Earlier this week, 32-year-old Brewers righty Josh Lindblom spoke to me about the winding path of his career in MLB and the Korea Baseball Organization. Drafted by the Dodgers in the second round in 2008 out of Purdue, he spent parts of four seasons (2011-14) in the majors with four different teams before joining the KBO’s Lotte Giants, with whom he spent 2 1/2 seasons as a starter, interrupted only by a half-season stint in the Pirates’ organization. Returning to South Korea with the powerhouse Doosan Bears, and armed with a wider repertoire and some insights gained via analytics, he won the Choi Dong-won Award, as the circuit’s top pitcher, in both 2018 and ’19, and took home MVP honors in the latter season while helping the Bears win the Korean Series.
As she waits to find out whether there will be a 2020 NWSL season, Portland Thorns forward Christine Sinclair’s thoughts from day to day probably mirror those of many others when it comes to the prospects for reopening amid the coronavirus pandemic.
“I personally go through one day, I’m like, ‘Yeah, you can see progress is being made and somewhere down the line this is going to happen,’” Sinclair said Tuesday during a conference call with reporters. “And then the next day you’re like, ‘Who are we kidding?’ For me it just depends on the day. I think as a team and as a league, we’re just following the guidelines of experts and we’ll see where that takes us.”
… Larson and her U.S. teammates have longed dreamed of having the option to play professionally without having to leave the country. Last fall, 13 members of the women’s national team went to play in the Italian league, three headed to Japan, four went to the German Bundesliga and others spread out to France, Turkey, Switzerland, Russia, Brazil and China, where Larson played. In total, USA Volleyball processed a record 501 international transfer certificates (380 women and 121 men) allowing U.S. athletes to compete in overseas professional leagues in 2019-20.
Now, some of those women will have the opportunity to play professionally on home soil for the first time ever, in a structure that is unique to Athletes Unlimited.
Instead of being based in different cities, all four teams will play in one yet-to-be-announced city. There will be no owners or general managers. Furthermore, the teams will change each week. Players will earn points based on team wins and individual performances to establish a leaderboard, and the top four athletes in the standings each week will serve as team captains and be able to choose their own teams.
… Maximising performance involves monitoring and managing fatigue, but don’t forget the primary outcome is performance. This requires a change in thought pattern from “how do I minimise fatigue for competition” to “how can I maximise performance for competition”. Resistance exercise, which has been shown to be effective to elicit a priming response, is typically low in volume but high in intensity. This is similar to methods that induce the Type 6 HIIT response, which utilises the neuromuscular system without straining. This can be done through lifting heavy loads (15, 16), or lighter load in a ballistic manner (16-18).
Research has shown that priming exercise can enhance subsequent performance measures in as little as 2 hours and up to 48 hours following its completion.
Because of the performance-enhancing benefits of priming, practitioners have opportunities within this pre-competition period to prescribe an exercise stimulus that may enhance athletic performance. Figure 2 summarises the results from three different studies. The shaded area of each figure represents the times at which performance was measured in each study (15, 17, 18). However, the time course of performance response across this whole period is unknown. The two different lines in Figure 2 represent some possibilities concerning the time course of performance response.
The Pico Simón Bolívar is one of the highest mountains in Colombia. Near the top, there is only half as much oxygen as at sea level, a dizzying 5,500m (18,000 feet) below. The air up there makes it hard to walk and causes fatigue and headaches, so the body tries to adapt: breathing rate increases, the heart beats faster and blood vessels expand to get more oxygen to tissues.
As you might expect, giving someone an oxygen tank to breathe from will reverse these changes. They’ll quickly feel less tired and their head will stop pounding as their heart rate and breathing return to normal. What you wouldn’t expect is that you can achieve exactly the same thing if the oxygen tank is a fake – it’s empty.
Fabrizio Benedetti is the scientist behind these experiments. Based in Italy at the University of Turin, he has given people placebo oxygen on mountains in Colombia, Alaska and his laboratory in the Alps and observed the same thing –fake oxygen tanks can mimic the effects of the real thing.
… The researchers also assessed how much each person slept the night before, and how tired they felt at 2:00 P.M., 2:30 P.M., and 3:00 P.M. immediately before the nap opportunity. Their sleepiness was assessed on a nine-point scale called the Karolinska Sleepiness Scale. And on these measures, there were no differences between the groups. The athletes got just as much sleep as the non-athletes, and reported virtually identical levels of sleepiness. They weren’t excessively tired—they were just really good at falling asleep.
The researchers link this finding to a concept called “sleepability,” which was first proposed in the early 1990s. Falling asleep quickly and easily is a skill, and some people are better at it than others.
I delivered my first feedback as a manager in my second year in consulting at the ripe age of 23. Nervous, I sat down across from the slightly more junior consultant. “This isn’t going to be an easy conversation,” I began. “Your performance needs to improve.” It was then that the junior consultant began to cry.
This week, my professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business, Allison Kluger, invited Kim Scott, author of the NYT & WSJ bestseller Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss without Losing your Humanity to our Reputation Management class. Kim Scott’s book would have saved me from my feedback delivery disaster of 5 years ago. Luckily, it’s not too late for me to start using her approach.
… Some hormones — the molecules moving around our bloodstream to regulate different biological processes — ride our circadian rhythms mostly for the sake of making us sleepy. Others, however, rise and fall with those sleep-wake cycles even though they have different responsibilities, including regulating our immune systems.
For example, cortisol ebbs and flows on a day-and-night pattern. This hormone plays a role in reining in our immune systems and can dampen the boosted blood flow and pain associated with inflammation. Getting too little sleep can throw off the cortisol rhythm and keep high levels of the hormone going for longer.
In an opinion piece published in the journal Matter, members of the Fibers@MIT research group recently laid out a detailed vision for how the rapidly growing field of advanced fibers and fabrics could transform many aspects of our lives. For example, “smart clothing” might continuously monitor temperature, heart rate, and other vital signs, then analyze the data and give warnings of potential health conditions. Headed by Professor Yoel Fink, the group is developing fibers and fabrics with advanced computational properties. MIT News asked PhD student Gabriel Loke, who was the article’s lead author, along with Fink and six others, to elaborate on the team’s outlook.
A new generation of wearable devices could be powered by human sweat instead of conventional, environmentally-unfriendly batteries, scientists say.
In a new paper published today in the journal Advanced Materials, engineers from the Bendable Electronics and Sensing Technologies (BEST) group at the University of Glasgow describe how working up a sweat could be enough to generate power for exercise monitors and other electronic devices in the future.
Toward the end of a 20-minute telephone interview Saturday evening with America’s COVID-19 expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, I asked a question about testing, and about NFL teams playing football this fall.
“Suppose,” I asked, “you test a team of 53 players on a Saturday night and four are positive. Is there a level at which—”
Fauci, the director of the National Institutes for Health since 1984, interrupted. “You got a problem there,” he said. “You know why? Because it is likely that if four of them are positive and they’ve been hanging around together, that the other ones that are negative are really positive. So I mean, if you have one outlier [only one player testing positive], I think you might get away. But once you wind up having a situation where it looks like it’s spread within a team, you got a real problem. You gotta shut it down.”
Ready or not, America is gradually reopening. When and how community sports join in is a topic that will play out in the coming weeks and months. How to return will be shaped by what local and state authorities allow, what leading sport and public health bodies recommend, what liability risks exist, and what parents are willing to accept for their kids to play again. Project Play hosted a discussion with experts on return to play. [video, 1:04:47]
Finally, after weeks of claustrophobia and a weekend of confusion, some clarity. From Wednesday, tennis players and golfers in England will be able to lubricate rusty swings and overly tight hips again. Basketball players will be able to dunk and shoot from downtown. And all outdoor sports facilities will be allowed to open, with the sole exception of open-air swimming pools.
People will even be able to exercise with someone outside their households – a sweet blessing for personal trainers, coaches, and those driven up fingerprint-stained walls by their families. The only catch? Social distancing guidelines will still have to be rigorously followed. So no doubles matches or fourballs, yet.
However, sharing sports equipment – such as tennis rackets and balls – is now permitted according to Sport England providing people “enforce strong hygiene measures”, such as using antibacterial spray and washing hands thoroughly before and afterwards.
The Premier League is asking clubs to share their performance data in order to ensure they do not gain a competitive advantage from new Project Restart protocols.
A ‘shareholder meeting’ of the 20 Premier League will take place via Zoom tomorrow, with discussions continuing over the resumption of the season. The Project Restart working group sent proposals regarding training and matches to the clubs yesterday (Saturday May 9th).
These included sending training performance data, including GPS, to the Premier League, club sources have told TGG. There has been concern among some that rivals might gain a competitive advantage by stretching the protocols, which will include training in small groups of only five players with three members of staff present.