Alphonso Davies might not have enjoyed his 8 a.m. soccer practice runs as a youth alongside the North Saskatchewan River in his hometown of Edmonton, Canada. But today, one of the fastest players in European club football can look back at those memories a bit more fondly.
“It helped me a lot having to run for a while,” Davies said.
From running up and down stairs and hills in Alberta as a preteen to hoisting trophies with one of the most prominent football clubs in the world, the 19-year-old is making a name for himself as a talented wingback and one of the most promising Canadian soccer talents ever.
Every team needs 3-point shooting, yet few even gave Duncan Robinson an honest look. But the Heat believed in his potential, and got him to believe in it too.
… Whether you use pain to help you thrive and strive toward your endurance-sport goals or you succumb to the pain that helped us survive for so many millennia depends on your understanding of pain and whether you can gain mastery over it. In the former case, you’re attempting to resist not only 100s of 1000s of years since we became human beings, but millions of years of evolution since living creatures climbed out of the primordial muck as reptiles. In the latter case, you might consider taking up golf or bowling.
Perspective on Pain
Using pain to your advantage starts with gaining a realistic perspective on what pain really is. A number of years ago, I was out for a long, hilly (about 6000 vertical) ride with friends north of San Francisco. At the end of the six-hour ride, one of the guys said, “That was a sufferfest!” Here is where some perspective on pain is needed. You need to understand the difference between suffering, pain, and physical discomfort.
Pronounced differences in individual physiological adaptation may occur following various training mesocycles in runners. Here we aimed to assess the individual changes in performance and physiological adaptation of recreational runners performing mesocycles with different intensity, duration and frequency. Methods
Employing a randomized cross-over design, the intra-individual physiological responses [i.e., peak (V˙O2peak
) and submaximal (V˙O2submax
) oxygen uptake, velocity at lactate thresholds (V2, V4)] and performance (time-to-exhaustion (TTE)) of 13 recreational runners who performed three 3-week sessions of high-intensity interval training (HIIT), high-volume low-intensity training (HVLIT) or more but shorter sessions of HVLIT (high-frequency training; HFT) were assessed. Results
V˙O2submax
, V2, V4 and TTE were not altered by HIIT, HVLIT or HFT (p > 0.05). V˙O2peak
improved to the same extent following HVLIT (p = 0.045) and HFT (p = 0.02). The number of moderately negative responders was higher following HIIT (15.4%); and HFT (15.4%) than HVLIT (7.6%). The number of very positive responders was higher following HVLIT (38.5%) than HFT (23%) or HIIT (7.7%). 46% of the runners responded positively to two mesocycles, while 23% did not respond to any. Conclusion
On a group level, none of the interventions altered V˙O2submax
, V2, V4 or TTE, while HVLIT and HFT improved V˙O2peak. The mean adaptation index indicated similar numbers of positive, negative and non-responders to HIIT, HVLIT and HFT, but more very positive responders to HVLIT than HFT or HIIT. 46% responded positively to two mesocycles, while 23% did not respond to any. These findings indicate that the magnitude of responses to HIIT, HVLIT and HFT is highly individual and no pattern was apparent. [full text]
Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology journal from
Introduction: During cyclical steady state ambulation, such as walking, variability in stride intervals can indicate the state of the system. In order to define locomotor system function, observed variability in motor patterns, stride regulation and gait complexity must be assessed in the presence of a perturbation. Common perturbations, especially for military populations, are load carriage and an imposed locomotion pattern known as forced marching (FM). We examined the interactive effects of load magnitude and locomotion pattern on motor variability, stride regulation and gait complexity during bipedal ambulation in recruit-aged females.
Methods: Eleven healthy physically active females (18–30 years) completed 1-min trials of running and FM at three load conditions: no additional weight/bodyweight (BW), an additional 25% of BW (BW + 25%), and an additional 45% of BW (BW + 45%). A goal equivalent manifold (GEM) approach was used to assess motor variability yielding relative variability (RV; ratio of “good” to “bad” variability) and detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA) to determine gait complexity on stride length (SL) and stride time (ST) parameters. DFA was also used on GEM outcomes to calculate stride regulation.
Results: There was a main effect of load (p = 0.01) on RV; as load increased, RV decreased. There was a main effect of locomotion (p = 0.01), with FM exhibiting greater RV than running. Strides were regulated more tightly and corrected quicker at BW + 45% compared (p < 0.05) to BW. Stride regulation was greater for FM compared to running. There was a main effect of load for gait complexity (p = 0.002); as load increased gait complexity decreased, likewise FM had less (p = 0.02) gait complexity than running.
Discussion: This study is the first to employ a GEM approach and a complexity analysis to gait tasks under load carriage. Reduction in “good” variability as load increases potentially exposes anatomical structures to repetitive site-specific loading. Furthermore, load carriage magnitudes of BW + 45% potentially destabilize the system making individuals less adaptable to additional perturbations. This is further evidenced by the decrease in gait complexity, which all participants demonstrated values similarly observed in neurologically impaired populations during the BW + 45% load condition. [full text]
UK-based startup TeamSportz has a straight up goal that they’re on a mission to solve. They want anyone that enjoys sport and wants to improve their performance to have access to a sophisticated bit of technology without barriers.
Utilising artificial intelligence, TeamSportz has developed a way to capture a person’s performance using their phone to provide analysis for individual athletes and teams. They are positioning their tech around accessibility so their platform can be the partner, teammate and the one constant for athletes no matter the age, level, coach or team.
As founder Francisco Baptista explained to Bullpen, “I finally thought that I would be able to use technology to improve my performance on the court yet no matter where I looked I was unable to find a solution that could be used indoors and could perform an analysis of my game rather than just tracking how far I have run or my heart rate. Thus the concept for TeamSportz was born.”
Wearable devices that can help monitor people’s fitness levels are already popular. But researchers have been steadily evolving this technology to help people keep track of not only their fitness but also their health.
Researchers at Tufts University are among scientists involved in this endeavor. They recently developed a sensing patch that can be sewn into clothing to analyze someone’s sweat for biomarkers. The wearable technology uses a combination of special sensing threads, flexible electronic components, and wireless connectivity.
Other scientists at Tufts already had previously developed threads that can be woven into clothing to detect harmful environmental gases, and the patch includes technology that’s similar to this work.
An Imperial medical student has created a new platform that gamifies physiotherapy and helps patients to recover.
Motics, co-founded by medical student Harvinder Power, is addressing challenges in the field of physiotherapy, connecting patients with physiotherapists and developing technology that monitors muscle function via a game to improve adherence to exercises.
Through a series of wearable sensors, users get actionable insights into their muscle function while electrical signals help them understand which muscles to use during exercise.
… “In athletic monitoring, if you have a device on your skin, sweat can build up under that device,” Brown said. “That can cause inflammation and also inaccuracies in continuous monitoring applications.”
For instance, one experiment with electrocardiogram (ECG) analysis showed that the porous PDMS allowed for the evaporation of sweat during exercise, capable of maintaining a high-resolution signal. The nonporous PDMS did not provide the ability for the sweat to readily evaporate, leading to a lower signal resolution after exercise.
The Watson team created a porous PDMS material through electrospinning, a production method that makes nanofibers through the use of electric force.
On a day when college football applied one more mismatched patch to its 2020 eyesore of a quilt, college basketball presented a relative work of art—a season plan that aspires to include everyone and sets broad-based national parameters.
The difference between two sports contested by many of the same schools is striking. It underscores what can be done with centralized NCAA leadership and cohesive conferences (basketball), as opposed to five oligarchies that don’t much care whether the whole of the enterprise survives as long as each gets their own (football).
Dan Gavitt, the NCAA vice president for basketball, has been the unifying presence that football has lacked over the past six months. He’s immersed himself in the workings of leagues from coast to coast, brainstorming a framework for how the season should look.
“We wanted to build consensus and consider all perspectives,” Gavitt told Sports Illustrated.
Construction could wrap up in mid-December on Emory University’s musculoskeletal and sports medicine clinic at the Atlanta Falcons complex in Flowery Branch, according to the Atlanta-based hospital.
“Physicians have been recruited and are starting at our other locations, ready to move in when (the clinic is) open,” said Dr. Scott Boden, chair of the Department of Orthopaedics, in a recent email from Emory.
Work has been underway for months on the $15 million, 29,000-square-foot Emory Orthopaedics & Spine Center at the Falcons complex at 4400 Falcon Parkway, across from C.W. Davis Middle School.
One of our biggest concerns is how to make soccer analytics more interpretable and accessible to coaches. With SoccerMap, you can produce full probability surfaces for a way range of exciting problems in soccer, such as pass probability, pass selection, or expected value.
The Heat have been described as a team that is made for the NBA bubble, the quarantined location where the championship playoffs are taking place. To me, that means that this team likes and knows how to work, and their work translates to ongoing improvement, both as individual players and as a collective team.
The opposite situation can also occur. And it’s become a consistent part of the explanation for why the Clippers underachieved during these playoffs.
I think that a big part of being a 4th quarter team is a team that demonstrates visible ongoing improvement throughout the season, beginning to end. The Seattle Sounders have used this template with great success in Major League Soccer.
The new MLS franchise in Austin recently hired the originator of the Sounders’ athlete preparation and development plan, Dave Tenney, away from the NBA’s Orlando Magic. Tenney has had some success with the Magic, and the team hired his successor from the current staff, evidence that the team likes the track it is on. However, injuries to top players, Aaron Gordon and Jonathan Isaac, derailed the team and contributed to the Magic’s rapid exit from this year’s NBA playoffs.
How to best incorporate endurance training is an open question in professional team sports. The amount of running required in soccer makes it the most obvious sport to watch for players’ endurance, but there was less than perfect transfer of Tenney’s soccer expertise to NBA basketball athletes. Of course, endurance athletes’ coaches, like well known UK cycle coach David Brailsford, are known to struggle with how to achieve consistent top performances.
Sports have winners and losers, and they provide clear evidence that the work pays off for winners. If the Boston Celtics highly vocal reaction to the Game 2 loss last night is indicative, “talking” about what late-game performance should be takes a backseat to “knowing” what superior late-game performance actually is, like the Miami Heat do.
