Part of the sensational Japan side that won the FIFA Women’s World Cup™ in 2011, Nagasato has been an integral figure in helping the game grow, not only in Japan, but also in Germany, England, USA and Australia, where she’s inspired young players to continue to chase their dreams.
Just when one would think she’s given all there is to give in the game, the 33-year-old forward recently made global headlines with her perhaps her most significant career move yet. On 10 September 2020 Nagasato made history by becoming the first woman to play in a men’s professional league in Japan when she signed for Hayabusa Eleven on loan from parent club Chicago Red Stars of the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL).
What makes the move even more special is that she’s lacing up her boots alongside older brother Genki. FIFA.com caught up with Yuki to talk about what went in to the move, her prime motivation behind it and her dreams for further development of the game for women in Japan.
… There seems to be a threshold in 10 seconds (i.e. very slow repetitions) above which the stimulus of muscle mass increase would diminish.2 In another paper, it was observed that for the same total workload, a group that took 4 seconds per repetition (2 seconds for the concentric phase and 2 for the eccentric phase) the cross-sectional area of the muscle increased by 39% compared to only 11% in the group that performed very slow repetitions (14 seconds in total, 10 for the concentric phase and 4 for the eccentric phase).4 In other words, despite the time under tension, was three times longer in the group that performed super slow repetitions, the benefits of muscle mass increase, were almost four times less.4
Although in this regard evidence is still inconclusive, at least it does suggest that the repetition duration can cover a wide range when the main objective is to increase muscle mass. Fitness coaches should always respect and consider training personalization given the variability of responses by different subjects.
Wim Hof’s teachings about breath work and the health benefits of cold plunges have attracted millions of followers who swear it has cured everything from depression to diabetes and makes them happier and stronger. Our writer traveled to Iceland (naturally) for a deep dive with the man and his methods.
… Last week my friend Rick Lovett wrote a PodiumRunner article that focused mostly about the “predictive” power of new big-data equations published in Nature Communications, a highly-regarded journal. I’ve been corresponding with the author of that paper, Paris-based Thorsten Emig, about the training implications of his work.
Another group, led by the University of Dublin’s Barry Smyth, has been following a similar path in recent years. Smyth often works with “recommender systems” like the one Netflix uses to predict what movies you might enjoy — or what works for you. In running, another name for this is “coach.” This group has unlocked some training = success patterns I’ve never seen before. I doubt you have, either.
Emig has worked with aggregated data from Polar, and Smyth with Strava data.
I’m going to leave out the math (there’s a lot of it), and just give you the most useful findings, first from Emig’s paper, then from Smyth’s recent work. Emig reaches four key conclusions that can help guide your marathon buildup. Smyth has one significant take-away.
MIT News, Picower Institute for Learning and Memory from
Electrodermal activity (EDA) — the sweat-induced fluctuations of skin conductance made famous in TV dramatizations of lie-detector tests — can be a truly strong indicator of subconscious, or “sympathetic,” nervous system activity for all kinds of purposes, but only if it is analyzed optimally. In a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, an MIT-based team of scientists provides a new, fast, and accurate statistical model for analyzing EDA.
“Only so much of EDA is intuitive just by looking at the signal,” says Sandya Subramanian, a graduate student in the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology program and the study’s lead author. Meanwhile, existing mathematical methods of analysis either compute averages of the signal that obscure its instantaneous nature, or inefficiently force measurements into a fit with signal processing models that have nothing to do with what’s going on in the body.
Major League Baseball has struck a multi-year strategic partnership with injury recovery technology company Hyperice. San Diego Padres star shortstop Fernando Tatis Jr. will serve as the company’s newest spokesman, Hyperice added Friday in announcing the pact.
The deal will include an investment by MLB in Hyperice’s percussion, vibration, dynamic air compression and thermal technology. As an element of the partnership, Hyperice and MLB will work together with club medical, athletic training, and strength and conditioning professionals.
“This multi-year partnership with MLB represents our collective commitment and vision to prioritize player health and optimize performance league-wide,” said Hyperice chief executive Jim Huether.
Testing someone for nerve damage is done manually by a clinician who determines what a patient can detect on their skin, most often using a specialized set of monofilaments or a tuning fork. It can be a long and uncomfortable process for the patient and the clinician. But using wearable technologies, Dr. Ryan Peters, PhD, in the Faculty of Kinesiology and member of the Hotchkiss Brain Institute at the Cumming School of Medicine, is developing new ways for performing neurological testing anytime, anywhere, and with greater accuracy.
Peters is a co-founder and chief science officer of Vibratus Inc., which is bringing these new neurological wearable technologies to market. “You can think of Vibratus as your wearable neurologist,” says Peters. He is pictured above, right, with members of his team.
… One of the early risers among the inaugural 2019 Techstars Sports Accelerator class was Ergatta, which unveiled its connected indoor rowing machine at CES and raised a $5 million investment round led by Greycroft Ventures, the private equity firm that had the late NBA commissioner David Stern as an adviser.
In a similar vein comes Tennibot, an AI-powered robot that collects tennis balls and fires them back across the court to the user in a customizable pattern. Before this invention, solo tennis players resorted to hitting balls against a solid wall. “As people are getting more comfortable paying for Mirror, Tonal and Peloton—paying up front for the product, a bike or a rower or whatever it might be—and then a monthly subscription, we thought that that would apply to tennis as well,” Fliegel says.
Also tapping AI to help athletes track workouts and improve is SenSwim, a Tel Aviv startup led by former Israeli Olympic swimmer Gal Nevo. SenSwim harnesses computer vision to track data for each lane of the pool, including time, stroke rate, turn speed, and underwater distance as well as provide the capability for identifying someone potentially drowning, streaming races live or even hosting virtual swim meets.
Over the past decades, the use of computational physics-based models representative of the musculoskeletal (MSK) system has become increasingly popular in many fields of clinically driven research, locomotor rehabilitation in particular. These models have been applied to various functional impairments given their ability to estimate parameters which cannot be readily measured in vivo but are of interest to clinicians. The use of MSK modelling and simulations allows analysis of relevant MSK biomarkers such as muscle and joint contact loading at a number of different stages in the clinical treatment pathway in order to benefit patient functional outcome. Applications of these methods include optimisation of rehabilitation programs, patient stratification, disease characterisation, surgical pre-planning, and assistive device and exoskeleton design and optimisation. This review provides an overview of current approaches, the components of standard MSK models, applications, limitations, and assumptions of these modelling and simulation methods, and finally proposes a future direction.
Scouting players for the next Draft is always a difficult task, as evaluators cross the country to get enough looks to develop some degree of certainty in selecting players, or at least strong follow lists for the next spring.
That has become nearly impossible in the midst of the pandemic. Even though several high school showcase events were held, they were more limited in scope, with players and scouts unable to travel in the same quantities they would during a normal summer. And there were virtually no opportunities to see any junior college or four-year college players over the summer.
Major League teams expressed a desire to have additional events this fall to make up for those lost opportunities. There will be five over the next few weeks for amateur players across the country.
Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Associated Press, Steve Magargee from
Wisonsin’s football team is practicing amid a pandemic knowing the start of its season is only a week away. Members of the Badgers’ other fall sports teams have no choice but to be more patient.
The Big Ten football season starts Oct. 23 — nearly two months later than expected — when the 16th-ranked Badgers host Illinois. All the other Wisconsin athletes who’d normally play this fall are waiting for their pandemic-delayed seasons to start in 2021 while they continue practicing and studying under unusual circumstances.
“Soccer’s been my personal escape from everything else, so I can assume that’s the same thing for all the other guys on the team,” said Zach Klancnik, a junior defender. “It’s nice to get back out there, keep competing and do what we love.”
The Big Ten announced Aug. 11 it was postponing its fall sports season. Although it partially reversed itself a month later by announcing it would begin playing football in late October, that didn’t extend to other fall sports.
The purpose of this study was to investigate the role of psychological safety in explaining the impact of identity leadership on team performance and athlete well-being. Adopting a cross-sectional survey design, 289 handball players rated the identity leadership skills of their coach, their captain, and the informal leaders in the team, as well as various performance- and well-being-related measures. Structural equation modelling (controlling for the nested structure of our data) revealed that by demonstrating identity leadership, coaches, captains, and in particular informal athlete leaders, all had a unique contribution in strengthening their team members’ identification with their team. By this shared sense of ‘us’, athletes felt psychologically safe in their team to speak up, provide input, and take risks. In line with our hypotheses, this sense of psychological safety acted as a mediator between identity leadership and two subsequent pathways: (1) a team-oriented pathway in which psychological safety inspired good teamwork, which fostered team resilience and, in turn, enhanced athletes’ satisfaction with their team’s performance; and (2) an individual-oriented pathway wherein psychological safety buffered against athletes’ burnout, thereby enhancing their health. In addition to these pathways mediated by psychological safety, the informal leaders directly influenced the performance pathway (with total effect sizes being 10 times larger than those of coaches and team captains), whereas coaches had a direct influence on the health pathway (with total effect sizes being three times larger than those of informal leaders and captains). Given the often-underestimated importance of the informal leaders, sport teams can be recommended to adopt a structure of shared leadership in which team members are encouraged to engage in identity leadership. In conclusion, we found that by nurturing a shared sense of ‘we’ and ‘us’ within the team, leaders are able to foster a psychologically safe environment, which in turn paves the way for an optimal team functioning and a healthier team.
… at Stats Perform, we wanted to remove the bias that comes with these labels and look at the characteristics of players and how they perform the roles they’ve been tasked with.
We look at where they perform their actions on the pitch and then how successfully they do it, against the role they’ve been asked to fulfil.