As Golden State Warriors superstar Stephen Curry gets ready to enter his 11th NBA season, he does so with those around him believing he is at the “peak” of his basketball powers. Warriors coach Steve Kerr has reiterated throughout training camp that he is not expecting Curry to do more than he has already shown he can do over the years, even though the organization enters the new year in a transition without Kevin Durant, who signed with the Brooklyn Nets, and Klay Thompson, who continues to rehab a torn left ACL.
“Just the usual,” Kerr said after Sunday’s practice. “I’m not looking for anything different than what he’s done for five years, but what he’s done is pretty special: two MVP’s and a perennial top-five player. He’s had an incredible camp. To me, he’s at his peak physically, mentally. He’s seen every defense that people have thrown at him now during his career, and he’s ready to have a great year.”
The question on everyone’s mind is not just if Eliud Kipchoge is going to make history and run the first-ever sub-two-hour marathon, but when?
Last Sunday, the decision was made for Kipchoge to fly from his training camp in Kaptagat to Vienna, with his coach Patrick Sang and a number of his team-mates, now pacemakers. His manager Valentijn Trouw informed Kipchoge about the decision.
The team behind Kipchoge are leaving nothing to chance in the final week before the first scheduled date for the Challenge on Saturday.
… He said he hoped to have a decision by next month. Gregg Berhalter, the U.S. coach, who had previously found Dest “enthusiastic” about playing for the USMNT, now sounded guarded. “I’ve had conversations with Sergino. The conversations were positive, and the content of these conversations is going to remain private,” Berhalter told the Washington Post.
The cautious conclusion must be that the Netherlands are favorites to win this race. Certainly, they would be the rational choice for Dest. And though it’s far too early to tell, he may prove a prize worth having for the next 15 years.
… Biomechanics analysts can postulate that Altuve’s success derives from a relatively high strength to body mass ratio, fast-twitch muscular interaction and exceptional ability to translate energy through adjacent body parts.
But it takes the words of a witness such as Justin Verlander, armed only with his two good eyes and an appreciation of the skills required to play big-league baseball, to provide an adequate summary of what these elements represent to anyone playing with or against Altuve.
“The stamp of an incredible ballplayer is when you know immediately, after playing with them a week or two, how special they are,” Verlander said before the Astros open the American League Championship Series against the Yankees on Saturday at Minute Maid Park.
… as I’ve grown as a coach and honed my philosophy for training athletes, I have decided to never use running (or anything that can be used as training) as punishment.
Here’s why I believe you should join me on that!
First and foremost, we want to maximize the performance potential of our athletes. When we run them into the ground, regardless of the reason, that potential decreases. We create undesirable stress on their bodies and nervous systems.
As the running world eagerly looks on this weekend, Kenyan distance runner Eliud Kipchoge will set out on a tree-lined course in Vienna for his second attempt to break the fabled 2-hour marathon barrier. To do so, he’ll have to shave 26 seconds off his previous bid at an Italian auto racing track, dipping his per-mile pace below an unfathomable 4 minutes, 35 seconds per mile.
But a new CU Boulder-led study mathematically assessing the new course suggests his chances of making history this time are excellent.
“We wanted to scientifically quantify just how close to perfect this course is, and the answer is it is really darn close,” says senior author and Integrative Physiology Professor Rodger Kram.
… Sports Science Week placed the emphasis on the need for different disciplines of sports medicine to work together to confront the various challenges they face, in order to adopt a more holistic approach to athletes’ concerns.
This focus from various points of view is closely linked to the Barça methodology, which is part of the style of play that has so distinguished the club all over the world, and in which Paco Seirul·lo, who also gave a talk at the event, has been such a key driver. This approach emphasises how the physical and cognitive parts interact in player performance and how this needs to be observed in a comprehensive manner, thus overseeing both the physical and the emotional aspects.
The first thing you notice is the grunting. Walk by the Carolina Hurricanes’ weight room, and there’s a good chance you’ll see the biggest gym rat on the team.
“You peek your head in and see him,” says forward Jordan Martinook. “He’s got his head down, his hat low, you can’t even see his eyes. He’s got a weight vest on, and you just hear him go, ‘Mmmpfh.'”
“You just see a lot of veins,” says defenseman Haydn Fleury. “Some grunts. It’s kind of scary, to be honest.”
Frontiers in Sports and Active Living journal from
The foot is a complex system with multiple degrees of freedom that play an essential role in running or sprinting. The intrinsic foot muscles (IFM) are the main local stabilizers of the foot and are part of the active and neural subsystems that constitute the foot core. These muscles lengthen eccentrically during the stance phase of running before shortening at the propulsion phase, as the arch recoils in parallel to the plantar fascia. They play a key role in supporting the medial longitudinal arch, providing flexibility, stability and shock absorption to the foot, whilst partially controlling pronation. Much of the foot rigidity in late stance has been attributed to the windlass mechanism – the dorsiflexion of the toes building tension up in the plantar aponeurosis and stiffening the foot. In addition, recent studies have shown that the IFM provide a necessary active contribution in late stance, in order to develop sufficient impedance in the metatarsal-phalangeal joints. This in turn facilitates the propulsive forces at push-off. These factors support the critical role of the foot in providing rigidity and an efficient lever at push-off. During running or sprinting, athletes need to generate and maintain the highest (linear) running velocity during a single effort in a sprinting lane. Acceleration and sprinting performance requires forces to be transmitted efficiently to the ground. It may be of particular interest to strengthen foot muscles to maintain and improve an optimal capacity to generate and absorb these forces. The current evidence supports multiple exercises to achieve higher strength in the foot, such as the “short foot exercise,” doming, toes curl, towing exercises or the more dynamic hopping exercises, or even barefoot running. Their real impact on foot muscle strength remains unclear and data related to its assessment remains scarce, despite a recognized need for this, especially before and after a strengthening intervention. It would be optimal to be able to assess it. In this article, we aim to provide the track and field community with an updated review on the current modalities available for foot strength assessment and training. We present recommendations for the incorporation of foot muscles training for performance and injury prevention in track and field. [full text]
The Detroit Pistons today opened the Henry Ford Detroit Pistons Performance Center, a $90 million state-of-the-art training center and corporate headquarters in the New Center area of Detroit. Designed as a community hub, the new 185,000 square-foot facility is the largest of its kind in the NBA and anchors a multi-use development that is transforming the neighborhood and attracting additional investment. Connected to the $37 million William Clay Ford Center for Athletic Medicine, the performance center will feature publicly accessible grocery, food, fitness and retail amenities, and an inviting streetscape that promotes walkability and community engagement.
Tufts Health & Nutrition Letter, Laura Ferguson from
With a variety of fiber types to consider—and health claims on food labels to vet—it can be awfully difficult to separate what’s real from what’s hype. Fortunately, Nicola M. McKeown is here to help. A nutritional epidemiologist at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts, and an associate professor at the Friedman School, McKeown offers her quick guide to fiber, including how to better incorporate different kinds of it into your diet.
New Zealand Rugby has been promoting the game of rugby since 1892. From the time when sports did not involve so much technology. According to performance analytics manager, Jason Healy, New Zealand Rugby finds itself in a very dynamic environment in terms of technology. While he told ZDNet it’s a “whole lot of work,” to provide for New Zealand Rugby’s team with the latest upgraded technology, the ability to analyze data for insight, is a critical step forward.
“We look at all of the actions of the teams and the players on the field, the ball, the referee — all those types of data — they all get invested into the visual analytics platform, and then depending on the user preference, that data is essentially visualized in a way that aligns with either the game strategy that they’re trying to measure or they’re actually looking for particular insights or filling knowledge gaps that they don’t currently have,” Healy explained.
… Armed with the experiences of Monza and Berlin, Kipchoge was on pace from the start and, despite a rough patch just prior to the 30km mark, never looked unlikely to break the barrier. Courtesy of the pacing team, Kipchoge rarely strayed further than two seconds either side of the optimal kilometre splits (official splits pending), and exploded over the last kilometre in typical fashion with a smile on his face. Despite comfortably breaking the barrier, the result was not a forgone conclusion. The spectacle, two minutes faster than the official world record, was a product of careful innovations and interventions that took shape over years.
Proponents of skill acquisition theory (shoutout to my LTU squad) will know that performance is generally limited by elements categorised into three domains – 1) the athlete (their anatomy and physiology), 2) the equipment (in this case, the shoes), and 3) the environment (factors such as temperature, air and wind resistance, and the course). By applying subtle, and not so subtle, manipulations in all three domains, substantial improvements in performance can be made. And that’s exactly what we saw today.
“n this competition, you will develop a model to predict how many yards a team will gain on given rushing plays as they happen. You’ll be provided game, play, and player-level data, including the position and speed of players as provided in the NFL’s Next Gen Stats data. And the best part – you can see how your model performs from your living room, as the leaderboard will be updated week after week on the current season’s game data as it plays out.” Deadline for final submissions is November 27.
RAPTOR, which stands for Robust Algorithm (using) Player Tracking (and) On/Off Ratings, is FiveThirtyEight’s new NBA statistic. We’re pretty excited about it. In addition to being a statistic that we bake in house, RAPTOR fulfills two long-standing goals of ours:
First, we wanted to create a publicly available statistic that takes advantage of modern NBA data, specifically player tracking and play-by-play data that isn’t available in traditional box scores.
Second, and relatedly, we wanted a statistic that better reflects how modern NBA teams actually evaluate players.