The NFL’s chief medical officer called Carson Wentz “heroic” for reporting his concussion during Philadelphia’s playoff loss and disputed the notion the league’s system failed the Eagles quarterback.
“I think what Carson Wentz did is heroic and should be highlighted as an example of how an unbelievably skilled and competitive athlete understands the seriousness of concussion injury and is willing to honestly report it and receive the care that he needs independent of his desire and drive to continue to participate in the game,” Dr. Allen Sills told The Associated Press on Thursday.
… There’s nothing too exotic about what Ronaldo puts inside his body, but the consistency of his nutrition paired with excellent sleep habits and intelligent training has kept him among the world’s best soccer players despite the fact he’s nearly 35 years old.
“It’s the basics, it’s not secrets. You have to take care of yourself,” Ronaldo told YouTuber ChrisMD in a 2019 video.
Olympic gold medalist Natasha Hastings shares her journey of being a pregnant athlete and what she’s learned throughout the process. [video, pre-roll + 3:16]
… Growing up in Arlington, Massachusetts, Connaughton figured he’d have to separate himself from the pack when it came to basketball by doing things that would make people remember his name.
“To be able to [dunk] and to be able to catch people off guard and to be able to make people shocked at how high I could jump was something I always took pride in,” he said.
To Connaughton, who was selected in the fourth round of the 2014 MLB draft by the Baltimore Orioles, dunking would prove two things: one, hard work (and natural athleticism) pays off; and two, there would be fewer questions about his place in the sport.
Elite athletes participate in multiple competitions and are exposed to important training load. There is a need to match the recovery process against such a number of competitions and important training load, with the aim of preventing overtraining and injury. Several recovery strategies exist. Some strategies such as hydration, diet, cold water immersion and sleep are effective in their ability to counteract the fatigue mechanisms. Elite athletes regularly display compromised sleep quantity and quality with sleep quality being most vulnerable prior to major competitive events, during periods of high-intensity training and following long-haul travel to competitions. Compromised sleep quantity and/or quality may be detrimental to the outcome of the recovery process after training and competition. Future studies should focus on the interest of sleep hygiene strategies to optimise recovery, performance and preventing injury.
U.S. Air Force, Air Force Materiel Command Public Affairs from
… Airmen who are current on their fitness assessments may attempt up to three diagnostic assessments, or “mock tests,” during the time period ranging from 45 days before their official assessment month and up to 15 days before their assessment due date. They may elect to take a diagnostic test for certain components, such as pushups or situps, or they may choose to complete the entire test during the mock assessment.
If an Airman completes the full test during a diagnostic session, they may elect to have the assessment count as their official requirement documented in the Air Force Fitness Management System. Once an assessment is recorded, the Airman may not take another diagnostic test until 45 days before the start of their next testing cycle.
“The practice tests aim to both motivate Airmen to maintain a year-round exercise and fitness program while reducing the stress many face during testing,” said Lt. Col. Rachel Marazita.
It is incredibly difficult for players to speak out due to the power dynamics of the pro game. I’ve seen it in the international game as well. Without other coaches, management, and former players speaking against this kind of hire the change needed to end abuse won’t happen.
What makes a good coach? With no agreed upon definition of a “qualified coach,” this is a question often ignored! Julie McCleery, PhD, of the Center for Leadership in Athletics at the University of Washington, joins us to talk about how the often toxic culture in sports could be transformed through better, more holistically-minded training for coaches. With Opal: Food+Body Wisdom’s Exercise+Sport Director Kara Bazzi, LMFT, CEDS, and host and therapist Carter Umhau, LMHC, Julie discusses how allegations of abuse in the professional sports sphere reflect our need for a more robust understanding and care of the athlete as a whole person. Julie will offer context around her training model of “Ambitious Coaching” and how coaches can approach youth sports differently to create positive change starting in athletes’ younger years. [audio, 35:31]
In a review published in Sports Medicine (2018), researchers set out to define how manipulating key parameters of endurance training can influence the functionality of muscles and the respiratory system, thus giving us insight into how our bodies adapt to training.
… Endurance has gotten a bad reputation among sprint coaches, but it is necessary. Note that this is an anaerobic endurance, so it doesn’t mean slogging through a zillion gassers. The idea here is to decrease the rate at which their max v declines.
Our favorite workout for speed endurance is a fly 20 workout I stole from Chris Korfist. We run 10 fly 20s in 15 minutes. We only time the fly 20 zone. Then we take the total time and multiply by 1.05 to come up with a predicted 200 time.
International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance from
The gap between sport science and field practice has been the subject of considerable debate. While there are numerous examples describing how poorly research often applies to the field, there are numerous success stories from which lessons can be learned. As an employee at Olympiatoppen (the Norwegian Olympic Sport Center) in the time period 1994–2019, I was continuously involved in discussions around the importance of research for sport performance. At the beginning of this century, most elite athletes and coaches at Olympiatoppen were not interested in sport science, based on the arguments that academic institutions addressed research questions of limited relevance to the elite sport community and the large majority of scientific studies were performed on young and/or untrained athletes/students. However, we were also challenged by research groups with convincing arguments based on results from short-term training interventions on more or less untrained populations, without having the ability to provide strong scientific evidence for our best practice approach. This dilemma created confusion among athletes and coaches. One notable example was that endurance athletes were strongly recommended to solely focus on high-intensity intervals, whereas low-intensity training was considered a waste of time. This was followed by a marked performance decline in many endurance sports after the 2002 Olympics, particularly for Norwegian cross-country skiing. It was not until Stephen Seiler and his associates published a series of articles related to intensity and duration distribution in endurance athletes that the polarized training concept was “reborn.” This concept detailed that 80% to 90% of the total training duration should be performed at low intensity, whereas 10% to 20% should be performed at higher intensity zones. At the same time, this knowledge was implemented when Norwegian cross-country skiing clarified its training philosophy, based on a mix of science and best practice, together with researchers Espen Tønnessen and Øyvind Sandbakk. This period of reflection was followed by a long-term success for Norwegian winter endurance sport. The take-home messages from this story are that (1) caution should be used when sport scientists with limited practical experience provide “groundbreaking” training prescriptions for elite athletes and (2) the likelihood for success increases when training implementation is founded on an interaction between best practice and science.
Within SuperBetter, a mobile game designed to improve the player’s mental health, each user’s journey begins with a simple question: What’s your challenge?
Instead of vanquishing a dragon or thwarting an evil wizard, the options range from anxiety to chronic pain to a desire to eat healthier.
What follows will be familiar to anyone who has ever played a video game, and that’s by design. The company uses the framework of role-playing games, combining quests, power-ups and villains to motivate users to change their real-life habits.
USA Triathlon today announced a three-year partnership with Amp Human, an industry-leading biotechnology company dedicated to helping athletes reach their maximum potential. Amp Human will support members of the U.S. National Team and Toyota U.S. Paratriathlon National Team, as well as age-group athletes, through its flagship product, PR Lotion. In addition, Amp Human will serve as the presenting sponsor of the National Challenge Competition, a virtual challenge for USA Triathlon clubs.
Education of athletes, coaches and the entire triathlon community will be a meaningful component of the partnership. PR Lotion is the world’s first and only bicarbonate sports lotion that allows bicarbonate — a natural electrolyte with more than 40 years of research supporting its performance and recovery benefits — to be absorbed through the skin. For triathletes, this means the ability to maximize training efforts, aid in recovery between training sessions and sustain high output in competition.
Andy Burnham, Mayor for Greater Manchester, made a fact-finding tour of facilities that are pioneering graphene innovation at The University of Manchester.
The Mayor toured the Graphene Engineering Innovation Centre (GEIC) which is an industry-facing facility specialising in the rapid development and scale up of graphene and other 2D materials applications.
As well as state-of-the art labs and equipment, the Mayor was also shown examples of commercialisation – including the world’s first-ever sports shoes to use graphene which has been produced by specialist sports footwear company inov-8 who are based in the North.
Data collection and analysis in elite sport can amount to “ubiquitous surveillance” and result in feelings of anxiety, precariousness and performance fatigue among participants, new research by two academics from Bath University has shown.
Dr Andrew Manley and Dr Shaun Williams investigated the “implications surrounding a comprehensive and intensive mode of organisational surveillance” and “the consequences of deploying data-driven systems of performance management” in elite sport.
Sensome, the company pioneering the connected medical device revolution with the world’s smallest biological tissue sensor, announced today the successful completion of a 9 million dollar financing round from its historical investors (Kurma Partners, Idinvest Partners, BNP Paribas Développement, Paris-Saclay Seed Fund) joined by Asahi Intecc Co., Ltd. from Japan, a world leader in guidewire technology. The funds raised will serve to test the clinical performance of Sensome’s first product Clotild®, a proprietary connected guidewire, and get it ready for market. Sensome and Asahi also agreed to a two-year development plan to design a new connected guidewire for the treatment of ischemic stroke, combining Sensome’s proprietary micro-sensor and Asahi’s CHIKAI guidewire.
… Virtual reality, though, doesn’t constitute the full extent of Clemson’s use of technology. The program recently unveiled its Applied Science Lab that includes Sparta Science’s injury prevention technology. Sparta Science is one of the most successful startups to enter the injury prevention space. The company has raised $9.7 million in funding and worked with the NBA’s Cleveland Cavaliers and MLB’s Colorado Rockies on injury prevention efforts. Sparta has also worked with the 49ers and the Detroit Lions and began working with the Steelers in 2018. Clemson installed the system before the last season and has been looking for ways to use the technology to analyze players with a force-plate system that records 3,000 data points per second. The recorded information is processed to create a Movement Signature.
In the near future, you might squeeze in a sweat session while picking up some milk.
Your local gym will be tucked inside the local market, perhaps just a few feet away from the produce section. There you’ll don a lightweight VR headset and pedal your way through a virtual exotic world as trackers count your every moment. When you’re done, your phone will ping you to book a massage—it’ll know exactly which muscles are aching.
It’s not that far off: Today’s health-club sector offers the utmost in convenience and personalization, in part due to AI-enabled technology. And with consumers taking a far bigger interest in health and wellness, clubs are growing faster and more innovative than ever: Gyms experienced a 50% increase in revenue in the past decade, reports the Global Wellness Institute.
… ASICS’s debut at CES was primarily focused on showcasing how the company’s sneakers can help runners be more efficient with the help of technology. First up, ASICS decided to humble whatever pride in my running form I had by showing me everything I was doing wrong. To do that, they had me run in a normal pair of shoes and then again in a pair of its Glideride sneakers. The Glideride has a special sole that’s designed to reduce how much your ankle flexes during a run. According to ASICS, the more your ankle flexes, the less efficient you are at running. The less efficient you are, the more energy you waste and the faster you tire out on long-distance runs.
Non-contact anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries are a major problem among adolescent female soccer and handball players. Therefore, the aim of this study was to examine if known biomechanical and neuromuscular ACL injury risk factors obtained from single-planar jump-landings and multi-planar side-jumps can resemble the demands of side-cutting maneuvers, a known high-risk ACL injury movement for this population. Methods
Twenty-four female soccer and handball players (mean ± SD: age: 17 ± 1 year; height: 172 ± 66 cm; mass: 67 ± 9 kg) performed a series of functional tasks including two single-planar jump-landings, two multi-planar side-jumps and a sports-specific side-cutting maneuver on their dominant leg. Frontal and sagittal plane knee and hip joint kinematics and kinetics were calculated from three-dimensional motion analysis, whereas hamstring and quadriceps muscle pre-activity levels were measured with surface electromyography. Results
The sports-specific side-cut was distinguished by more knee flexion at initial contact, greater abduction angles and external knee abduction moments, higher biceps femoris and semitendinosus muscle pre-activity levels than both the single-planar jump-landings and multi-planar side-jumps (p < .05). Whilst, poor-to-strong spearman rank correlation coefficients inconsistently were found for the biomechanical and neuromuscular ACL injury risk factors explored between the side-cut and the single-planar jump-landings (rs = 0.01–0.78) and multi-planar side-jumps (rs = 0.03–0.88) respectively.
Conclusion
Single-planar jump-landings and multi-planar side-jumps should be used with caution to test for non-contact ACL injury risk factors in adolescent female soccer and handball players, because they do not mimic the biomechanical nor neuromuscular demands of the most frequent injury situation.
Lower Extremity Review Magazine, Nicole Wetsman from
While innovations in running shoes have helped everyone from top athletes to casual joggers push the boundaries of speed, efforts to determine the characteristics of shoes that will help reduce injury risks are more elusive. In his lab at San Jose State University, JJ Hannigan, PhD, ATC, CSCS, is working to understand the way different levels of cushioning affect gait and running mechanics—which might hint at how they affect injuries.
In a recently published study in the Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport, Hannigan found few differences between the ground reaction forces in runners’ using maximal, traditional, and minimal running shoes (see Figure 1). However, runners wearing maximal shoes had increased eversion, which might signal increased injury risk.
This new study builds on two prior investigations of maximal running shoes. “The first was a simple study, with two visits,” Hannigan said. “We had participants run in a maximal shoe, which they had never run in before, and then run in a regular shoe.” Fifteen female runners participated in that study, which showed that maximal shoes gave runners higher impact forces than regular shoes—which was surprising, he said, as he had hypothesized that extra cushioning would decrease impact forces.
Lamine Diack, the former president of the governing body of world athletics, offered a deal to delay doping sanctions against 23 Russian athletes in exchange for $1.5m in funding to help a friend win the 2012 Senegalese presidential election, French investigators are due to claim in court on Monday.
If you have a child or a grandchild playing a contact sport in America — 1.3 million are playing football — you’ll want to pay close attention. Alcohol and concussions have been quietly on a collision course for years.
Alcohol interferes with adolescent brain development, particularly with the growth of brain “white matter” known as myelin. Myelin forms an insulating sheath around the brain’s synapse network, insulating the circuitry and enabling the conduction speed of each motor prompt or cognitive thought to accelerate by a factor of up to 10 times. Some believe it also performs a spacing and cushioning role, protecting the fragile axonal circuitry from any inadvertent jolting or cranial impacts.
It could be argued that myelin is nature’s own performance enhancer. When reaction time counts — when fast twitch muscles need to be engaged — alcohol should not be in the mix.
A new study has the secret ingredient to improve the safety of common breakfast foods.
Professor Michelle Colgrave, a researcher based at Edith Cowan University and CSIRO, is using revolutionary protein technology to detect “hidden” gluten and other proteins causing food allergies.
Most recently she has focused her investigations on food commonly found on the Australian breakfast menu including cereal, breakfast bars and drinks, powdered drinks and a popular savoury spread.
Influencer designed products will be one of the biggest trends in 2020 for sports nutrition and the market is ripe to capitalise on the trend, according to a market analyst.
… Christian Hilbe, a mathematician, directs a group at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, in Germany, where he studies the conditions under which people cooperate. His group builds predictive models inspired by social dilemmas like climate change, which involve cooperation dynamics too complex to model realistically. “We want to distill the essence or the logic of this problem, make it as simple as possible, and then understand this very simple model,” Hilbe told me in a recent interview. “We are all aware that by solving the simple model, we don’t solve the climate change problem. But still we want to understand some of the strategic calibrations taking place in the whole game.”
Nature. In his paper, “Social dilemmas among unequals,” Hilbe—along with his co-authors from the University of Exeter Business School, the Institute for Science and Technology Austria, and Harvard—found that, among other things, extreme inequality prevents players from cooperating to provision resources for public goods. “Our findings,” the researchers concluded, “have implications for policy-makers concerned with equity, efficiency and the provisioning of public goods.” In our conversation, Hilbe broke down the thinking behind his model and the consequences of his results.
There’s a trend in football which has been allowed to remain unchallenged for a long time. Or, at least, it’s one which nobody appears able to do anything about.
When wealthy men own or run football clubs, they’re easily seduced into believing that their skillset – which is typically financial, commercial or a combination of the two – actually equates to a working technical knowledge of the game. While bearing responsibility for a club’s day-to-day future naturally lends itself to acquiring unique experience, having that kind of oversight is quite different to possessing the expertise of a sporting or technical director.
… I, for one, am looking forward to it. Implicit in that news was another forthcoming change. MLB (in this case that means people within the commissioner’s office) expects teams to shift toward having coaches in the dugout calling the game instead of catchers behind the plate. The various trickle-down effects — making the backstop more of a filler role for another offensive powerhouse — are fascinating, both fun to predict and exciting in their exhaustive unpredictability. Baseball doesn’t change so much as evolve — developments in the wider world beget necessary reactions which beget adaptations or even exploitations and counterstrikes and codifications and overcorrections, and the whole process is constantly acting on all areas of the game in perpetuity.
In the spirit of all this and the new decade, here are a handful of (arbitrary and largely uninformed) predictions for baseball in the 2020s:
1. Robot umpires will arrive and … it won’t be that big a deal.
We often assess clubs’ efficiency by looking at how well they perform given their wage budget, or revenues. But most clubs are constrained at a more fundamental level by the league they are in. There is a strong relationship between a country’s GDP and its clubs’ revenues. The challenge then for smaller leagues is to grow their revenues beyond what can be expected given the economy they are based in. How can they attempt to rebalance the playing field?
… Multiple ownership-level sources told ESPN that dissatisfaction with the penalties had emerged following a conference call with Manfred, in which he explained how the Astros would be disciplined, then told teams to keep their thoughts to themselves.
“The impression,” one person familiar with the call told ESPN, “was that the penalty for complaining would be more than Houston got.”
The aim of the current study was to objectively identify position-specific key performance indicators in professional football that predict out-field players league status. The sample consisted of 966 out-field players who completed the full 90 minutes in a match during the 2008/09 or 2009/10 season in the Football League Championship. Players were assigned to one of three categories (0, 1 and 2) based on where they completed most of their match time in the following season, and then split based on five playing positions. 340 performance, biographical and esteem variables were analysed using a Stepwise Artificial Neural Network approach. The models correctly predicted between 72.7% and 100% of test cases (Mean prediction of models = 85.9%), the test error ranged from 1.0% to 9.8% (Mean test error of models = 6.3%). Variables related to passing, shooting, regaining possession and international appearances were key factors in the predictive models. This is highly significant as objective position-specific predictors of players league status have not previously been published. The method could be used to aid the identification and comparison of transfer targets as part of the due diligence process in professional football.