… It’s only possible if Engram stays healthy. He missed five games last season with various injuries and was managed carefully this summer after a minor hamstring problem in the spring. The Giants even went as far as keeping Engram out of live drills on the second day of training camp to manage his workload. That is not the normal handling of a 25-year-old tight end. It’s an approach used primarily for vital players.
Engram noted there were things he identified this offseason that he could be doing better as a professional. Things that he could control to take care of his body.
He’s put a stronger emphasis on his sleep (deep sleep, REM sleep) and now has a chef who cooks him fresh dinners. He even has a whole recovery room set up in his house, complete with foam rollers, NormaTec boots and an inversion table.
My name is Blair McDonald, and I am a sophomore on the Vanderbilt Women’s Soccer team. I have noticed that, at times, there is a disconnect between athletes and other students on campus. As a result, I wanted to write about my college experiences and try to bridge the gap between student-athletes and the rest of the student population. Throughout the year, I hope to write a variety of pieces that provide a little bit more insight, the good and the bad, into the lives of Vanderbilt’s student-athletes.
A lot of people ask me what it means to be a student-athlete.
It means finding an impossible balance between school, sports and sleep (notice I didn’t say anything about a social life). It means sore legs, arms, backs, knees, ankles, necks…even hair? It means 15-minute naps between class and practice. It means ending practice at 6 p.m. just to wake up at 6 a.m. the next morning for early conditioning. It means doing homework on the floor of an airport before you board an 11 p.m. flight back to Nashville. It means running from post-practice rehab to a class on Commons with a to-go box of pancakes and bacon.
November was normal. October was optimistic. September seemed impossible.
Clemson receiver Amari Rodgers tore the anterior cruciate ligament, or ACL, in his right knee during practice on March 25. After reconstructive surgery, Clemson doctors and trainers estimated he could return to action in approximately eight months.
Rodgers initially circled the sixth game on the schedule — Oct. 12 at home against Florida State. That was an optimistic, yet reasonable, goal for his return.
However, after he began his rehab, Rodgers grew less content with being optimistic. He pursued the impossible.
Liverpool’s specialist throw-in coach Thomas Gronnemark says Jurgen Klopp’s innovative approach to management is helping to build “something special” at Anfield.
Klopp made headlines last season when he added Gronnemark to his coaching staff midway through the campaign.
The Dane, who holds the world record for the longest throw-in at 51.33m, had an immediate impact on the technique of the club’s full-backs – most notably Joe Gomez.
Differentially-private data analysis is a principled approach that enables organizations to learn from the majority of their data while simultaneously ensuring that those results do not allow any individual’s data to be distinguished or re-identified. This type of analysis can be implemented in a wide variety of ways and for many different purposes. For example, if you are a health researcher, you may want to compare the average amount of time patients remain admitted across various hospitals in order to determine if there are differences in care. Differential privacy is a high-assurance, analytic means of ensuring that use cases like this are addressed in a privacy-preserving manner.
Today, we’re rolling out the open-source version of the differential privacy library that helps power some of Google’s core products. To make the library easy for developers to use, we’re focusing on features that can be particularly difficult to execute from scratch, like automatically calculating bounds on user contributions. It is now freely available to any organization or developer that wants to use it.
… It’s hard to see where the next big thing will come from. Galvanic Skin Response, which measures how well our skin conducts electricity the more we sweat as a response to triggers, judges skin hydration. But the only device to try to use it in a smartwatch was HealBe’s much-derided food-tracking device. If you wanted to do more in-depth blood analysis, you’d need to break the skin, a hard sell for customers (aside from diabetics) and a legal minefield for manufacturers.
Without new, and compelling, ways of looking after our bodies, there’s little reason to spend another $400 on a timepiece.
Researchers from the Polytechnic University of Milan and the University Hospital of Basel have developed a microfluidic chip containing cartilage, which can be subjected to mechanical stress. The procedure mimics the conditions of osteoarthritis and could help in developing new treatments.
The accelerometer created by KTH researchers could be used in mobile phones for navigation, mobile games and pedometers, as well as monitoring systems for heart disease and motion-capture wearables that can monitor even the slightest movements of the human body
… Like many of the broad takeaways from research at his Institute for Orthopaedics & Sports Medicine in Gulf Breeze, Andrews points to overuse, fatigue and burnout as prime culprits for so many injury-rattled players.
“I think we have way too many games already,” Andrews said. “I’d like to see the fatigue factor eliminated to some degree. It’s really related to the injuries that we see.
“Football like all sports has become a year-round involvement. These NFL, college and even high school players, they have something going on 12 months a year.”
Gummies, tinctures, salves, and pills. Lip balm, toothpicks, shampoo, and lube. CBD is in practically everything these days. And if you listen to the hype, this nonpsychoactive compound found in various strains of cannabis can cure just about anything, from pain to depression to insomnia. Last year, CBD sales in the U.S. surpassed $600 million. By 2022 they will hit nearly $22 billion, according to estimates by the Brightfield Group, a Chicago research firm. But is CBD the panacea consumers are being sold? Is taking it even safe? And is it legal? We tapped researchers and industry experts to answer all those questions and more.
The question is simple enough: Should the NFL soften its hard-line stance on marijuana?
No one with the Chargers cares to answer, a team spokesman says. Same goes for the Rams where, at a summertime practice, one player after another declines to comment.
As veteran Rams safety Eric Weddle says: “It’s kind of tricky.”
This reticence might seem unusual given that league executives recently agreed to include cannabis in a study of alternative pain therapies.
Orioles general manager Mike Elias has fired 14 members of the organization, most from the player development department and international operations.
Elias has dismissed 25 people thus far in an overhaul of the system that he inherited when taking the job in November.
“It’s tough stuff, but we’re trying to reposition our organization for the future to compete in our division,” Elias said Tuesday before Baltimore played the Los Angeles Dodgers. “Right now we’re 46-97 and we’ve got a long way to go to get better and we need to do things differently to get better.”
Since the 1970s, Major League Baseball clubs have generally added more and more minor league affiliates. In 1979, there were an average of 4.7 affiliates per major league club.1 This season there are 8.2 — a total of 245 minor league affiliates, the most since 1948, spread across 30 major league organizations.
But the Houston Astros, a model of modern player development, bucked that trend a few years ago. After the 2017 season, they reduced their affiliate count from nine to seven clubs.2 The Astros believed they could become a more efficient producer of talent with fewer farm clubs.
If you take an introductory statistics course, you’ll learn that a datapoint can be used to generate inspiration or to test a theory, but never both. Why not?
Humans are a bit too good at finding patterns in everything. Real patterns, fake patterns, you name it. We’re the sort of creatures that find Elvis’s face in a potato chip. If you’re tempted to equate patterns with insights, remember that there are three kinds of data patterns:
Patterns/facts that exist in your dataset and beyond it.
Patterns/facts that exist only in your dataset.
Patterns/facts that exist only in your imagination (apophanies).