For now the season debut of Celtics point guard Kemba Walker remains in a holding pattern.
The Celtics haven’t played a game in nearly a week thanks to the recent rash of coronavirus cases that continues to cause postponements across the league. Walker would love to provide the team with an available body, but for now the All-Star point guard isn’t rushing his return.
“I’m definitely going to make the best decision for myself, but honestly I’m feeling pretty good right now,” Walker said. “I know I did say I was feeling really good the last time before the bubble, which I was. But it was just the timing in between just wasn’t really beneficial for me.”
Sometimes when Shelby Houlihan and Karissa Schweizer go out for an easy run together, it turns into a tempo run by accident. They talk about American records they want to set and Olympic medals they want to win. Before they even realize it, their pace has turned into something…not easy.
“We hype each other up in these conversations,” Schweizer says, as Houlihan adds, “We’re good with each other like that. We just keep feeding off each other. We just look at each other like, ‘Yeah, I think we can do this.’”
… Rapinoe will turn 36 and Lloyd 39 in July, the month the Tokyo Olympics are scheduled to open. Neither is likely to stick around for the next World Cup in 2023, so both want to make the most of whatever playing time they have left.
“From a very selfish and personal standpoint,” said Rapinoe, “there was so much positive that came from this long layoff. I don’t think I’ve been this rested my entire career.” Rapinoe spent much of 2020 quarantining with fiancée Sue Bird, an 11-time WNBA all-star.
“I actually feel really good physically and just refreshed in a lot of ways, mentally and emotionally. But I’m obviously so excited to start playing again. It was really difficult to not be out on the field with my teammates, and to not have a consistent training environment.”
When we experience a new event, our brain records a memory of not only what happened, but also the context, including the time and location of the event. A new study from MIT neuroscientists sheds light on how the timing of a memory is encoded in the hippocampus, and suggests that time and space are encoded separately.
Objective: To examine the effects of training intensity and environmental condition on the hydration status of Elite football players. Methods: Eleven elite football players completed three training sessions of varying intensity in cool (12°C) and warm (23°C) environments. Training demands was measured by Global Positioning System, sweat rate and sweat sodium concentration were measured using dermal patches and body mass change. Results: Warm condition increased sweat rate (0.9 ± 0.3 vs 1.7 ± 0.3 L.h-1, P<0.001), fluid intake (0.7 ± 0.1 vs 1.5 ± 0.2 L, P<0.001), total sodium loss (1405 ± 340 vs 2946 ± 958 mg, P<0.001) and total sweat loss (1.4 ± 0.5 vs 2.5 ± 0.4 L, P<0.001) compared to cool. Training intensity increased sweat sodium concentration (16.1 ± 6.6 vs 54.6 ± 22.2 mmol.L-1, P<0.001) and sodium loss (779 ± 231 vs 1405 ± 340 mg) in both environmental conditions. Total sweat loss and sodium loss were positively correlated with total distance covered (r=0.48, P=0.005 and r=0.4, P=0.023, respectively), meanwhile sodium loss was also positively correlated with the total number of high-intensity efforts (r=0.35, P=0.045). Conclusions: The results show that training load and environmental condition have a major impact on the hydration status of elite football players, hence hydration strategies should be developed accordingly.
Sleep scientists have found lots of benefits for naps. Napping can help to reduce stress, boost the immune system and improve our mood. Post-lunch naps can help us to stay alert and improve our performance at work, and there’s even evidence, albeit from small studies, supporting the ‘nappuccino’, where people drink coffee just before a nap – and reportedly wake up feeling recharged from the combination of caffeine and sleep.
Despite all this, naps are not for everyone. Many people wake up feeling groggy. This state is known as ‘sleep inertia’, and it’s more likely to happen when we nap for longer than 20 minutes. It’s not known exactly what causes sleep inertia, but it may involve a molecule called adenosine, which builds up in our brain during waking hours, and decreases during sleep.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how sport science has changed in the past few years. Most sports have invested heavily in sport science, and coupled with a boom in the use of technology to measure performance there is real depth of knowledge in sport science in some sports. There are also an increasing number of data analysts plying their trade in sport, sometimes without deep discipline or practical knowledge in the sport or sport sciences. These analysts answer the questions asked of them within sports, but may lack the awareness to bring new ideas from other sports. It is thus really easy to get on the collect, analyse, report data treadmill in servicing a sport, with a resulting lack of time to invest in raising the gaze to seek a broader perspective.
We have increasingly become specialists in our sport. But to borrow some sporting cliché’s we need balance in our team, and all-rounders can sometimes be the pivotal players that can change the outcome of a match. In a world of specialists there is clear strength in having the capacity for a helicopter view of performance across many sports. Instead of re-inventing the wheel, there just might be a perfect wheel already developed in a different sport.
… Adia Barnes sweated out every moment that passed. One of the UA coach’s worst fears — that her team would be exposed, get sick and knocked out of a promising season — seemed to be happening.
The Pac-12’s new tracking device kept it from becoming a full-blown nightmare. The Wildcats wear SafeTags, a device that times how long people are in close contact with each other.
To contact-trace, the Wildcats downloaded information from the electronic chips at a docking station and simply read the data. They learned that CU’s two presumed positive players included a shooter who stayed in the corner on most of the Buffaloes’ offensive sets and a bench player.
“It’s just cool to see that data and be able to feel safe,” UA senior Sam Thomas said. “It’s really nice to know, if someone does, gosh forbid, catch it from someone we played with, we’re able to … track everything to be as safe as you can.”
At first glance the silicone wristband could be mistaken for one that tracks your heart rate when you are doing exercise.
However, the wearable technology, called a Moodbeam, isn’t here to monitor your physical health. Instead it allows your employer to track your emotional state.
The gadget, which links to a mobile phone app and web interface, has two buttons, one yellow and one blue. The idea is that you press the yellow one if you are feeling happy, and the blue one if you are sad.
University of Copenhagen, Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research from
Scientists at the University of Copenhagen have performed the most in-depth analysis of fast and slow twitch muscle fibers and the different ways they respond to exercise. Their novel approach uses large scale protein analysis of freeze-dried muscle samples, which opens the door for new analyses of muscle samples that are located in freezers around the world.
I’ve spent two decades as a researcher and educator in artificial intelligence, drawn to the field by the opportunity to explore the mysteries of perception and cognition. But life is rarely as simple as we’d like, and the arc of my career has paralleled my mother’s escalating health struggles, including a chronic, life-threatening cardiovascular condition. As all-consuming as the world of academia can be, it sometimes feels as if I’ve spent as much time in hospitals as I have in my lab.
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I’m happy to report my mother continues to persevere, but her resilience hasn’t been the only silver lining to this ordeal. Years spent in the company of nurses and doctors—unfailingly committed, but perpetually overworked and often sleep deprived—convinced me that the power of AI could radically elevate the way care is delivered. Intelligent sensors could keep tireless watch over patients, automate time-consuming tasks like charting and transcription, and identify lapses in safety protocols as they happen. After all, if AI can safely guide cars along freeways at 70 miles per hour, I wondered, why can’t it help caregivers keep up with the chaos of the healthcare environment?
At the heart of this idea was an obstacle, however. I was proposing research that extended beyond the limits of computer science and into an entirely different field, with decades of literature and traditions stretching back generations. It was clear I needed a collaborator—not just an authority in healthcare, but one with the patience and open-mindedness to help an outsider bring something new to the table. For the first time in my career, success would depend on more than the merits of my work; it would require the humility of researchers like me to recognize the boundaries of our knowledge, and the graciousness of experts in another discipline to help us overcome them.
Urban Meyer is older and wiser, which he says should help keep him healthier as he tries to turn around one of the NFL’s worst franchises.
Meyer’s health scares while he was the head coach at Florida and Ohio State — which were exacerbated by the stresses of running major programs and the immense pressure he put on himself to win — forced him to step away from the game. But the Jacksonville Jaguars’ new head coach says he has learned from those experiences and a new approach will help him avoid further problems.
Winter high school sports will resume on Tuesday with practices, and games no sooner than Feb. 8, as the state’s the two-month long pause on team and club sports is expected to expire. Most athletes have not participated in large-group training, team practices or competitions since early November. For others, it’s been even longer.
With that pause in mind, some medical experts worry the extended layoff could lead to injuries if the athletes’ bodies aren’t prepared for the physical workload of a sports season.
“It’s a huge concern of ours,” said Dr. Alison Crepeau, an orthopedic surgeon and sports medicine physician at Connecticut Children’s Hospital. “In the pre-COVID world we always advocated for athletes to take a break from their sports. Now, we sort of got what we asked for, but a little too much of it.”
… A partial return to a modicum of normalcy in recent months has allowed Kreis and his staff to get to work. The U-23s are currently training alongside the senior USMNT in Florida. The chaotic 2020 vibes linger, though. MLS’s COVID and collective bargaining concerns have thrown the timing of the upcoming season into doubt and with it perhaps the potential club games that count for his domestic-based players prior to Olympic qualifying.
“It’s a really interesting situation,” Kreis told reporters in a conference call this week. “It feels like with this qualification process, it’s been one challenge after another, seems like there’s been one hurdle laid in front of us after another. And we just continue to step over them, so we’ll do the same with this.”
Against a difficult financial backdrop, in the midst of a global pandemic, the NCAA is going to try something unprecedented.
The association announced Jan. 4 that it would host the entire Division I men’s basketball tournament in central Indiana, even as the state reported 3,630 new cases of coronavirus and an additional 39 deaths, and saw a steady rise in the positivity rate from Dec. 23 through the early part of January. Those numbers have begun trending better recently.
The NCAA is taking what it hopes will be a once-in-a-lifetime approach to the 2021 tournament after last year’s tournament was shut down by COVID-19 before it could begin, costing the NCAA revenues approaching $1 billion.
Which is why, even given the unprecedented challenges, the wider public health situation and the fact that this has never been tried before, there exists a firm belief that the NCAA will, come hell or high water, find a way to make it happen.