… One concern raised by many has been how fit players will be when tennis returns, but Serena Williams says that shouldn’t really be an excuse for anyone.
“Everyone has an opportunity to be more fit now, because we spent so much time at home to work on ourselves,” Williams said.
“Fitness wise, there is going to be a tonne of fitness, but match fitness is different to fit-fitness.”
… Williamson is about to learn what that process is like. The New Orleans Pelicans are out of playoff contention, something they pretty much knew was the case after a loss to San Antonio on Sunday afternoon — and something that became mathematically certain that night, when Portland beat Philadelphia.
“What I see is what everybody else on the planet sees: that he’s a hard-working, aggressive player,” San Antonio coach Gregg Popovich said of Williamson. “Competes at the highest level. Very explosive, very quick, very strong. He’s learning the game like any other young player, but very willing and quite a young prospect.”
With the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic happening across the United States and Canada, professional women’s hockey fans should not reasonably expect to see the sport return for some time. In all sports at this point, the health and safety of those involved and impacted should be the top priority. This is perhaps even more important when you’re reminded that NWHL players are not paid a living wage, and PWHPA players are not paid at all. However, even if they were getting paid hundreds, thousands or even millions of dollars like some professional men’s players are, sports aren’t – or shouldn’t be – the priority right now.
… It was an FC Dallas youth-squad practice session in 2018, and the coaches had designed a small-sided team game which used a tennis ball and had bizarre restrictions around how and when it could be passed and scored – You have to bounce it once with your left hand, then pass with your right, that kind of thing. While most of his teammates were bemused, Richards, who would soon sign for European giant Bayern Munich, came alive.
“Chris quickly figured out how to take advantage of the rules and was coaching his teammates how to win,” Chris Hayden, Dallas’ academy director, tells the Guardian. “His team won easily. A player has to be able to figure out something and take advantage of the situation. I think he has that in his DNA and it’ll really carry him well in his career.”
Though it isn’t a conventional medical addiction, for many people success has addictive properties. To a certain extent, I mean that literally—praise stimulates the neurotransmitter dopamine, which is implicated in all addictive behaviors. (This is basically how social media keeps people hooked: Users get a dopamine hit from the “likes” generated by a post, keeping them coming back again and again, hour after miserable hour.)
But success also resembles addiction in its effect on human relationships. People sacrifice their links with others for their true love, success. They travel for business on anniversaries; they miss Little League games and recitals while working long hours. Some forgo marriage for their careers—earning the appellation of being “married to their work”—even though a good relationship is more satisfying than any job.
Many scholars, such as the psychologist Barbara Killinger, have shown that people willingly sacrifice their own well-being through overwork to keep getting hits of success.
Individual behaviors impact physical and mental health. Everyday behaviors such as physical activity, diet, sleep, and tobacco use have been associated with a range of acute and chronic medical conditions. Educating, motivating, and promoting sustained healthy behaviors can be challenging for clinical providers attempting to manage their patients’ health. The ubiquity and integration of mobile and digital health devices (eg, wearable step counters, smartphone-based apps) allow for individuals to generate and record enormous amounts of patient-generated health data. Research studies have begun to reveal how mobile and digital devices offer promise in motivating individual behavior change but they have not had consistent results. In this viewpoint, we discuss the potential synergy of digital health modalities and behavioral strategies as an approach for clinicians to prescribe, motivate, monitor, and sustain healthy behaviors. We discuss the strengths, challenges, and opportunities for the future of promoting health behaviors.
… Now in August, MLS announced it would account for a total of 11,000 players in six age groups. The nonprofessional groups signed now number 78. That means MLS in only four months is better than halfway to the number of youth served after 13 years of the Development Academy.
With a mission more ambitious than the Development Academy, the latest plateau reached by organizers months into its life isn’t the last word, assures Fred Lipka, Vice President and Technical Director of MLS Player Development.
He said the August announcement covered the first wave of new club expansion. The league continues to seek clubs ready for year-round competition, player identification initiatives, coaching education, and premier player development.
… One element of that was having his staff examine video of last year’s fall camp to track the amount of contact there was for each position in a two-hour practice. Fuente examined the data with chief medical officer Mark Rogers and Goforth, associate director of athletics for sports medicine, to decide where to make changes.
“I was personally shocked at how low those numbers actually were,” Fuente said. “I think everybody thinks, me included, that football’s just played in a big pile, and it wasn’t like that. The numbers were, I thought they’d be a lot higher than they were.”
… But as Covid-19 catapults Headspace into a new stratosphere of popularity, experts say its scientific grounding is shakier than its subscription numbers might suggest.
“I think we’ve seen a lot of exciting pilot studies, and they should be commended for that,” said John Torous, the director of digital psychiatry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. “But I don’t think we’ve seen rigorous, high quality, reproducible research.”
Engineers at Tufts University have created a first-of-its-kind flexible electronic sensing patch that can be sewn into clothing to analyze your sweat for multiple markers. The patch could be used to to diagnose and monitor acute and chronic health conditions or to monitor health during athletic or workplace performance. The device, described today in the journal NPJ Flexible Electronics, consists of special sensing threads, flexible electronic components and wireless connectivity for real time data acquisition, storage and processing.
The Eurostars project XPatch is developing a flexible sensor system that can track biochemical information in real time. The international consortium is working on a new generation of diagnostic patches that monitor the sweat of high performance athletes for second-by-second medical information about their cardiovascular fitness. As part of the project, Fraunhofer IZM is working on the energy supply, communication, and system integration concepts for the flexible and autonomous fitness monitor.
Should you be drinking cold drinks when exercising in hot weather? Precision Hydration founder and Sports Scientist, Andy Blow, explains what effect the temperature of a drink can have on your performance in hot conditions…
Many of the things that significantly impact the outcome of football games have a great deal of variance when measured either year-over-year or versus an expectation.
When projecting how teams will do in 2020, it’s important to look back at 2019 and see which teams were particularly lucky or unlucky in these kinds of situations, as we should expect a team’s luck to be closer to the mean in 20
… Oscar Pareja and Giovanni Savarese are “hyphenated Americans” who arrived here in pursuit of their destiny from Colombia and Venezuela, respectively, and are building their own particular footballing legacies in their adopted land. “Papi” Pareja planted his flag at FC Dallas before moving onto Club Tijuana in Liga MX, while “Gio” is deeply associated with the MetroStars and Cosmos of his New York-area stomping grounds, then fluidly translated that passion to Soccer City USA.
“Soccer, if you treat it like it’s life and you have the same values as life, I think you build something strong,” Savarese told me in an extended sitdown two years ago. “You bring a good foundation and a good base, and I think at the end when you go back and you see these people again, you want them to remember you, not only for being a coach but to be a person that, at least you left them something. And they know that you also grew, because they were able to give you something.”
BABIP has been unusually low this season, but front offices and outside observers are struggling to understand why. So what’s making life difficult for hitters? Here are a few theories.