… What we find especially inspiring about Johnny is his approach to the human body. While he’s undoubtedly one of the most talented athletes in the world, he’s also incredibly humble in his athletic philosophy and the way he views movement and health. It’s our pleasure to support him while he prepares for another season of snow, and in this episode of our Be Momentous series, Johnny shows us a snapshot into his current training, philosophy, and routine. [video, 7:00]
… The research so far suggests hybrid training as the most effective option, and it has attracted attention and support from the U.S. Army and U.S. Department of Defense. According to the researchers involved in the study, it also could have a profound impact in helping U.S. Army Cadet Command prescribe fitness regimens to help ROTC cadets train for the new test.
“Colorado State is at the cutting edge of producing a combat fitness protocol for a very select population,” said Al Armonda, a CSU military science instructor who helped lead the study. “This falls well within our land-grant mission in filling a gap in the force that the Army needs.”
Thaddeus Moss visited LSU in April 2017 looking to transfer from North Carolina State. Within a couple days, the tight end wanted to play for coach Ed Orgeron.
One reason was Orgeron wanted Moss the tight end, not his father and Pro Football Hall of Fame receiver Randy Moss.
“Coach O, he’s a big coach, he’s been in big places, he’s had big players before,” Moss said. “K.J. Malone (son of former NBA All-Star Karl Malone) was on the team before I was here. So, it wasn’t like I was the first one with a name behind myself.
TwinCities.com, St. Paul Pioneer-Press, Andy Greeder from
Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott became a meme with his pregame hip exercises before he played the Vikings on Sunday Night Football.
His gyrations looked like dance moves, so the internet ran with NBC’s footage, setting it to, of course, Shakira’s “Hips Don’t Lie” and other songs, often with #DakDancesToAnything.
The Gophers have been in on the joke for a while now.
Quarterback Tanner Morgan has prescribed to incorporating these movements into his throwing motion and will get loose doing versions of them in the weight room and on the practice field. Teammates standing behind Morgan will mimic it and laugh.
… As someone who came up playing AAU in the midst of the organization’s peak and who also has two sons who are active in today’s AAU sphere, there’s no better player to weigh in on the subject than Lakers superstar LeBron James.
“These kids are going into the league already banged up, and I think parents and coaches need to know [that] … well, AAU coaches don’t give a f- – -,” James told Yahoo Sports. “AAU coaches couldn’t give a damn about a kid and what his body is going through.”
James granted Yahoo Sports an exclusive interview that covered the state of load management, a draining AAU culture that often leads to destruction, how he monitors his son’s involvement, and preventable measures to ensure that kids aren’t being taken advantage of and physically damaged before beginning their professional careers.
… Dr. Georgia Giblin, who worked with the Tigers this past season as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Michigan, joins the organization full-time as its first director of performance science. Her focus has been to build a system to help players stay healthy and reach peak performance by blending traditional baseball methods with advanced technology.
The hire does not change the Tigers’ partnership with U-M, but it will allow Giblin to focus on putting the Tigers’ new technology in place.
“She’s the person that will do the athlete monitoring system that helps us assess fatigue, workouts and end-game situations,” Avila said. “As far as the training for the staff, using force plates, wearable technology, all these technologies that we’re implementing into the system, she’s the one that will be doing the testing and the monitoring.”
After all of the training hours and race days have been logged it only makes sense to look at your season in review. A proper season review is the best way to identify your strengths and weaknesses and develop a comprehensive plan for the upcoming season. With the availability of powerful data, and dynamic tools to analyze that data, reviewing your season is easier than ever. However, it’s also critical to the review process to know what metrics to focus on to allow you to make informed decisions regarding your training. Having the right tools and know-how make for a successful season review and sets you up for success when it comes time to start training again.
Wearable, smart technologies are transforming the ability to monitor and improve health, but a decidedly low-tech commodity — the humble toilet — may have potential to outperform them all.
That’s the conclusion of a team of metabolism scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Morgridge Institute for Research, who are working to put the tremendous range of metabolic health information contained in urine to work for personalized medicine.
Urine contains a virtual liquid history of an individual’s nutritional habits, exercise, medication use, sleep patterns and other lifestyle choices. Urine also contains metabolic links to more than 600 human conditions, including some of the major killers such as cancer, diabetes and kidney disease.
The team has two essential questions. First, can frequent monitoring and testing of urine samples glean useful real-time information about an individual’s health? And second, can a technology platform be adapted to toilets that can make the collection process simple, accurate and affordable?
By electrically stimulating nerves, neuromodulation therapies can reduce epileptic seizures, soothe chronic pain, and treat depression and a host of other health conditions without the use of conventional drugs like opioids.
Now, University of Wisconsin–Madison biomedical engineers and their collaborators have made a significant advance that could dramatically reduce the cost of neuromodulation therapy, increase its reliability and make it much less invasive.
With a type of electrode that can be injected as a liquid and then cure in the body, the researchers have laid the groundwork for a new kind of neural interface system.
Blood test data were traditionally confined to the clinic for diagnostic purposes, but are now becoming more routinely used in many professional and elite high-performance settings as a physiological profiling and monitoring tool. A wealth of information based on robust research evidence can be gleaned from blood tests, including: the identification of iron, vitamin or energy deficiency; the identification of oxidative stress and inflammation; and the status of red blood cell populations. Serial blood test data can be used to monitor athletes and make inferences about the efficacy of training interventions, nutritional strategies or indeed the capacity to tolerate training load. Via a profiling and monitoring approach, blood biomarker measurement combined with contextual data has the potential to help athletes avoid injury and illness via adjustments to diet, training load and recovery strategies. Since wide inter-individual variability exists in many biomarkers, clinical population-based reference data can be of limited value in athletes, and statistical methods for longitudinal data are required to identify meaningful changes within an athlete. Data quality is often compromised by poor pre-analytic controls in sport settings. The biotechnology industry is rapidly evolving, providing new technologies and methods, some of which may be well suited to athlete applications in the future. This review provides current perspectives, limitations and recommendations for sports science and sports medicine practitioners using blood profiling and monitoring for nutrition and performance purposes. [full text]
In a first, scientists at the University of Chicago, in collaboration with researchers at Cornell University and Argonne National Laboratory, have discovered an easy, efficient way to grow extremely thin films of organic materials. The findings, published Nov. 7 in Science, could be a stepping-stone to future electronics or technologies with new abilities.
Scientists have known for a long time how to make extremely thin layers—down to a few atoms thick—out of inorganic materials. That’s how cell phones have shrunk in size and solar panels have sprung up on roofs around the world. But duplicating that manufacturing process with materials that are organic (in the chemical sense, that is, something containing carbon) has been tricky.
“If you can make materials into atomically thin layers, you can stack them into sequences and get new functions, and there are some great reasons to think organic films could be really useful,” said Yu Zhong, a postdoctoral researcher and co-first author on the paper. “But until now it’s been very challenging to control the thickness of the film, and to make them in large quantities.”
When the phone call comes, it’s all hands on deck in Melanie Ott’s lab. A patient with hepatitis C is going in for surgery to remove a liver tumor, and the research team must prepare to receive a sample of the liver cells.
With the patient’s permission, the cells are rushed across town (freezing them would ruin them) from the operating room to the lab. There, the researchers quickly yet carefully spread and suspend them within a nutritious gel. Then, they wait.
One week later, just evident to the naked eye, the “seed” cells—stem cells found in the patient’s liver—have multiplied, diversified, and grown into miniature versions of the organ. Each consisting of about 300 cells, and about as wide as a strand of hair, these mini-livers hold clues to the mechanisms of hepatitis C infection.
“Studying them is deepening our understanding of the virus and could open new paths to treatment,” said Senior Investigator Melanie Ott, MD, PhD.
This season has seen a handful of medical issues reach a breaking point between players and teams (notably Trent Williams and Kelechi Osemele). How can this be improved?
Researchers at an Army institute are more than halfway through a major study of what causes injuries in new recruits and what can be done about it.
Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine, or USARIEM, Research Physiologists Julie Hughes and Stephen Foulis recently spoke with Army Times about the effort, which has so far studied 2,291 recruits with a goal of tracking 4,000 recruits for two years from basic training forward.
Some early findings show that, on average, the overall body weight of recruits didn’t change dramatically during basic training. But both body fat and muscle mass did.
… “In this industry your name can go from hot to cold in a minute, and that stinks for a lot of people,” Cristobal said Tuesday in a phone interview shortly before the College Football Playoff selection committee ranked his Oregon team No. 6 this week. “It’s the best profession in the world, but in terms of the business side, it’s pretty brutal.”