Sergio Aguero has revealed that ditching barbecues and Argentine steak is the key behind his consistent goalscoring form after the Manchester City star detailed how his old diet lead to dizzy spells on the pitch.
The 31-year-old has been a terror to many Premier League defences since arriving at the Etihad Stadium in 2011, scoring 254 goals in 368 games for the Citizens.
However, the Argentine has revealed how his diet did not agree with his body, with regular barbecues and steaks leading to the striker putting on weight and suffering dizzy bouts during games.
… It’s a lot to absorb, but Soroka’s got help on the other end of the phone. “Wow, that was a real, real, real, playoff game,” he says. “Everything before that just feels fake. Doesn’t mean anything. Doesn’t match up.”
The 22-year-old is speaking to retired big-league pitcher Chris Reitsma, a guiding light since Soroka’s days of youth ball and throughout his professional career. After big moments, Reitsma, 42, is often the first person Soroka turns to, and it’s easy to understand why — the two share similar paths, perspectives and even musical taste. A pair of six-foot-five right-handers from Calgary who were both first-round picks, their relationship seems almost fated. It’s also played a crucial role in Soroka’s development, helping to shape him into one of the best young starters in baseball and someone with the potential to be one of the greatest pitchers this country has ever produced.
… Malone made sure to emphasize that the team has stayed in touch regularly throughout the past month or so. As Zoom calls have become prevalent across the U.S. workforce, the same can be said for the Nuggets, as the team even had a team-wide call Tuesday morning that included all 16 players, the coaching staff and members of the front office.
Additionally, Malone revealed that the team has an app that allows the strength and conditioning staff to send players workouts. The app also tracks which players have viewed and completed the workouts, which has been helpful for players who don’t have access to personal gyms or training equipment.
“You have to get creative,” Malone said. “Felipe Eichenberger and his staff have done a great job of engaging our players on a daily basis. Some guys have gotten Peloton bikes to have some sort of conditioning in case you can’t get outside. Then some players are going out and running, hiking, etc.”
Millwall Head of Performance Laurence Bloom went from monitoring his players every day to suddenly having minimal contact with them because of lockdown.
At first, he used the mass market Strava app for remote monitoring, setting basic aerobic interval sessions, but soon realised its limitations.
“Strava was straightforward to set up, but in terms of the type and reliability of data we were able to collect it was limited,” said Bloom, who has been with Millwall since June 2016.
“It gave us an indication of whether a player had done the session we’d asked, but a lot of the metrics we would normally collect – like high speed running distance, top speeds, number of sprints, number of high-speed accelerations and decelerations – weren’t available.
When Jesse Smith looks out at his Zoom audience, he knows exactly what the crowd is going through.
The captain of the U.S. men’s water polo team is adjusting his training, too. He also misses playing alongside his friends.
One way Smith is dealing with the coronavirus pandemic is through virtual speaking engagements with water polo clubs and teams all over the country, passing along what he has learned during a couple decades in the water.
The 37-year-old Smith is one of several Olympic athletes who have been using digital avenues to help their sport during the shutdown. While Zoom sessions are a frequent choice, some athletes are offering training tips on Instagram and Olympic federations are pitching in with newsletters and other web-based help.
… “It’s eye-opening,” says Toronto Blue Jays pitching coach Pete Walker. “Everybody from all walks of life are figuring that out. My kids are online studying right now, and maybe there won’t be any more snow days in the future, they can always get their work done. From our standpoint, it’s the Zoom calls, the way we can correspond, especially during the off-season, all sorts of text chains, group chains, things we’ve used in the past but not to this extreme.
“It has been really valuable as far as getting information out and seeing guys face to face, as opposed to a call or text. I envision that changing and being a bigger part of our organization moving forward. The off-season is approached a little bit differently … watching guys work out, watching guys throw, something I’m sure we’ll co-ordinate and be a part of our program. … It has been impressive, the way we’ve stayed together and connected and communicated.”
Advances in rapid prototyping platforms have made physiological sensing accessible to a wide audience. However, off-the-shelf electrodes commonly used for capturing biosignals are typically thick, non-conformal and do not support customization. We present PhysioSkin, a rapid, do-it-yourself prototyping method for fabricating custom multi-modal physiological sensors, using commercial materials and a commodity desktop inkjet printer. It realizes ultrathin skin-conformal patches (~1μm) and interactive textiles that capture sEMG, EDA and ECG signals. It further supports fabricating devices with custom levels of thickness and stretchability. We present detailed fabrication explorations on multiple substrate materials, functional inks and skin adhesive materials. Informed from the literature, we also provide design recommendations for each of the modalities. Evaluation results show that the sensor patches achieve a high signal-to-noise ratio. Example applications demonstrate the functionality and versatility of our approach for prototyping a next generation of physiological devices that intimately couple with the human body.
North Carolina State University, NC State News from
Engineering researchers have created ultrathin, stretchable electronic material that is gas permeable, allowing the material to “breathe.” The material was designed specifically for use in biomedical or wearable technologies, since the gas permeability allows sweat and volatile organic compounds to evaporate away from the skin, making it more comfortable for users – especially for long-term wear.
“The gas permeability is the big advance over earlier stretchable electronics,” says Yong Zhu, co-corresponding author of a paper on the work and a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at North Carolina State University. “But the method we used for creating the material is also important because it’s a simple process that would be easy to scale up.”
Specifically, the researchers used a technique called the breath figure method to create a stretchable polymer film featuring an even distribution of holes. The film is coated by dipping it in a solution that contains silver nanowires. The researchers then heat-press the material to seal the nanowires in place.
AJC.com, Atlanta Journal Constitution, Ken Segiura from
… Across all of Tech’s 17 varsity sports, Tech has about 40 or 50 athletes who are rehabilitating injuries, according to sports-medicine director Carla Gilson. There are many more, though, whom the sports-medicine staff monitors as they heal from smaller aches or pains or get treatment to maintain their health.
Among the solutions is Fusionetics, a sports-medicine platform (the company is based in Milton) through which trainers can assess movement, create a maintenance program and share videos of prescribed exercises for the athletes, among other tools.
Ashley McLendon, who works primarily with the track and field teams, gives her athletes a week’s worth of exercises to perform. For the ones they’re not familiar with, she demonstrates it in a video and includes photos and bullet points. She makes sure to assure that she’s only a phone call away to offer explanations or critiques or show a diagram.
… the aim of the scouting department is always the same.
To find the best possible players for their team within their available budget.
It sounds simple, but structuring a department to do this as cost-effectively as possible can be a real challenge.
A good starting point would be to look at a traditional club set up and see how we could get most of the value of an advanced setup for relatively little money.
We are big believers in the Pareto principle; 20% of the spend gets you 80% of the value.
It’s nearly two years since the StatsBomb site was relaunched in its current form, and I’ve been writing about the Premier League here for most of that time. With no football until God knows when, now is the best time to take stock and look at what we’ve learnt over the past couple of seasons.
Expected Goals catch up to you… eventually
It’s May 2018 and Manchester United are flying high-ish. A second place finish with 81 points is comfortably the best they’ve done in the post-Sir Alex Ferguson era, even if Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City look a long way off. The usual rumblings with Jose Mourinho are going on in the background, but with the right signings there’s no reason why this positive trajectory can’t continue, right?
… “It’s going to present different challenges, probably,” said Scott Pleis, Detroit’s director of amateur scouting. “It’s just going to be different. It’s not going to affect the outcome, it’ll just be a different way of coming to that outcome.”
The NFL experienced that last week because of the coronavirus pandemic, conducting a remote draft with video screens, Zoom chats and other tech innovations that made the event popular with fans.
Normally, the college baseball season would be in full swing right now, giving major league teams a chance to monitor top prospects in the weeks leading up to the draft. But with college and high school games shelved because of the virus outbreak, front offices can only do so much in what is clearly an abnormal year.
… The circumstances surrounding a 2020 NHL draft and the COVID-19 pandemic, however, aren’t anything resembling normal.
The culmination of junior seasons were cancelled, tournaments were nixed and the league’s annual combine — a crucial exercise where teenage hopefuls are put through physical exercises and mental hula hoops — was postponed and looks unlikely to go ahead.
There’s talk the NHL could hold its draft online in the first part of next month even though the 2019-20 season has yet to be completed. But that’s far from the only unique aspect for teams poised to make franchise-altering decisions in this unprecedented era of social distancing.
In short, the book on many of the youngsters in question won’t be fully written.
… Families of top prospects being courted by agents are asking questions about potentially skipping the season if it’s delayed. One industry source summed up the conversation this way: “They may save college football by playing in the spring, but it may be played without the stars.”
To be clear, no stars have publicly indicated their preference on the different hypothetical scenarios for the season. But the conversations happening behind the scenes make it apparent that a delayed season could mean an option for top players to sign with agents, work out privately and spend the year getting ready for the draft.
Publicly, most officials across college athletics are mustering up smiles on their faces and hoping that students will be back in school. That could mean the football schedule will play out as planned and the billion-dollar machine of college football will be back to business. But the reality is that there are all kinds of plans and contingencies being discussed, including worries about the reverberations of an alternate schedule.