The statistical revolution is changing the way pro sports are played and watched, but it’s also changing what we know about athletes. By measuring g-forces, breathing patterns, adrenaline and plenty more aspects of athletes and their equipment, these sports technologies go far beyond the old 40-yard dash in measuring a player’s prowess. And they’re not just for professional athletes: Weekend warriors can now receive performance feedback to help them train smarter and get stronger. All you need is a smartphone and plenty of willpower.

Read more: 5 Personal-Sport Technologies to Help You Get Stronger, Faster and Better – Popular Mechanics

As the U.S. Open Snowboard Championships take place in Vermont this week, we take a look at the tech that allowed snowboard halfpipes to get taller, wider and longer—and help snowboarders get some serious air.

Read more: U.S. Open Snowboard Championship – Winter Snowboarding Halfpipe – Popular Mechanics

Old white men can be a curious lot. Through much of the country they’re bellyaching for freedom, against the tyranny of outside forces, like the government, taxes or unions from impeding them in any way. However, sometimes, ideals be damned, they need to stand up for other old white men who feel aggrieved by people exercising the very freedom they harp about defending.

On the day the Knicks introduced Carmelo Anthony after a months-long courtship, the Nets acquired the alleged coach-killing Deron Williams from the Jazz. Not to mention this being less than a year after LeBron, D-Wade and Chris Bosh orchestrated a coup that allowed the three to join forces in Miami. And let’s not forget that Chris Paul isn’t exactly thrilled with his situation either playing for the league-owned Hornets. Well, this isn’t sitting well with old white sportswriters and talking heads.

Dick Vitale thinks the inmates have taken over the asylum, a New York Daily News beat writer takes to the airwaves to argue players have too much power, Ken Berger of CBSSports.com calls it all a “shell game” that exposes a “dark underside,” which portends league-wide “Armageddon,” Rick Reilly is tut-tutting over these egotistic stars deleterious effects on the game, SI’s Michael Rosenberg rails against Carmelo’s selfishness and the same magazine’s Ian Thomsen said these deals just about assured a lockout because owners won’t stand for player machinations of this sort any longer. Yet, I didn’t see anyone writing stories about how wrong Denver was to trade Chauncey Billups, who wanted to finish his career in Denver–so much for player control.

As much as “The Decision” was a disgrace and that the whole ‘Melo trade talk was needlessly protracted, this endless handwringing over players pushing to play on the team of their choosing is fraught with stupidity; a pervasive attitude that athletes should stay under the thumbs of owners. The hive mind of sports media seems to agree that the olden days of owners maintain total control like in those wondrous days of yore before free agency, when sports was closer to indentured servitude.

This idea is hardly new. Chuck Klosterman enjoys arguing that if you polled sports writers on their personal politics, they majority would appear left of center, however the lens through which they view sports makes them seem oppressive and antiquated. None of them would want an asshole like Bill Parcells as their boss, but they insist that players need to stay in lock-step with his dictatorial demands. Columnists, like the current Supreme Court, are firmly on the side of bosses and our corporate overlords. That means the NFL’s dean of journalists, Peter King, writes slurpy love letters to NFL commissioner Roger Goodell in Sports Illustrated on the eve of a major labor negotiation that’s looking to fleece the players and Buzz Bissinger idiotically opines that the NBA is too black for white America.

Somehow, owners have co-opted the notion that their actions represent the ones that are for THE GOOD OF THE GAME and that players, in opposing ownerships’ moves, are in the business of destroying sport. Mind you that it’s the owner Tom Hicks that bankrupted the Texas Rangers and eviscerated Liverpool FC with his over-leveraged idiocy. It was George Shinn whose moral and financial bankruptcy has nearly brought the NBA’s Hornets to their knees. The NHL, in their lust for money, expanded idiotically into the Southern US, diluting and bankrupting their sport. Donald Sterling’s naked profiteering has kept the LA Clippers from ever being great, on top of him being a horrid human. The NFL owners create a system where they don’t guarantee player salaries, forcing them to destroy their bodies to keep a roster spot, but then get fine-happy when the players start destroying their bodies too much, and yet the owners still push to add two more games to an already grueling season. For THE GOOD OF THE GAME, indeed.

The sports media has been complicit in this charade for a long time. These guys have been so used to carrying water for ownership, that siding with them in these current labor disputes must almost be a Pavlovian response. There was hardly a whiff of dissent back in the 1990s, when America’s cities went on stadium-building binges with their own cheering section in the media.

Those halcyon times when a predominantly conservative group of multi-millionaires and billionaires built their entire economic model on government subsidies and handouts in the form of opulent sports palaces constructed on the public’s dime. In these pursuits, sports talk radio and newspaper columnists handled the PR for them by heralding the “need” for stadiums for the city’s economy despite countless studies by the likes of economist Andrew Zimbalist that point to the contrary. They held up the idea that to be a “World Class” city, you had to have professional sports teams, but as was aptly pointed out back when the Seattle Sonics begged for a new arena, the visiting Prime Minister of China didn’t meet with the owners of the team, he met with Bill Gates.

The media helped fleece cities to benefit owners and now they’re primed to do the same to wrest money and rights from the players. Perhaps because with the advent of free agency, sports fandom has become a practice in rooting for laundry, so it makes sense to stick up for those who own the laundry as apposed to the ones who are loaned the shirts and short pants on a limited basis. But in the coming labor battles in both the NBA and NFL, the Tea Party should break with the old white men in the front office and get on the players’ side to demand that they keep their freedom.

Before the season started, I told my editor at Popular Mechanics “Some big pitcher is going to blow out his elbow and need Tommy John surgery, let me write a story right now that explains how it works and how the science is changing to help pitchers recover from a torn elbow ligament faster.” He agreed and here it is! p.s. Sorry, Strasburg fans, he won’t be pitching at a high level again until 2012.

The bicycle is the near-perfect vehicle, but that doesn’t stop people from (brilliantly) messing with the design to increase speed, comfort or desirability to commuters. I spoke to some leading bicycle designers to highlight 10 variations on the traditional bike. Read the full story and see all the pictures at Popular Mechanics.

Seems that most everything your high school gym teacher told you is wrong. Well, at least when it comes to all that start-of-the-class stretching.

A recent spate of studies shows that when it comes to warming up before exercising, phys ed instructors didn’t do us any favors by having us to go through a series of calf extensions, hurdler’s stretches and the like.

The latest salvo against stretching comes from a study published in the September issue of the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, which found that static stretching before a workout lowered runners’ endurance and made their body less efficient. While previous studies have illustrated the effects of stretching on anaerobic activities, this was the first one to show the effects on runners.

Read the rest at Wired.com

At 28 years old and approaching the downside of his career, a rib injury kept American tennis player Mardy Fish out of last year’s US Open. A few weeks after the tournament, nursing two bad knees, he had the left one surgically repaired and realized his chronic pains and slipping world ranking weren’t merely a product of age.

The 6-foot-2 Minnesotan acknowledged what others had already known: “I was just too heavy,” he told Wired.com. “Flat out too heavy.”

Read the rest at Wired.com

Last Friday was a mixed bag for fans of the fastball. Early in the day, the Washington Nationals announced that phenom Stephen Strasburg, who hurled a 101-mph pitch in his debut in June, would likely require Tommy John surgery for his injured elbow; a procedure that could sideline him for up to 18 months. But later that night Aroldis Chapman, a 22-year-old Cuban defector pitching for the Cincinnati Reds’ triple-A affiliate in Louisville, captured baseball fans’ attention when he threw a pitch clocked at 105 mph.Read the rest on Popularmechanics.com

As NFL and college football training camps begin preparing players for their upcoming 2010 seasons, the focus on the long-term damage of concussions is greater than ever. One industrial designer thinks he’s found a solution: a better, safer helmet.Read the rest at Wired.com

The Minnesota Twins’ Central Division title hopes took a major hit before the season even began when their All-Star closer, Joe Nathan, went under the knife to have season-ending ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction; more commonly known to baseball fans as Tommy John surgery. But it isn’t just Major Leaguers undergoing this operation; the number of young pitchers requiring elbow reconstruction has surged during the past decade. As UCL injuries increase and recovery time for Tommy John surgery remains protracted, doctors worry that athletes will turn to platelet-rich plasma therapy (PRP), an unproven treatment that has faced scrutiny from anti-doping officials.

PRP, a treatment that injects a concentration of a person’s own platelets into an injury to aid healing, first stepped into the spotlight when Pittsburgh Steelers safety Troy Polamalu received the treatment to speed the recovery of an injured knee ligament before Super Bowl XLIII. It was back in the news a few weeks ago when Tiger Woods said before the Masters that he had received PRP injections the year before to help recover from his knee operations and aid in healing his torn Achilles’ tendon. In July 2008, Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Takashi Saito received PRP to treat a partial tear in his UCL—instead of undergoing Tommy John surgery he was back pitching later that season.

While Tommy John surgery has saved countless careers by restoring the elbow stability that provides pitchers their velocity and control, the recovery leaves hurlers sidelined for more than a season. Now more than ever an alternative treatment to surgery is needed to combat the number of young pitchers needing the operation, which has skyrocketed since 2000, according to Dr. James Andrews, America’s leading sport orthopedist. Instead of performing eight to nine Tommy John surgeries per year on young players as he did a decade ago, lately Andrews is doing 75 to 80 a year and he says 2010 “is worse than it’s ever been.”

With teams investing so much money in their pitchers and those early years being so important to a young player’s development, Saito’s experience with PRP makes the treatment that much more enticing, but doctors still haven’t confirmed its effectiveness. “Sometimes we get ahead of ourselves and everybody jumps onboard to start doing this stuff because they want to be innovative and get ahead of the game,” says Dr. Grant Jones, a professor of orthopedics at Ohio State University Medical Center. “So far we haven’t seen any adverse affects, but we need better studies before we start throwing PRP in everybody, which seems to be happening right now.”

Andrews, whose client list has included Drew Brees, Roger Clemens, Brett Favre, Peyton Manning and Michael Jordan, says he’s “applying PRP sparingly,” believing the science on the treatment to be “10 years away from being solid.” However, he sees promise in the practice for UCL injuries. “I’ve used it on some young throwers and have had some good response,” he says. “It may be the most revolutionary advancement in our field since the orthoscope.”

Despite early positive returns, questions surrounding PRP aren’t limited to its efficacy, as anti-doping officials have debated recently whether it should be banned altogether. In 2009 both the World Anti-Doping Agency and the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency barred PRP’s use, except in cases where a therapeutic-use exemption is granted. However, PRP differs from synthetic performance enhancers like steroids, in that it’s derived from blood drawn from the patient. The doctor uses a centrifuge to separate the patient’s platelets from the red and white blood cells and then injects the PRP around the injured tendon, ligament or muscle. Doctors isolate the platelets and introduce them to aid in tissue regeneration because “they are thought to be the main constituent of the blood that promotes the whole healing process,” says Jones.

Jones authored a paper earlier this year reviewing applications of PRP, finding that “there are several animal and laboratory studies that have shown the benefit of PRP, but in terms of the human literature, the data is still somewhat sparse in terms of its effectiveness.” While positive results were noted in his paper, where PRP aided in the healing of shoulders, knees and elbows, some trials, like those using PRP in ACL reconstructions, found little benefit from the treatment.

Seeing the limited scope of previous PRP trials, Jones is conducting a more comprehensive examination of the treatment, by studying its effects on patients with tennis elbow. As with UCL injuries, tennis elbow occurs from repetitive stress that leads to tears and strains in the tendon on the part of the elbow opposite the UCL. While the study remains a year from completion, Jones says “there does seem to be a trend toward PRP working thus far.”

If PRP fails to become an effective treatment for healing UCL injuries, the last hope to save a pitcher’s career will remain Tommy John surgery, which until 1974 wasn’t even an option. But that year Dr. Frank Jobe invented the operation that gave hurlers hope when he replaced Los Angeles Dodgers lefty pitcher Tommy John’s UCL with a tendon from his right arm.

Nearly four decades on, the operation remains very similar to the original, with a surgeon taking a tendon from a player’s wrist or hamstring, then threading it through holes drilled in the humerus and ulna to replace the UCL. And the operation has been effective. A 2007 study published in The American Journal of Sports Medicine found that 82 percent of Major League pitchers who underwent Tommy John surgery between 1998 and 2003 returned to baseball with little drop-off from their pre-injury performance; however, it took them an average of 18.5 months to do so. “We haven’t figured out ways to appreciably speed recovery up,” says Dr. David Geier, the Medical University of South Carolina’s director of sports medicine. “You’ve got to wait several months for the body to incorporate that ligament.”

While the surgery hasn’t changed, Andrews says that in the last seven to eight years doctors and trainers have come to better understand how the entire body works together to throw a pitch, which allows them to better prevent UCL strains or tears. So he’s spearheaded the STOP Sports Injuries campaign to educate young athletes on how to train properly, advocating building not just muscle around the elbow, but rotator cuff and core strength as well. Pitchers emphasizing total body strength will support their arm better during the pitching motion and mitigate the cumulative stress that pitching puts on the elbow. That’s important because the UCL “can withstand the stress of one throw, but you’re talking hundreds of pitches a week—it’s wear and tear over time,” Geier says.

Allowing players to rest will also ease that wear and tear, but Andrews says that doesn’t happen enough in youth sports right now. He’s seen pitchers throwing year-round and playing in multiple leagues at the same time, which fatigues pitchers and leaves them 36 times more susceptible to injury. To preserve pitchers’ elbows, they need limited pitch counts during a game, to have rest days between outings and to spend at least two months each year without pitching.

Without that rest and conditioning, and with PRP still unproven, the jump in the number of pitchers requiring Tommy John surgery will continue. And Andrews, a man who’s performed nearly 3000 of the operations, says pitchers should heed his warning about overusing their arm, conceding that “I can’t make that ligament any better than the good Lord made it.”

This article originally appeared on Popularmechanics.com