… His involvement with the senior side meant that he was in and out of the “B team” earlier in the campaign, making just seven appearances for the third division side before Christmas.
However, a change of strategy has seen him start to play for the “B team” every week, allowing him to run into form. In his last three matches, he’s scored four times, helping the Garcia Pimienta’s side book their place in the playoffs for promotion to the second tier of Spanish football.
“Honestly, it’s not really easy to be in this position because as a soccer player you always want to be playing,” De la Fuente said in a news conference with American media on Wednesday.
Amber Neben’s Olympic story isn’t that at 46, she’s a decade or two older than the other women who are vying for a spot on the U.S.’ road team. It’s that, at 46, she wants to win a gold medal.
“I wouldn’t have committed for this long if I didn’t think I could,” Neben told VeloNews. “It would be the most special one because of everything I’ve overcome to this point. The challenge to get here, the wait time, the feeling that I might be breaking through. It would be really special.”
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Yale University, Yale Daily News student newspaper, Nader Granmayeh from
TJ Belanger, a member of Yale’s strength and conditioning team since 2017, is stepping up to become the department’s director of sports performance and student-athlete innovation.
Yale Athletics announced Belanger’s promotion in a release last Wednesday, putting Belanger in charge of the department’s strength and conditioning unit. In a phone interview with the News, Belanger said he will have the chance to pursue inventive ways to keep athletes performing at the top of their abilities. His promotion follows the departure of Tom Newman, Yale’s former director of student-athlete innovation and performance, earlier this year. Belanger told the News he served as an interim director for six weeks before the promotion.
… “We’re beyond excited to bring in someone like Andrea Hudy,” Auriemma said. “She’s been here before and knows what the expectation level is. She had a lot of success here, and at Kansas, and at Texas. To get one of the premier strength and conditioning coaches, in men’s or women’s basketball, was a great opportunity for us. We’ve had great success here with our strength and conditioning. I think Hudy being here, especially with such a young team this year, gives us an opportunity to add to what we’ve been doing here all this time.”
Vancouver Whitecaps coach Marc Dos Santos looks forward to the day when he can focus solely on the soccer.
Dos Santos’ attention must often turn to other logistics these days — even seemingly miniscule details like who takes care of players’ pets — while the team is based in Utah because of the coronavirus pandemic. Ensuring the emotional wellbeing of his players and their families has become a priority.
Like Major League Soccer’s other Canadian teams, the Whitecaps have been hampered by travel restrictions between the United States and Canada. Last season after the MLS is Back Tournament in Florida, Vancouver set up shop in Portland, Oregon, and played “home” games at Providence Park.
This season started for the Whitecaps in Sandy, Utah, home of Real Salt Lake. It’s not known how long they will have to stay.
Aston Villa have opened a new £6m High Performance Centre that takes their sports science, strength and conditioning, rehab and sports therapy to “elite 21st-Century standards”.
The new two-storey building is in front of the first-team training pitches at Bodymoor Heath and features a state-of-the-art gym, indoor 50-metre running track, sand box, match analysis room, meeting and treatment rooms and a balcony.
The facility is said to have been inspired by the Minnesota Vikings’ Twin Cities Orthopedics Performance Center in Eagan, with chief executive Christian Purslow, manager Dean Smith and the club’s performance staff having visited there during the close season in 2019.
PLOS One; Anne C. Wunderlich, Florian Follert, Frank Daumann from
Nations have been competing in sporting competitions for centuries. Therefore, explaining the success of different countries has a long history in sports science. At first, researchers tried to explain success patterns with the help of divergent geographical factors. Later, literature included other determinants on the macro-level which provide evidence that especially the GDP as a proxy for the prosperity of a country has a significant impact on success in sports. Within this broader field of research, also specialization patterns in sports developed into an important topic of research. In line with the literature on factors which lead to (national) success, so far, the discussion mostly concentrates on determinants on a macro-level. We identify the problem that different specialization patterns can be observed in countries that have similar factors on the macro-level, as well. There seems to be a research gap concerning the influencing factors on a meso-level. As a result, the aim of this paper is to show which determinants on the meso-level can affect sports specialization patterns. We provide a model based on the findings of lobbying theory that explains not only different specialization patterns between, e.g., Europe and Africa, but also different specialization patterns within a continent and dissimilar patterns of countries with a similar macro-level can be understood. Overall, our paper contributes to the discussion on specialization in elite sports from an economic perspective, so that future research can build on our work, in particular concerning empirical tests of our approach.
Just a quick item to start the morning off, but it appears Garmin rolled out overnight two beta firmware versions for Forerunner 245, Forerunner 745, and Forerunner 945 users that include long-awaited features from last fall, but also more recent features from the Garmin Enduro in the past few months. Both of these are being released as a public beta, so you can go download them if you want. For this cycle, I don’t expect the public beta will last too long – meaning if you don’t want to try beta software, I don’t think you’ll be waiting long for the production releases.
It’s always interesting to see which services are gathering the most of our personal data. We’ve done it before, looking at the major social networks (We found that Facebook gathers the most, hands down.) But your phone is filled with apps for services that purport to have only your best interests at heart: fitness apps. How much of your personal information do they need to make you a better you?
Apparently, a lot. The folks at Supplement Timing researched what kinds of data fitness apps are gathering, both by default (you can’t use the app without providing it) and optionally (sometimes you hand over more data for more feedback). They cobbled together an exhaustive list of apps and services and then checked all their privacy policies and user agreements. They found 27 types of data.
American Chemcal Society, ACS News Service Weekly Press Pac from
… Scientists have developed ways to measure glucose in sweat, but because levels of the sugar are much lower than in blood, they can vary with a person’s sweat rate and skin properties. As a result, the glucose level in sweat usually doesn’t accurately reflect the value in blood. To obtain a more reliable estimate of blood sugar from sweat, Joseph Wang and colleagues wanted to devise a system that could collect sweat from a fingertip, measure glucose and then correct for individual variability.
The researchers made a touch-based sweat glucose sensor with a polyvinyl alcohol hydrogel on top of an electrochemical sensor, which was screen-printed onto a flexible plastic strip. When a volunteer placed their fingertip on the sensor surface for 1 minute, the hydrogel absorbed tiny amounts of sweat. Inside the sensor, glucose in the sweat underwent an enzymatic reaction that resulted in a small electrical current that was detected by a hand-held device. The researchers also measured the volunteers’ blood sugar with a standard finger-prick test, and they developed a personalized algorithm that could translate each person’s sweat glucose to their blood glucose levels. In tests, the algorithm was more than 95% accurate in predicting blood glucose levels before and after meals.
… The use of BMI – a person’s weight divided by height – is deeply integrated into U.S. health care systems. The World Health Organization and the National Institutes of Health use BMI to define obesity. A patient’s weight, which is among the first measurements taken during hospital admissions, is calculated for BMI and checked against thresholds, or what experts call “cut points.” During the coronavirus pandemic, certain jurisdictions prioritized people with higher BMIs in vaccine distribution plans because some research suggests that obesity can be a risk factor for more severe covid-19 outcomes.
But the measure has long been controversial among obesity experts, dietitians and the public. Many experts debate its effectiveness for people of all races and ethnicities – and criticize how it has become overinterpreted as a catchall proxy for body fat, nutritional status and health risk. Some say that assumptions, practices and policies based on BMI adversely affect Americans of color by shaping the diagnoses they receive, treatment they access and stigma they may face. And, they say, the measure’s very origin is racially problematic.
Data scientists from the personalised nutrition company ZOE have conducted a study involving 1,000 people which helps explain why some people feel hungry all the time and struggle to lose weight.
Colorado youth sports teams travel more miles to get to games than those in any other state, a new study shows.
Why it matters: The extensive travel is part of what makes youth sports — particularly those in elite leagues — so costly and inaccessible for many children.
The question of who gets to decide the appropriate age for athlete to turn pro is central to a lawsuit filed on Tuesday by 15-year-old Olivia Moultrie, a highly regarded American soccer player, and her father. Represented by Oregon attorney Joshua Sasaki and others, Moultrie has sued the National Women’s Soccer League for antitrust violations in Oregon’s federal district court.
NWSL, which Moultrie portrays as “the only professional women’s soccer league in the U.S.,” requires that players be at least 18 years old.
Moultrie, who routinely participates in NWSL’s Portland Thorns practices and scrimmages, is already a professional by virtue of signing a nine-year endorsement deal with Nike. She demands, among other forms of relief, a temporary restraining order to allow her to sign with one of NWSL’s 10 teams and a court declaration holding the restriction unlawful. Judge Karin Immergut will preside over the case.