Three years ago, Jarrion Lawson did something only Jesse Owens had ever done. Now he’s banned from track & field, his career in jeopardy because of something he says was out of his control.
49ers coach Kyle Shanahan and defensive coordinator Robert Saleh have made similar observations about Solomon Thomas just past the halfway point of the preseason.
“He’s moving different,” Shanahan said. “He’s playing a lot more aggressive, I think his mind’s a lot clearer and it’s showing.”
“He’s very decisive, he’s got good technique, he’s playing very fast and I like where he’s at mentally,” Saleh said. “I like where he’s at physically.”
Every country in the world’s top-10 rankings has a professional women’s league, so why doesn’t Canada? It’s the next logical step for the game in this country, says the nation’s most respected star
To purge the angst that had stacked up inside him for months, Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Carson Wentz turned to his pastor and unloaded.
It was December 2018 and Wentz had just learned he had a stress fracture in his back that threatened to end his season. He was searching for answers — attempting to regain control and stay in control — before he finally conceded the load was too great. So he loosened his white-knuckled grip and slowly started to let the weight slide away.
In a one-on-one conversation with the pastor, whom Wentz considers a spiritual mentor and close family friend, he let everything out. The anxiety accumulated from dealing with the injury, which surfaced earlier and bothered him more than he had been previously known. The disappointment over a lack of team success in 2018 under his stewardship. The frustration after being hurt for a second consecutive season. All of it.
Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports from
Although the 11+ programme has been shown to reduce injuries in sub-elite football, programme compliance is typically poor, suggesting that strategies to optimize delivery are necessary. This study investigated the effect of rescheduling Part 2 of the three-part 11+ programme on programme effectiveness. Twenty-five semi-professional football clubs were randomly allocated to either a Standard-11+ (n=398 players) or P2post group (n=408 players). Both groups performed the 11+ programme at least twice a week throughout the 2017 football season. The Standard-11+ group performed the entire 11+ programme before training activities commenced, whereas the P2post group performed Parts 1 and 3 of the 11+ programme before and Part 2 after training. Injuries, exposure and individual player 11+ dose were monitored throughout the season. No significant between group difference in injury incidence rate (P2post vs Standard-11+ = 11.8 vs 12.3 injuries/1000 h) was observed. Severe time loss injuries >28 days (33 vs 58 injuries; p<0.002) and total days lost to injury (4303 vs 5815 days; p<0.001) were lower in the P2post group. A higher 11+ programme dose was observed in the P2post (29.1 doses; 95% CI 27.9-30.1) versus Standard-11+ group (18.9 doses; 95% CI 17.6 -20.2; p<0.001). In semi-professional football, rescheduling Part 2 of the 11+ programme to the end of training maintained the effectiveness of the original 11+ programme to reduce injury incidence. Importantly, rescheduling Part 2 improved player compliance and reduced the number of severe injuries and total injury burden thereby enhancing effectiveness of the 11+ programme.
The initial dip is the most challenging, sinking shoulder deep into frigid ice water after just practicing in nearly triple-digit temperatures.
“The first five minutes, you’ve got to tough it out,” UNLV redshirt freshman linebacker Malakai Salu said. “That’s when you feel it the most. Then after that, you just get numb and relax. You try not to move, because when you move, it gets colder.”
UNLV football players are encouraged to sit in one of the seven 100-gallon ice tubs after each morning practice at Rebel Park. While the idea of wading in 55-degree water might give most chills, the older players often run to the tubs because they understand from experience the benefits of a late-morning soak.
Team USA, USA Triathlon Magazine, Stephen Meyers from
One lap to go in the race of his life and Matt McElroy thought to himself: “What happens if I podium?”
This was new territory for McElroy, the 27-year-old California native who grew up surfing and lifeguarding and joining local group rides in Huntington Beach. Four years ago, he was a runner at Northern Arizona University contemplating his post-collegiate career as a professional triathlete. He’d watch web broadcasts of ITU World Triathlon Series races, wondering if he’d ever be able to swim fast enough to hang with the world’s best.
But here he was on June 9 in Leeds, England, the fourth stop of the 2019 ITU World Triathlon Series, running alongside WTS stalwarts Javier Gomez Noya and Henri Schoeman thanks to a fantastic swim that put him with the lead group.
To receive maximum benefits from injury prevention exercise programmes (IPEP) such as Knee Control, players need to perform the exercises as prescribed. But, exercise fidelity in IPEPs is seldom evaluated. We developed a checklist to assess exercise fidelity in the Knee Control IPEP, and the primary aim was to evaluate its inter-rater reliability. The secondary aim was to study Knee Control exercise fidelity in youth football players and compare sex differences. Methods
This observational study included 11 teams with male and female youth players (11–18 years). On average, the players trained with the Knee Control IPEP for 7 weeks (SD 1.4, range 6–10 weeks). After the training period, two physiotherapists attended a team training session to observe players executing exercises and individually assessed their performance of these exercises as correct or incorrect based on standardised criteria set in the fidelity checklist. Agreement between observers was assessed using Cohen’s kappa coefficient. Results
The observers agreed on 144 out of 160 (90%) observations (Kappa = 0.80, substantial agreement). Both observers agreed on correct exercise performance for 69 out of 144 observations (exercise fidelity 48%). Exercise fidelity was higher in females (56%) than males (40%), but the difference was not statistically significant (p = 0.18). Conclusion
The Knee Control exercise fidelity checklist had high inter-rater reliability with substantial agreement. The exercise fidelity was low, which could hamper the preventive effects of an IPEP. Understanding the reasons for low exercise fidelity is important and more effort should focus on increasing exercise fidelity alongside the implementation of IPEPs. [full text]
Everyone will encounter high-pressure situations in their lives, and everyone will find themselves reacting differently. Some of us thrive in such high-stakes situations while others falter. As a whole, major league players are much, much better than the average person at pulling off stunning feats under pressure. But even at this elite level, the variation in outcomes is pretty significant.
Since baseball has a measurement for virtually everything imaginable, there’s a statistic based on WPA and pLI that measures clutch.
… Are some people more susceptible to these biases, while others are immune, for instance? And how do those tendencies relate to our general intelligence? Conan Doyle’s story is surprising because we intuitively expect more intelligent people, with their greater analytical minds, to act more rationally—but as Tversky and Kahneman had shown, our intuitions can be deceptive.
If we want to understand why smart people do dumb things, these are vital questions.
During a sabbatical at the University of Cambridge in 1991, a Canadian psychologist called Keith Stanovich decided to address these issues head on. With a wife specializing in learning difficulties, he had long been interested in the ways that some mental abilities may lag behind others, and he suspected that rationality would be no different. The result was an influential paper introducing the idea of dysrationalia as a direct parallel to other disorders like dyslexia and dyscalculia.
It was a provocative concept—aimed as a nudge in the ribs to all the researchers examining bias. “I wanted to jolt the field into realizing that it had been ignoring individual differences,” Stanovich told me.
… Wearables will be a much talked about technology in the run-up to the gathering. The actual event opens to the public on September 6th (and leasts until September 11th), but there will be a string of press conferences in the run-up to the big day.
We will be on the ground in Berlin to report on all the news. Last year we witnessed a number of launches including the Fitbit Charge 4, Samsung Galaxy Watch, Garmin Vivosmart 4, Skagen Falser 2, Diesel On Full Guard 2.5, Bellabeat Leaf Chakra and more. This year should be no less exciting.
My parents need to take their insulin pills before every meal and the fool-proof system that they have devised is, to keep the tablets on the dining table. The second back-up plan is the house-help, who is supposed to remind them.
Needless to say, both are not idiot-proof solutions and on several occasions, they both forget to pop the pills. Design Thinking being a solution-provider for everything, the team at Cambridge Consultants have come up with an innovative solution.
They have designed an electronic strip called Tapp, that uses NFC technology to transfer the medicine’s data (stored on the blister pack) to a dedicated Tapp App. From the App, the user can select the reminder times and integrate other essential information of the prescription.
Here’s a terrifying sentence: Hackers are “becoming increasingly interested in the susceptibility of health data.”
At least that’s the takeaway from researchers at the University of Southern California’s Center for Body Computing. They were at the Blackhat hacker conference in Las Vegas recently, where programmers set up a fake hospital environment and invited medical tech companies to bring their devices for a live stress test. “There was a lot of talk about the ease of insurance fraud and blackmail with some of this legacy software that is very hard and frustrating to update,” Dr. Mona Sobhani, who is the head of research for the Center for Body Computing, told me.
I initially got on the phone with Sobhani to get a sense of how our medical devices might be compromised. But the discussion quickly veered into different territory. She argued that our focus on medical data as the information coming out of connected pacemakers isn’t nearly as vulnerable as the information coming from far less secure sources. There’s a bigger security risk here, she argued, saying “all our data is health data.”
… No Bones About It: Solving The NBA’s Stress Fracture Issue
Play a lot of basketball and you may experience a lower extremity injury. Bone stress, tendon and muscle injuries can be a challenge for elite-level basketball players, and GE Healthcare has teamed up with the NBA to fund multimillion-dollar research projects — currently 17 studies are funded — alike. For example, Dr. John DiFiori, the NBA’s director of sports medicine, says musculoskeletal injuries range in severity and that in some cases, healing them can be a clinical challenge. “When bone stress injuries occur, they typically result in a significant loss of playing time,” he says. And certain injuries can be difficult to diagnose, leading to the end of a career on the court for some players. It’s why better research is so important to detect and treat these injuries early on, DiFiori says. Five proposals have been funded — with plans to incorporate imaging techniques to gain further insight — on how to improve bone stress injury prevention, explore early-diagnosis techniques and develop innovative treatment protocols.
There are all sorts of very healthy foods that are recommended as part of an elite athlete’s diet. However, consideration needs to be given to the issue of “timing”: a schedule adjustment that must be taken into account in order to know when these foods can be consumed if the athlete needs to compete or train afterwards. Although these foods may contain very healthy ingredients and nutrients, due to the fact that they take a long time to digest, or cause gas or bloating, they should not be eaten before practising sports.
Dr. María Antonia Lizarraga, specialist in Sports Medicine and Nutrition, explains, it is important to know what an athlete is eating and especially what they are eating before, during and after physical training. The key, she points out, is for them to know when food can be eaten so that it does not cause any issues in regard to digestion.
In general, on training or match days when there is very little time for digestion, it is recommended that small quantities of food are eaten, preferably liquid meals rather than solids, and foods which contain only a small amount of fibre.
A 2015 study found that athletes who adequately replaced the sodium lost in their sweat finished a middle distance triathlon an average of 26 minutes faster than those who didn’t.
That’s quite a significant potential boost in performance! But, what’s the science behind sodium supplementation during exercise and how can athletes ensure they’re getting their intake right? Andy Blow, Founder and Sports Scientist at Precision Hydration has the answers.
Scientific American Blog Network, Observations, Louise Elizabeth Maher-Johnson and Ayana Elizabeth Johnson from
As food writer Mark Bittman recently remarked, since food is defined as “a substance that provides nutrition and promotes growth” and poison is “a substance that promotes illness,” then “much of what is produced by industrial agriculture is, quite literally, not food but poison.” Of course, it doesn’t have to be this way. Eliminating pesticides and transitioning to organic regenerative farming can get us back on track to nutritious food, restore microbiomes and protect our health. Let’s break all this down, and then talk solutions.
“You would have to eat twice as much broccoli today to get the same nutrients as a generation ago.” That is according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, from 1975 to 2010, as reported by Planetary Health/Amberwaves. So much chewing!
Kellen Moore has just one year of coaching experience under his belt. This season, he’s tasked with getting Dak Prescott and Ezekiel Elliott to justify their looming mega-extensions.
… there was a good deal of discussion on player health and safety. Brooks Platt showed that after Tommy John Surgery, pitchers tend to lose movement on their fastball. Kristen Nicholson detailed a robust study that Wake Forest is conducting that combines various biomechanics measurements with psychological evaluation to see which factors affect pitcher injuries and rehabilitation. Chris Ewanik did some preliminary research on players who use the C-flap helmet, and through case studies of a few notable hitters showed there might be some plate discipline improvement with the safer helmet, but the effect would be small.
… “There were people who were happy to stay at that level but others said: ‘No, we have to push on.’ In the last few years the thought was in a lot more people’s heads. For me this attitude can still change a little bit more because some people are like: ‘Ah, I don’t like to have all the stuff related to the top level, let’s stay where we are and do our own thing.’ There was a change in mentality but for me it could still be bigger.”
That is the tension Union must now master: establishing themselves as a strident Bundesliga outfit without sacrificing what, even by German standards, is a unique atmosphere at the altar of mammon. It is one reason Parensen, now 33 and a bit-part player, agreed to sign a new contract despite knowing he will feature irregularly.
Six women’s football matches in 2018, including three internationals, were identified as having suspicion betting patterns by a new report shedding light on the growing vulnerability in the women’s game.
The joint report, by the Starlizard Integrity Services, Stats Perform and TXODDS, reveals how suspicious betting patterns for matches have surged.
Six games were identified as having suspicious betting partners in 2018 – in practice, almost invariably a sign of fixing – compared to zero in 2017.
Three of the suspicious betting patterns were in international games, two were in matches between clubs from different nations and one was in a domestic league game.