In an excerpt from his new book, “Most Valuable,” Gare Joyce explains how Sidney Crosby forever changed the way NHLers — particularly generational talents — approach being pros.
SB Nation, Pounding the Rock blog, BrunoPassos from
… “Well, Dejounte, in some ways he’s a work in progress,” Pop said after Murray’s 15-point, 10-assist, 8-rebound performance against OKC. “But if that work in progress can do what he did tonight, that’s pretty good.”
When it’s not Pop in Murray’s ear, it’s assistant coaches Tim Duncan and Becky Hammon, both of whose jerseys are currently hanging in the rafters of the AT&T Center. Up and coming players are lucky to have a direct line to even one Hall of Famer; Murray has three in his corner on a nightly basis, constantly imparting wisdom in the moment that tells him what he did right and wrong and allows him to recalibrate appropriately.
“That’s my big bro for sure,” Murray said of Duncan. “
… Griffin is a different player physically and mentally in his third season. He lost almost 20 pounds and also ditched what he called a “selfish” mentality that he had last season — that he needed to be Richard Sherman just because he was replacing him at left cornerback.
… To be honest, the biggest takeaway I expected to get from this talk was a list of Samuels-approved apps and wearable devices for tracking and analyzing sleep. But at one point, he asked for a show of hands from the audience, which consisted mostly of training staff from various Olympic sports, to see how many were using watches or other wearables to track their athletes’ sleep. No one raised a hand. “Good,” Samuels said. “Don’t.”
That’s not to say that all information about sleep is bad. In fact, one of the first things Samuels does with prospective new patients is ask them to keep a pen-and-paper sleep log for 30 days. The information in those logs can reveal all sorts of useful information like total weekly duration of sleep, regularity of sleep habits, late or early circadian bias, and so on. But pervasive sleep tracking can create its own sleep-troubling anxiety. For athletes who use sleep trackers on themselves and find it useful, that’s no problem. But for a coach or trainer to impose it on a team is more problematic. The simplest and most accurate way of assessing how someone is sleeping, Samuels said, is to ask them: “How are you sleeping?”
There’s new evidence that girls start out with the same math abilities as boys.
A study of 104 children from ages 3 to 10 found similar patterns of brain activity in boys and girls as they engaged in basic math tasks, researchers reported Friday in the journal Science of Learning.
“They are indistinguishable,” says Jessica Cantlon, an author of the study and professor of developmental neuroscience at Carnegie Mellon University.
Nature Communications; Robert C. Wilson et al. from
Researchers and educators have long wrestled with the question of how best to teach their clients be they humans, non-human animals or machines. Here, we examine the role of a single variable, the difficulty of training, on the rate of learning. In many situations we find that there is a sweet spot in which training is neither too easy nor too hard, and where learning progresses most quickly. We derive conditions for this sweet spot for a broad class of learning algorithms in the context of binary classification tasks. For all of these stochastic gradient-descent based learning algorithms, we find that the optimal error rate for training is around 15.87% or, conversely, that the optimal training accuracy is about 85%. We demonstrate the efficacy of this ‘Eighty Five Percent Rule’ for artificial neural networks used in AI and biologically plausible neural networks thought to describe animal learning.
Heat acclimation (HA) involves physiological adaptations that directly promote exercise performance in hot environments. However, for endurance-athletes it is unclear if adaptations also improve aerobic capacity and performance in cool conditions, partly because previous randomized controlled trial (RCT) studies have been restricted to short intervention periods. Prolonged HA was therefore deployed in the present RCT study including 21 cyclists [38 ± 2 years, 184 ± 1 cm, 80.4 ± 1.7 kg, and maximal oxygen uptake (VO2max) of 58.1 ± 1.2 mL/min/kg; mean ± SE] allocated to either 5½ weeks of training in the heat [HEAT (n = 12)] or cool control [CON (n = 9)]. Training registration, familiarization to test procedures, determination of VO2max, blood volume and 15 km time trial (TT) performance were assessed in cool conditions (14°C) during a 2-week lead-in period, as well as immediately pre and post the intervention. Participants were instructed to maintain total training volume and complete habitual high intensity intervals in normal settings; but HEAT substituted part of cool training with 28 ± 2 sessions in the heat (1 h at 60% VO2max in 40°C; eliciting core temperatures above 39°C in all sessions), while CON completed all training in cool conditions. Acclimation for HEAT was verified by lower sweat sodium [Na+], reduced steady-state heart rate and improved submaximal exercise endurance in the heat. However, when tested in cool conditions both peak power output and VO2max remained unchanged for HEAT (pre 60.0 ± 1.5 vs. 59.8 ± 1.3 mL O2/min/kg). TT performance tested in 14°C was improved for HEAT and average power output increased from 298 ± 6 to 315 ± 6 W (P < 0.05), but a similar improvement was observed for CON (from 294 ± 11 to 311 ± 10 W). Based on the present findings, we conclude that training in the heat was not superior compared to normal (control) training for improving aerobic power or TT performance in cool conditions. [full text]
Sportlogiq and the National Lacrosse League (NLL), the largest and most successful professional lacrosse property in the world, have agreed to a multi-year partnership through which the Montreal-based sports analytics leader will become the NLL’s Official Statistics Partner. The agreement will see Sportlogiq collect, analyze, and distribute live match data and advanced level statistics from every game, beginning the 2019-2020 season.
As the Official Statistics Partner of the NLL, Sportlogiq will collect live match data directly from all 13 NLL venues across North America, utilizing its proprietary collection technology. It will also use cutting-edge AI to surface insights from more detailed rich statistics, allowing partners and fans of the NLL to analyze the sport in new ways.
Here’s a Thursday quick heads up for ya – Garmin has begun the roll-out of PacePro to the Forerunner 945 and FR245/FR245M series watches. You might remember PacePro was introduced on the Fenix 6 about two months ago, and essentially gives mile by mile (or kilometer by kilometer, or even random chunk by random chunk) pacing guidance for races by looking at the terrain and your pacing goals (including time and distance, but also details such as negative split or positive split). It’s like the old-school pace bands that you see at marathons with your splits for it but with way more smarts in it.
It’s super cool tech, but is also something that’s actually more than meets the eye under the covers. Specifically – Garmin designed it to be extensible. Meaning that as they get past this particular firmware update to these devices, they’ll be looking at how to make tweaks to it. Be it covering more use cases, or bringing in partners to leverage it. For example, the way Garmin Connect plops files on the watches was designed to be open to allow 3rd parties to create files as well.
Caltech scientists have developed a new kind of polymer that can carry a chemical payload as part of its molecular structure and release it in response to mechanical stress. The chemical system they have developed could one day be used to create medical implants that can release drugs into the body when triggered by something like ultrasound waves, they say.
Skeletal muscle plasticity is reflected by a dynamic balance between protein synthesis and breakdown, with basal muscle tissue protein synthesis rates ranging between 0.02 and 0.09%/h. Though it is evident that other musculoskeletal tissues should also express some level of plasticity, data on protein synthesis rates of most of these tissues in vivo in humans is limited. Six otherwise healthy patients (62±3 y), scheduled to undergo unilateral total knee arthroplasty, were subjected to primed continuous intravenous infusions with L-[ring-13C6]-Phenylalanine throughout the surgical procedure. Tissue samples obtained during surgery included muscle, tendon, cruciate ligaments, cartilage, bone, menisci, fat, and synovium. Tissue-specific fractional protein synthesis rates (%/h) were assessed by measuring the incorporation of L-[ring-13C6]-Phenylalanine in tissue protein and were compared with muscle tissue protein synthesis rates using a paired t test. Tendon, bone, cartilage, Hoffa’s fat pad, anterior and posterior cruciate ligament, and menisci tissue protein synthesis rates averaged 0.06±0.01, 0.03±0.01, 0.04±0.01, 0.11±0.03, 0.07±0.02, 0.04±0.01, and 0.04±0.01%/h, respectively, and did not significantly differ from skeletal muscle protein synthesis rates (0.04±0.01%/h; P>0.05). Synovium derived protein (0.13±0.03%/h) and intercondylar notch bone tissue protein synthesis rates (0.03±0.01%/h) were respectively higher and lower compared to skeletal muscle protein synthesis rates (P<0.05 and P<0.01, respectively). Basal protein synthesis rates in various musculoskeletal tissues are within the same range of skeletal muscle protein synthesis rates, with fractional muscle, tendon, bone, cartilage, ligament, menisci, fat, and synovium protein synthesis rates ranging between 0.02 and 0.13% per hour in vivo in humans.
Meaty subjects have been in the news recently, with a series of studies questioning dietary recommendations that we eat less of the red stuff, even as plant-based substitutes have moved into the spotlight with fast-food breakthroughs. A new generation of faux burgers, such as Impossible Burgers and Beyond Meat, which more closely replicate the experience of eating the real thing (they even “bleed”), have been popping up on the menus of chains like Burger King, Subway, and KFC. Scientists re-examining the dietary role of red meat, meanwhile, turned the nation’s nutrition landscape on its head in early October by casting doubt on the conventional wisdom that generally Americans need to eat less of it. Those findings drew a rapid and negative reaction from several quarters, including the American Heart Association, the American Cancer Society, and scientists such as Frank Hu, chairman of the Nutrition Department at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Hu discussed the shifting landscape with the Gazette.
Respiratory and gastrointestinal infections limit an athlete’s availability to train and compete. To better understand how sick an athlete will become when they have an infection, a paradigm recently adopted from ecological immunology is presented that includes the concepts of immune resistance (the ability to destroy microbes) and immune tolerance (the ability to dampen defence yet control infection at a non-damaging level). This affords a new theoretical perspective on how nutrition may influence athlete immune health; paving the way for focused research efforts on tolerogenic nutritional supplements to reduce the infection burden in athletes. Looking through this new lens clarifies why nutritional supplements targeted at improving immune resistance in athletes show limited benefits: evidence supporting the old paradigm of immune suppression in athletes is lacking. Indeed, there is limited evidence that the dietary practices of athletes suppress immunity, e.g. low-energy availability and train- or sleep-low carbohydrate. It goes without saying, irrespective of the dietary preference (omnivorous, vegetarian), that athletes are recommended to follow a balanced diet to avoid a frank deficiency of a nutrient required for proper immune function. The new theoretical perspective provided sharpens the focus on tolerogenic nutritional supplements shown to reduce the infection burden in athletes, e.g. probiotics, vitamin C and vitamin D. Further research should demonstrate the benefits of candidate tolerogenic supplements to reduce infection in athletes; without blunting training adaptations and without side effects. [full text]
… Arguments against load management pine for some impossible past and leave out the fact that, no matter what, few stars are playing more than 80 games a season — it’s a matter of whether they sit out voluntarily or involuntarily.
The regular season is just too long. I’m hardly the first person to say this, but we’ve truly reached a head here. It has long been teetering toward meaninglessness, but the emergence of load management and the discussion around it risks turning it into a farce, generating news stories that inevitably paint players as uncompetitive when, in reality, it’s the opposite.