… “I was like, oh wow, the little things that I do, guys will notice it,” Iguodala, who now plays for the Miami Heat, told FOX Sports in a wide-ranging interview.
Something clicked for Iguodala that night.
He started devoting himself to the things that don’t show up on stat sheets. He became an assassin who unravels teams before they notice the loose threads of their own vulnerability.
Chelsea have stabilized their form under new manager Thomas Tuchel, who replaced Frank Lampard on Jan. 26. The reworked Blues have been unbeaten since, winning six games and drawing three in all competitions, but much of the positivity has been lacking one person in particular: Christian Pulisic.
The USMNT international, who has battled injuries and form all season long, has only played 192 minutes under Tuchel, despite them having a prior working relationship together at Borussia Dortmund. Pulisic, whose contract runs until 2024, is not thinking of leaving, but on Feb. 19, Tuchel made the bizarre proclamation that “no decisions” have yet been made over the club’s summer business or Pulisic’s status at Stamford Bridge. “He proved in many weeks that he has the level to be a Chelsea regular player, to have a big impact in this club,” Tuchel said. “It’s a challenge now to hold this level, to improve and to maintain the level and keep improving.”
Roger Federer never contemplated retirement as he spent 13 months on the sidelines due to double knee surgery last year and the 39-year-old says he is now pain-free and ready to play again with a feeling that his story is not over yet.
Athletes train to improve strength and endurance to demonstrate maximum performance during competitions. Training methods vary but most focus on strength, endurance, or both. Concurrent training is a combination of two different modes of training. In this study, we combined resistance exercise (RE) and high‐intensity interval exercise (HIIE) to investigate the influence of the order of the concurrent training on signal molecules on hypertrophy and glycolysis in the skeletal muscle. The phosphorylation levels of mechanistic target of rapamycin (mTOR) signals, p70 S6 kinase (p70S6 K), ribosomal protein S6 (S6), and glycogen synthase kinase beta (GSK‐3β) were significantly increased in the HIIE first group compared with the control group. The combined training course did not affect the glycogen content and expression levels of proteins concerning glycolytic and metabolic capacity, suggesting that a combination of HIIE and RE on the same day, with HIIE prior to RE, improves hypertrophy response and glycolysis enhancement. [full text]
When Jeff Burton began working with young hockey players in Bismarck, North Dakota, he was looking forward to the idea of being able to combine skill development with strength and conditioning expertise.
Sanford POWER Hockey Academy has since become an increasingly popular choice for those who want to get better at the sport.
“When I first started training kids in Bismarck, we had 40 or 50 participating,” said Burton, the Sanford Health head of hockey operations. “After two or three months that number turned into 150 kids really quick. And then that 150 kids became 350. The results are speaking for themselves.”
For motivation, there are multiple brain regions involved, but one in particular is the reward centre of the brain. It consists of two key areas: one called VTA (ventral tegmental area) and the other called nucleus accumbens (or NACC).
During pleasant activities, the VTA secretes a chemical called dopamine. Dopamine is called the molecule of pleasure – anything that feels enjoyable to us, it feels that way because of dopamine.
And different activities secrete different levels of dopamine. And the things which are enjoyable, such as our favourite food, or time with our loved ones, they secrete high levels of dopamine.
Interestingly, there is some research showing that actually in order to secrete more dopamine, we need unpredicted rewards.
Business Insider, Bartie Scott and Hillary Hoffower from
… The practice of tracking health metrics this closely, and purchasing the accessories to do so, has moved from locker rooms to living rooms over the last year. A category of apps, wearables, content, and workout equipment make up what’s known as the high-performance lifestyle (HPL) market, which has seen a boom during the pandemic as people with disposable income increasingly turned to tech to optimize their performance.
The last year has upended the the fitness industry’s status quo. Companies scrambled to keep up with the surge in at-home fitness, using artificial intelligence (AI) to offer personalized workouts and real-time feedback.
Fitness tech startups got the chance to snag a permanent foothold in the market. In 2020, they raised a record $2.3 billion, per CB Insights, a 30% increase from 2019.
North Carolina State University, NC State News from
North Carolina State University researchers took a step forward in the development of an armband that could track the heart’s electrical activity without requiring bulky wiring or sticky gel on the skin.
Specifically, the researchers determined the ideal placement for three electrodes in their band design, and how tightly the band needs to be worn, to best detect electrical signals from the heart.
The findings are the latest advance in a multi-institutional effort to develop an armband that takes electrocardiogram, or ECG, measurements in order to track heart rate. They are ultimately envisioning a device that could be worn as an arm sleeve throughout the day, powered by energy captured from body heat or movement.
… one way to study the effects of stress would be to study the presence of stress biomarkers in the body. But to detect such biomarkers, researchers need a sensor, which is where AFRL comes in.
“This project has come out of a lot of in-house collaborative work between the Materials and Manufacturing Directorate and 711th Human Performance Wing that focuses on molecular recognition and real-time monitoring,” said Project Lead Dr. Lawrence Drummy. “Drug and vaccine studies look for molecular recognition elements, such as antibodies, for a given target. We want to use similar types of molecular recognition in sensors that can identify hormones and neurotranmitters for monitoring Airman stress and fatigue in real-time, while also demonstrating they work in real-world conditions. That is the ultimate goal.”
… Michael Kennedy, an associate professor in kinesiology at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, has been interested in the effects of cold weather on lungs for more than a decade.
His curiosity comes from working as a wax technician for Canadian elite cross-country skiers in the early- to mid-2000s while he was still getting his PhD. He travelled with teams for months and noticed how breathing issues would worsen as the ski season wore on.
“By the time you got to national or the spring season races in March, they were hacking all the time, so they basically had chronic cough,” he said. “It’s not healthy to have chronic cough.”
The resumption of activity in a limited and controlled manner has offered a unique opportunity to evaluate how sports contribute to the spread of the coronavirus between teammates.
Do people from benefit from food labels? When? By how much? Public officials face persistent challenges in answering these questions. In various nations, they use four different approaches: they refuse to do so on the ground that quantification is not feasible; they engage in breakeven analysis; they project end-states, such as economic savings or health outcomes; and they estimate willingness-to-pay for the relevant information. Each of these approaches is subject to strong objections. In principle, the willingness-to-pay question has important advantages. But for those who favor asking that question, on the ground that it is the best way to measure the welfare effects of food labels, there is a serious problem. In practice, people often lack enough information to give a sensible answer to the question how much they would be willing to pay for (more) information. People might also suffer from behavioral biases (including present bias and optimistic bias). And when preferences are labile or endogenous, even an informed and unbiased answer to the willingness to pay question may fail to capture the welfare consequences, because people may develop new tastes and values as a result of information. A good path forward is to focus on the effects of food labels on people’s actual experience, in order to capture their welfare effects, rather than to rely on how much people are willing to pay for such labels, or on whether they report, in advance, that they favor them.
During this time last year, Kevin Stefanski was fully absorbed in curating an offensive playbook that would dictate one of the biggest questions he faced in his first season as the Browns’ head coach: Can he elevate the talented offensive weapons to a dominant level in 2020?
The answer was a resounding yes. Cleveland stacked one of its most successful offensive seasons in franchise history and nearly every player found a way to contribute and help end the franchise’s 18-year playoff drought.
Now, Stefanski is going back to work on improving the offense, a task that will require just as much work as his playbook creation duties one year ago.
“We have to, as coaches, really pull this thing apart and find ways to improve schematically,” he said Tuesday in a video call with local reporters. “We have to evolve, and I think that has been a big part of our process to date. I think also, as coaches, we have to get better. I have to be a better coach next year for this team and that is my goal.”
SB Nation, Beyond the Box Score blog, Kenny Kelly from
The NL Central is easily the worst division in baseball. There are four mediocre teams who each had a wide open door for a playoff berth, but each refused to step through it. The Reds nontendered players they had acquired in midseason trades. The Cubs are going to try Joc Pederson as an everyday player and they traded away Yu Darvish. The Brewers added Kolten Wong and stockpiled on buy-low players like Travis Shaw. The Cardinals fleeced the Rockies for Nolan Arenado, but they’d look much better with Wong. These four teams are essentially competing to see who gets eliminated by the Padres or the Dodgers in the Divisional Series.
Then there’s the Pirates who are competing for nothing in division that could be won with 88 wins according to PECOTA and 82 per FanGraphs’ playoff odds. FanGraphs gives the Pirates a 0.3 percent chance to make it to the postseason, and frankly, that seems high. That Pittsburgh could make it to the postseason in any simulation is really more of an indictment of the NL Central than anything.
Recent shifts in professional basketball have led teams to place more urgency in drafting as well as possible. Draft picks must play out their initial years under team-friendly contracts that provide teams with increased salary cap flexibility. Yet, while this urgency has led to widespread discussion and research of how to improve teams’ draft decisions, little attention has been given to identifying what teams can do to maximize the performance and potential of their draft picks once they are added to their roster. However, theories of learning and ecological psychology suggest that giving young players as much playing time as possible should lead to concrete improvements in their development and future performance. In this study, I test this causal theory by evaluating the relationship between the minutes a player receives in their first two seasons in the NBA and their fourth-year performance using a novel method of propensity score weighting that enables weighting for continuous treatment variables. I find that players who receive more minutes in their first two seasons have better fourth seasons and make larger jumps from their first two seasons to their fourth season, controlling for a broad set of potential confounders. These results have important implications for teams as they develop organizational strategies for the short- and medium-term.