I’m grateful for 5 a.m. wake-ups, run tests and practices in the cold. I’m grateful for screaming coaches, competing for playing time and losing games. While these aren’t typical highlights of a field hockey player’s career I’ve learned to embrace them just for the simple fact that they exist and the lessons they have taught me. I will never take for granted any aspect of this amazing sport due to the perspective I have gained over the years.
At 10 years old I first started playing club field hockey in my home state of New Hampshire. My journey began when I met a Boston College field hockey player who coached me at their annual summer camp. Her name was Chelsey Feole and she told me that she was starting her own club program and I recognized what a great opportunity it would be.
Approaching his 36th birthday in February, Cristiano Ronaldo has no intention of slowing down.
“I still feel good, sharp and in a good moment in my life,” the Juventus and Portugal star said in a video interview. “I hope to play many, many years more, but you never know.”
The forward still has another full season on his contract at Juventus, expiring in 2022 when retirement won’t be considered.
Sleep doesn’t get the respect it deserves. Not getting enough sleep is a common concern among both adults and children. This lack of sleep can have a real impact on mental well-being. New research shows a lack of sleep impacts fear regulation, potentially increasing stress and anxiety.
I am often asked if the 80/20 rule of intensity balance applies to athletes who train at very low volumes. It’s a fair question. We know that low-intensity exercise doesn’t do a lot of good in small amounts, whereas high-intensity exercise does. It is plausible therefore that, below a certain volume threshold, doing less than 80 percent of one’s training at low intensity will yield better results than sticking to the 80/20 rule.
A new study by Luca Festa of the University of Verona and colleagues addresses this question—sort of. The subjects were recreational runners with at least four years of experience. For eight weeks, half of them followed a “polarized” training program in which 77 percent of training was done at low intensity, 3 percent at moderate intensity, and 20 percent at high intensity, while the other half maintained a 40/50/10 intensity split (“focused endurance training”). Volume was adjusted to ensure that the total training load (intensity and volume combined) was equal for the two groups. This required runners in the polarized group to run slightly more than runners in the focused endurance group, though volume was quite low in both groups, averaging out to 3.73 hours per week and 3.1 hours per week, respectively.
Oura’s smart ring could help detect COVID-19 infections before noticeable symptoms show up — and earlier than other methods — thanks to its ability to continuously monitor body temperature, according to a University of California, San Francisco study.
Why it matters: Earlier detection, especially of those without symptoms, could spur people who may be infected to get tested and self-isolate, crucial steps in slowing the coronavirus’ spread as the pandemic worsens in the U.S.
Between the lines: Because the smart ring continuously monitors vitals, researchers found, it can spot when someone’s temperature is running higher than the normal range of fluctuations around their personal baseline, even if they’re not running an objectively high fever.
A smart shirt for athletes that will examine the work of the heart and muscle activity, analyse temperature and perspiration during exercise has been developed by scientists from the Military University of Technology.
Working with an app that records the course of training, the route of walking, running or cycling, the shirt can also help users to compete online with other athletes.
The technology developed by a team led by Dr. Mariusz Chmielewski, and in the digital part by Dr. Tadeusz Sondej, is being developed in cooperation between the university and the company NUTPro, responsible for its commercialisation.
OnePlus fans have been demanding a smartwatch from the company for years now, and 2021 will be the year that finally delivers it. Before that happens, though, the “OnePlus Band” fitness tracker is reportedly set to debut.
The folks over at Android Central report that sometime in Q1 2021, OnePlus will release a fitness tracker that will be called the “OnePlus Band.” This is apparently a separate device from the company’s upcoming smartwatch offering a fitness-focused, barebones experience.
The current technology used to monitor an athlete’s performance ranges from small wearable fitness trackers to elaborate clinical monitoring equipment. Fitness trackers are compact and lightweight but can only collect data from a single point, which is insufficient to generate meaningful insights. Clinical monitoring equipment uses multiple sensors to capture data from various points on the athlete’s body but is mired in tangles of wires and is too bulky to be used outdoors. Now, a team of researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) Institute for Health Innovation and Technology has developed a smartphone-powered suit capable of providing athletes with physiological data such as their posture, running gait, and body temperature while they are out on the field. Assistant Professor John Ho, PhD, led the team.
The smart suit is made up of web-like circuitry, the pattern of which was designed to relay electromagnetic signals from a nearby smartphone to sensors on the body as far as a meter away; the inductive patterns act as hubs at strategic locations. Custom-made sensors placed at those hubs can transmit data back to the smartphone and are powered by the smartphone’s NFC chip, removing the need for batteries. This reduces a significant amount of weight while enabling the collection of data from multiple areas on the body with minimal impact on the athlete’s performance.
A team of researchers led by Michigan State University’s Changyong Cao has created stretchable energy-storage devices using a specialized printing technology, innovative materials and the centuries-old art of origami.
Developing such malleable energy devices will help existing wearable technologies, such as smart watches, become more flexible, comfortable and reliable. But Cao, director of the Soft Machines and Electronics Laboratory, also is envisioning new possibilities empowered by his research.
For example, he’s working toward smart textiles to monitor athletes’ vital signs during games, electronic skins to restore some sense of touch for people using prosthetics and smart implants that can track patients’ health while helping support it.
The NBA G League is focusing on Orlando’s Disney World campus as a bubble site for the 2021 season, according to The Athletic’s Shams Charania.
There will be 18 teams participating in the season, and 11 that are not. The Toronto Raptors’ affiliate, Raptors 905, will be one of the teams bound for Orlando (as the parent club plays its games nearby in Tampa).
The American Hockey League remains on course to start its season in early February.
What that actually looks like in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic remains to be seen.
AHL president and CEO Scott Howson said in a statement Wednesday the league’s board of governors “has approved the structural framework” for a schedule slated to begin Feb. 5 — the same target date announced in late October.
The sudden collapse of Florida basketball player Keyontae Johnson this month deepened Adama Washington’s belief of what spared her daughter from the same fate — if not death.
Demi Washington, a sophomore basketball player at Vanderbilt, announced on Twitter Dec. 7 she would miss the rest of the season. She disclosed she had been diagnosed with myocarditis, a potentially fatal inflammation of the heart that has been linked to COVID-19.
It was detected by a cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) exam after three other tests failed to uncover any abnormality, according to Adama Washington. Yet the cardiac MRI exam she said that may have saved her daughter is not mandated by most college conferences, with the Big Ten and Big 12 being the only Power Five conferences to require the test be administered to athletes who test positive for COVID-19.
Royal Philips (NYSE: PHG, AEX: PHIA), a global leader in health technology, and BioIntelliSense, Inc. [1], a continuous health monitoring and clinical intelligence company, today announced they have been selected by the U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command (USAMRDC) to receive nearly USD 2.8 million from the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) through a Medical Technology Enterprise Consortium (MTEC) award to validate BioIntelliSense’s FDA-cleared BioSticker device for the early detection of COVID-19 symptoms. The goal of the award is to accelerate the use of wearable diagnostics for the benefit of military and public health through the early identification and containment of pre-symptomatic COVID-19 cases.
Working with the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, the clinical study will consist of 2,500 eligible participants with a recent, known COVID-19 exposure and/or a person experiencing early COVID-19 symptoms. Individuals may learn more about the study eligibility and enrol online at www.BioStickerCOVIDstudy.com. The research will focus on the validation of BioIntelliSense’s BioSticker for early detection of COVID-like symptoms, as well as assessment of scalability, reliability, software interface, and user environment testing.
What looks like a thin pack of gum is attached to Braden Schneider’s event credential at the world junior hockey championship.
It’s a beacon providing both contact tracing capability should the Canadian defenseman test positive for COVID-19 and a warning if he stands too close to someone else for too long.
“It’s a mandatory thing to make sure we’re all safe in these times,” Schneider said. “If that’s one of the things we have to do, we’re very privileged and lucky to even get the chance to come here and play.”
TraceSafe’s wearable technology is Hockey Canada’s extra layer of defense against the spread of the virus at the 12-day, 10-nation tournament, in addition to the same cellphone app the NHL used in its Edmonton and Toronto playoff bubbles earlier this year.
… Society yearns for normalcy. Recapturing it will depend on widespread vaccine acceptance. And vaccine acceptance, experts say, is something sports figures can help foster in a variety of ways. Skepticism is diminishing, but still substantial. So throughout 2021, public messaging campaigns will persuade skeptics to roll up their sleeves. And athletes, says Steven Hoffman, a York University professor who has studied the subject, “actually might be [some] of the very best and most effective messengers.”
Most campaign planning remains in early stages, with vaccine availability to the general public still months away. But several city and state health departments told Yahoo Sports that sports figures will “definitely” or likely be involved. Spokesmen for two prominent college coaches said the coaches will be willing to participate. Adam Silver has said the NBA will “very likely be part of some public service campaigns.”