American Football

American Football has seen limited success in international markets until recently. This paper is based on participant observations that incorporate a geographical perspective of sport and identity focusing on an American Football event played in Dublin, Ireland. The aim of this paper is to discuss observations of how a popular American sport is staged and performed in a foreign setting. Many people from the United States travelled to Dublin to follow their university team. The event was staged to allow spectators to create a distinct atmosphere that was similar to a game played in the United States. There was much emphasis on (re)creating an American sporting experience. The match resembled a spectacle and a neoliberal discussion addresses commercialization, power, and contesting spaces.

Presentation about the fitness for American football. Involving approach: characteristics, tactical positions, the game, skills, metabolic domain, relationship effort-pause, anthropometric profile, physical demands, distance covered, velocity zones, heart rate, wingate, endocrine and biochemical changes. Capacities conditioning, coordinative capacities, physical assessment, training types, special technical training, longitudinal changes in strength and power, speed, agility, and anaerobic conditioning. Collision and tackle. Game based in conditioning drills, macrostructural variables of functional training ( movement learning, proprioception, core and biomotor capabilities), periodization. Injuries (head, shoulders, knee, leg, ankle and foot). Injuries in room weight, control training loads, loads relationship versus injuries, recovery and regeneration, neuropsychological recovery.

Celebrity athletes have been a focus of recent valuable research, as has the psychological impact of retirement on professional athletes. There remains, however, a gap in scholarship addressing the cultural role of former footballers and their leverage of personal celebrity in the context of developing a post-playing career. This article seeks to make a contribution to the literature regarding the roles that retired athletes can play off the field.
Crafted narratives allow celebrity athletes to endorse products as well as cultural values while active in competition. Narratives are story formats that order social events and meaning in recognisable patterns over time. This article explores the overarching social and sporting values embedded in these storylines. It also investigates the current occupations of retired celebrity athletes and the extension of such values to these career changes via a meaning transfer process.
The analysis examines professional athletes in association football and American football and women’s soccer codes following the end of their active playing careers. Unpacking biographical and sporting narratives, the study seeks to better articulate the cultural values they comprise.

Given the prevalence of traumatic brain injuries (TBI) in contact sports such as American Football, the need for increased research in TBI has been dramatically increased over the last 20-years. TBI has two main mechanisms that cause neuronal cell death
following an incident: direct axonal death and neuronal inflammation, with the latter being the most common because it persists
more than a decade and chronically affects neighboring neurons. Therefore, proper management that reduces inflammation
post-TBI should be stressed in order to facilitate propitious recovery. While sideline concussion protocols have been implemented in sports fields, it is important immediately to initiate recovery protocols in order to minimize the degree of progressive neuronal death caused by TBI. While difficult to individualize symptoms for each occurrence, it is essential to incorporate a pretest
of cognition, memory, and balance as a means of determining the severity of TBI. Although the sports concussion assessment
tool 2 has been used by collegiate and professional teams, this tool is just based on observation and comparison. Thus, more
precise and advanced diagnosis using biological methods are needed to accurately assess individual symptoms, which should
save lives. One example is to use serum creatine kinase (CK) levels because CK released from damaged brain tissues enters the
bloodstream and thus TBI can be quickly assessed and identified. While the immediate diagnosis of TBI is one part of management, efficacious treatments of post-TBI is also critical. Regarding this, exercise and nutritional supplementation have been
reported to be effective. While specific pathways of neuroprotective mechanisms remain to be elucidated, endurance exercise
along with supplementation of fish oil, caffeine, and vitamin D seems to elicit neuroprotective effects. This review provides
potential mechanisms responsible for exercise and nutritional supplementation-mediated neuroprotection against TBI. Since
human subjects are limited to mechanistic studies requiring invasive surgical procedures, research involving animals (e.g., mouse
and rat) are also introduced in this review.

Background: Femoroacetabular impingement is a debilitating hip condition commonly affecting athletes playing American football. The condition is associated with reduced hip range of motion; however, little is known about the range-of-motion demands of football athletes. This knowledge is critical to effective management of this condition.

Purpose: (1) Develop a normative database of game-like hip and knee kinematics utilized by football athletes, and (2) analyze kinematical data by playing position. The hypothesis was that kinematics would be similar between running backs and defensive backs and between wide receivers and quarterbacks and that linemen would perform the activities with the most erect lower-limb posture.

Study Design: Descriptive laboratory study

Methods: Forty National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) football athletes, representing 5 playing positions (quarterback, defensive back, running back, wide receiver, offensive lineman), executed game-like maneuvers while lower-body kinematics were recorded via optical motion capture. Passive hip range of motion at 90° hip flexion was assessed using a goniometer. Passive range of motion, athlete physical dimensions, hip function, and hip and knee rotations were submitted to 1-way analysis of variance to test for differences between playing positions. Correlations between maximal hip and knee kinematics, and maximal hip kinematics and passive range of motion were also computed.

Results: Hip and knee kinematics were similar across positions. Significant differences arose with linemen, who utilized lower maximal knee flexion (mean ± SD, 45.04±7.27°) compared to running backs (61.20±6.07°; P < 0.001) and wide receivers (54.67±6.97°; P = 0.048) during the cut. No significant differences were found among positions for hip passive range of motion (overall means: 102±15° [flexion]; 25±9° [internal rotation]; 25±8° [external rotation]). Several maximal hip measures were found to negatively correlate with maximal knee kinematics.

Conclusion: A normative database of hip and knee kinematics utilized by football athletes was developed. Position-specific analyses revealed that linemen use smaller joint motions when executing dynamic tasks, but do not demonstrate passive range of motion deficits compared to other positions.

Clinical Relevance: Knowledge of requisite game-like hip and knee ranges of motion is critical for developing goals for nonoperative or surgical recovery of hip and knee range of motion in the symptomatic athlete. These data help to identify playing positions that require remedial hip-related strength and conditioning protocols. Negative correlations between hip and knee kinematics indicated that constrained hip motion, as seen in linemen, could promote injurious motions at the knee.

This study examined individual branding efforts of marquee high school football prospects in the United States who had verified Twitter accounts. Specifically, this study investigated if top recruits who delayed public announcements of their college choice impacted their number of Twitter followers before and after they selected a specific school on National Signing Day, compared to recruits who committed early to one university long before National Signing Day. Results showed that recruits who may have attempted to increase their notoriety and Twitter followers by waiting to announce college choice are no more successful in doing so than those who commit to one school early. Further, uncommitted recruits generally did not have more followers than those who had been consistently committed to one school before signing day. Most prospects – regardless if they committed to a college long before or on National Signing Day – gained and did not lose Twitter followers over the entire examined period. This could be because sports fans on Twitter generally do not stop following athletes. It could also be that these fans found specific athletes interesting to follow and thus plan to continue doing so.