… Manning surveyed the line, and the Chargers gave him the look. He turned left to Stokley, who was in the slot, opened up one hand, balled up the other hand and started pounding it, as if he wanted Stokley and Reggie Wayne, who was lined up out wide, to run the “smash” play. Stokley looked back at Manning nodding his head in agreement.
Wayne ran the short hitch, but Stokley did something different, something none of the other nine offensive players on the field knew was coming.
He started to the corner, but then broke to the middle on a route where he was open by almost 10 yards on Manning’s 49th touchdown pass of the season, breaking the single-season mark for touchdowns in a season, set in 2004.
We hypothesize that the V[Combining Dot Above]O2 time constant (τV[Combining Dot Above]O2) determines exercise tolerance by defining the power output associated with a “critical threshold” of intramuscular metabolite accumulation (e.g. inorganic phosphate), above which muscle fatigue and work inefficiency are apparent. Thereafter, the V[Combining Dot Above]O2 “slow component”, and its consequences (increased pulmonary, circulatory and neuromuscular demands) determine performance limits.
As a coach, I pay attention to my athletes’ heart rate for more than prescribing intensity. I review what heart rate tells us about recovery, fitness progression, general wellness, and the effectiveness of fueling and hydration plans. Understanding what your HR communicates can help you make decisions to adjust your effort as you train and race so that you perform your best, sustainably.
For the uninitiated, “redshirting” kids in the kindergarten context (as opposed to the better known college athlete context) means delaying kindergarten entry for a year. A just-five-year-old can be quite different from an almost-six-year-old. There are concerns, especially given the increased focus on more academic kindergarten, that younger kids will be at a disadvantage.
These considerations are mostly relevant for kids with summer birthdays, and more so for boys than for girls..
Sapiens Anthropology Magazine, Anna Goldfield from
Human athletic palaeobiology is a branch of research that uses trained athletes to explore adaptations of the human body. These studies focus on metabolism and peak physical performance, limb biomechanics and other aspects of human anatomy and physiology to get a sense of the types of activities that humans in the past might have been capable of performing.
Here is a short roundup of some things we humans can do that make for great sport, along with a quick look at where these skills come from and how long they’ve been around.
NPR, Shots blog, Suzette Lohmeyer and Rhitu Chatterjee from
… [Sarah] Everts tells NPR’s Short Wave, instead of thinking of sweat as gross, think of it as an “evolutionary marvel.” She even calls it a human superpower and a highly efficient one at that. “We effectively dispatch water to our skin and, as it evaporates, it whisks heat away from our bodies,” she says.
Everts points out in her book that this superpower enables humans to thrive and dominate across the globe. “Sweating allowed us to forage out in the sun without overheating, while our predators were relegated to the shade for survival,” she writes, and for us to adapt to many new environments. “Like the (city) pigeon and desert dove, we’re capable of surviving almost anywhere.”
… Its main product is a point-of-care ultrasound that combines nano-materials, sensor technology, and advanced signal processing and computation.
The company has also created a workflow tool for point-of-care ultrasounds called Exo Works. It is able to streamline exam review, documentation and billing, and is designed to work with any point-of-care ultrasound.
A biocompatible, flexible, yet robust conductive composite hydrogel (CCH) for wearable pressure/strain sensors has been achieved by an all-solution-based approach. The CCH is rationally constructed by in situ polymerization of aniline (An) monomers in the polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) matrix, followed by the cross-linking of PVA with glutaraldehyde (GA) as the cross-linker. The unique multiple synergetic networks in the CCH including strong chemical covalent bonds and abundance of weak physical cross-links, i.e., hydrogen bondings and electrostatic interactions, impart excellent mechanical strength (a fracture tensile strength of 1200 kPa), superior compressibility (ε = 80%@400 kPa), outstanding stretchability (a fracture strain of 670%), high sensitivity (0.62 kPa–1 at a pressure range of 0–1.0 kPa for pressure sensing and a gauge factor of 3.4 at a strain range of 0–300% for strain sensing, respectively), and prominent fatigue resistance (1500 cycling). As the flexible wearable sensor, the CCH is able to monitor different types of human motion and diagnostically distinguish speaking. As a proof of concept, a sensing device has been designed for the real-time detection of 2D distribution of weight or pressure, suggesting its promising potentials for electronic skin, human–machine interaction, and soft robot applications.
In sports, inertial measurement units are often used to measure the orientation of human body segments. A Madgwick (MW) filter can be used to obtain accurate inertial measurement unit (IMU) orientation estimates. This filter combines two different orientation estimates by applying a correction of the (1) gyroscope-based estimate in the direction of the (2) earth frame-based estimate. However, in sports situations that are characterized by relatively large linear accelerations and/or close magnetic sources, such as wheelchair sports, obtaining accurate IMU orientation estimates is challenging. In these situations, applying the MW filter in the regular way, i.e., with the same magnitude of correction at all time frames, may lead to estimation errors. Therefore, in this study, the MW filter was extended with machine learning to distinguish instances in which a small correction magnitude is beneficial from instances in which a large correction magnitude is beneficial, to eventually arrive at accurate body segment orientations in IMU-challenging sports situations. A machine learning algorithm was trained to make this distinction based on raw IMU data. Experiments on wheelchair sports were performed to assess the validity of the extended MW filter, and to compare the extended MW filter with the original MW filter based on comparisons with a motion capture-based reference system. Results indicate that the extended MW filter performs better than the original MW filter in assessing instantaneous trunk inclination (7.6 vs. 11.7° root-mean-squared error, RMSE), especially during the dynamic, IMU-challenging situations with moving athlete and wheelchair. Improvements of up to 45% RMSE were obtained for the extended MW filter compared with the original MW filter. To conclude, the machine learning-based extended MW filter has an acceptable accuracy and performs better than the original MW filter for the assessment of body segment orientation in IMU-challenging sports situations.
… Most world records are marginal gains. The hard-won erosion of a few centimetres, a handful of hundredths. Years of training rewarded with a pipette’s worth of improvement.
Others are of an altogether greater magnitude, so far off the scale they seem to come from another cosmos entirely.
With millions of dollars on the line, athletes are discovering the power of their own personal data. Once exclusively used by sports leagues and teams to maximize performance and profits, data analytics has become a tool elite athletes count on while negotiating their million-dollar contracts.
The trend gained attention this past spring when Kevin De Bruyne, the 30-year-old midfielder for Manchester City FC, decided to negotiate with the powerhouse club without an agent. Instead, he hired a software company called Analytics FC. The company uses a database “across 100 leagues and multiple data models to highlight players that contribute to their team results in a holistic way, rather than just goals scored or xG (expected goals) earned,” Analytics FC founder and CEO, Jeremy Steele, said in an interview.
The Harvard Sports Analysis Collective, Johnattan Ontiveros from
One of the greatest sports rivalries of the past 17 years, has been between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal. Since the 2005 Miami Masters Finals, when 17 year-old Nadal shocked the tennis world by upsetting the seemingly unstoppable Federer in straight sets, fans have witnessed some of the best matches ever played between the pair.
At first glance, the two would seem near 50-50 competitors in any match with Nadal having won 24 of their overall 40 meetings. However, when accounting for the court surface, the odds in any given match shift greatly.