John Tolkin has emerged as one of the best teenagers in MLS and his path as taken him through all levels of the New York Red Bulls organization – from ball boy to the academy, USL team, and now the first team. ASN’s Brian Sciaretta spoke to the Chatham, NJ native about his past, his present, and his future.
Anyone who’s been to a U.S. national team game before has probably seen it: The team has dispersed and the field is empty, except for one player. Carli Lloyd, by her lonesome, is still out there, doing push-ups or running sprints. But pretty soon, that ritual will be gone and the field will stay empty. Carli Lloyd, at age 39, is retiring and will appear in her final U.S. national team matches this fall.
… why are they so good? While in-depth analytic research into successful training programs for runners is a rare commodity, fortunately for us one 2019 study published by the International Journal of Sports Science and Coaching explored the exact curious case of the mega talented Ingebrigtsen brothers. The study traced seven years of training by the trio. This research paired with another 2019 paper published in The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, which covered seven years of training by elite athletes, ranging from a 26:44 10K road racer to a 2:03:23 marathon runner, helps unlock a series of genetic and training characteristics that have led to the Norwegian brothers dominance.
Both reports generally support the well-known 80/20 system of training-intensity distribution. That is: Run 80% of your miles easy, and 20% hard. But they also introduce new wrinkles that are worth considering.
… “I’ve said it before: The NFL train stops for nobody,” Saleh said Saturday night after a 23-14 win against the Green Bay Packers. “If someone falls off the train … it’s another opportunity for someone to jump on the train. There are a lot of men on this football team, especially at that D-end spot, that are champing at the bit to get an opportunity — and they got it.”
Saleh has been down this road before.
As the San Francisco 49ers’ defensive coordinator in 2020, he lost top pass-rusher Nick Bosa to a torn ACL in Week 2 (against the Jets) and several other starters throughout the course of the season, yet still managed to finish 17th in yards allowed and fifth in points allowed. He’s not a big believer in blitzing, but he deviated from his philosophy by increasing the blitz rate to keep the pressure on. Look for him to repeat that plan sans Lawson. Saleh’s ability to overcome last year’s injury plague is one of the things that attracted the Jets.
The voice of Urban Meyer’s chief of staff, Fernando Lovo, booms over the speakers surrounding the practice fields off the parking lots abutting TIAA Bank Field.
Difference … difference … difference!
With the start of this particular period—the difference period—all 90 guys on the roster are doing something. Some linemen are hitting bags, others are holding them. Some backs are holding balls, others are slapping at them. And there’s a movement and tempo to the whole thing that’s unmistakable and clearly intentional. As Lovo’s voice gives way to blaring music, no one’s standing around. Everyone’s moving. And moving urgently.
It used to be that running things this way in the NFL was newsworthy. When Chip Kelly hauled gigantic speaker towers out to practice in 2013, reporters tweeted playlists. When Jim Harbaugh split his team into two in 2011, to maximize time in a post-lockout training camp, it was considered an innovative way of adapting college time constraints to NFL efficiency. When Pete Carroll brought names to days of the week (Competition Wednesday!), it was first seen as hokey, and later considered central to how he built the Seahawks.
In the past decades, researchers have extensively studied (elite) athletes’ physiological responses to understand how to maximize their endurance performance. In endurance sports, whole-body measurements such as the maximal oxygen consumption, lactate threshold, and efficiency/economy play a key role in performance. Although these determinants are known to interact, it has also been demonstrated that athletes rarely excel in all three. The leading question is how athletes reach exceptional values in one or all of these determinants to optimize their endurance performance, and how such performance can be explained by (combinations of) underlying physiological determinants. In this review, we advance on Joyner and Coyle’s conceptual framework of endurance performance, by integrating a meta-analysis of the interrelationships, and corresponding effect sizes between endurance performance and its key physiological determinants at the macroscopic (whole-body) and the microscopic level (muscle tissue, i.e., muscle fiber oxidative capacity, oxygen supply, muscle fiber size, and fiber type). Moreover, we discuss how these physiological determinants can be improved by training and what potential physiological challenges endurance athletes may face when trying to maximize their performance. This review highlights that integrative assessment of skeletal muscle determinants points toward efficient type-I fibers with a high mitochondrial oxidative capacity and strongly encourages well-adjusted capillarization and myoglobin concentrations to accommodate the required oxygen flux during endurance performance, especially in large muscle fibers. Optimisation of endurance performance requires careful design of training interventions that fine tune modulation of exercise intensity, frequency and duration, and particularly periodisation with respect to the skeletal muscle determinants.
To investigate the quantity and quality of sleep hours in young athletes in a professional football club, to study if there is a significant relationship with mood state and subjective well-being, and to identify the relationship between sleep and quarterly academic performance. We also explored the relationship between sleep and quarterly academic performance. Method
the study included 261 players of the various age group categories from football at Barcelona Football Club (average age:13.04 ± 3.16). Participants maintained a sleep diary and completed questionnaires on their mood state and the quantity and quality of their sleep. Results
70% of the athletes slept less hours than recommended by the American National Sleep Foundation. Athletes with worse quantity and quality of sleep showed negative effects on academic results. Conclusions
The results show that the majority of young players sleep less than recommended and show that those who sleep more hours obtain better academic results.
npj digital medicine journal, Leia Wedlund & Joseph Kvedar from
With the prevalence of type II diabetes rising rapidly it has become increasingly apparent that something must be done to stem the tide. While pharmaceutical treatments aimed at lowering average blood sugar are an important tool in this endeavor, it is equally (if not more) important to motivate patients to make healthy diet and exercise choices. Recent advances in non-invasive glucose monitoring suggest that real-time patient feedback may soon be available to help guide daily patient decision-making.
Nutrition plays a key role in training for, and competing in, competitive sport, and is essential for reducing risk of injury and illness, recovering and adapting between bouts of activity, and enhancing performance. Consumption of a Mediterranean diet (MedDiet) has been demonstrated to reduce risk of various non-communicable diseases and increase longevity. Following the key principles of a MedDiet could also represent a useful framework for good nutrition in competitive athletes under most circumstances, with potential benefits for health and performance parameters. In this review, we discuss the potential effects of a MedDiet, or individual foods and compounds readily available in this dietary pattern, on oxidative stress and inflammation, injury and illness risk, vascular and cognitive function, and exercise performance in competitive athletes. We also highlight potential modifications which could be made to the MedDiet (whilst otherwise adhering to the key principles of this dietary pattern) in accordance with contemporary sports nutrition practices, to maximise health and performance effects. In addition, we discuss potential directions for future research.
Teams are the backbone of critical institutions. Companies are run by top management teams, science is produced by research teams, and justice is rendered by teams of jurors. Our use of teams signals a commitment to the promise of diversity: More voices lead to more intelligent decisions than fewer voices do. Moreover, meta-analyses reveal the precise type of diversity that enhances collective intelligence. It’s not diversity in surface-level demographic characteristics of team members that enhances collective intelligence. It’s deep-level diversity, where team members differ in their viewpoints and information. This makes sense intuitively. Different people possess different pieces of information. Putting people together in teams gives them all the diverse pieces they need to solve complex puzzles. But teams seldom realize this promise in practice. They may have all the right pieces, but they frequently fail to connect the pieces to see the full picture.
Diversity therefore helps. But diversity alone is not enough. How can we ensure that teams use their diverse information to make more-intelligent collective decisions? This is the question my colleagues and I set out to answer in a recent study, published in IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems. To answer this question, we used an agent-based model: a type of computer simulation in which decision-makers known as “agents” are programmed on the basis of known psychological principles. These agents are then allowed to interact with other agents in teams across a variety of decision-making situations. Unlike laboratory studies using a limited sample of human subjects, an agent-based model lets us peer directly into the black box of team decision-making, as simulated across tens of thousands of different decision-making situations.
PLOS One; Joel Guerette, Caroline Blais, Daniel Fiset from
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a major impact on professional sports, notably, forcing the National Hockey League to hold its 2020 playoffs in empty arenas. This provided an unprecedented opportunity to study how crowds may influence penalties awarded by referees in an ecological context. Using data from playoff games played during the COVID-19 pandemic and the previous 5 years (n = 547), we estimate the number of penalties called by referees depending on whether or not spectators were present. The results show an interaction between a team’s status (home; away) and the presence or absence of crowds. Post-hoc analyses reveal that referees awarded significantly more penalties to the away team compared to the home team when there is a crowd present. However, when there are no spectators, the number of penalties awarded to the away and home teams are not significantly different. In order to generalize these results, we took advantage of the extension of the pandemic and the unusual game setting it provided to observe the behavior of referees during the 2020–2021 regular season. Again, using data from the National Hockey League (n = 1639), but also expanding our sample to include Canadian Hockey League games (n = 1709), we also find that the advantage given to the home team by referees when in front of a crowd fades in the absence of spectators. These findings provide new evidence suggesting that social pressure does have an impact on referees’ decision-making, thus contributing to explain the phenomenon of home advantage in professional ice hockey. [full text]
The Orioles are in the midst of one of the worst stretches in baseball history. In other words, everything is going according to plan.
The state of play: The O’s have lost 18 games in a row (17 by more than one run), while being outscored by 102 runs. They’re the first team in AL history with two losing streaks of 13+ games in a season.