On the football pitch, things happen quickly and players have seconds at best to take decisions and act upon them.
What separates the best players is often the ability to read the game quickly and respond accordingly by observing, thinking and executing.
Zlatan Ibrahimovic falls into this category and, despite his advancing years, is in great form, benefitting not only from his excellent physical conditioning but also a sharp mind that allows him to be one step ahead.
The AC Milan forward recently returned to international football with Sweden and has terrific peripheral vision and awareness, which allows him to situate himself quickly and have a map of the game in his head
… It would be impossible to outline what March 2020 to March 2021 meant to sports, to America or even the world. For Olympic athletes — whose opportunity on the world stage comes every four years — the past year involved a precarious dance between unending questions and cautious optimism. The Tokyo Olympics were postponed a year ago. On Thursday, finally, the torch relay began. This tumultuous year has given many athletes a chance to re-evaluate their priorities and purpose.
For three-time Olympic volleyball gold medalist Kerri Walsh Jennings, that meant moving to Nevada so she and her family could focus on building a more sustainable life for themselves. For diver David Boudia, this time meant perspective — that as much as the dream is to win an Olympic medal, nothing is as important as a healthy mind and body. And, for the U.S. women’s soccer team captain, Becky Sauerbrunn, it was about finding her voice as a new captain, and standing up for bigger systemic changes in America.
The short track speedskater the world got to know in 2018 as an effervescent 18-year-old making her Olympic debut in PyeongChang is now 21, and she’s as vivacious as ever. But with an Olympic year looming, she also has a plan.
“My focus, well, I’m trying to have my focus on being uncomfortable, and bringing that theme to everything — my racing skills, my speed, stuff like that,” she said. “That’s a good place for my mind to be right now. Be uncomfortable and go for it.”
For decades, scientists have looked to the behavior of the brain’s neurons to understand the nature of sleep. Now researchers at University of California San Francisco (UCSF) have confirmed that a different type of brain cell that has received far less study—astrocytes, named for their star-like shape—can influence how long and how deeply animals sleep. The findings could open new avenues for exploring sleep disorder therapies and help scientists better understand brain diseases linked to sleep disturbances, like Alzheimer’s and other dementias, the authors say.
“This is the first example where someone did an acute and fast manipulation of astrocytes and showed that it was able to actually affect sleep,” said Trisha Vaidyanathan, the study’s first author and a neuroscience graduate student at UCSF, in a release. “That positions astrocytes as an active player in sleep. It’s really exciting.”
Here is a late contender for the most obvious statement of the week: American professional sports are ridiculously competitive.
The margins at the top are tiny, the slightest of edges can separate triumph or heartbreak, and tactical blueprints are protected with a level of sophistication that would make a military commander proud. No news there.
Yet there is one element of the athletic sphere that manages to break down some of the traditional rivalries surrounding teams and organizations throughout the most popular leagues in the country.
Psychologist Ethan Kross calls it “chatter” — the inner monologue that works tirelessly to drag you down. Kross runs the Emotion and Self Control Lab at the University of Michigan, and he’s particularly interested in the voice in your head that is constantly self-critical, negative, afraid, counterproductive, or just plain annoying. The good news is that Kross, author of Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It, has studied your inner naysayer, and devised simple strategies for managing it. That’s why I invited Kross to join me for a recent episode of “How To!”
This weekend, the Houston, Michigan, UCLA and Villanova men’s basketball teams are competing in the Sweet 16 of the NCAA tournament in Indianapolis. The schools are in different conferences and have rarely played each other through the years, but they share at least one commonality. They are among the more than 100 college athletic departments and professional sports franchises that use Sparta Science in their training regimens.
Sparta, a Menlo Park, Calif., technology firm, offers a combination of hardware and software that allows teams to identify their players’ risk of sustaining various injuries and tailor training programs to increase the probability of avoiding such injuries.
The assessment only takes a minute or two. Players perform six consecutive vertical jumps on a force plate, which resembles a bathroom scale, measures the forces exerted on the ground and gathers data. They can also balance with one foot or get into a plank position on the scale. Sparta’s artificial intelligence and machine learning software then analyzes the results, compares it to tens of thousands of other scans in the company’s cloud database and displays what injuries players are susceptible to and what exercises they could do to help prevent them.
… cuff blood pressure monitoring, whether in a health setting or at home, isn’t convenient for many reasons: it can’t be taken at night, might elevate blood pressure levels when the cuff inflates and could be difficult to wear during the day for those who work, are on-the-move, disabled people or older adults.
This is why wearable tech companies are developing methods that could make a reading as simple and unobtrusive as wearing a fitness tracker-style device on your wrist that takes measurements throughout the day – less stress, no cuff.
Musculoskeletal simulations are useful in biomechanics to investigate the causes of movement disorder, to estimate non-measurable physiological quantities or to study the optimality of human movement. We introduce Bioptim, an easy-to-use Python framework for biomechanical optimal control, handling musculoskeletal models. Relying on algorithmic differentiation and the multiple shooting formulation, Bioptim interfaces nonlinear solvers to quickly provide dynamically consistent optimal solutions. The software is both computationally efficient (C++ core) and easily customizable, thanks to its Python interface. It allows to quickly define a variety of biomechanical problems such as motion tracking/prediction, muscle-driven simulations, parameters optimization, multiphase problems, etc. It is also intended for real-time applications such as moving horizon estimation and model predictive control. Six contrasting examples are presented, comprising various models, dynamics, objective functions and constraints. They include data-driven simulations (i.e., a multiphase muscle driven gait cycle and an upper-limb real-time moving horizon estimation of muscle forces) and predictive simulations (i.e., a muscle-driven pointing task, a twisting somersault with a quaternion-based model, a position controller using external forces, and a multiphase torque-driven maximum-height jump motion). [full text]
This is one of my favorite stats to look at in football for two reasons:
1- Player availability is the #1 determinant of success in sports. Mentally tough, driven, resilient athletes drive team success.
2-It is an all-encompassing stat reflecting the coordinated efforts of sport coaches, sports med, S&C, sport science, nutrition, etc. Shout out to @makennahsdad
@UA_CoachBallou
@RVick83
@Bobby23feeback
@gsell_jeremy
and all the Drs and support staff for such a positive impact!
… “For six months, we had amazing athletes, like Julie Chu, Hilary Knight and Kendall Coyne eating at our dinner table and cheering for our four kids at their youth sports events,” Boynton said. “That was our family’s first taste of elite women’s hockey, and we were hooked.” He added that he and his wife are committed to “addressing some of the persistent inequities [in women’s hockey] that are all too visible.”
The NWHL, which began in 2015, made the important decision last year to reorganize. It began a transformation from a single-entity league, where the league owns all of the franchises (like the XFL and the early years of MLS), to the more common joint venture pro league model, with individually owned franchises. Boynton called the decision an organic part of the NWHL’s natural evolution.
“Most of the new [sports] leagues that have been formed in the past 20 years,” he noted, “took the form of single-entity because it was easier and safer. Easier because one group of investors with sufficient capital can get the whole thing going—think XFL—and safer because single entities are less exposed to antitrust claims than joint venture leagues.”
Imagine you’re at a soccer game, and just as the opening whistle blows, the power cuts out. The stadium goes black. Eventually someone rigs up a single spotlight and the game goes on, but the light can only follow the ball. You can see who’s making a pass or a tackle, but as for what the other 21 players are up to, you’re in the dark.
That’s basically what most soccer data looks like: clear information about what’s happening on the ball and a total blank everywhere else. For such a big, messy sport, that can be a problem. No less an authority than Johan Cruyff once said the test of a good player is: “What do you do during those 87 minutes when you don’t have the ball?”
… This year’s players were tasked with evaluating actual NFL defensive strategies deployed against the offense’s passing game and identifying “unique and [effective] approaches to measuring defensive performance on these plays,” according to the tournament website. They worked with NFL player tracking, called Next Gen Stats, which captures real time location data, speed, and acceleration for every player in every play. It works via radio-frequency ID tags placed, for example, on players’ shoulder pads, on officials, and even in the ball. Sensors around the stadium pick up the signals and track individual movements within inches.
[Sam] Walczak’s team found a better way to evaluate pass coverage by spotting whether the defensive team was playing “man” or “zone” defense and more accurately identifying which receiver each defender was assigned to cover.
Brighton & Hove Independent (UK), Logan MacLeod from
… I came across Packing last year while reading Christoph Bierman’s Football Hackers: The Science and Art of a Data Revolution.
In his book, Bierman explains Packing was created by former Bayer Leverkusen players Stefan Reinartz and Jens Hegeler back in 2015.
Reinartz was quoted as saying: “You need a pass giver and a pass recipient, to get into reasonably interesting spaces. You need someone drawing the ball and someone who plays the killer pass.”
… Big stories of the season — 1. Pitcher injuries, 2. Labor negotiations, 3. The return of Alex Cora and A.J. Hinch, 4. Tony La Russa is back. The industry is nervous about the health of pitchers after last season. A rash of injuries as spring training started to wind down only made it worse. With the collective bargaining agreement set to expire on Dec. 1, the future of the game will be an ongoing topic. That MLB and the Players Association couldn’t agree on something as easy as the universal DH was a bad omen. Cora and Hinch return to the game with only partial attendance allowed in most cities and fans kept away from dugouts. But there are sure to be some days they face vengeful crowds. Hinch’s Tigers play in Houston on April 12. La Russa and the White Sox feels like an all-or-nothing. Either the Hall of Famer’s credibility will bridge the gap with players decades younger or it will be a season of missed connections.