☕️ S&C Daily — Take a Load Off

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A few days into training camp the New England Patriots told fullback Reggie Gilliam he had the next day off - a vet day. Instead of practicing in pads he lifted, rode a bike and went home. Every player wears a GPS unit in practice and in games, and the performance staff under Frank Piraino reads those numbers to decide who gets one.

In a new Athletic story, head coach Mike Vrabel explains how the call gets made. He came up through 10 straight two-a-days as a player. What he watches now is high-speed running and total yardage, read against how the player looks in front of him. The formula itself is not public, but it weighs three things: recent workload, injury history, and how much depth sits behind that player at his position.

Right tackle Morgan Moses is the case they point to. He signed 18 months ago after missing time in back-to-back seasons, went on a plan that pulls him out of some practices, and played all 21 games last season including the Super Bowl. New England was one of the healthiest teams in the league. Not everyone qualifies. Nobody has offered one to 27-year-old defensive tackle Milton Williams. "I guess I haven't been in the league long enough yet," Williams said.

A new review in Molecular Psychiatry pulled together everything published on cold exposure and mental health. The short term effect is real - people feel better right after immersion in every trial that has measured it, and in two trials of whole body cryotherapy in depressed patients, symptom scores fell further than in the controls. What is missing is a fair comparison. In the largest randomized trial, 78 women with mild depression did either cold showers with Wim Hof breathing or warm showers with slow breathing for 21 days. Both groups improved 20 to 30%, with no difference between them.

One mechanism finding stands out. Cortisol peaks in the minutes before immersion, including in control sessions where the person never got in the water, so part of the response is anticipation rather than cold. Norepinephrine is the real effect - up to fivefold, lasting hours, and still there after twelve weeks of regular exposure.

Ole Miss lost its head coach and its strength staff in the same week last winter, when Lane Kiffin left for LSU and Pete Golding took over. Defensive tackle William Echoles says the second one hit harder. "What really had got to me was when the strength and conditioning staff left, like Coach Savage," Echoles said. "Nick Savage, you know, that was my guy." He found out a day after the fact.

Golding hired Paul Constantine, who came to Oxford from the NFL and has been carrying pieces of that setup across to the college calendar. Two games in, Echoles is sold. "Paul does a great job with preparing us, especially with our bodies," Echoles said. "He's done a great job of the recovery aspect."

Heavy lifting drives blood pressure to extremes, and the worry has always been that years of it leave scar tissue in the heart. A new study in the European Journal of Applied Physiology went looking for it. Thirteen elite male Olympic style weightlifters with five or more years of training got echocardiography and cardiac MRI alongside 13 matched controls. The scarring was not there. Diffuse fibrosis measured identical in both groups at 25%, and visible scar turned up in 15.4% of the lifters and 15.4% of the controls.

At rest their bloodwork was no different from the controls either. After a training session one marker of tissue turnover rose and the main pro-fibrosis signal actually fell, while troponin, the marker of real heart damage, did not move at all. The authors call the whole picture normal adaptation rather than scarring. Thirteen lifters is a small group, but nothing in the imaging or the blood pointed at damage.

Michigan State University

R&D Baseball

Washington Nationals

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