It’s midafternoon, and Kyle Long has everything and nothing to do. He plays video games well into the night and wakes up whenever he wants. He went off-roading in the desert south of Las Vegas recently, unfettered by contract restrictions. He has lost 50 pounds.
Retiring from the NFL at 31, Long says, was a great decision. He has his whole life ahead of him.
“I feel like a phoenix rising from the ashes,” he says. “You don’t realize how bad Stockholm syndrome is until you get outside the building and can speak for yourself, feel for yourself and express emotions and actually have a voice. Nothing against the NFL, it’s just the nature of being a good soldier.
At the SheBelieves Cup three years ago, Rose Lavelle earned her first U.S. women’s national team cap. Her rise since and what she’s still capable of achieving have made her a must-see attraction, but it wasn’t always so simple.
… Robinson is a three-point specialist in every way. Right now, 88 percent of his field goal attempts come from three-point range. That’s the highest three-point rate in the history of the NBA, per Basketball-Reference. It is no coincidence that the Miami Heat players have four of the top-seven three-point rate seasons ever since Spoelstra became head coach.
In so many ways, Robinson and the Heat are a match made in heaven. Spoelstra runs Robinson off a variety of floppy sets, stagger screens, and pin downs to get him open and create space for everyone else. Robinson is a master at staying in constant motion and moving off the ball.
Aaron Judge had nothing but good intentions when he believed he could get beyond normal soreness in his right shoulder and chest this offseason. The Yankees, however, would have preferred that Judge keep their medical department apprised of the soreness.
“Sure, you always want guys to communicate exactly what they are doing,’’ manager Aaron Boone said Saturday. “But you also understand as an athlete you try to work through things and sometimes you don’t think something is that big of a deal. You are not going to run in every opportunity, especially when you are away from the club. Trying to create that environment where hopefully our guys almost overcommunicate as far as exactly what is going on.’’
… On April 6, 2019, McDavid flew through the neutral zone like he always does, drove hard to the net and was tripped by Calgary defenseman Mark Giordano before crashing into the post and knocking the net off its moorings. McDavid immediately grabbed his left leg and the arena went silent.
“It’s broken,” television cameras caught McDavid mouthing to his trainer.
The official diagnosis? A full tear to the posterior cruciate ligament (PCL). Tears in both the lateral and medial meniscus. The popliteus muscle was completely torn off the bone. The back of his knee joint lining was also torn. Plus, a bone bruise and crack in front of his tibia.
Reconstructive surgery would have been a 10-plus month rehab and required internal implements, such as screws and anchors, to increase stability in his knee. But McDavid decided against it and went through “one of the most advanced non-surgical rehabilitation programs ever attempted by a star player,” which was chronicled by Sportsnet in a 60-minute documentary titled, “Connor McDavid: Whatever It Takes.”
Not only did he make a full recovery, but McDavid was cleared to play in the season opener on Oct. 2 and scored the game-winning goal. He didn’t skip a beat and is better than ever.
… “Every single world record I have set hasn’t been a perfect race,” says US runner Camille Herron, who holds records over 80km (50 miles), 160km (100 miles), 12 hours and 24 hours. In the last of these, set at the end of 2019, she ran 270.116km at a pace of 5:20 per km. In preparation for these long distance races, athletes often don’t practice running anywhere near the time or for the distance that they will need to do on the race day.
But elite runners training for ultramarathons do run a lot. Ahead of Herron’s 24-hour world record, she ran around 1,000 miles in two months of training. To build up for the race she spent 15 weeks preparing – the first month of this was spent regaining fitness after a period of rest. Herron says the longest runs she will do as part of her training reach around 32-35km, as she doesn’t get much benefit from running longer. Overall, she runs around 160km to 190km per week.
Herron puts her success down to repeated speed workouts, which are scattered between runs that help build up overall mileage.
Just six years after starting his own search for answers following a forgettable freshman season on the mound at Skagit Valley College in Washington, and only two years after his college career ended, Rob Hill is doing all he can to maximize the production of established Dodger pitchers.
His speedy ascent from injured junior college pitcher to Driveline Baseball instructor to Dodgers pitching coordinator of technical development sounds just as unbelievable to him as it would to anyone else.
“It’s pretty cool,” Hill said, seconds before correcting his own understatement. “It’s freaking nuts, man. I’m 24.”
The skillsets needed to be an effective researcher or practitioner might be different, but they are related. Both require years of hard work to develop, all the while learning across similar topics in the field. As a result, it’s hard to develop both skillsets to the same level (2).
This can mean that both researchers and practitioners remain in their ‘silos’, and simply get on with ‘research’ or ‘practice’ (3).
Equally, they can find it difficult to communicate with either their research or practitioner counterpart. For instance, researchers work in clean, carefully manipulated conditions, and to much longer deadlines than practitioners, which can make it difficult to translate research into the fast-paced, real-life applied sport context (4). As Martin discussed previously, this barrier between researchers and practitioners is particularly likely to occur when individuals are ‘ego-oriented’ i.e. unwilling to talk to people outside their community, working to make themselves look strong and powerful and embracing only the science that confirms their existing beliefs (5).
Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology from
Traditionally, running biomechanics analyses have been conducted using 3D motion capture during treadmill or indoor overground running. However, most runners complete their runs outdoors. Since changes in running terrain have been shown to influence running gait mechanics, the purpose of this study was to use a machine learning approach to objectively determine relevant accelerometer-based features to discriminate between running patterns in different environments and determine the generalizability of observed differences in running patterns. Center of mass accelerations were recorded for recreational runners in treadmill-only (n = 28) and sidewalk-only (n = 25) environments, and an independent group (n = 16) ran in both treadmill and sidewalk environments. A feature selection algorithm was used to develop a training dataset from treadmill-only and sidewalk-only running. A binary support vector machine model was trained to classify treadmill and sidewalk running. Classification accuracy was determined using 10-fold cross-validation of the training dataset and an independent testing dataset from the runners that ran in both environments. Nine features related to the consistency and variability of center of mass accelerations were selected. Specifically, there was greater ratio of vertical acceleration during treadmill running and a greater ratio of anterior-posterior acceleration during sidewalk running in both the training and testing dataset. Step and stride regularity were significantly greater in the treadmill condition for the vertical axis in both the training and testing dataset, and in the medial-lateral axis for the testing dataset. During sidewalk running, there was significantly greater variability in the magnitude of the vertical and anterior-posterior accelerations for both datasets. The classification accuracy based on 10-fold cross-validation of the training dataset (M = 93.17%, SD = 2.43%) was greater than the classification accuracy of the independent testing dataset (M = 83.81%, SD = 3.39%). This approach could be utilized in future analyses to identify relevant differences in running patterns using wearable technology. [full text]
… a research team led by Marina Freitag, assistant professor at the Department of Chemistry, Uppsala University, has developed new indoor photovoltaic cells that can convert up to 34 per cent of visible light into electricity to power a wide range of IoT sensors. The team has designed novel dye-sensitised photovoltaic cells based on a copper-complex electrolyte, which makes them ideal for harvesting indoor light from fluorescent lamps and LEDs. The latest promising results establish dye-sensitised solar cells as leaders in power conversion efficiency for ambient lighting conditions, outperforming conventional silicon and solar cells made from exotic materials.
The research promises to revolutionise indoor digital sensing for smart greenhouses, offices, shelves, packages and many other smart everyday objects for the Internet of Things.
“Knowing the spectra of these light sources makes it possible to tune special dyes to absorb indoor light. While generating large amounts of energy, these indoor photovoltaics also maintain a high voltage under low light, which is important to power IoT devices,” says Freitag.
Gary Lewin is looking back at a balancing act of risk and reward that, in no small way, helped Arsenal to their greatest night of all. “Micky Thomas, 1989,” he says. “He’d come off injured against Wimbledon and had a fitness test the day before we went to Anfield. I remember telling George Graham: ‘He’s fit to start but I can’t guarantee he’ll finish; if he gets one block tackle on that ligament he’ll be in trouble.’ What do I know, he scores the winner in the 92nd minute. At the time you don’t really take it in but later on you sit back and think: ‘Wow, what a difference that makes.’”
Now Lewin is sitting alongside his cousin, Colin, in the smart surrounds of the clinic they have run since October in east London. They are the most recognisable physiotherapists in English football, primarily through the combined four decades spent at Arsenal but also through Gary’s spells with England and West Ham and it has taken some adjustment to depart the weekly cut and thrust that became a way of life.
Background It is widely accepted that athletes sustain sports injury if they train ‘too much, too soon’. However, not all athletes are built the same; some can tolerate more training than others. It is for this reason that prescribing the same training programme to all athletes to reduce injury risk is not optimal from a coaching perspective. Rather, athletes require individualised training plans. In acknowledgement of athlete diversity, it is therefore essential to ask the right causal research question in studies examining sports injury aetiology.
Purpose In this first part of a British Journal of Sports Medicine educational series, we present four different causal research questions related to the ‘too much, too soon’ theory and critically discuss their relevance to sports injury prevention.
Content If it is true that there is no ‘one size fits all’ training programme, then we need to consider by how much training can vary depending on individual athlete characteristics. To provide an evidence-base for subgroup-specific recommendations, a stronger emphasis on the following questions is needed: (1) How much training is ‘too much’ before athletes with different characteristics sustain sports-related injury? and (2) Does the risk of sports injury differ among athletes with a certain characteristic (eg, high experience) compared with athletes with other characteristics (eg, low experience) depending on how much training they perform?
Conclusion We recommend that sports injury researchers aiming to examine the ‘too much, too soon’ theory should carefully consider how they, assisted by coaches, athletes and clinicians, pose their causal research question. In the light of the limitations of population-based prevention that intends to provide all athletes with the same advice, we argue that a stronger emphasis on research questions targeting subgroups of athletes is needed. In doing so, researchers may assist athletes, clinicians and coaches to understand what training advice/programme works best, for whom and under what circumstances.
Fansided, Nylon Calculus blog, Todd Whitehead from
… In this post, I am taking a second look at optimizing lineup fit using the talent grades developed by Tim (@Tim_NBA) and Jacob (@JacobEGoldstein) at the Bball-Index. These grades use publicly-available stats to provide objective measures of skill that are designed to be independent of team-specific factors such as coaching, schemes, and teammates. For my analysis, I used six seasons of percentile ranks for the following talent grades: 3-point shooting, off-ball movement, playmaking, one-on-one, roll gravity, finishing, post play, offensive rebounding, defensive rebounding, total rebounding, perimeter defense, and interior defense. I linked these talent grades with six years of play-by-play data from PBPstats.com (70k lineups, 1.4M possessions) to find out which skills contribute most to offensive and defensive success.
Observable, MIT Visualization Group, Arvind Satyanarayan from
… With visualization grammars, we still specify how data values map to the properties of graphical marks, but we now have an additional set of operators to specify this mapping with more fine-grained control.
In this notebook, we will gain familiarity with one of the most widely used visualization grammars: D3.js.
Everyone loves a good idea. It’s even better when the idea becomes a tangible innovation, a better mousetrap that anyone can use and every mouse should fear. The awkward truth, however, is that even in a polished form, good ideas can be slow to spread.
Anaesthetic and antiseptic offer an instructive contrast. Both were developed in the mid-1800s. Anaesthetic spread faster than a hula-hooping craze. Atul Gawande explained in the New Yorker, “within seven years, virtually every hospital in America and Britain had adopted the new discovery”. Antiseptic, in contrast, took a generation to catch on.
“The puzzle is why,” noted Dr Gawande, before conceding that it is not a puzzle at all. Anaesthetic solves an immediate problem: a patient screaming and writhing in agony. Antiseptic is a defence against an invisible killer, infection, that acts only with a delay.