It was early May 2018 and Alex Bregman, the Houston Astros’ star third baseman, had only one home run on the season. His teammate Justin Verlander, one of the best pitchers of this generation, noticed Bregman’s low power and hints of fatigue, and asked how many hours Bregman had slept the night before.
Six, Bregman answered. And his normal amount? Six, as well.
The responses bewildered Verlander. He promptly told Bregman, 25, that he slept at least 10 hours a night and said Bregman should start getting more hours himself.
“I felt like that’s overdoing it,” Bregman said. “You shouldn’t sleep that much
… As a six-year-old, at a local meet, Ledecky competes in a 25-yard race. Several times over the course of a the one-lap race she stops to hang on the lane rope and catch her breath.
She struggles to complete the race, and when she does, her dad has a video camera to capture:
“Tell me about your first race. How was it?”
“Great,” she says, beaming. “That was hard!”
Her coach at NCAP, Bruce Gemmell, later recounts this story, noting that this is the attitude she has with training and competition to this day.
… After nine years of having given everything I had to the program, and to my country, I was no longer a member of the USWNT — the team that meant everything to me. It was my second family.
My mind was spinning. I kept thinking about how I had just played one of the best club years of my life. And how before that I had gotten on the FIFA FIFPro World XI in 2016. I couldn’t help but wonder: What happened?
It’s always easier to deal with a failure or criticism when you know what you’ve done wrong. That way you can at least try to work on the things that led to the decision.
You start thinking about all the reasons you might not be good enough. But in work, life or relationships, you don’t always get those reasons and details.
You can decide if you are going to let someone’s decision define you or if you are going to take control of your life and make the most of the situation.
I decided to make the most of it. Adversity is nothing new to me. I’d been there before. I knew what to do.
There is growing evidence that leaders’ effectiveness derives in part from their creation of a sense of identity that is shared by members of a group they are attempting to lead (i.e., their identity entrepreneurship). Little is known, however, about the impact of identity entrepreneurship in sport and exercise settings, particularly in relation to its effect on group members’ effort and performance. Using a pre-post between subjects experimental design, we examined the effect of leaders’ identity entrepreneurship on group members’ effort and performance during 5km cycling time trials. Following a baseline session (in which time trials were completed individually), participants (N = 72) were randomly allocated to either a high or low identity entrepreneurship condition, and further randomly divided into groups of five (including a leader who was a confederate). In the subsequent test sessions (which participants attended with their fellow group members), leaders displayed either high or low identity entrepreneurship behaviors. Results indicated that, compared to participants in the low identity entrepreneurship condition, those in the high identity entrepreneurship condition maintained greater effort (maximum heart rate), and demonstrated improved (rather than poorer) performance (average power output in the first 60 seconds of time trials). Examination of pacing showed that the largest increases in participants’ average power output occurred in the early stages of their second time trials for those in the high identity entrepreneurship condition only. Results provide causal evidence that leaders who create a shared sense of identity among team members are able to inspire greater participant effort and performance. [full text]
Looking to build endurance? What about power? Do dreams of being an all-star hitter or marathon runner need to be dashed if twitch ratios aren’t ideal? Not necessarily. The types of muscle fibers targeted in different types of training programs can impact performance goals.
The two types of skeletal muscle fibers are slow-twitch (type I) and fast-twitch (type II). The difference is that slow-twitch muscle fibers support long distance endurance activities like marathon running, while fast-twitch muscle fibers support quick, powerful movements such as sprinting or weightlifting. In this article, we explore the two types of muscle fibers in detail and discuss how to train each type according to athletic goals.
Today’s wearables are still designed for the healthy and wealthy, not those who could benefit the most. Medical wearables offer the potential to collect health data and improve health via a combination of real-time AI and expert human intervention. Apple’s announcement of FDA clearance of its Watch for screening for irregular heart rhythms was meant to be groundbreaking. But its medical value right now remains limited and controversial. What will make the promise into reality?
I believe the application that will make wearables medically matter is automated blood pressure monitoring. Blood pressure may not be sexy, but it’s a universally understood measurement and a clinically central one. Your doctor measures your blood pressure every single time you visit. Even those who don’t pay close attention to their health know that high blood pressure increases risk of heart attack and stroke, and lower blood pressure saves lives.
Our personal tech columnist tracked his sleep for two weeks with an Apple Watch and some software. Here’s why he concluded it was a pointless exercise.
Making medicines isn’t about aesthetics. Your pill doesn’t need to be pretty to work.
But with mental health apps, good design is half the battle. App makers have to be able to translate traditional therapy techniques into easy exercises that people can flip through on their phones. They have to make it responsive and, in theory, they have to make it effective. They also have to convince people the app is something they can trust — and can turn to when they’re feeling anxious.
That can take a village: To build Daylight, an app for anxiety, one digital health company relied on psychologists, animators, podcasters, designers, scriptwriters, product managers, and software engineers. The creators, Big Health, even called in a longtime Pixar animator and the former executive producer at “Radiolab” for reinforcement.
Elon Musk doesn’t think his newest endeavor, revealed Tuesday night after two years of relative secrecy, will end all human suffering. Just a lot of it. Eventually.
At a presentation at the California Academy of Sciences, hastily announced via Twitter and beginning a half hour late, Musk presented the first product from his company Neuralink. It’s a tiny computer chip attached to ultrafine, electrode-studded wires, stitched into living brains by a clever robot. And depending on which part of the two-hour presentation you caught, it’s either a state-of-the-art tool for understanding the brain, a clinical advance for people with neurological disorders, or the next step in human evolution.
The chip is custom-built to receive and process the electrical action potentials—“spikes”—that signal activity in the interconnected neurons that make up the brain. The wires embed into brain tissue and receive those spikes. And the robotic sewing machine places those wires with enviable precision, a “neural lace” straight out of science fiction that dodges the delicate blood vessels spreading across the brain’s surface like ivy.
… we were also curious about what it means to be better, faster, stronger when money is no object. We asked five elite runners, all of whom are flush with sponsorship deals and prize money, on what they use to train and how they protect their most important piece of equipment: their bodies.
A couple of items on this list were universally recommended, namely the Hyperice Volt ($349) massage-ball gun (as I’m describing it) and NormaTec’s compression boots ($1,295), both muscle-recovery tools. And, of course, plenty were eager to tout the wares of their sponsor partners. Here’s what they’re using.
… So many females respond to a lack of progress by pushing harder instead of recognizing that their nutrition is not meeting their demands. If your body is in a caloric deficit for too long, it adapts. In this adapted state, your body decreases its metabolic rate as a survival tactic. It simply doesn’t know how long or how severe this calorie restriction will end up being, so it adapts by using limited resources.
Thus, you end up burning fewer calories. When it comes to fat loss, a caloric deficit is king. But when your metabolism is decreased in this manner, achieving a caloric deficit becomes extremely difficult.
… The University of Alabama has invested $14 million into building a state-of-the-art, 25,000-square-foot, bi-level Sports and Nutrition facility. Inside, athletes can find five chefs, four dietitians, a smoothie bar and plenty of tasty food. It’s another reason why Alabama football is a perennial contender for the national championship.
Ryan O'Hanlon, No Grass in the Clouds newsletter from
If Wayne Gretzky never scored a goal, he’d still be the National Hockey League’s all-time leader in points. This the ur-sports-fact — a universe in a grain of sand. You get a point for a goal and a point for an assist, and Gretzky has the most of each. He scored 894 times; no else has more than 801 goals. He assisted on 1,963; next best is all the way down at 1,249. Pathetically, Gretzky is only seventh all-time in goals per game, a couple one-thousandths behind the still-active, sixth-place Alexander Ovechkin. But The Great One — there is not and will never be a better nickname in sports — tops the list of assists per game, despite the fact that he played 20 freaking seasons. Gretzky averaged 1.320 assists per game; Sydney Crosby, the highest active player, ranked fifth all-time, is averaging 0.817.
More stats: Gretzky has the top eight and ten of the top 11 creative (I promise, I’m starting to pull this around toward soccer) seasons in NHL history. The league-leader in assists this year had 87; Gretzky beat that 13 times, topping out all the way up at 163. There’s really nothing comparable to Gretsky’s total dominance in any other major team sport — not Messi, not Manning, not MJ, and not Mike Trout.
Those assist numbers are really hard to comprehend.
The success of the Vegas Golden Knights in their inaugural season is going to put pressure on Seattle to ice a winning team in their debut campaign, but GMs are going to be far more cautious heading into the next expansion draft.
