Amid a rash of injuries to star players during the NBA playoffs, James took the league to task on Twitter for starting the 2020-21 season just two months after the 2020 NBA Finals — an issue he was vocal about when the league’s schedule initially was announced.
“They all didn’t wanna listen to me about the start of the season. I knew exactly what would happen,” James wrote.
In about 60 minutes, Katie Ledecky managed to do several things. She won the 200-meter freestyle title (1:55:11), collected her gold medal at the ceremony and gave a short pool-side press conference (where she joked that she couldn’t form words because she was internally warming up for the next race). Then she walked back out to the pool to thundering Omaha applause. It was like watching a perfectly choreographed dance.
She was a seasoned champion, but she was about to do something new and exciting — she was about to take part in the debut 1,500-meter freestyle event in the U.S. Olympic trials.
Buffalo Bills wide receiver Cole Beasley is not happy with the NFL and NFLPA’s newly agreed-to COVID-19 protocols for training camp and the preseason, and he aired his concerns Thursday on Twitter.
The latest COVID-19 policy heavily restricts unvaccinated players while allowing vaccinated players to return to near normalcy.
Beasley, 32, placed equal blame on the NFL for prioritizing money over its players’ freedom and the NFLPA for not supporting the players it represents.
“This is crazy. Did we vote on this?” he wrote in response to the list of protocols. “I stay in the hotel. We still have meetings. We will all be together. Vaccinated players can go out the hotel and bring covid back in to where I am. So what does it matter if I stay in the hotel now? 100 percent immune with vaccination? No.
Femi was 21 years old when he was pulled over for speeding in Colindale, London; the police charged him with a cannabis offence. It was one of several brushes with the law. But Femi changed. As Christian Jarrett writes in Be Who You Want, “Femi, or to use his full name, Anthony Oluwafemi Olaseni Joshua OBE, became an Olympic gold medallist and the two-time heavyweight boxing champion of the world, heralded as an impeccable role model of clean living and good manners.”
Katy Milkman begins her book, How To Change, with another sporting icon: tennis player Andre Agassi. Agassi’s crimes were to wear an earring and tie-dyed shirts to tournaments, swear on court and — a Wimbledon crown notwithstanding — seem to be more interested in sponsorship than living up to his prodigious potential. Like Joshua, Agassi sorted it out: he found a new coach, Brad Gilbert, and sharpened his game enough to win seven further grand slam titles and — like Joshua — an Olympic gold.
I have never aspired to win an Olympic medal, but I can certainly imagine being stronger, fitter, more successful or just different, so I was intrigued to see two new books about personal change, both boasting that they bring “the science”. Jarrett’s book presents a more radical view of change: can a neurotic person become resilient and confident? Can a cautious, conservative soul become curious and keen to explore new experiences? Can an introvert become an extrovert — and should they want to? Milkman, in contrast, is interested not in changing who you are, but “where you want to be”. She wants to help you get more exercise or spend less time arguing on Facebook and more time reading, say, the Financial Times.
… Athletes use two main forms of self-talk. Motivational self-talk (sometimes referred to as positive self-talk) serves many functions; you can use it to increase the effort you exert (“I’m going to give it everything I have”) or build belief and self-confidence (“I can do this”). Instructional self-talk involves cues or trigger words. Telling yourself “Drop your shoulders” or “Run tall” can help you maintain concentration or channel your focus.
Those general frameworks are a good starting point in using self-talk to get the most out of yourself. But you can get even more benefit from self-talk by honing how you address yourself. There’s growing evidence that calling yourself “you” is usually better than calling yourself “I” in challenging situations.
Linear loading, the two-for-two rule, percent of one repetition maximum (1RM), RM zones, rate of perceived exertion (RPE), repetitions in reserve, set-repetition best, autoregulatory progressive resistance exercise (APRE), and velocity-based training (VBT) are all methods of adjusting resistance training intensity. Each method has advantages and disadvantages that strength and conditioning practitioners should be aware of when measuring and monitoring strength characteristics. The linear loading and 2-for-2 methods may be beneficial for novice athletes; however, they may be limited in their capacity to provide athletes with variation and detrimental if used exclusively for long periods of time. The percent of 1RM and RM zone methods may provide athletes with more variation and greater potential for strength–power adaptations; however, they fail to account for daily changes in athlete’s performance capabilities. An athlete’s daily readiness can be addressed to various extents by both subjective (e.g., RPE, repetitions in reserve, set-repetition best, and APRE) and objective (e.g., VBT) load adjustment methods. Future resistance training monitoring may aim to include a combination of measures that quantify outcome (e.g., velocity, load, time, etc.) with process (e.g., variability, coordination, efficiency, etc.) relevant to the stage of learning or the task being performed. Load adjustment and monitoring methods should be used to supplement and guide the practitioner, quantify what the practitioner ‘sees’, and provide longitudinal data to assist in reviewing athlete development and providing baselines for the rate of expected development in resistance training when an athlete returns to sport from injury or large training load reductions. [full text]
A smart automated video analysis that helps #athletes and coaches, taking video footage of the athlete’s motion, uploading it to the cloud where the images get analyzed and their platform provides actionable insights and personalized recommendations!
There are 1.3 Billion people in the world speaking Chinese, making it the most common language in the world. Interestingly, the most popular sport, football, has 4 Billion fans — more than 3 times more. Any sports game has strict rules and format, as grammar has, and a defined set of actions, as vocabularies have. Apparently, if football were a formal language, it would be the most popular in the world.
Inspired by this insight, in this work I try to project current state-of-the-art methods of representing humans language, aka Natural Language Processing, to represent the global language of football.
I will mainly focus on the motivation of creating such representation, as well as on how to create it, and, to some extent, validation of the results. My next posts will deal with developing explainers and UI on top of the representation and demonstrating its use for a variety of use-cases in the football domain.
Co-founders of Dallas-based Monarc Sports, Igor Karlicic and Bhargav Maganti, started testing their robotic quarterback, the Seeker, by firing footballs off a townhouse balcony. Nine iterations of the Seeker later, the two engineers have created a product often incorporated into NFL and college football player training.
Meet the Team
The Seeker is the world’s first robotic quarterback and allows players to catch passes and field punts or kicks by themselves—without needing a team to practice. In addition, the technology possesses the capability to track athletes’ positions on the field to throw the ball at a specific speed, at a specific location on the field, and at a specific position on the player’s body.
This review explores the effects of oestrogen and progesterone fluctuations across the menstrual cycle on fluid and electrolyte balance. The review aims to provide information on this topic for the exercising female but also for researchers working in this field. Beginning with a basic introduction to fluid and electrolyte balance, the review goes on to describe how oestrogen and progesterone have independent and integrated roles to play in the regulation of fluid and electrolyte balance. Despite evidence that oestrogen can influence the osmotic threshold for arginine vasopressin release, and that progesterone can influence aldosterone production, these actions do not appear to influence fluid retention, plasma volume changes at rest and during exercise, or electrolyte losses. However, the large inter-individual variations in hormonal fluctuations throughout the menstrual cycle may mean that specific individuals with high fluctuations could experience disturbances in their fluid and electrolyte balance. During phases of oestrogen dominance (e.g., late-follicular phase) heat dissipation is promoted, while progesterone dominance (e.g., mid-luteal phase) promotes heat conservation with overall higher basal body temperature. However, these responses do not consistently lead to any change in observed sweat rates, heat-stress, or dehydration. Finally, the literature does not support any difference in fluid retention during post-exercise rehydration periods conducted at different menstrual cycle phases. Although these mean responses largely reveal no effects on fluid and electrolyte balance, further research is required particularly in those individuals who experience high hormonal fluctuations, and greater exploration of oestrogen to progesterone interactions is warranted.
Middle distance runner Shelby Houlihan, the American record holder in the 1,500 and 5,000 meters, posted on Instagram she’s facing a four-year ban following a positive test result for nandrolone, a banned anabolic steroid.
Houlihan will not be able to participate in the U.S. Olympic track and field trials set to take place in Eugene, Oregon, from June 18-27 — shutting down her Tokyo Olympic dreams, and, if the ban stands, she will remain ineligible until after the 2024 Olympics as well. In 2016, Houlihan finished 11th in the Olympic 5,000-meter race.
In the post on June 15, Houlihan, 28, said she had concluded that the steroid was from a pork burrito she consumed from a Mexican food truck near her house in Beaverton, Oregon, approximately 10 hours before her drug test.
… Cristiano Ronaldo, one of the biggest athletes on the planet, stood up to the pressure to promote unhealthy products on Monday when he scoffed at two bottles of Coca-Cola that were placed in front of him at a press conference ahead of Portugal’s Euro 2020 opener with Hungary.
freestar
The Juventus star moved the two bottles of soda out of camera view and picked up a bottle of water saying, “Drink water, not Coca-Cola.” Having one of the biggest stars of the championship denigrate a sponsor must have infuriated UEFA officials.
Annual Review of Sociology, Jenna Burrell and Marion Fourcade from
The pairing of massive data sets with processes—or algorithms—written in computer code to sort through, organize, extract, or mine them has made inroads in almost every major social institution. This article proposes a reading of the scholarly literature concerned with the social implications of this transformation. First, we discuss the rise of a new occupational class, which we call the coding elite. This group has consolidated power through their technical control over the digital means of production and by extracting labor from a newly marginalized or unpaid workforce, the cybertariat. Second, we show that the implementation of techniques of mathematical optimization across domains as varied as education, medicine, credit and finance, and criminal justice has intensified the dominance of actuarial logics of decision-making, potentially transforming pathways to social reproduction and mobility but also generating a pushback by those so governed. Third, we explore how the same pervasive algorithmic intermediation in digital communication is transforming the way people interact, associate, and think. We conclude by cautioning against the wildest promises of artificial intelligence but acknowledging the increasingly tight coupling between algorithmic processes, social structures, and subjectivities. [full text]
… “We have the chance to affect something bigger than ourselves,” Southgate said during the World Cup. “We’re a team with our diversity and our youth that represent modern England. In England we have spent a bit of time being a bit lost as to what our modern identity is. I think as a team we represent that modern identity and hopefully people can connect with us … you have a chance to affect something bigger.”
He was right: his likeable multiracial team – many of the players had progressed from the lower leagues – did affect something bigger that summer as we followed their journey back in Britain. The 2018 World Cup coincided with an extraordinary heatwave in England, the hottest and most enduring since the summer of 1976, and, for a time, millions of us were united by an interest in football.
“Injury rates were virtually the same this season as they were during 2019-20 while starter-level and All-Star players missed games due to injury at similar rates as the last three seasons. (1/2)
As the postseason limps toward the finish line, one thing is clear: Try as they might, the NBA’s players can’t handle the cruel grind of another season like this