Fatigue is one of the most commonly reported symptoms to physicians worldwide. It is also one of the least specific symptoms out there, often offering no guidance to what the underlying problem is.
So, when we are concerned that Bayern Munich’s players are playing like they are tired or are suffering from fatigue, what are we really talking about? Is it just that they have not fully recovered from the last match? That the heavy schedule that they have undergone for the several months has worn the down? Or is it something else entirely? And perhaps more importantly, other than simple rest and importing a pile of new bodies to eat minutes, what can the team do about it?
… If the NBA can’t design a season to protect these players (and in fact is doing the opposite) teams need a plan better than hope. Smart teams will build in what the schedule will not: meaningful evidence-based rest. This does not mean two minutes of sitting on a folding chair before the quarter break, nor does it mean sitting Kawhi for the second night of back-to-backs.
This means getting out the calendar now and planning for top NBA starters to have breaks. Real rest. Long weekends are just the beginning. Behold the magical healing power of an entire week off.
It’s part of elite training for athletes in many sports, it has documented benefits, and it’s long overdue in basketball. This is a strange sport where players get slower, less explosive, and more injury prone as the season goes on.
Three years ago, fans had to fight to keep the Crew in Columbus. On the eve of MLS Cup, two stars were ruled out due to COVID-19. Yet the Crew’s future has never been brighter, and the present is looking pretty sharp, too, after the club overcame more adversity to win MLS Cup.
At the very beginning of her new book Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain, psychology professor Lisa Feldman Barrett writes that each chapter will present “a few compelling scientific nuggets about your brain and considers what they might reveal about human nature.” Though it’s an accurate description of what follows, it dramatically undersells the degree to which each lesson will enlighten and unsettle you. It’s like lifting up the hood of a car to see an engine, except that the car is you and you find an engine that doesn’t work at all like you thought it did.
For instance, consider the fourth lesson, You Brain Predicts (Almost) Everything You Do. “Neuroscientists like to say that your day-to-day experience is a carefully controlled hallucination, constrained by the world and your body but ultimately constructed by your brain,” writes Dr. Barrett, who is a University Distinguished Professor at Northeastern and who has research appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. “It’s an everyday kind of hallucination that creates all of your experiences and guides all your actions. It’s the normal way that your brain gives meaning to the sensory inputs from your body and from the world (called “sense data”), and you’re almost always unaware that it’s happening.”
People tend to feel like we’re reacting to what’s actually happening in the world. But what’s really happening is that your brain is drawing on your deep backlog of experience and memory, constructing what it believes to be your reality, cross-referencing it with incoming sense data from your heart, lungs, metabolism, immune system, as well as the surrounding world, and adjusting as needed.
Olfaction may play an important role in the motivation to seek voluntary exercise, according to a new study. The University of California, Riverside (UCR) researchers speculate that “individual differences of exercise habit may be accounted for by a differentiated perception of specific smells.”
Dogmatic individuals tend to form less accurate judgements thanks to a generic resistance to seeking out additional information, according to new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The findings shed new light on the cognitive underpinnings of dogmatic worldviews.
“We have never been so free to decide if we have enough evidence about something or whether we should seek out further information from a reliable source before believing it,” explained study author Lion Schulz, a doctoral researcher in the Department of Computational Neuroscience at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics.
If Casey Stoney is feeling the pressure of having guided Manchester United to the summit of the Women’s Super League in their second year in the top flight and third season of existence, then she is not showing it. “Pressure is a privilege,” says the 38-year-old. “If people are talking about you, if people are criticising you, it means that you’re doing something right.”
United have rapidly shifted from being outsiders to favourites heading into pretty much any game they play. “You’re always up against it when you play for Manchester United. As soon as you pull on that badge there’s not many that want you to win. But the standards are set now. Every single week there’s a pressure to achieve.”
Protect3d co-founders Kevin Gehsmann, Clark Bulleit and Tim Skapek began making customized 3D printed protective devices while they were still undergraduate engineering students at Duke University.
“It began as a series of projects using the skills we learned in our engineering classes and our experience as college football players to help our teammates,” said Skapek.
In the fall of 2018, Gehsmann, Bulleit and Skapek watched teammate Daniel Jones break his collarbone during a game. Using 3D scanning and printing, they created an anatomically fitting brace to act as a bridge over Jones’ collarbone. Jones returned to play three weeks after the injury and he’s now quarterback for the New York Giants.
Muscle injuries involve more than 30 % of injuries in professional football players. Even though in recent years the resources to reduce the risk of muscle injuries has increased, the tendency of suffering a hamstring injury (the most common one among football players) has increased around 4 % per year during the last 13 seasons in Europe. Because of that, the diagnosis becomes a key factor that can establish the time it takes for the player to return to play (RTP) and the risk of a possible relapse. In this respect, returning to the pitch quickly can increase the risk of relapse. For this reason, medical specialists employ different imaging techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in order to assess the prognosis and injury level.
Due to the lack of agreement on classifying the injuries and prognosis, currently, the discussion about the moment to predict the RTP in an optimum way is still on. In this way, it would be helpful to find tools that can complement the current imaging techniques to obtain more data for decision-making during injury recovery.
Based on previous studies (Detection of muscle gap by L-BIA in muscle injuries: Clinical prognosis. doi: 10.1088/1361-6579/aa7243) members of the FC Barcelona Medical Department have just published a study Differentiation Between Tendinous, Myotendinous and Myofascial Injuries by L-BIA in Professional Football Players (doi: 10.3389/fphys.2020.574124) where the L-BIA capability is assessed to distinguish muscle injuries according to the anatomical position following the histoarchitectural approach (A Histoarchitectural Approach to Skeletal Muscle Injury: Searching for a Common Nomenclature. doi: 10.1177/2325967120909090) according to tendon injuries at the myotendinous junction (MTJ) and the myofascial junction (MFJ). They also evaluate the capability of associating the injury severity, the prognosis of the return to play, and the changes in L-BIA 24 hours after the injury. The gold standard, employed to confirm the changes found in the L-BIA, has been the diagnostic imaging tests through magnetic resonance imaging.
CBD and the NFL have a long and complicated relationship. Fortunately, it looks like the NFL is finally coming around to recognizing the pain relief and inflammation benefits of cannabinoids like CBD and CBG (cannabigerol). Top NFL players have argued for years that the benefits of CBD for pain and inflammation relief far surpass the traditional pharmaceutical drugs they take to knock down the week in, week out aches and pains associated with being a professional football player. In fact, several players even started their own cannabis brands shortly after retirement for the specific purpose of marketing pain relieving therapeutic compounds.
Evaluative research of technological officiating aids in sports predominantly focuses on the respective technology and the impact on decision accuracy, whereas the impact on stakeholders is neglected. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate the immediate impact of the recently introduced Video Assistant Referee, often referred to as VAR, on the sentiment of fans of the English Premier League. We analyzed the content of 643,251 tweets from 129 games, including 94 VAR incidents, using a new variation of a gradient boosting approach to train two tree-based classifiers for text corpora: one classifier to identify tweets related to the VAR and another one to rate a tweet’s sentiment. The results of 10-fold cross-validations showed that our approach, for which we only took a small share of all features to grow each tree, performed better than common approaches (naïve Bayes, support vector machines, random forest and traditional gradient tree boosting) used by other studies for both classification problems. Regarding the impact of the VAR on fans, we found that the average sentiment of tweets related to this technological officiating aid was significantly lower compared to other tweets (-0.64 vs. 0.08; t = 45.5, p < .001). Further, by tracking the mean sentiment of all tweets chronologically for each game, we could display that there is a significant drop of sentiment for tweets posted in the periods after an incident compared to the periods before. A plunge that persisted for 20 minutes on average. Summed up, our results provide evidence that the VAR effects predominantly expressions of negative sentiment on Twitter. This is in line with the results found in previous, questionnaire-based, studies for other technological officiating aids and also consistent with the psychological principle of loss aversion. [full text]
… “Hearing comments like that motivates me,” [Jared] Porter said Monday after being introduced as New York’s general manager. “It shows a strong commitment from ownership who wants to win, who wants to put a winner on the field for the fan base in New York, and I completely align with that. It excites me. I want those expectations.”
In a news conference on Zoom that lasted nearly 50 minutes, Porter outlined his vision of emphasizing talent, flexibility, innovation and depth throughout the organization for a Mets team transforming under new owner Steve Cohen and president Sandy Alderson.
