For US soccer star Alex Morgan, eating like an Olympian means getting plenty of fruits and veggies.
To fuel hours of training for the upcoming Tokyo Olympics, Morgan told Insider she bases her diet on anti-inflammatory foods, which are rich in nutrients to help reduce physical stress and promote faster recovery.
“There’s not time for anything else, because you need to make sure your body and mind are focused and ready,” Morgan said in an interview about her new partnership with iFit, an interactive online fitness platform.
Having a shot profile (*relative to the average player at his position*) like his is so useful in the playoffs — see Booker, Durant, Harris, and Leonard as well
Inside the netting surrounding the indoor bullpen at Performance Velocity Systems, a baseball training center in the southern hills of Pittsburgh, was an assortment of grip-enhancing substances.
On the plywood pitching mound was a container of pine tar; aerosol cans of BullFrog sunscreen and Cramer Firm Grip; and in a shallow, circular container of something called Spider Tack, a super-sticky paste developed to help grip Atlas Stones in strongman competitions. There was also a bag of rosin, a ubiquitous sight on major-league mounds.
While rosin is legal, when mixed with BullFrog or pine tar, it’s said to create a performance edge.
… middle-distance events—800 meters, 1,500 meters, and the mile—require a compromise between these two extremes. Increasing the force you transmit to the ground with each step, for example, might worsen your efficiency, and vice versa. Instead of a maximization challenge, middle-distance training is all about making the best trade-offs possible between the conflicting demands of speed and endurance. In other words, as an ambitious new paper in Sports Medicine argues, it’s an art.
The authors of the new paper are all sports scientists, hailing from four different universities in Norway, led by Thomas Haugen of Oslo’s Kristiania University College. But they admit that our knowledge about middle-distance training is mostly derived from “the practical experience and intuition of world-leading athletes and coaches.” Their goal is to lay out the current state-of-the-art in order to identify gaps that scientists can begin to fill—and the result is a handy (and free-to-read) guide to what it takes to run a great mile. Here are some of the highlights.
Objective/Design
Bedtime media use has been associated with poor sleep and attention difficulties among adolescents, but much of this research has been cross-sectional, limiting current understanding of directionality of effects. This 2-wave prospective study tested bidirectional effects between bedtime media use and sleep measures, including time in bed, sleep onset latency, and daytime sleepiness, and further examined whether bedtime media use and sleep variables were related to attention control difficulties. Setting/Participants
Data were collected from 345 middle-schoolers (ages 12-14, 47% female) at baseline (T1) and at 6-month follow-up (T2). Measurements
Students self-reported their access to media devices and internet in their bedroom, bedtime media use, sleep, and attention control. Data were analyzed using cross-lagged panel modeling. Results
Greater bedtime media use (at T1) was associated with less time in bed and longer sleep onset latency at T2, controlling for T1 levels of these variables. In the case of sleep effects on bedtime media use, greater daytime sleepiness and less time in bed (at T1) were associated with greater bedtime media use at T2, controlling for T1 levels. Further, greater daytime sleepiness (at T2, controlling for T1 levels) was associated with greater attention control difficulties at T2. Conclusions
Findings provide evidence for some reciprocal relations between bedtime media use and poor sleep in adolescents. Furthermore, higher daytime sleepiness was linked to greater attention control difficulties.
Performance during the baseball pitch is dependent on the flow of mechanical energy through the kinetic chain. Little is known about energy flow during the pitching motion and it is not known whether patterns of energy flow are related to pitching performance and injury risk. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to quantify energy generation, absorption, and transfer across the shoulder and elbow during the baseball pitch and explore the associations between these energetic measures, pitch speed, and traditional measures of upper extremity joint loading. The kinematics of 40 youth baseball pitchers were measured in a controlled laboratory setting. Energy flow between the thorax, humerus, and forearm was calculated using a segmental power analysis. Regression analyses revealed that pitch speed was best predicted by arm cocking phase shoulder energy transfer to the humerus and peak elbow valgus torque was best predicted by arm acceleration-phase elbow energy transfer to the forearm. Additionally, energy transfer across the shoulder and elbow generally exhibited the strongest correlations to pitch speed and upper extremity joint loads. These data reinforce the importance of energy transfer through the kinetic chain for producing high pitch speeds and provide descriptive data for energy flow during baseball pitching not previously found in the literature.
Nature Portfolio Health Community, Brinnae Bent and Jessilyn Dunn from
… Using a dataset of 25,000 simultaneous interstitial glucose and noninvasive wearable smartwatch measurements, we demonstrated the feasibility of using noninvasive and widely accessible methods, including smartwatches and food logs recorded over 10 days, to continuously detect personalized glucose deviations and to predict the exact interstitial glucose value in real time with up to 84% and 87% accuracy, respectively (Figure 1).
Engineering & Technology magazine, Crispin Andrews from
… “Every athlete training for the Olympics will have a flight path showing where they need to be over the four years of an Olympic cycle,” says Professor Steve Haake, from the Centre for Sports Engineering and Research at Sheffield Hallam University. “This flight path determines the athlete’s downtime, their training, which competitions they enter. Athletes know that if they’re not on that path they won’t make it to the medals, but with Covid the whole thing has fallen apart. Training is supposed to be optimised for the moment you’re at, but athletes have lost some intelligence about where that might be at any given moment.”
John Brewer, visiting professor of sports and exercise science at the University of Suffolk, adds that athletes have been starved of competition for much of last year and they will likely arrive at the Games without their usual sharpness and extra level of physiological preparedness.
Professor Brewer, a former fitness and nutrition adviser for the London Marathon, says: “You can’t replicate the demands of competition in training or during virtual competitions. You don’t quite push yourself as hard as when you’re up against opponents.”
University of Massachusetts Amherst, Research from
A research team from the University of Massachusetts Amherst has created an electronic microsystem that can intelligently respond to information inputs without any external energy input, much like a self-autonomous living organism. The microsystem is constructed from a novel type of electronics that can process ultralow electronic signals and incorporates a novel device that can generate electricity “out of thin air” from the ambient environment.
Danish footballer Christian Eriksen has spent his third night in hospital having tests, following a cardiac arrest during a European Championship match on Saturday.
But doctors are still no clearer as to why his heart stopped suddenly – and looking for the cause is now a priority.
“It was a 29-year-old fighting for his life,” Prof Sanjay Sharma, cardiologist and chairman of the Football Association’s expert cardiac committee, told the BBC.
Shelby Houlihan, the American record holder in the 1,500 and 5,000 meters, posted on social media that she’s been banned for four years following a positive test for what she concluded was a tainted pork burrito.
Houlihan’s announcement on her Instagram account Monday arrives days before the start of U.S. Olympic track and field trials in Eugene, Oregon, where the top three in each event earn a spot to the postponed Tokyo Games. She finished 11th at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics in the 5,000 meters.
The 28-year-old Houlihan said she received an email from the Athletics Integrity Unit (AIU) on Jan. 14, notifying her that a drug testing sample returned a finding for the anabolic steroid nandrolone.
Team GB’s athletes will not face medal targets for the Tokyo Olympics after it was revealed that its experts do not have enough data to make accurate forecasts, because of the Covid pandemic.
Mark England, the British Olympic Association’s chef de mission for Tokyo, was asked whether Team GB’s athletes were capable of exceeding the 67 medals won at the Rio 2016 Games. “We haven’t put a medal target on it – and we won’t, to be honest,” he said. “I don’t think UK Sport will either.”
When asked why, England said: “The past 12 months has given an opportunity for young athletes to be stronger and put themselves in contention. But it has been very obvious that any competition data in terms of where we stand against our main competitors across the world really isn’t there. We only have snatches of times and qualification times.”
The NBA’s competition committee met Monday to further explore rule changes to restrict the unnatural motions surrounding jump shots that players are using to draw fouls, sources told ESPN.
The league wants to limit the ability of players — including crafty stars like James Harden, Luka Doncic and Trae Young — to lean backward and sideways, for example, to initiate contact and get to the free throw line.
The NBA has shared a video compilation of player examples with the 30 teams that outlines a number of motions deemed unnatural that were used to draw fouls. The NBA and the competition committee will drill down on specific plays with the league’s GMs next week to target examples that will be recommended for owners to vote to eliminate next season, sources said.
… [Daniel] Memmert analyzed 7,263 goals scored in the English Premier League in seven years, starting with the 2012/13 seasons. Since the English Premier League is arguably the best football league in the world, it seems like a good place to start.
The researchers’ analysis selected six variables that defined the randomness involved in scoring a goal: goals following a rebound, long-range shots, deflected shots or goals created by defensive errors like, for instance, own goals. The study also included nine situational variables such as season, matchday, match location, match situation, goal number or team strength.
The researchers were surprised to see that 46% of all scored goals had some form of random influence to them. Furthermore, more than 60% of all matches ended either in a draw or with a goal difference of one goal — emphasizing the importance of these chance goals.