… If it sounds odd to say that a guy who has only thrown two innings at Double-A could be part of an MLB bullpen, that’s because it is. But it’s not entirely impossible. Kenley Jansen spent his first five seasons in the Dodgers organization as a catcher before moving to the mound in 2009. Just one season and 56.2 minor-league innings later, he was in LA posting a 0.67 ERA over 25 appearances.
[Jerrick] Suiter has logged about 55 fewer MiLB innings than Jansen had prior to his debut, but he’s also six years older and presumably has a greater understanding of the game as a result. The Cubs feel he’ll be able to ramp up quickly, particularly if he’s able to gain some confidence against a relatively low level of competition out in Mesa.
Neil Warnock admits his medical and sports science departments will play a big part in Middlesbrough’s season – with the need to avoid injuries key.
Boro have had a superb start to the season and sit fifth in the Championship table after nine games.
And while Warnock admitted he looks at the table after every game recently, he won’t be getting carried away with Boro’s current position, joking ahead of the trip to Blackburn that he’d be happy if it was May right now.
Instead, we’re only roughly 20% through the season, and with the late start due to coronavirus pandemic, there’s a shorter timeframe with which the complete the campaign this term, meaning the games continue to come thick and fast.
There’s a weirdly unsettling scene in the 1953 Western Shane in which the dastardly gunfighter Jack Wilson, played by Jack Palance, dismounts his horse. The character’s movements look unnatural and creepy, but the story behind the shot is hardly sinister. Palance was terrible around horses and didn’t know how to safely climb off of one. The director managed to catch him successfully mounting his horse just one time during shooting, and so he played that clip in reverse when it came time to show Palance getting off the steed.
That scene came to mind on Sunday during the Miami Dolphins’ surprising 28–17 victory over the Los Angeles Rams. Rookie quarterback Tua Tagovailoa made his debut as a starter for Miami, throwing his first NFL touchdown pass at the end of the first quarter. It looked odd—not unlike Palance’s dismount in Shane. Had the Fox camera crew flipped the image by mistake? The man was throwing with the wrong hand!
Sleep helps you perform better during games or competitions, recover faster from training sessions, and according to a Clinical Journal of Sports Medicine study, can even help prevent injuries. But sleep isn’t just good for your body, it helps the mind too. The following guidelines will help you fall asleep and stay asleep.
Rule #1 Establish regular bedtime and waking hours by going to bed at a relatively consistent time and getting up at about the same time to help synchronize your body clock.
… Moving and running solely in biped fashion has its disadvantages compared with the reduction of force dissipation throughout the multiple weight-bearing limbs of quadrupeds. Although the movement is as old as humankind, perhaps the original dirty truth is that running is instinctual not behavioral. Humans run on trigger; they run for all sort of other reasons too, but they run in a challenged manner because we evolved as functioning bipeds.
There are some very inconvenient truths about human bipedal walking and running relating to collision dynamics, which need to be addressed here. From the get-go, let’s identify some of the problematic relationships between form, function, and physics.
BMC Sports Science, Medicine and Rehabilitation journal from
Background: The aim of this study was to compare the postural control of the Poland national women’s volleyball team players with a control group of non-training young women. It was hypothesized that volleyball players use a specific balance control strategy due to the high motor requirements of their team sport.
Methods: Static postural sway variables were measured in 31 athletes and 31 non-training women. Participants were standing on a force plate with eyes open, and their center of pressure signals were recorded for the 20s with the sampling rate of 20 Hz in the medial-lateral (ML) and anterior-posterior (AP) planes.
Results: In both AP and ML planes, athletes had lower range and higher fractal dimension of the COP. They had also higher peak frequency than control group in the ML plane only. The remaining COP indices including variability, mean velocity and mean frequency did not display any intergroup differences.
Conclusion: It can be assumed that due to the high motor requirements of their sport discipline Polish female volleyball players have developed a unique posture control. On the court they have to distribute their sensory resources optimally between balance control and actions resulting from the specifics of the volleyball game. There are no clearly defined criteria for optimal postural strategies for elite athletes, but they rather vary depending on a given sport. The results of our research confirm this claim. [full text]
Wearable sensor technology already has a great impact on the endurance running community. Smartwatches and heart rate monitors are heavily used to evaluate runners’ performance and monitor their training progress. Additionally, foot-mounted inertial measurement units (IMUs) have drawn the attention of sport scientists due to the possibility to monitor biomechanically relevant spatio-temporal parameters outside the lab in real-world environments. Researchers developed and investigated algorithms to extract various features using IMU data of different sensor positions on the foot. In this work, we evaluate whether the sensor position of IMUs mounted to running shoes has an impact on the accuracy of different spatio-temporal parameters. We compare both the raw data of the IMUs at different sensor positions as well as the accuracy of six endurance running-related parameters. We contribute a study with 29 subjects wearing running shoes equipped with four IMUs on both the left and the right shoes and a motion capture system as ground truth. The results show that the IMUs measure different raw data depending on their position on the foot and that the accuracy of the spatio-temporal parameters depends on the sensor position. We recommend to integrate IMU sensors in a cavity in the sole of a running shoe under the foot’s arch, because the raw data of this sensor position is best suitable for the reconstruction of the foot trajectory during a stride. [full text]
Is your resistance band dumb? In this review, the Hello SportsTech team tests a smart resistance band, Straffr. The once simple, home workout staple gets upgraded with this innovative fitness solution and we had fun testing it (and in a new location). As always, we offer the key takeaways from our experience using the device and the app to help you learn more about this cool product from the world of sports and technology. [video, 7:01]
Metrics. Data. Measurements. All are crucial to the evolution of improving collegiate athletic performance. Every coach looks for that edge—whether it is in speed, strength, pace of play, recovery—all are critical to reaching an athlete’s full potential. A college coach is always looking for ways to quantify performance, training and recovery.
These athlete data are called biometrics. They are unique to every person, and the battle over who owns them is just beginning to hit the NCAA. More and more tech companies like Sparta Science, Kinetrax, Hudl, and K Vest are developing new products, looking to capitalize on the goal of optimizing performance. All are founded on the premise of measuring, storing and analyzing athlete data.
But who owns that data? The company? The school that bought the technology? The athlete? And what happens to the data once it’s collected?
As university professors who study technology in college athletics (Karen) and hold the role of Faculty Athletics Representative for the University of Missouri (Pamela), it’s a question that led us separately to reach out to the NCAA for a conversation.
In cooperation with partners, testing service provider Hohenstein has created the new DIN SPEC 4868, which will define the market standard and testing protocols for compression behaviour of sportswear.
Until now, there has been no uniform standard in the booming sports and leisure segment, the institute says. Claims of textile compression properties could not be checked transparently and understandably, it adds. The DIN SPEC 4868 test method combined with the HOSYcan compression tester will enable objective comparison of products and materials and provide analytical performance data with regard to the desired properties, Hohenstein says.
Second-tier Scottish football club Inverness Caledonian Thistle doesn’t have a camera operator for matches at their stadium so the club uses an AI-controlled camera that’s programmed to follow the ball for their broadcasts. But in a recent match against Ayr United, the AI controller kept moving the camera off the ball to focus on the bald head of the linesman, making the match all but unwatchable. No fans allowed in the stadium either, so the broadcast was the only way to watch.
In soccer (football), dominant limb kicking produces higher ball velocity and is used with greater frequency than the non-dominant limb. It is unclear whether limb dominance has an effect on injury incidence. The purpose of this systematic review with meta-analysis is to examine the relationship between limb dominance and soccer injuries. Studies were identified from four online databases according to PRISMA guidelines to identify studies of soccer players that reported lower extremity injuries by limb dominance. Relevant studies were assessed for inclusion and retained. Data from retained studies underwent meta-analyses to determine relative risk of dominant versus non-dominant limb injuries using random-effects models. Seventy-four studies were included, with 36 of them eligible for meta-analysis. For prospective lower extremity injury studies, soccer players demonstrated a 1.6 times greater risk of injury to the dominant limb (95% CI [1.3–1.8]). Grouped by injury location, hamstring (RR 1.3 [95% CI 1.1–1.4]) and hip/groin (RR 1.9 [95% CI 1.3–2.7]) injuries were more likely to occur to the dominant limb. Greater risk of injury was present in the dominant limb across playing levels (amateurs RR 2.6 [95% CI 2.1–3.2]; youths RR 1.5 [95% CI 1.26–1.67]; professionals RR 1.3 [95% CI 1.14–1.46]). Both males (RR 1.5 [95% CI 1.33–1.68)] and females (RR 1.5 [95% CI 1.14–1.89]) were more likely to sustain injuries to the dominant limb. Future studies investigating soccer injury should adjust for this confounding factor by using consistent methods for assigning limb dominance and tracking use of the dominant versus non-dominant limb.
Over the past seven months, the coronavirus has upended life, prompting widespread shifts in how people spend their days. What was hard to comprehend in March — virtual schooling, isolation, meetings through videoconference, plexiglass and masks — is now the norm.
But according to a new study from the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, some of those disruptions have turned into habits. And they might have long-lasting effects on health.
The details of Arizona’s NCAA notice of allegations reported on Sunday were greeted with a shoulder shrug around college basketball, a sport that has become numb to one of the most sensationalized scandals in the history of college athletics. “I didn’t even click on the story,” said one veteran head coach, summing up the sentiment.
This is where we are in the meandering, impotent and completely ineffective NCAA enforcement process: We are entering the fourth college basketball season to be played since that day in September 2017 when the feds held a boisterous news conference to announce their investigation into basketball’s underbelly.
The NCAA has been so slow to act on the trove of evidence, testimony and wiretaps that they actually invented a new process to handle cases like the ones Arizona, Kansas, Louisville and others are facing. So when people ask what’s going to happen, there’s really no good answer, as the independent panel expected to handle their cases has never formally handled a case.
University of Colorado Boulder CU Boulder Today from
This week’s international court ruling barring a Black double-amputee sprinter from the Olympics overlooks evidence that his prostheses provide no competitive advantage and instead hinges on racially biased data, according to CU Boulder researchers at the center of the debate.
“Our studies found that Blake Leeper’s prostheses do not provide him with a competitive advantage compared to nonamputees, and there is no data to suggest that his height allows him to run faster,” said Alena Grabowski, an associate professor of integrative physiology who specializes in the study of running prostheses.
Grabowski added that the court’s surprising decision, published in full Wednesday, was informed by studies including only white and Asian athletes.
“We believe this is a discriminatory and unorthodox ruling,” Grabowski said.