… She has raced three times since February 2020, when she dropped out at mile 21 of the U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials in Atlanta. Sisson, whose marathon best is 2:23:08, came into the Trials as a top contender to make the Tokyo Games, but the brutally hilly course and relentless wind that day took a toll. Afterward she felt beat up and defeated.
“Usually how I get back after bad races is to just jump into the next one,” she said. “But Ray said that losing this year of racing could just add time to the end of my career if I invest in getting stronger and learning how to correct my weaknesses. It took four months before I started feeling all right again after the Trials.”
With the help of her husband and often training partner, Shane Quinn, she’s looked at more videos and photos of her running form. They had noticed that it was not the same as it was before her 26,2-mile debut at the 2019 London Marathon. It seemed like her quads were the culprit, she said.
More than half of the players on the Vancouver Canucks have tested positive for COVID-19, a source confirmed to ESPN. Two more names were added to the team’s COVID-19 protocol list on Sunday, bringing the total up to 16.
Some players are symptomatic, and according to several sources there are a few who are in “rough shape.” One Canucks player told ESPN he hadn’t heard from a team representative about any players going to the hospital, but he had heard of teammates receiving IV treatments for severe dehydration, presumably at their homes. A source told ESPN that at least three Canucks coaches have tested positive for the virus as well. In addition, many family members of players have tested positive and are experiencing symptoms, according to sources.
Load management, that dubious term coined by the Sixers and synonymous with Joel Embiid, has infiltrated the Flyers.
Coach Alain Vigneault indicated Friday he’s in constant communication with the Flyers’ sports science people, and their input is important during the NHL’s condensed 56-game season. Of course, there’s not much the Flyers can do when COVID outbreaks result in postponements creating more back-to-back games.
“They tell us that when we’re in red, players are more susceptible to injury, that fatigue is going to show on the ice,” Vigneault said of the sports science staff. “Everybody in our league this year has been in red 90 percent of the time. We were in red the whole month of March. It’s something that I’ve never seen before and it’s going to come up again. On Monday we’re starting five (games) in seven (days). So, it’s very hard, impossible to control the loads.”
… If you’ve ever silently repeated a phone number to memorize it, replayed a conversation imagining what you should have said, or verbally coached yourself through a problem or skill, then you’ve employed your inner voice. Most people rely on and benefit from theirs every day. And when they disconnect from the present, it’s often to converse with that voice or hear what it has to say—and it can have a lot to say.
Although the inner voice functions well much of the time, it often leads to chatter—the cyclical negative thoughts and emotions that turn our singular capacity for introspection into a curse rather than a blessing. This often happens precisely when we need our inner voice the most—when our stress is up, the stakes are high, and we encounter difficult emotions that call for the utmost poise. Sometimes this chatter takes the form of a rambling soliloquy; sometimes it’s a dialogue we have with ourselves. Sometimes it’s a compulsive rehashing of past events (rumination); sometimes it’s an angst-ridden imagining of future events (worry). Sometimes it’s a free-associative pinballing between negative feelings and ideas. Sometimes it’s a fixation on one specific unpleasant feeling or notion. However it manifests itself, when the inner voice runs amok and chatter takes the mental microphone, our mind not only torments but paralyzes us. It can also lead us to do things that sabotage us.
When we think about sports psychology, we typically think about how we can best prepare athletes to perform at their best in competition, and to be in a state of mental wellbeing across their careers. However, in doing so, we miss out a crucial person in the athlete development process: the coach. Coaches spend a lot of time with their athletes, and so can be a massive influence; they are also, in their own right, “performers” who can (and do) strive to be elite, just like their athletes.
As a result, we need to consider coaches as “performers in their own right”, who, like athletes, have to perform under pressure in an uncertain environment, regularly deal with disappointment and adversity, and are subject to high expectations—from themselves, their athletes, and their employers.
An important paper in this area, published in 2017, explores the psychological attributes underpinning elite sports coaching.
… “Resilience training is critical because our children are subject to substantial amounts of stressors and without those tools one of the natural responses is to feel helpless, hopeless, anxious or depressed,” said Dr. Tim Wilens, chief of child and adolescent psychiatry at MGH and one of the founders of the Child Resiliency Program. “By teaching them resilience, we are giving kids tools to function better in the world.”
Wilens said that resiliency training needs to include different techniques so that kids can find which ones resonate for them. This means interventions like mindfulness and meditation that are focused on dampening your physiological stress response, coping skills to better navigate feelings and cognitive behavioral interventions, which are based on identifying feelings and better managing the responses.
… The last year has seen many of us take our fitness into our own hands and into our own homes. We’re working from home and we’re working out at home.
Not surprisingly we’re buying more fitness wearables and we’re demanding more from them. “Wellbeing, fitness and activity tracking became a priority for many,” says Leo Gebbie, Senior Analyst for Wearables and XR at CCS Insight, about the Covid-19 pandemic.
By measuring a person’s movements and poses, smart clothes developed at MIT CSAIL could be used for athletic training, rehabilitation, or health-monitoring for elder-care facilities.
Sports footwear firm inov-8 has unveiled the world’s first running shoe to use a graphene-enhanced foam in the sole, bucking the widespread trend for carbon-plate technology and doubling the industry standard for longevity.
Developed in collaboration with graphene experts at The University of Manchester, the cushioned foam, called G-FLY™, features as part of inov-8’s new trail shoe, the TRAILFLY ULTRA G 300 MAX™, designed for ultramarathon and long-distance runners.
Tests have shown the foam delivers 25% greater energy return than standard EVA foams and is far more resistant to compressive wear. It therefore maintains optimum levels of underfoot bounce and comfort for much longer.
The body naturally and continuously secretes sweat for thermoregulation during sedentary and routine activities at rates that can reflect underlying health conditions, including nerve damage, autonomic and metabolic disorders, and chronic stress. However, low secretion rates and evaporation pose challenges for collecting resting thermoregulatory sweat for non-invasive analysis of body physiology. Here we present wearable patches for continuous sweat monitoring at rest, using microfluidics to combat evaporation and enable selective monitoring of secretion rate. We integrate hydrophilic fillers for rapid sweat uptake into the sensing channel, reducing required sweat accumulation time towards real-time measurement. Along with sweat rate sensors, we integrate electrochemical sensors for pH, Cl−, and levodopa monitoring. We demonstrate patch functionality for dynamic sweat analysis related to routine activities, stress events, hypoglycemia-induced sweating, and Parkinson’s disease. By enabling sweat analysis compatible with sedentary, routine, and daily activities, these patches enable continuous, autonomous monitoring of body physiology at rest. [full text]
AnyVision, a world-leading vision AI platform company, announced that the New Orleans Saints, a team in the National Football League (NFL), partnered with AnyVision to keep players and staff safe by providing secure, seamless access to its practice facilities.
Covid-19 has accelerated technological innovation in sports, though the adaptation of new technologies has transformed the industry long before the pandemic. Many professional sports teams, like the New Orleans Saints, use facial recognition technology to enable players and staff to quickly and conveniently access locker rooms or training facilities without having to stop or slow down.
… Stakeholders within the game will welcome a return to the more traditional elements that have shaped the sport. The lively crowds should come back next season and restore the atmosphere that makes college basketball one of the most exciting sports in the country. Apart from that, however, coaches, players and administrators are currently debating whether some of the changes this season, such as creative scheduling, could enhance the game in the future.
Schools were forced to shred their schedules in 2020-21 as conferences focused on solidifying their league slates and avoiding unnecessary risks from traveling or hosting nonconference matchups. That disruption, however, also created opportunities. Teams began to schedule games on the fly, sometimes with just a few days’ notice.
ESPN, Women's College Basketball, Andrea Adelson and Heather Dinich from
In 2013, Val Ackerman compiled an exhaustive report on the state of women’s basketball for the NCAA. Known as the “Division I Women’s Basketball White Paper,” the account was filled with concerns from those she interviewed over a span of six months and detailed recommendations to market and usher the sport into 2020.
… The benefit that fans bring is not the only explanation for the boon that accrues to home teams. It could also come from the effects of travel on the visiting opponents, the local teams’ familiarity with the venue or territoriality—a defensive response to the invasion of one’s home. Territoriality is commonly seen in animals, but researchers have found that soccer players’ testosterone levels rise more before home games than away ones, suggesting the phenomenon may also play a role in sports.
Determining the degree of these factors’ influence persists as a challenge because it is difficult to test their effects experimentally, says Daniel Memmert, a sports scientist at the German Sport University Cologne. He and his colleagues decided to take advantage of the opportunity to undertake a natural social science experiment—a large stretch of audience-free matches afforded by the pandemic—to assess how much the presence of fans influenced the outcomes of games.