Ryan O'Hanlon, No Grass in the Clouds newsletter from
Alphonso Davies is fast. How fast? Here’s what one of his old performance coaches told my buddy Noah Davis: “[He] could get up to 10.5 meters per second in game play. That’s 23.5 miles per hour. I still haven’t seen that in any other athletes. He could get to that speed at any point in the game.” As Noah wrote: “That speed of 23.5 mph puts Davies in the elitist of elite company, ahead of Paris Saint-Germain speedster Kylian Mbappe (22.4 mph), Manchester City’s Kyle Walker (21.9 mph) and Liverpool’s Mohamed Salah (21.8 mph).”
Davies is faster than, well, just about everyone. He’s so easily and effortlessly the fastest player on the field that it almost seems artificial. He destroys context. RB Leipzig’s Dani Olmo is 22 years old. This video will convince you that he’s already had multiple hip-replacement surgeries and should have retired from football five years ago:
Objective Massage is ubiquitous in elite sport and increasingly common at amateur level but the evidence base for this intervention has not been reviewed systematically. We therefore performed a systematic review and meta-analysis examining the effect of massage on measures of sporting performance and recovery.
Design and eligibility We searched PubMed, MEDLINE and Cochrane to identify randomised studies that tested the effect of manual massage on measures of sporting performance and/or recovery. We performed separate meta-analyses on the endpoints of; strength, jump, sprint, endurance, flexibility, fatigue and delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS).
Results We identified 29 eligible studies recruiting 1012 participants, representing the largest examination of the effects of massage. We found no evidence that massage improves measures of strength, jump, sprint, endurance or fatigue, but massage was associated with small but statistically significant improvements in flexibility and DOMS.
Conclusion Although our study finds no evidence that sports massage improves performance directly, it may somewhat improve flexibility and DOMS. Our findings help guide the coach and athlete about the benefits of massage and inform decisions about incorporating this into training and competition. [full text]
Reflecting on my hockey career, I always remembered the first few days of training camp. Those were intense times. I also recollect questioning my off-ice preparation during these times? Why did my legs feel so heavy? Did I not train hard enough? Time and time again, I didn’t feel I had my “hockey legs” underneath me. For someone who took so much pride in off-season preparation, why did I feel this way? It took me many years to formulate a working hypothesis. They say experience comes at the user’s expense, if only I knew then.
Bottom line (my current hypothesis), if you want to condition the body for sport, you need to perform the sporting task in the environment on which it’s played. There’s a reason Lance Armstrong finished 488th in the Boston Marathon. It wasn’t his VO2max (central adaptation), rather the peripheral capacities of his muscular system. This plays a critical role in sports performance.
… Mental fatigue, or exhaustion caused by a brain on overdrive, can have negative effects on our physical performance, research shows. A 2014 study found that prolonged mental stress increased the amount of perceived energy it took to work out, fatigue, and soreness for up to four days. Meaning: Not only will your run feel harder, but you’ll also feel slightly more taxed than usual afterward, too.
Another study, also from 2014, showed that runners who were mentally exhausted ran slower than if they were not. In a review of scientific research, the authors concluded that stress can have a negative effect on physical activity performance. The main consequence of mental stress on performance is the amount of perceived effort needed to complete the task, studies show.
… As stressful as your daily life has become, is it possible that there are hidden advantages to the many 180 turns you’ve had to make in order to adapt? Neuroscience research makes it clear that one of the keys to a healthy brain throughout life is to put it to use in solving novel situations. In a newly-published paper, Tel-Aviv University’s Noa Herz and colleagues (2020) note that “the mind is a dynamic construct that can change according to circumstances” (p. 184). Can this work in your favor?
To explain the ways in which the mind can accomplish these dynamic feats, the Israeli authors propose a global construct of “State of Mind (SoM),” or the “dispositions and tendencies, which together comprise our current state” (p. 184). Incorporating the realms of perception, attention, thought, and affect (mood), the SoM can range, in any given moment, from narrow to broad.
Tuskegee University’s Computer Science Department has been awarded a two-year grant entitled “”Indoor Moving Object Trajectory Generation and Query Evaluation” from the National Science Foundation to strengthen STEM undergraduate education and research at HBCUs.
Google AI Blog, Lucas Beyer and Alexander Kolesnikov from
In “Big Transfer (BiT): General Visual Representation Learning” we devise an approach for effective pre-training of general features using image datasets at a scale beyond the de-facto standard (ILSVRC-2012). In particular, we highlight the importance of appropriately choosing normalization layers and scaling the architecture capacity as the amount of pre-training data increases. Our approach exhibits unprecedented performance adapting to a wide range of new visual tasks, including the few-shot recognition setting and the recently introduced “real-world” ObjectNet benchmark. We are excited to share the best BiT models pre-trained on public datasets, along with code in TF2, Jax, and PyTorch. This will allow anyone to reach state-of-the-art performance on their task of interest, even with just a handful of labeled images per class.
Machine vision coupled with artificial intelligence (AI) has made great strides toward letting computers understand images. Thanks to deep learning, which processes information in a way analogous to the human brain, machine vision is doing everything from keeping self-driving cars on the right track to improving cancer diagnosis by examining biopsy slides or x-ray images. Now some researchers are going beyond what the human eye or a camera lens can see, using machine learning to watch what people are doing on the other side of a wall.
The technique relies on low-power radio frequency (RF) signals, which reflect off living tissue and metal but pass easily through wooden or plaster interior walls. AI can decipher those signals, not only to detect the presence of people, but also to see how they are moving, and even to predict the activity they are engaged in, from talking on a phone to brushing their teeth.
Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal, Mark Reilly from
Thousands of U.S. athletes training for events during and after the Covid-19 pandemic have to follow an extensive plan of health and safety precautions before they compete. The rulebook has its roots in Minneapolis.
The Wall Street Journal has a profile on Dr. Jonathan Finnoff, formerly the medical director for Mayo Clinic Sports Medicine Center in Minneapolis and a team physician for the Minnesota Timberwolves and Lynx, who earlier this year was named chief medical officer for the United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee.
Finnoff, who led the Minneapolis sports-medicine arm of Mayo since its debut in 2014, hadn’t expected his first order of business to be drafting a pandemic plan. But as worries grew of the spreading virus — which has already postponed the Tokyo Olympic Games scheduled for this summer — he assembled a team of infectious disease specialists and drafted two publications: One for athletes returning to training and another for organizers planning events in the Covid-19 era.
The governing body for athletics in Australia; Athletics Australia released its “Return to Athletics Guidelines” to be used by clubs and associations around the country.
The Guidelines set out in conjunction with the AIS Framework for Rebooting Australian Sport in a COVID-19 Environment have been formulated with the help of Athletics Australia’s member associations and with Sport Australia.
BJSM blog; Simon Kemp, Charlotte Cowie, Mark Gillet, Richard Higgins, Jerry Hill, Zafar Iqbal, Paul Jackson, Rod Jaques, Jo Larkin, Gemma Phillips, Nick Peirce, James Calder from
The SARS-CoV-2 virus (that causes COVID-19) first infected humans in December 2019. With 118,000 cases and 4000 deaths globally, the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared a global pandemic on March 11th 2020(1). On March 20th and 23rd 2020, faced with a rising number of both COVID-19 cases and deaths, the United Kingdom (UK) Government imposed a range of measures in an attempt to control the pandemic in the UK. These included clear instruction for the public to stay at home with a small number of defined exceptions, a policy on essential travel only, the closure of all gyms, exercise out of the home limited to once a day (with household members only) and to follow strict 2m social distancing (SD) restrictions in public places. These instructions effectively put all sport on hold, resulting in widespread training disruption to the elite athlete population.
With sports around the world shut down by the coronavirus pandemic, the World Anti-Doping Agency is looking to artificial intelligence as a new way to detect athletes who cheat.
WADA is funding four projects in Canada and Germany, looking at whether AI could spot signs of drug use which might elude even experienced human investigators. It’s also grappling with the ethical issues around the technology.
Athletes won’t be suspended solely on the word of a machine. Instead, AI is a tool to flag up suspect athletes and make sure they get tested.
Omar Chaudhuri, chief intelligence officer at 21st Club, reflects on how the transfer market will change and impact clubs of all sizes during and after the Covid-19 crisis
Questions about COVID-19 safety protocols are the most significant but not the sole health concerns that baseball will confront in a potential 2020 season.
As an orthopedist who regularly repairs shredded elbows and who serves as the head physician of the Yankees, Chris Ahmad spends much of his time concerned with the well-being of athletes, with a particular interest in pitchers. As someone whose entire family became infected with the coronavirus early in the spring and who, after recovering, assisted in the emergency room at Columbia University Medical Center to help treat victims, Ahmad is spending plenty of time thinking about the devastation of the pandemic.
Perhaps it was inevitable that he would identify potential overlap of those two concerns. Earlier this month, he wrote a blog entry exploring why the return to baseball from the shutdown could lead to “a surge in Tommy John injuries” with players moving too quickly to ramp up from zero to season-ready form, in the process putting too much stress on their arms and potentially leading to elbow injuries and surgeries.