Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott was not expecting his warm-up routine to become a meme.
After all, he has done the same warm-up for the past two years, but less than three weeks ago it became a viral sensation, so much so the Cowboys’ online store is selling T-shirts, “How to Dak in 4 Steps.” After running back Ezekiel Elliott turned it into a touchdown celebration against the Detroit Lions, the team asked fans to send in videos of them doing the “Dak Dance” for the chance to win a jersey signed by Prescott and Elliott.
… “My dad and my brother, all those guys, they felt like scoring would get you where you need to be,” Williams said. “And my whole thought process is, like, there’s guys who are paid a lot of money to score who are way more talented than me at scoring the ball, at the time especially. So I was like, I need to be able to do all the little things first before I can expand my game and be the guy that’s a dominant scorer.”
Williams’ philosophy, he said, has always been about making the right play. He wants to do whatever he can to help the “team culture” and “create a winning environment.” He wants to foster the kind of energy on the court that you can only feel when all five players are engaged, enjoying themselves and playing as if their hair is on fire. His family preached selflessness in life, even if they didn’t always agree with the way he embodied it on the court, where he believes it is contagious.
… What are some of the ways you train for your sport apart from actually skating?
In the past, maybe up to four years ago, in skateboarding it was looked down upon to train, because it was a street sport; just skate how you want, don’t work out. I always liked boxing, and so as I became more of a fan, I would train with a little bit of boxingOpens in a new Window.. Sometimes I would go out on runs, but those hurt my knees. Skating is a very leg-oriented sport, so you need to be careful about that. I like to do small workouts, like 20 minutes on the stationary bike, 15 minutes of leg lifts, pushups, situps, squats, stuff like that to keep my body strong. The thing that helps the most is stretching; honestly yoga is the best thing you can do if you skate. I started doing yoga, I’d say nine years ago. I did it heavily for a while and it helped a lot. I’ve gotten away from it, but yoga and hot yoga really are great for skaters.
NFL teams are going to try and find the next Lamar Jackson after seeing the quarterback’s immense success this season. What a compliment it is to Lamar that they’re not going to be able to.
… The team’s dazzling forward, Brazil-born Catarina Macario, is proving to not only be the best collegiate player in the country, again, but a generational talent.
But there’s one problem for Brazil.
“They’ve known since about 2013 that my heart belongs to the U.S.,” Macario said. “This is the country I want to represent. They’ve been understanding about that.
“They do contact me every so often. They ask, ‘Have you changed your mind?’ But they’ve been pretty respectful.”
… Male dominance in football can be traced back to 1921, when the Football Association (FA) excluded women from participating in organised competitive football, after it had declared them “unsuitable” for the game.
This wasn’t always the case – football matches between women’s factory teams during WWI regularly attracted crowds in the tens of thousands. But after the FA ban come into effect, women’s exclusion from football lasted five decades. One author argued this exclusion was part of the FA’s deliberate attempt to restrict women to traditional notions of femininity, and recover the masculine image of football which had been lost during World War I.
When the FA rescinded the ban in 1971, women’s football was seen as lesser than men’s football. Female players repeatedly experienced gender discrimination and stereotyping. The president of FIFA was even accused of being sexist in 2004, after urging women to wear skimpier football kits to increase the popularity of women’s football.
It’s been two months since the Apple Watch Series 5 came out, and the watch has been on my right wrist every one of those days. Swim, bike, run…and plenty more. You may remember my initial thoughts on it back in September after the first few days worth of workouts. Did things get better? And is it actually a better watch than Series 4 for sport and fitness? Back in September, the answer was a definite no. But with a pile of updates later, I kept on using it hoping that future firmware upgrades would resolve the issues I saw.
… from fitness trackers to smart watches, devices designed to help us live happier, healthier lives still rely on data that is biased towards men. And it’s not a new issue.
Treadmills, for example, often use calorie counters skewed towards men’s weight, while fitness trackers can be wildly inaccurate because a woman’s resting heart beat changes throughout her menstrual cycle. No recognition of this may push women to over-exert themselves in an attempt to correct it.
This bad data can give women a warped view of reality: technology is trying to tell them how they are performing but the results are wildly inaccurate because it assumes they are men.
It was the day after elite runner Mary Cain bravely shared her riveting story of the unhealthy pressures and emotional abuse she experienced while training under Alberto Salazar at the Nike Oregon Project, that I saw a female teenage runner and her mother in my clinic for knee pain. With genuine curiosity, the teenager asked me about the piece. What followed was a healthy discussion on the importance of recognizing the early signs and symptoms of the female athlete triad1 and relative energy deficiency in sport (RED-S)2 to prevent the physical and emotional repercussions that Cain and many other runners experience. As a sports medicine physician who regularly treats female runners, many of whom are battling with amenorrhea secondary to disordered eating and/or overtraining, I am inspired by the outpour of supportive responses to Mary’s battle cry and all of the personal accounts from elite runners that have emerged.
It’s quite evident that this toxic running culture needs a rebuild, but what is the exact role of the medical professional in this process? And how can we prevent similar occurrences for the generations to come?
First, we need to acknowledge the magnitude of the problem.
Tyrese Haliburton doesn’t jump out of the gym nor do his stats jump off the page, but the Iowa State sophomore might be college basketball’s best-kept secret
… In a recent interview for The Rick Eisen Show, Mark Cuban was talking about load management and why teams use this method now more than they did in past years. Cuban is a firm believer that load management is a good thing and that there is a misconception around it and how most people don’t understand the necessity behind it.
“These are professionals that make a living with their bodies. Science has changed over the years, and we are now a lot smarter about the impact of a 48-minute game. We can track fatigue, and we can see the impact not just on their bodies but in their performance. When we limit the guy’s minutes, we get more out of them. And not only that, but hopefully for the Mavs back to the playoffs, we tend to balance it out, so our load management isn’t just reduction of minutes.”
SB Nation, Stanley Cup of Chowder blog, Chris Fevens from
Hockey is a tough sport. This is not news to the players who’ve donned the black and gold over the past decade or the fan base that follows this team.
The current Boston Bruins are already beaten up, much like Bruins teams have been over the past two years. Add that to the fact that the core of the 2019-20 Bruins has seen a lot of hockey over the past 10 years or so, with a lot of that hockey taking place in grueling playoff runs, and it makes you wonder how long this team can continue playing at such a high level.
Taking all of this into account, and with the recent injury woes to Patrice Bergeron, David Krejci and Torey Krug, should the Bruins emulate the NBA and employ a load management strategy for their top players this season?
The New England Patriots’ Stephon Gilmore is widely considered one of the best cornerbacks in the NFL. Through Week 11, he had given up a 47.1 passer rating when targeted this year — to put that into perspective, a 39.6 passer rating is awarded to a quarterback who spikes the ball on every play. (Through Week 11, no qualifying starting QB in 2019 had a passer rating lower than 70.) Because of his prowess, offensive coordinators and QBs don’t even look his way: Of the 326 passing attempts against the Patriots this year, only 64 (19.6 percent) came against Gilmore.
When it comes to measuring this aspect of defensive performance, we’re only beginning to scratch the surface. That’s because individual defense is inherently difficult to assess: A player’s defensive impact may be more significant in the absence of activity, but we can only count things that do happen. To measure a defensive player, we’re always chasing ghosts, trying to count things that don’t.
But thanks to the NFL’s Next Gen Stats tracking data — and the impressive work of researchers such as Baltimore Ravens personnel analyst Sarah Mallepalle1 — we can visualize that absence of activity.
When it comes to the use of data analytics in football, there are few better case-studies than Dutch outfit AZ Alkmaar. AZ have embraced data and objectivity as part of their club culture, including in player development. This seems to be giving them a strong competitive edge; currently second in the Eredivisie, they have been showcasing some of the most promising young talents in the Netherlands this season: Calvin Stengs, Myron Boadu, Owen Wijndal and Teun Koopmeiners, to name but a few.