… Curry turns 33 on Sunday, an age at which most NBA players — especially guards — begin to slow down. And yet Curry is speeding up, carrying his team into playoff contention and threatening to stretch the prime of his career into new frontiers.
This sounded like fodder for a sports science expert, so The Chronicle contacted Dr. Marcus Elliott, the Harvard-educated founder and director of Peak Performance Project (known as P3) in Santa Barbara. Elliott studies elite athletes, including many NBA players, and advises them on strength and biomechanics.
He offered compelling data to convey pro basketball’s quickening pace: The average perimeter player, he said, creates 10% more lateral force than 10 years ago. Elliott also acknowledged aging: If a player doesn’t commit to extensive training, he said, it’s not unusual to see an 18% drop in power output (often measured with a vertical jump test to gauge power and explosiveness in an athlete’s legs) between ages 28 and 35.
Yahoo Sports, NBC Sports Bay Area, Marcus White from
Warriors star Klay Thompson’s goal is to return around opening night of the 2021-22 NBA season, but he knows getting back to his best will require some patience.
“I’ll be honest with you guys — I don’t expect to come back and [play] balls to the wall, 38 minutes a night, guarding the best player, running around 100 screens,” Thompson told reporters in a video conference Sunday, his first media availability since sustaining a torn Achilles in November.
“I’m gonna get to that point. I guarantee that. But I’ve talked to [Warriors director of sports medicine] Rick Celebrini about it a lot. It might be 20 minutes [a night] to start the season, 18 minutes [on a minutes] restriction. We’ll see where I’m at. This is usually a 12-month process with the Achilles, and that’ll take me to mid-November.”
Just as technology informed an evolution in pitching strategy and evaluation throughout MLB, it’s facilitated a crucial expansion of our understanding and appreciation for the other half of the battery. Catchers’ ability to win strikes and influence umpires by presenting pitches well on the edges of the strike zone has been quantified for over a decade and has become the top statistic teams and serious analysts use to evaluate defense behind home plate. Elite framers can create 20 runs of value in a season. There’s always been much more to being a catcher than meets even the careful eye, though, and that’s as true as ever.
Good catchers have to be singularly unselfish. The grueling nature of the position requires sacrificing playing time and health. They must be willing to sacrifice their own offensive potential to make their whole team better at preventing runs. A good catcher trades some time in the batting cage for extra prep time and scouting meetings with the pitching staff and coaches, and he practices his techniques for framing pitches, blocking balls in the dirt and throwing out would-be basestealers, all of which are demands on his time.
Recent developments in technology and engineering have provided novel solutions for monitoring health and performance, as well as assessing key variables that would not have been easily accessible a few years ago. Options include digital solutions for collecting self-reported data on physical activity, recovery, psychological readiness, or injury (Düking et al., 2018), measurement technologies for quantifying physiological variables (Khundaqji et al., 2020), wearable sensors for motion analysis (Sperlich et al., 2020), and technology-based approaches for performance and load quantification (Lutz et al., 2019). Moreover, customized algorithms and data analytics help to extract and visualize relevant metrics for effective coaching and athletes’ health protection (Rommers et al., 2020).
A close relationship between engineers, coaches, sports scientists, and medical professionals ensures the success of healthy sporting activity and the sustainable long-term development of athletes throughout their careers. This is especially true for winter sports and youth athletes.
New contact lens technology to help diagnose and monitor medical conditions may soon be ready for clinical trials.
A team of researchers from Purdue University worked with biomedical, mechanical and chemical engineers, along with clinicians, to develop the novel technology. The team enabled commercial soft contact lenses to be a bioinstrumentation tool for unobtrusive monitoring of clinically important information associated with underlying ocular health conditions.
… For the private ride last week, VeloNews members were each shipped a swag pack from Gatorade containing two Gx Sweat Patches, a customized bottle with their name on it, and Gatorade Gx Hydration Pods.
Then, the members joined a Zwift Meetup and a simultaneous Zoom video call to test the Sweat Patch and learn about the science behind it.
On the Zwift and Zoom ride were Dr. Matt Pahnke from the Gatorade Sports Science Institute and Xavi Cortadellas from Gatorade’s Design and Innovation team, along with Ben Delaney from VeloNews. In the first half of the ride, Dr Pahnke and Cortadellas talked about the concepts behind the Sweat Patch and how it can be used for cycling. Then in the second half of the 60-minute ride, VeloNews members got to ask questions about the Sweat Patch and the Gx App, and about the science of hydration in general.
Among the many rule changes Major League Baseball is experimenting with in the minors this year is the expansion of the use of the automated strike zone, which will be used in low Class A Southeast games.
The so-called “robo-umps” were first tried out in the Atlantic League and Arizona Fall League in 2019, and an MLB news release stated the ABS (automatic ball-strike system) will “assist home-plate umpires with calling balls and strikes, ensure a consistent strike zone is called and determine the optimal strike zone for the system.”
ESPN Men's College Basketball, Kevin Van Valkenburg from
f there was one truism about the NCAA men’s and women’s basketball tournaments prior to COVID-19, it’s that they felt — especially the opening weekend — like a shared American experience. Once the ball was tipped, the action was happening everywhere at once, in cities big and small, from sea to shining sea. A basketball fan watching a first-round game in Boise, Idaho, could feel connected — spiritually, emotionally and financially — to a fan watching a first-round game in Charlotte, North Carolina. The tournaments’ geographical diversity was, in a way, unifying.
What will happen to the energy of the tournaments when each event is compressed into one state over three weeks? How will limited attendance, limited travel and players’ sequestering in hotels so they can be tested rigorously each day for COVID-19 shape the outcome of one of America’s biggest and most lucrative sporting events? Will things go smoothly enough that the NCAA will actually be able to crown its champions?
… One of the leading causes of myocarditis is a viral infection, like influenza. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, fear grew as investigators sought to learn how the virus might impact myocarditis rates. Even though young athletes might be at lesser risk of COVID-19 outcomes, could this silent killer raise in prevalence?
The worry and early research into the myocarditis and COVID-19 link fueled debates over the resumption of NCAA athletics seasons. Smaller samplings in August and September showed astonishingly high rates of the potentially deadly disorder that led to athletic departments across the country to either opt out of sports, or reconsider plans to play.
But as more and more data became available, both through surveys and antidotal evidence, theories change to believe myocarditis may not actually be a huge byproduct of the virus.
After a workout, many of us reach for Gatorade or water, but brewers want you to consider beer as a post-exercise option. To make their brews more palatable for health-conscious drinkers, a growing number of beer makers are taking a cue from sports drinks and are adding electrolytes – and often reducing the calories and carbs.
Traditional average method underestimates peak physical demands. Thus, it would be recommendable to complement the average approach with an analysis of the most demanding scenarios.
… It is worth separating a strategy of building from the back, passing in your own penalty area, dropping a midfielder in and splitting the centre-backs so they are in no position to prevent goals, from errors. It may be a high-risk, high-reward approach which is increasingly important for those with genuine aspirations but some do it while minimising mistakes: John Stones, a defender who used to be coached by Arteta and was long accused of taking poor decisions in dangerous positions, has been virtually flawless this season.
There can be a cold, clinical element to Arteta. At times earlier this season, Arsenal seemed so structured that they were coached into sterility. But he is the perfectionist with wildly imperfect players. In particular, Arsenal seem more disposed to meltdowns, brain fades or otherwise inexplicable errors than anyone else.
They are closely correlated (R^2 = 0.88), but goal differential is the better measure of performance, and most deviation between the two is probably random variance.
… We have had professional men’s competitions that have existed for anywhere between a handful and over 100 years, and professional women’s competitions that have emerged when organisers can make (or at least hope to make) the economics add up. Any relationship between corresponding men’s and women’s leagues is at best superficial, and never genuinely sporting.
And yet there is a major and very familiar precedent for a combined sporting approach: the Olympic Games. No broadcaster rounds up a day’s action at the Games with separate women’s and men’s medal tables. The idea that such a split could be used as a means to have a serious discussion about a country’s sporting prowess (“Uzbekistan should be proud of the fact that they finished 7th in the men’s medal table in 2016 – above Australia and the Netherlands”) feels slightly absurd. Certainly in Britain, a women’s and men’s gold medal is treated with (at least very close) to equal public admiration and pride. Anyone trying to justify the existence of separate Men’s and Women’s Olympics would be laughed out of court.
