If we had gotten him earlier, the things that he showed us that were a problem were entirely preventable,” Elliott says. “So that was one of those touchpoints. … I was like, ‘What if we got those guys not when they were 28 but when they were 18 or 17 or 16?'” That led to P3 to begin evaluating players like E.J., now being assessed for the third time. His first assessment came when he was just 14, making him one of the youngest players P3 has ever assessed. At one point, Elliott taps E.J. on the shoulder. “You don’t want to go limping into this next phase,” Elliott tells him. “I know you’ve got the skills to keep playing this game for a while, but your body has to be there, too.”
E.J. smiles, revealing his braces.
“They shouldn’t be peaking at 16 or 17,” Elliott says later. “But I can tell you from a data standpoint, you can make a case for it. And you talk to the individual athletes, a whole lot of them will tell you, ‘Oh, when I was a senior in high school is when I was jumping my best. I was moving my best.’ A lot of guys will tell that story. It just shouldn’t be that way. It should happen at 23, 24, 25, but with most of these kids, that’s not the case.”
