Eagles quarterback Carson Wentz is almost as passionate about hunting as he is football, and therefore about the last person you would expect to find at a vegan restaurant. But the new Wentz isn’t like the old one when it comes to how he fuels and maintains his body.
Wentz dramatically changed his diet and transformed his training regimen this offseason as part of an effort to put his recent injury history behind him. The early returns have been fruitful. He showed up to training camp several pounds lighter and noticeably leaner, and says he is feeling stronger.
“I can’t promise that nothing is going to happen this year, next year, whatever. This is football,” Wentz said in a conversation with ESPN. “But I can set myself up for success. Whether it’s avoiding big injuries, but just on a daily basis feeling better. Body feeling stronger. Feeling mentally better, too, at the same time. Just finding the right training regimen and rehabilitation regimen was a big part of it.”
… “This year, the whole training cycle is gearing up for this point and you’re just getting antsy. I’m so ready to race,” she says. “Last year, I was so exhausted that [USAs] was the last thing on my mind, like, ‘Let’s just get through this race.’ There was a lot of stress, considering it was a signing year and it was right after NCAAs, where I actually got sick, so that was a struggle.”
Adversity finally found Katie Ledecky and when it did, it hit hard.
Headaches, irregular pulse, elevated heart rate, sleeplessness, nausea. The symptoms she experienced struck the American star out of nowhere at the world swimming championships and derailed what had promised to be a stellar meet.
She suffered a loss in an event she’s dominated, withdrew from two others and spent seven hours in a Gwangju hospital enduring a battery of tests that never produced an exact diagnosis.
She still managed to win one gold and two silver medals.
… in retrospect, perhaps the most remarkable number from Tulowitzki’s rookie year was that first one: 155. It would represent the single-season high for his career, which, despite all its early success, will be remembered in equal part for its injury interruptions and the tragic, nagging question of what could have been. Tulowitzki exceeded 140 games in a season just three times, and not once after 2011, his age-26 season; he earned both his Gold Gloves, both his Silver Sluggers, and all five years of his MVP votes before turning 30.
He made 11 career trips to the injured list, with a new injury almost every time. He hurt his quad, hand, and wrist; his groin, ribs, and hip; his other quad, hamstring, and ankle; and finally, in the last two years, his heels and calf, which mean he’s batted just 13 times since July 2017.
After leaving Colorado for Toronto in a 2015 deadline trade—which reportedly so angered the career-long Rockie that he shouted at general manager Jeff Bridich and vowed never to talk to him again—Tulowitzki appeared inconsistently and produced at a below-average clip when he has been able to play.
One of the more extravagant claims made by tech companies is that they can detect emotions by analyzing photos of our faces with machine learning systems. The premise is sometimes dressed up in claims about “micro-expressions” that are below the threshold of human detection, though some vendors have made billions getting security agencies to let them train officers in “behavior detection” grounded in this premise.
A panel of eminent psych researchers have signed an open letter condemning these products as grounded in “outdated science.” The authors cite more than 1,000 journal articles that show that facial expressions are complex and cannot be classified using the techniques promoted by the self-interested commercial peddlers of emotion detection systems: a scowl is not a reliable indicator of anger, nor is a smile a reliable indicator of happiness.
Mounting scientific evidence illustrates the detrimental effects of sleep loss on the brain and behavioral functioning. Given the ongoing development of the brain from the onset of puberty into the early 20s, these behavioral and neural effects are particularly concerning for adolescents. In this review, I summarize what we know about the relation among sleep disruption, changes in sleep biology across puberty, and the developing adolescent brain. Although examinations of sleep and the developing brain have been promising, significant gaps in knowledge remain regarding populations sampled and methodological challenges. The field will also benefit from better communication among sleep researchers and developmental neuroscientists to translate the results of studies on the brain into meaningful outcomes.
There has been a lot of discussion about the issues of reproducible research, p-hacking for any publishable results in data, and an inability to publish negative results. So it’s a pleasure to report on a paper that actually does something about it. The authors—Skylar Brannon, Sarah Carr, Ellie Shuo Jin, Robert Josephs, and Bertram Gawronski—actually pre-registered their research plan, including the hypotheses they were going to be testing and the experiment that would test them.
The hypotheses were based on previous suggestions that testosterone would make people less empathetic and therefore more likely to choose a purely utilitarian solution, minimizing the total number of deaths. They also hypothesized that people given testosterone would prefer taking action, which would bias them toward changing the status quo. To test these hypotheses, they got 200 volunteers and randomly assigned some to receive a boost of testosterone, while the rest got a placebo. The participants were then asked to consider a moral dilemma and come to some decision on what they felt the right course of action wa
“There is, in sanest hours, a consciousness, a thought that rises, independent, lifted out from all else, calm, like the stars, shining eternal. This is the thought of identity,” Walt Whitman wrote in contemplating the central paradox of the self. And yet the most paradoxical feature of consciousness might be precisely the elusiveness of the self in an identity composed of porous, ever-shifting multitudes. A century after Whitman, the Austrian poet, playwright, and novelist Thomas Bernhard addressed this in his exquisite meditation on the attendant paradox of self-observation: “If we observe ourselves, we are never observing ourselves but someone else. Thus we can never talk about self-observation, [for then] we are talking as someone we never are when we are not observing ourselves, and thus when we observe ourselves we are never observing the person we intended to observe but someone else.”
Midway in time between Whitman and Bernhard, Virginia Woolf distilled the paradox into its central problem: “One can’t write directly about the soul. Looked at, it vanishes.” Far ahead of modern science, she understood that our experience of selfhood and the “soul” is largely rooted in our experience of time — that self and time are entwined in a shared elasticity.
The Australian Olympic Committee’s (AOC) Olympic Unleashed program will be lead by Optus after announcing the telco as the official presenting sponsor one year out from Tokyo 2020.
Five-time Australian Olympic swimming gold medallist, Ian Thorpe, will be one of many Olympians involved in the Olympics Unleashed program to deliver face-to-face lessons aimed at improving students’ ability to set goals, overcome challenges and build self-esteem.
Behavioural insights (BI) are lessons derived from the behavioural and social sciences, including decision making, psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, organisational and group behaviour. Public bodies around the world are increasingly using BI to design and implement better public policies based on evidence of the actual behaviour and biases of citizens and businesses. This toolkit provides practitioners and policy makers with a step-by-step process for analysing a policy problem, building strategies, and developing behaviourally informed interventions.
Figures from across the sports, media and entertainment landscapes will gather in Orlando in the lead-up to this year’s MLS All-Star Game presented by Target for the second edition of the Major League Soccer Innovation Showcase, where experts will from around the world will explore the role technology and innovation plays in the future of soccer and the media experience.
Held in collaboration with R/GA Ventures, the investment and innovation arm of global agency R/GA, the event will include an opening address by MLS Commissioner Don Garber and feature presentations from industry leaders on a variety of topics ranging from disruptive technology and its impact on viewing experiences to engaging and forging a deeper relationship with Gen Z fans.
Finding time to stay in shape can be a struggle for busy people. The obvious choices—going to a studio class or following along to YouTube videos at home—have flaws. Classes can be expensive and quality varies. Following a prerecorded yoga session or a high-intensity workout online is a quick and handy option but you won’t get individual feedback on your poses, planks, and squat jumps.
It is a problem that struck a chord with former athletes and Cornell Tech graduates, Chris Kruger, Skyler Erickson, Campbell Weaver, candidates for Master in Computer Science ’19, and Chris Brownell, Johnson Cornell Tech MBA ’19.
The team’s solution, Otari, is a smart exercise mat that uses computer-vision algorithms to recognize how your body is moving in three-dimensional space. It then gives real-time feedback and improvement tips. Designed with city dwellers and space-saving in mind, the mat can be stored in a closet and easily taken out for use.
… An important process in the collection of time-motion data is the creation of Drills. Drills allow practitioners to identify timepoints of interest within a performance, such as a specific training modality or a phase of play in competition and assess the physical outputs during these Drills in isolation, further contextualising the physical output. … A stronger integration between sport scientists and performance analysts has great potential for; 1). in a research setting to greatly improve the understanding of how tactical and technical actions influence physical outputs, and 2). in an applied setting, allow practitioners to improve drill creation to replicate match demands, encompassing the tactical and technical elements in addition to physical metrics, while possibly using physical measures tactical contexts to create new performance measures, e.g. Pressing Efficiency.
Injuries are a common occurrence in team sports and can have significant financial, physical and psychological consequences for athletes and their sporting organizations. As such, an abundance of research has attempted to identify factors associated with the risk of injury, which is important when developing injury prevention and risk mitigation strategies. There are a number of methods that can be used to identify injury risk factors. However, difficulty in understanding the nuances between different statistical approaches can lead to incorrect inferences and decisions being made from data. Accordingly, this narrative review aims to (1) outline commonly implemented methods for determining injury risk, (2) highlight the differences between association and prediction as it relates to injury and (3) describe advances in statistical modeling and the current evidence relating to predicting injuries in sport. Based on the points that are discussed throughout this narrative review, both researchers and practitioners alike need to carefully consider the different types of variables that are examined in relation to injury risk and how the analyses pertaining to these different variables are interpreted. There are a number of other important considerations when modeling the risk of injury, such as the method of data transformation, model validation and performance assessment. With these technical considerations in mind, researchers and practitioners should consider shifting their perspective of injury etiology from one of reductionism to one of complexity. Concurrently, research implementing reductionist approaches should be used to inform and implement complex approaches to identifying injury risk. However, the ability to capture large injury numbers is a current limitation of sports injury research and there has been a call to make data available to researchers, so that analyses and results can be replicated and verified. Collaborative efforts such as this will help prevent incorrect inferences being made from spurious data and will assist in developing interventions that are underpinned by sound scientific rationale. Such efforts will be a step in the right direction of improving the ability to identify injury risk, which in turn will help improve risk mitigation and ultimately the prevention of injuries. [full text]
… n football there is a saying that if they’re good enough, they’re old enough. This implies that age is not a barrier if a player has the talent to play. Similarly it is said that if they’re good enough they’ll get an opportunity. And yet both clearly aren’t true. Or, at least, not always. Otherwise, Longstaff wouldn’t have needed an injury to get his chance.
The very idea that all of the players who have the talent get to play at the highest level is an inherently flawed one. Take Harry Kane as another example. Today there is little doubt about his ability and yet he needed his own stroke of luck to get his opportunity at Tottenham. That came in the form of the appointment of Tim Sherwood, someone who strongly believed in the talent of those who were coming through the youth system and stood by them as they found their feet.