The Boston Red Sox haven’t yet scheduled Chris Sale’s follow-up appointment with Dr. James Andrews. But they have a timeframe in mind of when the appointment will happen.
The ace missed the final six and a half weeks of the 2019 season because of left elbow inflammation.
“We really anticipate ultimately he’ll have a pretty normal offseason. We expect that he’ll see Dr. Andrews in mid-November and then begin his throwing program shortly thereafter,” Red Sox GM Brian O’Halloran told MassLive.com on Monday at Fenway Park.
… David Ballou, IU’s Director of Athletic Performance, grew up in Indiana, went to Avon High School and played fullback for the Hoosiers in the late 1990s. He graduated from IU with a degree in kinesiology and has been all about strength and conditioning ever since.
Now he has that reputation as one of the best athletic performance guys in the business. It was a huge deal when Allen was able to hire him away from Notre Dame in January of 2018, and it was even a bigger deal last winter when Indiana was able to keep him and his colleague, Dr. Matt Rhea, with a big bump in salary when NFL teams and other major colleges came a calling.
“When I was up in South Bend, I knew we were good and would be good for a long time. But when Tom called, there was something that pulled me back down here,’’ Ballou said Tueday outside Indiana’s sparkling new weight room. “I believed in him, and I love Bloomington and I love this unversity. The challenge of coming back down here, I could not say no. I had to come.’’
The future of sport science has arrived, and it includes mouthwash, kangaroos and electric brain stimulation.
More than 225 sport scientists, researchers, and coaches gathered in Toronto on Tuesday for the first day of the Own the Podium SPIN Summit. The three-day event is hosted by Canada’s high-performance program with the goal of maximizing athletic performance in international competition.
Amarah Epp-Stobbe, a PhD candidate at the University of Victoria, won the top prize for The Dr. Gord Sleivert Young Investigator Awards on Tuesday for her work with Rugby Canada’s women’s sevens team.
Her ongoing research focuses on the impact physical contact has on fatigue levels and the value of limiting that contact to avoid overexertion. It’s an area of study that goes beyond concussions and instead considers how a hit to a thigh or shoulder might tax a body’s internal resources.
… Data scientists from Northwestern University and the University of Chicago looked at the dynamics of failure in three different areas – science, entrepreneurship and terrorism – and found that the way one fails matters. The study, which will be published Oct. 30 in Nature, was led by a team at Northwestern’s Center for the Science of Science and Innovation (CSSI), Kellogg School of Management and McCormick School of Engineering.
After an initial failure, paths diverge, the study found. Some individuals go on to achieve eventual success, and others continue to fail until they drop out. This divergence was evident as early as the second attempt. The factor that ultimately determined which path an individual took was the extent to which they learned from previous failures and how they applied that knowledge going forward, according to the study.
“If you only look at the attributes of successful attempts, you’re missing half the story,” said corresponding author Dashun Wang.
The purpose of this retrospective review was to report the physical and physiological development of top-level competitive male youth hockey players for 3 consecutive years (13, 14, and 15 years of age). Before each hockey season, the athletes (n = 103) underwent a fitness testing combine to assess aerobic, anaerobic, and musculoskeletal fitness. The tests performed included the height, body mass, body fat percentage determined by skinfolds, push-ups, chin-ups, plank, broad jump, grip strength 20-m shuttle run, Wingate bike test, and 5-10-5 shuttle test. Height and body mass increased with each consecutive year (p < 0.05) with no change in body fat percentage. Chin-ups, broad jump, and grip strength all improved with age (p < 0.001). However, push-ups only improved from 13 to 14 years of age (p < 0.001), whereas maximal plank duration decreased from 14 to 15 years of age (p < 0.05). The total distance covered during the 20-m shuttle run decreased from 14 to 15 years of age (p < 0.05). Absolute peak and average power increased with each age increase (p < 0.001), but relative peak and average power only increased from 13 to 14 years of age (p < 0.05). There was no change in the fatigue index with age. The 5-10-5 shuttle test improved with each age increase (p < 0.05). Over a 3-year period (13-15 years of age), there are many physical and physiological changes that occur in top-level competitive male hockey players. Having a better understanding of how these athletes develop could aid in the implementation of specific on- and off-ice training programs.
Return-to-sport protocols are integral in ensuring athletes are healthy and capable of safely performing at the highest level. … The methods used for rehabilitation vary depending on therapists, doctors and strength coach’s individual beliefs. An integrative approach that allows one to seamlessly transition from doctor to physical therapist to strength coach with matching beliefs and congruent systems is what yields optimal results!
… [Terry] Stotts has regularly provided his players with that type of in-depth and instantaneous feedback over the last month thanks to Noah Basketball, a shot-tracking data service that the Blazers installed in their practice facility this summer. Noah uses cameras and sensors positioned above the basket to compile data and give players real-time verbal feedback on every shot they take.
“Instantaneously, I was able to tell Dame and CJ what they did, what their average arc was, how they shot in different quadrants,” Stotts said. “It just tells you a lot of things. We’ve had some players where 75 percent of their misses are short, so that’s good information. I think it’s a really good tool.”
Google’s Android OS for smartwatches, Wear OS, isn’t nearly as successful as Android for smartphones, tablets, or televisions, and there’s a lot of blame to go around for that. We can blame Google for not having enough confidence to launch its own smartwatch hardware or for barely giving Wear OS the time of day at its big developer conference, or we can blame Qualcomm for failing to design a competitive smartwatch SoC. Smartwatches from Samsung, Huawei, and Apple, with their custom operating systems and SoCs, tend to have much better battery life than smartwatches with Wear OS and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Wear 2100 or 3100. Qualcomm’s current wearable platforms are manufactured on a 28nm fabrication process; in comparison, Samsung’s Exynos 9110, found in the Galaxy Watch series, is manufactured on a 10nm fabrication process. Qualcomm may be bridging the gap with its next SoC for wearables, however, and it could come in the form of the Snapdragon Wear 3300.
CVS Health is encouraging employers to cover an insomnia app called Sleepio.
Christopher Depner a sleep expert with the University of Colorado explains the benefits and downsides to sleep apps. [video, 1:15]
… exciting developments in 3D printing electronic components are what will truly unlock the mass-production of strong and capable IoT sensors. The use of conductive ink — an ink for 3D printing infused with conductive materials such as copper, silver, and gold — can enable us not only to conveniently print electronics, but to also remove the constraints of the traditional 2D circuit board. By creating three-dimensional circuit boards that can take on a number of different shapes or sizes, we will be able to build a more versatile array of devices. And importantly, this can consolidate and speed up the creation of IoT sensors.
Science and Medicine in Football journal, Editorial, Adam Beavan from
Objectives: Youth soccer is popular across the world and there is growing concerns about the safety of the sport, especially with regard to purposeful heading. The primary purpose of this study was to examine the frequency and characteristics (e.g. game vs practice) of purposeful soccer heading in youth players (ages 7-14) in the United States (US) and to better understand adherence to the 2015 U.S. Soccer heading guidelines.
Methods: A total of 8,104 respondents from teams across 55 state youth soccer associations in the US completed the online survey. U-12 players were represented most, while more male (59%) versus female (41%) teams took part.
Results: A majority of respondents (92.5%) indicated that their team adopted the guidelines. A large percentage of respondents (72%) indicated that they do not participate in soccer heading drills as part of their practice routines. A similarly large number of respondents reported none (49%) or a very small (i.e., 1-10) number of headers (44%) each week in games.
Conclusions: These findings suggest the 2015 U.S. Soccer heading guidelines appear to have been widely adopted in the United States, and that the number of exposures reported in our survey from heading a soccer ball in practices and games in these age groups of youth players is low.
Elegance is a design concept I have always found hard to define, especially in relation to data visualisation. I know when I see something that is elegant. I also know when this quality is absent. But it is often hard to articulate why. It lacks definition, which makes it hard to control, hard to explain and hard to pursue.
To try to find some common understanding, I asked Data Visualization Society members.
It was 2014, and Clark, then a doctoral student at Southern Methodist University, was part of a biomechanics group tasked by Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban with studying – and perhaps fixing – flopping, basketball’s dark, daffy art of fooling referees into calling fouls that aren’t.
Like all researchers, the SMU team needed data. Specifically, collision data. The underlying idea, Clark tells the Guardian, was “what if we just imagine people like billiard balls and go from there?” And that’s how Clark, his colleagues, and some hardy student volunteers found themselves in a campus lab, slamming each other off their feet, over and over again, as sensors captured every pileup.
“I don’t want to get the lab in trouble, as far as exposing students to bumps and bruises,” says Clark, now a kinesiology professor at West Chester University in Pennsylvania, with a laugh. “But I’ll say this: the collisions were designed to replicate what goes on in a game.”
