… Amid a pandemic in which NBA practice facilities, arenas and local gyms have all been shut down, even the elite of the elite haven’t had access to that luxury. The NBA’s reigning Most Valuable Player, Giannis Antetokounmpo, hasn’t shot a basketball in nearly two months. Stephen Curry, a two-time MVP himself, was forced to build an outdoor hoop with his bare hands. But an actual in-house gym, safe from the elements and the outside world? Beyond rare. At best, an NBA roster might feature one or two veteran players equipped with a home gym.
Now, Jarrett is one of them — if only temporarily. After being stuck in his downtown Minneapolis apartment by himself for just two days following the NBA’s March 11 shutdown, Jarrett couldn’t take it anymore. He decided to rent a house on AirBnB — most importantly, one with an indoor basketball court. Do they even have those, he wondered. Jarrett called up his agent Chris Emens and Minnesota Timberwolves VP of basketball operations Gersson Rosas to put in his request.
“I was going crazy the first two days without shooting a basketball,” Culver said. “I was just bugging everybody, like, ‘I want to have a basketball court. I need to have a basketball court. I need to shoot.’”
… “Vlatko has a unique and dynamic philosophy of how he would like the team to play. He has identified our strengths and is tweaking his philosophy to get the best out of our team. I like that he states that no two games are the same and we need to adapt to the day.
“It is also the first time that we have had a coach in all my years on the national team that takes a big interest in improving us as individuals. Vlatko has brought a rich learning environment to our team. It really is very different to the past.”
… “I think we all have questions to answer as coaches. The big thing is oftentimes there’s things that are being said where there’s no validity to them, they’re being painted by people that have never even been around you,” Thibodeau said when asked by Max Kellerman about the criticism that his players are fatigued in the playoffs. “And then I would say to all those people, the facts are what the facts are. To look into the facts, to do your research, to look into the numbers and to also talk to former players, the guys who have played for me. I think if you did that, you would find what the truth is. There are certain things that I do believe in. But as we all know, our league is always changing. It never stays the same and it never has, nor will it ever. So you have to keep adapting as time goes on.
“But I think the same things do win, from building your team with a fundamental base to what it will take to be successful in the playoffs. The thing that I’m most proud of: in Chicago we had the best record in the league two years in a row, we had Derrick Rose, who was the youngest MVP of the league. That team had a great chance to win a championship. And unfortunately Derrick got hurt. But if Derrick didn’t get hurt, I felt we would have been champions. The thing I was most proud of: when he did get hurt the team fought and continued to win and found a way to get in the playoffs.
We have a temptation to want to skip to the ‘cool, sexy’ stuff. It’s boring to do endless easy runs or to spend hours working on the starting position in the sprints. But the ‘boring’ work serves as our foundation. We need to have a firm understanding of the basics before we move on to the next step. And once we have moved on, we need to continually go back to the basics to make sure that they are ingrained. In my pet theory of connection, the key to cementing and understanding is connecting ideas. If we can’t connect a concept or training stimulus to anything, then its impact is negligible.
The demands of field based team sports are typically characterised by a relatively large volume of running at varying speeds. We tend to see anywhere from 10% all the way up to 30% of the total running distance occur at high and very high speeds.
Naturally, there are going to be some factors that play a significant role in determining your athletes high speed running outputs. Both sport and playing position will have the largest impact followed by a whole host of other factors such as tactics, opposition running patterns and weather conditions to name a few.
With all of this in mind, lets explore why high speed running in both training and competition is important and why we need to be adequately exposing our athletes to running at high speeds to mitigate injury risk.
We are joined by Aidy Boothroyd (England U21 Head Coach), James Ryder (England U21 Performance Analyst), Laura Seth (Performance Analysis Education Lead) and Stuart Delaney (FA Youth Coach Developer) as they discuss the importance of the relationship between coach and analyst. They consider:
• Creating the right environment for people
• Planning and game preparation processes
• Matchday and review processes
England Women are teaming up with a sports research and nutrition service designed to “truly understand the female athlete” and enhance performance.
The service, launched in March by Science in Sport, will embed an expert in the team’s performance staff. It is run from a department at Liverpool John Moores University, whose partners include cycling’s Team Ineos, sailing’s Ineos Team UK and the British Olympic gold medal swimmer Adam Peaty.
“A lot of the sports science current state of knowledge has all been based on males and a lot of practitioners over the years have used a kind of a copy and paste approach,” said James Morton, a professor of exercise metabolism at the university, who is heading the service.
Penn researchers have developed an different model for how the brain interprets patterns from complex networks. Published in Nature Communications, this new model shows that the ability to detect patterns stems in part from the brain’s goal to represent things in the simplest way possible. Their model depicts the brain as constantly balancing accuracy with simplicity when making decisions. The work was conducted by physics Ph.D. student Christopher Lynn, neuroscience Ph.D. student Ari Kahn, and professor Danielle Bassett.
This new model is built upon the idea that people make mistakes while trying to make sense of patterns, and these errors are essential to get a glimpse of the bigger picture. “If you look at a pointillist painting up close, you can correctly identify every dot. If you step back 20 feet, the details get fuzzy, but you’ll gain a better sense of the overall structure,” says Lynn.
A woman walking down the street hears a bang. Several moments later she discovers her boyfriend, who had been walking ahead of her, has been shot. A month later, the woman checks into the emergency room. The noises made by garbage trucks, she says, are causing panic attacks. Her brain had formed a deep, lasting connection between loud sounds and the devastating sight she witnessed.
This story, relayed by clinical psychiatrist and co-author of a new study Mohsin Ahmed, MD, PhD, is a powerful example of the brain’s powerful ability to remember and connect events separated in time. And now, in that new study in mice published today in Neuron, scientists at Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute have shed light on how the brain can form such enduring links.
The scientists uncovered a surprising mechanism by which the hippocampus, a brain region critical for memory, builds bridges across time: by firing off bursts of activity that seem random, but in fact make up a complex pattern that, over time, help the brain learn associations.
… smart mouthguards that can detect head injuries could help athletes who receive concussions on the pitch get more precise care in the moment, preventing more severe issues down the line.
A team of engineers and neurosurgeons at Cleveland Clinic spinoff Prevent Biometrics have developed the Prevent Impact Monitor Mouthguard (IMM), which can detect potential concussion-causing impacts in real time. The mouthguard measures the distance, angle and force of any blows to the head and lights up to signal when brain damage may have occurred during impact. The data is made available via Bluetooth on the Prevent Team mobile and web app for future review, and sideline personnel are able to see the results for all connected players on their teams in real time.
BMC Sports Science, Medicine and Rehabilitation journal from
Background
The Single leg squat (SLS) is a movement screening test widely used in clinical settings. The SLS is highly subjective in its nature. Objective measures, such as 3D-motion analyses, are seldom used in daily clinical work. An interactive, Kinect-based 3D-movement analysis system, the Qinematic™, is proposed to be easily used in clinical settings to assess the SLS. The aim of this study was to establish the test-retest reliability and construct validity of Qinematic™ for assessing the SLS. A further aim was to identify angles of medial knee displacement, to summarise the discriminative ability of the SLS measured by Qinematic™. Methods
We performed a test-retest reliability study (n = 37) of the SLS using Qinematic™ and a construct validity study, in which Qinematic™ data were compared with visual assessment of video-recorded SLS. Results
Three variables (left knee down, right knee up and down) reached “substantial reliability” (ICC = 0.64–0.69). One variable, “left knee up”, showed a significant difference between the two test occasions (T1–6.34°, T2 0.66°, p = 0.013, ICC = 0.50), and “poor absolute reliability” was seen for all variables (SEM = 9.04–10.66, SDC = 25.06–29.55). A moderate agreement between the visual assessment and Qinematic™ data for various knee angles was shown (Kappa = 0.45–0.58). The best discriminative ability of the SLS was found at a knee angle of 6° (AUC = 0.82, sensitivity = 0.86, specificity = 0.78, PPV = 0.58, NPV = 0.94). Conclusions
Qinematic™ shows a poor absolute reliability, and a substantial relative reliability, in measuring a SLS at the way down. This indicates that Qinematic™ should not be recommended for the use on an individual level, but it can possibly be used on a group level. The merged results of the construct validity study indicate that Qinematic™ at 6° of medial displacement can identify subjects with a knee over foot position. In summary, the use of the Qinematic™ net trajectory angle, which estimates the “line of best fit” cannot be recommended to assess a knee medial to foot position and should be reconsidered. [full text]
Although the Big Ten just announced the creation of its Mental Health and Wellness Cabinet, Ohio State’s sport psychology department has been working to reach student-athletes at the university since its department doubled in August.
The sport psychology department has used its increased staff to expand its services to more student-athletes. Jamey Houle, Ohio State lead sport psychologist, leads a group that he said is working to increase its visibility in order to reach and help as many student-athletes as possible.
“It’s really evolved for us to become highly integrated into the holistic treatment of the athletes, and we’ve been really happy with that as we’ve evolved throughout the year,” Houle said.
High quality sports injury research can facilitate sports injury prevention and treatment. There is scope to improve how our field applies best practice methods—methods matter (greatly!). The 1st METHODS MATTER Meeting, held in January 2019 in Copenhagen, Denmark, was the forum for an international group of researchers with expertise in research methods to discuss sports injury methods. We discussed important epidemiological and statistical topics within the field of sports injury research. With this opinion document, we provide the main take-home messages that emerged from the meeting. [full text]
A lot is often made of the fact that Liverpool’s Virgil van Dijk does not make many tackles. The Dutchman averages almost exactly one a game, less than every other central defender at England’s “Big 6” clubs bar one. Paolo Maldini famously said “If I have to make a tackle then I have already made a mistake,” yet – at least in England -it seems almost sacrilege to not talk about tackles when rating defensive players. Apart from a goal, the biggest cheer from Old Trafford to the Sunday parks occurs when someone puts in a crunching tackle; this display of aggression and bravery must surely be more common in better players?
We recently published a paper in the International Journal of Sports Medicine (Raymond-Pope et al., 2020) on body composition measures in over 200 NCAA Division I collegiate male and female basketball players. There is a wealth of information in the article and I encourage you to read it. This blog post is a companion to another post that I wrote examining the body composition in NCAA Division I male basketball players from that article (Raymond-Pope et al., 2020). For this blog post, I am going to focus on the female basketball players’ data from that article.
Female basketball players were placed into one of five major positions: point guard, shooting guard, small forward, power forward, and center. In total 122 NCAA Division I female basketball players were classified as point guards (n=34), shooting guards (n=27), small forwards (n=18), power forwards (n=27), and centers (n=16). These basketball players had their body composition determined by dual X-ray absorptiometry (DXA), which is considered the “gold standard” for measuring body composition due to its accuracy as well as its ability to measure regional as well as total body composition.