… “I love Tua,” Dolphins coach Brian Flores said Monday. “He’s come through it. He’s healthy. He’s playing well. He’s getting better on a weekly basis.
“I think that adversity ultimately will help him and has helped him. You come through something like that, rehab, you feel like everything’s going to be over, everything you’ve worked for is over. And you come back, rehab, I think that’s a testament to him, his family, his work ethic and how important the game is to him.
“So I don’t necessarily know where I was when it happened. I know where he is now. I think he’s in a good place physically, mentally, emotionally.”
… [Mac] Williamson’s attorneys—Randy Erlewine and Michael Levinson—contend that Oracle Park’s on-field bullpen mound presented “an unreasonable and unnecessary risk of harm.” They depict this “on field hazard” as exacerbated by the close proximity of walls and the lack of warning track or other marker. As a general matter, sports facilities owe players, fans and other invited guests a duty to warn of dangers.
Erlewine and Levinson insist that CBBC knew of “numerous instances of players falling over” bullpen mounds. The attorneys cite five players—Michael Saunders, Bryce Harper, Hunter Pence, Stephen Cardullo and Eduardo Nunez—as falling between 2014 to 2017. They also claim that, in 2018, only three MLB ballparks had positioned their bullpen mounds on the field. The mounds in Oracle Park have since been moved to behind the outfield wall, off the field of play.
21.8 – the first number in this piece has less to do with anything on the pitch than it does being born around the time Giovanni Reyna’s dad was approaching his prime with the U.S. men’s national team. It’s now Claudio’s son’s turn along with a group of players this international break who on average aren’t yet a year removed from their 21st birthday.
Coach Gregg Berhalter’s group played to a scoreless draw in Wales Thursday, and you’ve probably seen plenty of simple and subjective 6/10 or 8/10 player ratings since. Let’s go a bit deeper and see what the data has to say about five of those players in their recent club play around Europe.
The aim was to compare the running activity in official matches with that achieved in two small-sided games, designed with the same relative area per player but with different constraints and field dimensions, aiming to stimulate high-speed and very-high-speed running. Seventeen young professional players played one 5 vs. 5+5 with 2 floaters, varying in terms of whether there was a change of playing area (SSGCA) or not change (SSGNC). Running activity was monitored using GPS and the following variables were recorded: total distance covered; high-speed distance (18–21 km·h−1); very high-speed distance (>21 km·h−1); peak speed; accelerations and decelerations between 2–3 m·s−2 and above 3 m·s−2. SSGCA achieved statistically higher total distance, high-speed, peak speed and number of accelerations and decelerations than SSGNC (large to small magnitude). Both drills showed statistically greater high speed, number of accelerations and decelerations than official matches (large to small magnitude). Moreover, SSGCA exhibited statistically more total distance and distance at higher speed than official matches (moderate and small magnitude, respectively). In contrast, official matches showed statistically higher peak speeds than both training tasks and more very high speed than SSGNC (large and moderate magnitude, respectively). Coaches could use SSGCA to promote greater running activity in soccer players.
Across a race weekend, physiotherapist Angela Cullen is a near-constant presence at the side of her charge Lewis Hamilton – a fact which has even earned her cult status among some F1 fans. And standing on the brink of his seventh championship, Hamilton has hailed the relationship the pair enjoy as “the greatest partnership”.
New Zealand-born Cullen – who like many performance coaches working in F1 is part of the Hintsa Performance company, started by legendary fitness guru Dr Aki Hintsa – began working with Hamilton at the start of the 2016 season, with the six-time champion praising the positive impact Cullen had had on his performances.
… [Daniel Lieberman] has instrumented hunter-gatherers with FitBits (or the research-laboratory equivalent thereof) and laboriously trucked a treadmill and generator to power it over terrible roads into remote regions, in an effort to do exercise physiology tests on subsistence farmers. The latter didn’t work well; running or walking on a treadmill is a skill that takes practice, and his results were skewed by his subjects’ worries about falling off this unfamiliar device.
But in another test — more of a dare than a true experiment — one of his graduate students attempted to carry a 10-gallon bucket of water on his head, up a big hill from a stream to a village. It was something the petite Kenyan women did daily, with relative ease. The graduate student managed it, but only with difficulty. And not all of the water made it with him.
This is the gist of the first part of Lieberman’s thesis — which is as simple and straightforward as is, in retrospect, the realization that if you put someone who’s never seen one before on a treadmill, they might not walk or run normally. Our ancestors didn’t evolve to “exercise.” They evolved to hunt, forage, and do chores.
In fact, he says — leading to the second point of his thesis — we are also adapted to not do unnecessary exercise.
Everyone knows how beneficial running is for general health, but some of the biggest benefits of being a runner are found in our brain. It turns out the mind and the act of moving our feet are interconnected in ways you’d never imagine, and researchers are continuously learning more about. Many problems that plague the brain can be alleviated, and chances of developing reduced, by going for regular or even occasional runs.
With the help of ASICS NZ whose core ethos is a “Sound Mind in a Sound Body”, we decided to dive into the inner workings of exactly how running and the brain are interconnected. From the miraculous ability to trigger the growth of new brain cells to helping improve mental health, here’s how your brain benefits from being a runner.
Bosch Sensortec has introduced a new sensor targeted at applications that require always-on sensor processing at ultra-low power consumption. A software framework allows the offering of all features as virtual sensors which can be enabled/disabled according to end-user’s requirements.
The BHI260AP smart sensor includes a 32-bit customizable programmable controller, a 6-axis IMU, and a wide variety of software functionalities. The overall size of the system-in-package with an accelerometer, gyroscope and a programmable 32-bit microcontroller, is 3.6 X 4.1 mm.
ESPN Men's College Basketball, Associated Press from
UConn men’s basketball coach Dan Hurley is considering delaying the start of his team’s season after a player’s positive coronavirus test last week forced the program to suspend all activities for two weeks.
Hurley said Thursday that he hopes the team will be able to get back to practice on Nov. 19 and play its first games on Nov. 25 and Nov. 27.
But contracts for those games have not been signed. Hurley said ramping up practice after two weeks off will be difficult and he won’t put his team’s health in jeopardy to open the season this month.
Due to challenges associated with the coronavirus pandemic, the entire 2021 NCAA men’s basketball tournament will be played in one location, the NCAA announced Monday.
The NCAA said it is in talks with Indianapolis and the surrounding metro area to be that location.
The decision comes after NCAA officials met to consider a variety of contingency plans. The move means that 13 sites across the country will no longer host a preliminary round of the NCAA tournament.
There’s only one place that athletes can get the energy they need to train from (or to do anything for that matter!) and that’s food. The food they eat will have a direct effect on how well they do or don’t perform and really can be the difference between winning or losing.
This is especially important for youth athletes too. Most people tend to see young athletes just as “mini adults”, but what they don’t realise is how different their nutritional requirements actually are. Youth athletes have to balance a full-time sports schedule with full-time schoolwork too. That puts huge demands on the body in terms of the energy and nutrients it needs to keep going. Add on top of that the extra demands of normal growth and development and maturation and it becomes quite clear why they simply can’t just be thought of as “mini adults”.
So, here at Youth Sport Nutrition, we’re going to explain what exactly are the nutritional requirements of youth athletes and how can they meet them?
… 15-20% of endurance athletes have a chronic history of GI problems during prolonged exercise (4) and not ingesting larger amounts of carbohydrate may prove challenging or even unpractical. It is also known that exogenous carbohydrate oxidation is independent of body weight. In other words lighter and heavier athletes will use the same amount of carbohydrate from a drink (3).
What does all this mean for a marathon runner? Smaller runners may have a relative advantage. If oxidation rates max out at 1 g/min, then a 56kg runner is able to oxidize 20% more per kg BW compared to the 70kg runner (1.07 vs. 0.86g CHO/kg body weight/h) (1). For similar reasons it has been argued that smaller runners have thermoregulatory advantages compared with heavier runners. In a commentary a few years ago we argued that smaller runners may have a distinct advantage in term of exogenous carbohydrate oxidation and its contribution to total energy expenditure compared with heavier runners.
… “In our minds, people associate aesthetic beauty with nature and natural things, which transfers to perceptions that pretty food is healthy food, but people are often misled by the prettiness of food that’s not very good for you.”
Consumers see almost 7,000 food and restaurant ads annually — about 19 per day — and nearly three-quarters of the messages promote fast food. Advertisers employ teams of food stylists and digital tools to render food irresistible. The images include the artful architecture of a hamburger, a perfect circumference of cheesy pizza or cascading colorful nachos or French fries.
Hagen examined how classical aesthetics used in food presentation skews perception. Features such as symmetry, patterns, order and balance are hallmarks of classical beauty because they mimic nature. Think spider webs or honeycombs, a starfish or sunsets, butterfly wings or fish scales. Food looks pretty when it copies naturelike features. Moreover, previous neuroscience research suggests viewing delectable food images activates the brain’s gustatory cortex, essentially simulating the food’s pleasurable taste.
Existing models, such as our possessions and sequences framework, allow us to segment and analyse passages of play with descriptive metrics such as passes per sequence and direct speed. However, this only gives us a high-level overview of a team’s style or a player’s involvement and it is often too complex to group similar sequences together for deeper analysis.
Movement chains give us a whole new layer of detail.
Movement chains describe the pattern of four consecutive player involvements in an uninterrupted passage of play by displaying the locations of the first touches of the players involved, where a player can be involved more than once within the chain. The first touch of each player involvement in a movement chain is referred to as a node.