… row2k: Here in the US, and in other countries around the world as well, there seems to be rising and extraordinary pressure on younger athletes to develop earlier and earlier. Is it possible to develop elite athletes at a younger age, or is this generation of coaches making a grave mistake by not allowing athletes to develop by pushing harder to try to mold youngsters into elite athletes, maybe before they’ve really decided to fully commit?
Vernon: It’s definitely not just happening in rowing. In every sport, they’re trying to get younger and younger. It’s something I looked into a bit for the book and all the evidence indicated that early specialization is bad in terms of your general health, your mental health, and well-being, but also your general skill development. Actually, the best athletes are the ones who specialize quite late. They do a variety of different sports. Roger Federer, he was really into football, I think really into cycling, and it was only in his late teens he really started taking tennis seriously.
… The Sabres were no exception when [Dean] Higham arrived in 2015. But the athlete management system they were using at the time wasn’t comprehensive and more of a “piecemeal” amalgamation of services, complicating the team’s efforts to track, manage and analyze all of the data the club was collecting.
Roughly a year into his tenure, Higham and his department were tasked with finding a solution to the Sabres’ data needs. But it was clear he needed to do so in a way that “accommodated our workflow as opposed to completely changing [it],” he says. Higham arranged several vendor demonstrations and began evaluating products.
In 2017, Higham and the Sabres implemented Fusion Sport’s Smartabase platform. Higham had been familiar with the product from his time at the Australian Institute of Sport, which offered flexibility and a unified roof to house data collected from a wide array of tools.
After Reading captain Liam Moore revealed how mental performance consultant Mark Bowden helped him add another level to his game, Adam Bate speaks to Bowden to find out why the brain remains football’s final frontier…
Cutting actions are associated with non-contact ACL injuries in multidirectional sports due to the propensity to generate large multiplanar knee joint loads (KJLs) that have the capacity to increase ACL loading and strain. Numerous studies have investigated the biomechanical determinants of KJLs in cutting tasks. The aim of this systematic review was to comprehensively review the literature regarding biomechanical determinants of KJLs during cutting, in order to develop a cutting technical framework alongside training recommendations for practitioners regarding KJL mitigation. Methods
Databases (SPORTDiscus, Web of Science and PubMed) were systematically searched using a combination of the following terms: “Biomechanical determinants”, or “Knee abduction moment”, or “Technical determinants”, or “Knee loading”, or “Knee loads”, or “Mechanical determinants”, or “ACL strain”, or “Knee adduction moment”, or “Anterior tibial shear”, or “Knee internal rotation moment”, or “Knee valgus moment” AND “Change of direction”, or “Cutting manoeuvre”, or “Run and cut”, or “Run-and-cut”, or “Sidestepping”, or “Side-stepping”, or “Shuttle run”. Inclusion criteria were as follows: studies examining a cutting task < 110° with a preceding approach run that examined biomechanical determinants of KJLs using three-dimensional motion analysis.
Results
The search returned 6404 possibly eligible articles, and 6 identified through other sources. Following duplicate removal, 4421 titles and abstracts were screened, leaving 246 full texts to be screened for inclusion. Twenty-three full texts were deemed eligible for inclusion and identified numerous determinants of KJLs; 11 trunk, 11 hip, 7 knee, 3 multiplanar KJLs, 5 foot/ankle and 7 identifying ground reaction forces (GRFs) as determinants of KJLs. Conclusion
Using the framework developed from the results, cutting KJLs can be mitigated through the following: reducing lateral foot-plant distances, thus lowering hip abduction and orientating the foot closer to neutral with a mid-foot or forefoot placement strategy; minimising knee valgus and hip internal rotation angles and motion at initial contact (IC) and weight acceptance (WA); avoiding and limiting lateral trunk flexion and attempt to maintain an upright trunk position or trunk lean into the intended direction; and finally, reducing GRF magnitude during WA, potentially by attenuation through increased knee flexion and emphasising a greater proportion of braking during the penultimate foot contact (PFC). [full text]
Sue Bird says she was one of many working women intimidated by the process of freezing their eggs, nearly paralyzed by the stigma so long associated with the decision.
That changed in 2019 for the WNBA champion. At age 40, Bird decided it was time.
“I always put it off and never got around to it,” Bird said in a phone interview. “It got to the point where even though I’m at the end of my career, I need to start thinking about planning and being in a relationship changes how you look at things like this. I had enough people around me, including my agent who had done it, that I wanted to do it.”
Sheffield United will maintain its opposition to calls for the reintroduction of five substitutions in the middle of the 2020-21 Premier League season as it would affect the competition’s integrity, club CEO Stephen Bettis has said.
Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp and his Manchester City counterpart, Pep Guardiola, have been vocal in their criticism of the league’s decision not to stick with last season’s temporary rule that allowed five instead of three substitutions.
Despite an unprecedented 60-game schedule, a neutral site World Series, and a disturbing increase in the rate of coronavirus cases and related deaths across the U.S., Major League Baseball players are preparing to play the 2021 regular season as scheduled.
“Our players anticipate arriving in spring training as normal and playing a 162-game season as they otherwise would,” Tony Clark, the executive director of the MLB Players Association, said in a lengthy exclusive interview on Friday.
“There continues to be early dialogue and health and safety protocols, and that will continue.”
Health officials around the NBA have expressed concern for how to prepare players for a potential 72-game regular season with a training camp that starts on Dec. 1, less than a month away — especially for the teams that haven’t played games since March and the two conference champions.
“It’s going to be especially challenging to not only get ready to play Dec. 22 or whatever, but to maintain that for a period of four or five months,” said one head athletic trainer of a Western Conference team, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity.
“This is going to be another period of unchartered territory. As unchartered as the [Orlando] bubble was [this summer], this is the bubble times three or four or five [because we’re] trying to extend it to that period of time with a minimal ramp-up.”
… The Finnish Centre for Evidence-Based Orthopaedics (FICEBO, www.ficebo.com) has been studying arthroscopic surgery for almost 20 years. During this period, we have observed dramatic changes in orthopaedics, debated why some orthopaedic surgeons continue to perform arthroscopy for degenerative musculoskeletal problems despite mounting evidence that arthroscopy is an ineffective procedure and discussed what might be driving other surgeons to change their practice.
Here, we explore five reasons that could explain reversals of arthroscopic surgery (medical reversal,4 based on our experience in Finland). This is not a definitive list—we encourage others in our community to share their thoughts and experiences.
Reason 1: Healthcare funders have ceased reimbursing? [full text]
The main factors for home advantage (HA), quantified by the number of points won at home expressed as a percentage of all points, are believed to be crowd support, territoriality, familiarity, and travel fatigue. In 2020, the German Soccer Bundesliga interrupted its championship due to the Covid-19 pandemic after 25 rounds and the last nine rounds were played without audience. This unique situation allowed studying the effect of spectators on the team’s performance and the referee’s decisions. We hypothesized a decrease in HA and a more balanced distribution of fouls and disciplinary cards in the games without audience (GWOA) compared to the games with audience (GWA). We evaluated n = 223 GWA and n = 83 GWOA of the season 2019/20 and all games of the preceding season 2018/19 to analyze the distribution of game outcomes (wins, losses, and draws) and HA. We analyzed the number of fouls, disciplinary cards, and penalty kicks. We found significant differences in HA between GWA (HA = 54.35%) and GWOA (HA = 44.1%) as well as GWOA and games of 2018/19 (HA = 57.63%). The distribution of game outcomes in GWOA did not differ from GWA but differed significantly from 2018/19 (p = 0.031). The distribution of fouls showed a significant difference to equal distribution in GWA [home: 2,595 (48.56%); away: 2,749 (51.44%)] but not in GWOA [home: 1,067 (50.54%); away: 1,044 (49.46%)]. In the GWOA, we counted 178 (51.1%, home) and 170 (48.9%, away) cards, representing a significant difference in the distribution to GWA [home: 405 (44.85%); away: 498 (55.15%)]. The number of red cards differed significantly from an equal distribution for GWA (14 home and 28 away) but not for GWOA (eight home and seven away). In the last nine rounds without audience, we observed more home losses (36) than home wins (27). Hence, the Covid-19 lock-down led to a home disadvantage. One reason for this surprising result could be that the home team is missing an important familiar aspect when playing in their empty stadium without social support from their home audience. Furthermore, both teams know about the HA thus the away team could be more motivated in this unusual situation. [full text]