He’s got NFL genes. NFL skills. An NFL body. But no one—not even a star in this epic draft class of pass catchers—is immune to the upheaval of an epidemic. Pittman lost a relative, and his QBs are gone. His upside down world is everyone’s upside down world. His draft experience is every prospect’s experience.
In the lush green gardens of Eliud Kipchoge’s training retreat in the Kenyan highlands, the greatest distance runner of all time is describing the dusty beginnings to his sparkling career.
Growing up, running for Kipchoge was functional. Schoolchildren in Kenya often run long distances without thinking anything about it, and he would run to school and back every day, also repeating the journey at lunch.
“You don’t know you are running because it is a must,” says Kipchoge.
… With the 2020 draft coming up, and the deadline for underclassmen to declare right on the horizon, I felt like I wanted to try to pay it forward a bit by sharing some advice with those who are currently going through the decision-making process. And my very first tip has to do with that story I told above. It’s this: Rely heavily on the people you respect and trust most, and those who you know have your best interests in mind. Coach K was definitely one of those people for me. You need to find your inner circle and stick with those folks.
Beyond that, you have to think about your family’s economic situation, about whether your game would benefit from more college ball, and about the one thing everyone always mentions: the risk of injury. As for the rest of my thoughts and tips on the decision to leave school early, check them out below.
… “The target is to stay at home as much as possible and try to stay fit because we know the competition can start and we need to be ready,” Jota was quoted as saying by the BBC.
“When it starts, it’ll be like a pre-season for the players because when you don’t play it’s impossible to be as fit as you were. Anything can happen because it’ll be like a new season.”
Vancouver Canucks goalie Jacob Markstrom is using a tennis ball machine as part of his training to stay sharp.
Columbus Blue Jackets counterpart Joonas Korpisalo doesn’t have that technology at his disposal during the coronavirus pandemic, so a wall has had to do the trick.
Toronto’s Frederik Andersen is self-isolating with teammate and 47-goal man Auston Matthews.
“I have a pretty good shooter here,” Andersen said.
Fortune is one [thing], I think you need that luck with injuries and things like that. But I’ve always tried to do whatever I can to give myself the best opportunities, whether that’s looking at diet and gym work; I did that as early as Leeds and Newcastle, the gym stuff, and that’s developed as well. I just try to push myself. Earlier in my career, maybe five or six years ago, people were saying ‘You’re going to have to start toning down your work in training and reducing your numbers and output in training to keep that longevity’ and I didn’t really agree with that. I thought, obviously I’m going to drop off at some point in terms of physical output and things like that, but surely if I push myself more, the further distance I’ve got to fall. If I do drop off then I’ll be in amongst the pack as opposed to dropping from the middle pack downwards. That’s what I’ve always tried to do. I’ve always tried to push myself, always tried to keep the young lads in place in terms of running and stuff like that. I’m sure I’ll get reeled in at some point but I’m hoping that’s not for a few years yet.
… So what’s on his agenda? At the forefront, Vermes and the Sporting technical staff have played a leading role in developing return-to-play protocols that MLS clubs may use in the not-so-distant future. The progression, he describes, would follow something like this: individual workouts at team training facilities with entrance and exit procedures strictly monitored, followed by small group trainings of two to four players at a time, followed by the return to full-sided practice. Vermes also indicated that when MLS matches do resume, competition formats could be significantly altered and games could be televised without fans in attendance.
Another component on Vermes’ radar is the development of Major League Soccer’s new youth competition platform. MLS announced it would develop a new youth league for academy teams last week after U.S. Soccer shut down the Development Academy. Vermes believes the new platform will give the Sporting KC Academy an even better environment for player development moving forward. [audio, 52:49]
Sport enhancement specialist Tim Grover has trained some of the NBA’s biggest stars ever, including Kobe Bryant, Charles Barkley, Dwyane Wade and, of course, Michael Jordan. From reinforcing the fundamentals to creating the early morning workout ‘breakfast club,’ Tim explains how he helped Michael Jordan on his journey to greatness. [video, 23:04]
… plenty of previous studies have found that competition allows you to go faster, and we intuitively understand that the presence of competitors (and perhaps of a crowd) somehow allows us to push harder. But what does that really mean? Attempts to understand the psychology of endurance usually focus on the subjective sense of perceived exertion, which incorporates both physiological (breathing rate, lactate levels, etc.) and mental cues.
But take a look at the data on ratings of perceived exertion (RPE, on a scale of 6 to 20) during the two 10K races. For both the solo time trial (TT) and the head-to-head (HTH) race, RPE climbs in a more or less straight line approaching the maximum value at the finish
MIT researchers have developed a way to incorporate electronic sensors into stretchy fabrics, allowing them to create shirts or other garments that could be used to monitor vital signs such as temperature, respiration, and heart rate.
The sensor-embedded garments, which are machine washable, can be customized to fit close to the body of the person wearing them. The researchers envision that this type of sensing could be used for monitoring people who are ill, either at home or in the hospital, as well as athletes or astronauts.
“We can have any commercially available electronic parts or custom lab-made electronics embedded within the textiles that we wear every day, creating conformable garments,” says Canan Dagdeviren, the LG Electronics Career Development Assistant Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT. “These are customizable, so we can make garments for anyone who needs to have some physical data from their body like temperature, respiration rate, and so forth.”
Pirates director of sports medicine Todd Tomczyk typically traverses PNC Park and keep tabs on players himself. Maybe that means watching a rehabbing outfielder go through baserunning drills. Or a pitcher throw a side session. In the hours before games, home or away, Tomczyk never lacks for things to do.
These days, thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, Tomczyk’s life is quite different.
Tomczyk walks less. He’s become way too familiar with FaceTime, Zoom and Skype, though he does appreciate how they help personalize interactions with players. Even Instagram has offered updates, as Tomczyk explained Wednesday that he caught something Gregory Polanco posted recently where the right fielder was pulling bricks and throwing rocks.
… Skin is the largest organ of the human body. It conveys a lot of information, including temperature, pressure, pleasure and pain. Electronic skin (e-skin) mimics the properties of biological skin. Recently developed e-skins are capable of wirelessly monitoring physiological signals. They could play a crucial role in the next generation of robotics and medical devices.
My lab at Caltech is interested in studying human biology and monitoring human health by using advanced bioelectronic devices. The e-skin we have developed not only analyzes the chemical and molecular composition of human sweat, it’s fully powered by chemicals in sweat.
The Conversation, Carla Edwards and Jane Thornton from
“Telling an athlete to go outside and exercise [in order to feel better during COVID-19 isolation] isn’t really helpful for those struggling with mental illness.”
Those are the words of a prospective Olympian who has struggled with depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety. They highlight one of the challenges faced by athletes during this time of extreme, far-reaching disruption in training and daily routines.
The recommendation of daily outdoor physical activity included on most governments’ lists of essential reasons to leave home is a welcome one, given its proven benefits to promote good mental health. However, elite athletes — the ones you might assume would thrive most in a world (finally) valuing daily exercise as essential — may be suffering more than most.
In an attempt to help users reach their health goals and practitioners understand the relationship between diet and disease, researchers have proposed many wearable systems to automatically monitor food consumption. When a person consumes food, he/she brings the food close to their mouth, take a sip or bite and chew, and then swallow.Most diet monitoring approaches focus on one of these aspects of food intake, but this narrow reliance requires high precision and often fails in noisy and unconstrained situations common in a person’s daily life. In this paper, we introduce FitByte, a multi-modal sensing approach on a pair of eyeglasses that tracks all phases of food intake. FitByte contains a set of inertial and optical sensors that allow it to reliably detect food intake events in noisy environments. It also has an on-board camera that opportunistically captures visuals of the food as the user consumes it. We evaluated the system in two studies with decreasing environmental constraints with 23 participants. On average, FitByte achieved 89% F1-score in detecting eating and drinking episodes.
The NBA is a league of change. Recent roster turnover has been spurred by a number of factors, from an inflated salary cap and shorter, more exorbitant contracts, to restless owners, to star players progressively embracing their own power. Teams have been forced, at breakneck speed, to become comfortable with being uncomfortable.
Before the NBA went on hiatus due to the coronavirus pandemic, chaos was its new normal: compelling, delightful and anxiety-inducing. But the constant shuffle also sparked an existential question among hundreds of affected players, coaches and front office executives: How can chemistry be fostered in an increasingly erratic era of impatience, load management, reduced practice time and youthful inexperience?
“Every year you have six new teammates,” Houston Rockets guard Austin Rivers said in an interview with SB Nation. “It’s like gaw-lly! In some ways you wish that would stop.