… “Not to put this in a bad way, but when you win a lot it’s like how do you keep finding that next gear and that next push to keep getting better and better?” she said. “That’s why winning the World Cup and then turning around and winning an Olympics is challenging. We lost our way a little bit. I don’t think it was one particular thing, but I think that we maybe needed this tournament to go the way that it did for everybody to realize how important that culture is.
Heading into his third season with Chelsea, Christian Pulisic is working to change his mindset.
It’s not that Pulisic would say that opening himself up or sharing his vulnerability felt like weakness earlier in his life, but rather that now that he has been seeing a therapist it has helped him radically changed his mindset and embrace the challenges that come with his career.
“It really just gave me someone that would just listen to me and listen to how I felt,” Pulisic tells CBS Sports. “Previously I was feeling too tough, or that I didn’t need [therapy]. ‘I’m fine. I can deal with it.’ I felt like if I were to talk about the way I felt that I was weak or something like that.
… Price’s footballing ability soon turned heads. She represented Wales at under-16, under-17, under-19 and senior level – all before her 17th birthday.
She went on to play for her country 52 times across all age groups and captained Wales Under-19s, winning two senior caps in 2012-13.
Those kickboxing world titles and international football caps meant that two of the three goals that eight-year-old Lauren had written out had been achieved.
National Institutes for Quantum and Radiological Science and Technology (Japan) from
Our motivation to put effort for achieving a goal is controlled by a reward system wired in the brain. However, many neuropathological conditions impair the reward system, diminishing the will to work. Recently, scientists in Japan experimentally manipulated the reward system network of monkeys and studied their behavior. They deciphered a few critical missing pieces of the reward system puzzle that might help in increasing motivation.
BMC Sports Science, Medicine and Rehabilitation journal from
Background
Assessing lactate (LT) or anaerobic thresholds (AT) in athletes is an important tool to control training intensities and to estimate individual performance levels. Previously we demonstrated that ECG-based assessment of cardiac repolarization instability during exercise testing allows non-invasive estimation of AT in recreational athletes. Here, we validate this method in professional and amateur team sports athletes. Methods
We included 65 team sports athletes (32 professionals and 33 amateur athletes; 51 men, 14 women, mean age 22.3 ± 5.2 years) undergoing a standardized incremental cycle exercise test. During exercise testing a high-resolution ECG (1000 Hz) was recorded in Frank-leads configuration and beat-to-beat vector changes of cardiac repolarization (dT°) were assessed by previously established technologies. Repolarization-based AT (ATdT°) was estimated by its typical dT°-signal pattern. Additionally, LT was detected in accordance to methods established by Mader (LTMader) and Dickhuth (LTDickhuth). Results
All athletes performed exercise testing until exhaustion with a mean maximum workload of 262.3 ± 60.8 W (241.8 ± 64.4 W for amateur athletes and 283.4 ± 49.5 W for professional athletes). Athletes showed ATdT° at 187.6 ± 44.4 W, LTDickhuth at 181.1 ± 45.6 W and LTMader at 184.3 ± 52.4 W. ATdT° correlated highly significantly with LTDickhuth (r = 0.96, p < 0.001) and LTMader (r = 0.98, p < 0.001) in the entire cohort of athletes as well as in the subgroups of professional and amateur athletes (p < 0.001 for all).
Conclusions
ATdT°, defined by the maximal discordance between dT° and heart rate, can be assessed reliably and non-invasively via the use of a high-resolution ECG in professional and amateur athletes. [full text]
Fred Kerley was a world championship medalist at 400m. He didn’t become a 100m runner until the last few months. He was endlessly criticized saying he’d miss even making the team.
He won silver. Only you know what you’re capable of.
The National Football League (NFL) and Amazon Web Services (AWS) today launched a new artificial intelligence challenge to create ways for computers to automatically identify players using NFL game footage. New computer vision models created through the challenge will accelerate the NFL’s work with AWS to better understand, and aim to reduce, injuries in the NFL. Prize money totaling $100,000 will be awarded to data scientists with winning models. The contest will be open through November 2, 2021.
A new material designed by researchers at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering combines the flexibility of human skin with improved conductivity and tolerance of temperatures as low as -93 C.
Known as ionic skin, or iSkin, the substance could enhance a wide range of technologies – from wearable electronics to soft robotics.
… [Filip] Swirski acknowledged that “there is no question” that genetics play a role in cardiovascular health, but in the last several years, four risk factors — stress, sleep interruption or fragmentation, diet, and sedentary lifestyle — have been clearly identified as contributing to atherosclerosis, commonly referred to as hardening of the arteries, which can lead to a variety of complications, including death.
Current and ongoing research is seeking to uncover the mechanism by which these factors “alter the tissue on the cellular and molecular level,” he said, focusing on “inter-organ communication.” The goal, he said, is to “discover pathways to design therapeutic approaches and also change health policy,” much as research around smoking shaped public policy.
Briefly summarizing the current findings on sleep — “on average, we’re not getting enough” — as well as the widely recognized roles of diet and lifestyle, Swirski then settled in for a deep dive into the role of stress. Citing not-yet-published research, he used slides to illustrate how neutrophils — a type of white blood cell — can be seen “swarming” in the ears of mice subjected to stress. This is not surprising, he said, referencing a Curt Richter Award-winning study 10 years ago that showed the redistribution of such immune cells due to stress.
Current research is taking these studies down to a cellular level, however, examining the movements of different blood components associated with the immune system both during induced acute stress and in the recovery following. For example, in response to stress the levels of neutrophils appear to increase in the lung, liver, and spleen — but decrease in bone marrow. “It may be the case that the source of the neutrophils is the bone marrow,” he said. “And that they’re mobilizing very quickly” to the other organs.
AJC.com, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Chip Towers from
… Mental health, increasingly, has become a focus of UGA Athletics. Since 2017, the Bulldogs have employed a full time doctor of psychiatry, three clinical psychologists and two social workers. Lovie Tabron was named Georgia’s coordinator of behavorial medicine in 2017.
“It’s something we’ve been trying to put a great deal of emphasis on,” Georgia sports medicine director Ron Courson said after an athletic board of directors presentation on mental health support in 2018. “We’re excited about what we’ve done so far, but we’re really excited about what else we can do to get better.”
Courson said their mental health professionals treated 130 UGA athletes and had 895 individual “encounters” their first year. That did not count group meetings, which are held regularly for all 21 of Georgia’s teams.
Quarterback JT Daniels credits Georgia sports psychologist Drew Brannon for helping him through his transition from Southern Cal, where he’d suffered a season-ending knee injury and lost his starting job, to Georgia, where he was having to undergo an extensive recovery while buried on the depth chart.
… Lord Kelvin famously wrote that to understand something you need to be able to measure it. In Noise, academics Daniel Kahneman, Cass Sunstein, and Olivier Sibony synthesize a large existing literature on human and algorithmic decision-making to do exactly that: they provide crisp measurements and examples of error, breaking them down into noise and bias. While bias has dominated headlines, with allegations about racial biases in the criminal justice system — accentuated by our determination to acknowledge and adjust for centuries of racial discrimination — the authors show why noise is typically a much bigger problem.
But how do we measure error? The authors point out that bias and noise are independent sources of error. They can be thought of as “orthogonal.” The math is easy and amounts to using the Pythagorean theorem, which readers may remember from high school geometry classes. Since errors can be positive and negative, as in the duck shoot, we can’t just average them and call it a day. Instead, we commonly square them first: the overall error equals bias squared plus noise squared. Think of a right triangle, with the orthogonal sides representing bias and noise, the latter typically longer, and the hypotenuse representing their combination.
You only need to think of any marathon you’ve watched to assume that men tend to outperform women in sport.
But an interesting recent review published in the journal Sports Medicine has reignited the discussion. It highlighted that the male-female performance gap in ultra-endurance competitions (events typically more than six hours) is as low as 4 per cent, while it’s around 10 per cent in traditional endurance sport.
And the difference seems to reduce the longer the event becomes, to the point that women even outperform men when it comes to events like ultra-distance swimming. Just look at the finishing times for the 45.8km Manhattan Island marathon swim. On average over the past 30 years, the best women have been 12 to 14 per cent faster than the best men.
… Article 6.3 of the NCAA Manual requires athletic programs to conduct some form of an “exit interview” (or an end-of-the-season interview) with all teams. Did Syracuse comply with this responsibility? Did any athletes express their concerns in those interviews? Schools have a choice to conduct these interviews in person or in writing—did the athletics director review them?
Concerns about athlete welfare should be on any athletic administrator’s radar. But here’s the rub: If athletes are leaving your programs, they are under no mandate to explain why.