A small group of players, including Nationals slugger Ryan Zimmerman and Rockies outfielder Ian Desmond, have announced they plan to sit out this season. The Minnesota Twins have shuffled their on-field staff to protect the health of some of their older coaches.
As the sport lurches toward a late July start during the coronavirus crisis, roster flexibility and organizational depth will be key.
Zimmerman, who told The Associated Press last week he still was deciding whether to play this year, ultimately said having three young children, including a newborn, and a mother at higher risk because of multiple sclerosis factored into his decision.
“Given the unusual nature of the season, this is the best decision for me and my family,” Zimmerman said.
Tom Brady has been an earnest and largely reliable role model for two decades, and yet this week he has been setting a dreadful example for the millions who admire him. As the coronavirus pandemic rages across the nation, and through his adopted state of Florida, Brady has defied the recommendation of the NFL Players Association’s medical director and worked out with some of his Tampa Bay Buccaneers teammates.
Last weekend, Dr. Thom Mayer wrote: “Please be advised that it is our consensus medical opinion that in light of the increase in COVID-19 cases in certain states that no players should be engaged in practicing together in private workouts. Our goal is to have all players and your families as healthy as possible in the coming months.
Given an extra 3 1/2 months for their brittle stars to heal, the New York Yankees will closely monitor the conditioning of Aaron Judge, James Paxton, Aaron Hicks and Giancarlo Stanton ahead of a season unlike any other.
“We want these players to withstand a 60-game sprint over a 66-day schedule,” Yankees general manager Brian Cashman said Tuesday on the eve of the first arrivals for “spring” training 2.0, already dubbed summer camp in Major League Baseball’s marketing deal.
The best football manager on the planet right now is an uncompromising visionary who has rebuilt a club according to his own immovable ideas. Jürgen Klopp is fuelled by rivalry, revels in conflict and wields a drill sergeant’s discipline. Like all great managers, he is driven by the need to overcome his enemies. He may not be nice, he may not be popular, but he is a born winner.
Except, as you might have noticed, none of that is true. Well, almost none of it. Klopp is the best coach on the planet. But he is about as far from a drill sergeant as you can get. He has no enemies, no desire for strife and rarely gives an interview that doesn’t feature a manic belly laugh. His squad’s togetherness does not come from a confected siege mentality, but from a culture of cheerful, buoyant unity. In a sport beset by blinkered tribalism, he is almost universally well-liked.
For every player with the potential of Cristiano Ronaldo or Lionel Messi, how many reach it? On the current global model we have right now, Ronaldo and Messi are 2 in over 1 billion males between 18-38.
Of that 1 billion plus sample size, how many could have reached the levels that Ronaldo and Messi hit? Is it improbable that out there right now, walking amongst us, is somebody who could have challenged their 10+ year almost absolute duopoly over football’s individual honours?
If those 1 billion males in the current playing range, and in particular, those theoretical undiscovered world-beaters, were located in Germany, England or the talent hotbed of Brazil, they’d stand more of a chance of being noticed. They would be picked up from the reputable concrete cages littered across British cities, or scouted on the beaches of Copacabana by football staff who know where to look.
But what if that undiscovered gem was in the vast urban districts of Mumbai, or living their days in the isolation of Nauru? How would they be discovered, nurtured and improved?
New research on the two-dimensional (2D) material graphene has allowed researchers to create smart adaptive clothing which can lower the body temperature of the wearer in hot climates.
A team of scientists from The University of Manchester’s National Graphene Institute have created a prototype garment to demonstrate dynamic thermal radiation control within a piece of clothing by utilising the remarkable thermal properties and flexibility of graphene. The development also opens the door to new applications such as, interactive infrared displays and covert infrared communication on textiles.
A Stanford-led team has invented a way to store data by sliding atomically thin layers of metal over one another, an approach that could pack more data into less space than silicon chips, while also using less energy.
The research, led by Aaron Lindenberg, associate professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford and at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, would be a significant upgrade from the type of nonvolatile memory storage that today’s computers accomplish with silicon-based technologies like flash chips.
In this episode, Abate interviews Erin Bishop from Sense Photonics about the technology in their “Solid State” LiDAR sensors that allows them to detect objects more accurately and over a larger field of view than traditional scanning LiDAR. Erin dives into the technical details of Solid State Lidar, discusses the applications and industries of the technology.
Erin operates at the intersection of product management, project engineering, customer development, and product-market fit within 3D camera company Sense Photonics. [audio, 43:22]
Kiowa County Press (Eads, CO), Tamara Hew-Butler and Phillip D. Levy from
Along with the revival of professional sports comes the yearning for a return to amateur sports – high school, college and club. Governing officials are now offering guidance as to when and how to resume play.
However, lost in the current conversation is how schools and club sports with limited resources can safely reopen. As an exercise scientist who studies athlete health and an emergency medicine physician who leads Michigan’s COVID-19 mobile testing unit, we wish to empower athletes, coaches and parents by sharing information related to the risks of returning to play without COVID-19 testing. This includes blood tests to see if athletes have already had COVID-19 plus nasal swabs to test for the active SARS-CoV-2 virus.
Regular COVID-19 testing on all athletes may seem like overkill, but the current tally of 150 collegiate athletes, mostly football players, who have tested positive for COVID-19 grows longer by the day.
Fast Company, Tamara Hew-Butler and Phillip D. Levy from
… However, lost in the current conversation is how schools and club sports with limited resources can safely reopen. As an exercise scientist who studies athlete health and an emergency medicine physician who leads Michigan’s COVID-19 mobile testing unit, we wish to empower athletes, coaches, and parents by sharing information related to the risks of returning to play without COVID-19 testing. This includes blood tests to see if athletes have already had COVID-19 plus nasal swabs to test for the active SARS-CoV-2 virus.
Regular COVID-19 testing on all athletes may seem like overkill, but the current tally of 150 collegiate athletes, mostly football players, who have tested positive for COVID-19 grows longer by the day.
In sports, particularly contact sports, it’s critical to remove asymptomatic athletes–or those who do not show symptoms–before they infect others. This did not happen in South Korea, where one asymptomatic fitness instructor spread the virus to 112 people across 12 facilities, over 124 miles, and within 14 days. All this happened following a single vigorous four-hour dance session. The scariest point of this story is that these fitness instructors were spreading the virus before showing any symptoms.
The Aspen Institute, Project Play, Jon Solomon from
Jayme Murphy played football at the University of Iowa. He also got a master’s degree in public health while studying epidemiology. These days, he charts COVID-19 trends as the director of insights and business analytics at the National Sports Center in Minnesota, where he helps guide the state government’s process that determine when certain sports can resume for kids.
Murphy loves football. But ask him how youth and high school football can responsibly return during a pandemic and he struggles to answer.
“I don’t know how you do it,” Murphy said. “You can’t play the game without close, physical contact. I think of all the pile situations after tackles. It’s not just the tackling and the contact. You want to avoid close-contact breathing, which is every play. This would be a great year to figure out flag at lower levels with skill development.”
Objectives
To investigate the relationship between dietary intake, meal timing and sleep in elite male Australian Football players. Design
Prospective Cohort Study. Methods
Sleep and dietary intake were assessed in 36 elite male Australian Football League (AFL) players for 10 consecutive days in pre-season. Sleep was examined using wrist activity monitors and sleep diaries. Dietary intake was analysed using the smartphone application MealLogger and FoodWorks. Generalised linear mixed models examined the associations between diet [total daily and evening (>6 pm) energy, protein, carbohydrate, sugar and fat intake] and sleep [total sleep time (TST), sleep efficiency (SE), wake after sleep onset (WASO) and sleep onset latency (SOL)]. Results
Total daily energy intake (MJ) was associated with a longer WASO [β = 3, 95%CI: 0.2-5; p = 0.03] and SOL [β = 5, 95%CI:1-9; p = 0.01]. Total daily protein intake (g·kg -1) was associated with longer WASO [β = 4, 95%CI:0.8-7; p = 0.01] and reduced SE [β = -0.7 CI:-1.3- -0.2; P = 0.006], while evening protein intake (g·kg -1) was associated with shortened SOL [β = -2, 95%CI:-4 to -0.4), p = 0.02]. Evening sugar intake (g·kg -1) was associated with shorter TST [β = -5, 95%CI:-10 to -0.6; p = 0.03] and WASO [β = -1, 95%CI:-2 to -0.3; p = 0.005]. A longer period between the evening meal consumption and bedtime was associated with a shorter TST [β = -8, 95%CI:-16 to -0.3; p = 0.04]. Conclusions
Evening dietary factors, including sugar and protein intake, had the greatest association with sleep in elite male AFL players. Future research manipulating these dietary variables to determine cause and effect relationships, could guide dietary recommendations to improve sleep in athletes.
Protein is an important component of a healthy diet and appears to be integral to enhancing training adaptations in exercising individuals. The purpose of this narrative review is to provide an evidence-based assessment of the current literature examining increases in dietary protein intake above the recommended dietary allowance (RDA: 0.8 g/kg/d) in conjunction with chronic exercise on body composition (i.e., muscle, fat and bone). We also highlight acute and chronic pre-sleep protein studies as well as the influence of exercise timing on body composition. Overall, a high-protein diet appears to increase muscle accretion and fat loss and may have beneficial effects on bone when combined with exercise. Pre-sleep protein is a viable strategy to help achieve total daily protein goals. Importantly, there appears to be no deleterious effects from a high-protein diet on muscle, fat or bone in exercising individuals. [full text]
The esteemed Anfield boot room belongs to another era but was still in existence when Liverpool won the league on 28 April 1990. In Ronnie Moran and Roy Evans, Kenny Dalglish’s assistants, it also housed members of the brains trust assembled by Bill Shankly. It would be another three years before the wrecking ball demolished rich tradition for the sake of a bigger press room.
Repeated conquests of English and European football were plotted in that confined space where Bob Paisley, Joe Fagan, Reuben Bennett and Tom Saunders, as well as Moran and later Evans, sat on baskets surrounded by rows of boots and posters of topless pin-ups. The latter would be obscured by an open cupboard door or a strategically placed jacket when a photographer was allowed access to the inner sanctum. Sometimes they forgot.
It was also the place where opponents were coerced into unwittingly divulging tactical secrets or information on a transfer target over a few post-match whiskies.