Practice makes perfect. It’s as finer sporting cliché as you’ll find, but it’s as true now as it’s ever been. Skills, drills and techniques can take months of solid repetition before you feel comfortable taking them out on the pitch.
What a lifetime of playing football can do to the human brain
Football isn’t just a contact sport — it’s a dangerous game of massive bodies colliding into one another. And while it may seem obvious that this sport can do extraordinary damage to brains and bodies, it’s taken far too long for the NFL, the medical community, and football fans to fully reckon with this.
Doctors have learned a tremendous amount about concussions and chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, a degenerative brain condition believed to be caused by repeated hits to the head, since the first former NFL player was diagnosed with CTE in the early 2000s. Concern around the issue has only grown now that more than 100 former NFL players have received a postmortem diagnosis of CTE, and new research is finding that youth football may be a risk factor for CTE down the line.
Football is still an immensely popular sport in the United States, and this weekend, millions will watch and enjoy the Super Bowl. But all the evidence we now have about the very serious risk of brain injuries casts a dim light on the future of the sport. Here’s what you need to know.
1) Concussions are incredibly commonplace in professional football
The human brain — the most complicated and powerful organ on planet Earth — is squishy. And when a person hits their head hard, the brain can bounce around and twist in the skull. It’s this rapid motion of the brain inside the skull that creates the traumatic brain injury known as a concussion.
During impact, individual neurons can be stretched and damaged. Brain chemistry gets out of whack. Concussions make people “see stars,” become disoriented, lose consciousness, become sensitive to light and sound, get headaches, and have sluggish or confused thoughts for weeks and even months.
Heads and bodies get smashed and shuddered every week during the football season. And despite changing the rules to allow for more severe penalties and fines for flagrant helmet-to-helmet hits, the NFL has not succeeded so far in preventing concussions.
The number of concussions sustained during practice and gameplay in 2018 fell somewhat, from a total of 281 in 2017 to a total of 214 in 2018, according to the NFL’s injury data. And then increased again to a total of 224 in 2019.
This data doesn’t cover the countless additional blows to the head that don’t reach the level of concussion but still may pose a risk for the brain.
2) Chronic traumatic encephalopathy is a degenerative brain disease caused by repetitive hits
CTE is not about single concussions. It’s the result of repeated concussions — and even head impacts that are not quite as severe — which can result in lasting structural changes in the brain. “The pain you feel [after a hit] is not necessarily an indicator of the damage that does to your head,” Philip Bayly, an engineering professor at Washington University in Saint Louis, who has been studying the mechanics of brain movement inside the head, said in a 2019 interview.
Specifically, brains with CTE accumulate a protein called tau (which is believed to be dislodged from brain fibers during an injury). Tau clumps together in the tissues of the brain, interrupting critical information flow.
The mechanisms of how this all happens still aren’t well understood. “The challenge is nobody sees what happens to the brain when someone gets a concussion,” Bayly said. One hypothesis is that the sulci — the grooves on the surface of the brain — experience high mechanical stress during an injury and burst open pockets of tau. (In autopsies, these clumps of tau are often found near the blood vessels at the bottom of sulci.)
The disease isn’t exactly new. A form of it was originally discovered among boxers in the 1920 (who, like football players, sustain regular hits to the head). Then, it was called dementia pugilistica, or punch-drunk syndrome. Currently the only way to definitively diagnose CTE is through an autopsy. In 2005, researchers published the first confirmed case of CTE in an NFL player. The results of that report contained ominous statistics to suggest CTE might be frighteningly prevalent among players:
There are approximately 0.41 concussions per NFL game of American football: 67.7% of concussions involve impact by another player’s helmet, 20.9% involve impact by other body regions (e.g., a knee), and 11.4% involve impact on the ground (29, 31, 32, 40). It has been reported that 9.3% of the concussions involved loss of consciousness and 2.4% of the concussions resulted in hospitalization. Most (92%) of the players who sustain a concussion return to practice in less than 7 days; fewer (69%) of the players who experience loss of consciousness return to practice in less than 7 days.
And since then, evidence has only mounted that the repeated head blows in the NFL contribute to the disease.
In 2017, Aaron Hernandez, a former player for the New England Patriots, hanged himself in prison while serving time for a violent murder. Upon an autopsy, doctors diagnosed him with CTE. It was the most severe case ever seen in a person his age (27 years old).
How to Sketch a Soccer Player – 30 Minute Drawing Exercise
JOIN THE VIRTUAL INSTRUCTOR
Get ALL of our courses, ebooks, live lessons, critiques, lesson plans and more today.
START FREE TRIAL
FREE COURSE VIDEOS
For extended Live Lessons, video courses, ebooks and more, check out the membership program. Click on the button below to learn more.
How to Draw a Soccer Player
In this drawing challenge and timed exercise, we’ll draw a soccer or football player in 30 minutes. The finished result is a sketch and should not be considered as a “finished piece of art”. But this isn’t the point of an exercise like this. Our goal is to practice and improve our drawing skills by using the same observational skills that we would with a longer drawing.
The time constraint simply makes the drawing exercise a little more exciting and also helps us realize that there is a starting time and stopping time. Even if we go over a bit, we at least get started. For some of us, getting started is the hardest part. So if we know that we’re only going to spend a few minutes on the drawing, we’re more likely to get started and finish the exercise.
With this soccer player, we’ll approach the drawing in the same manner if we were to complete the drawing in a more finished manner. We’ll begin with looser marks and progressively get more precise as the drawing develops.
Drawing the human figure is challenging. Every person is different and body shapes vary greatly. Although there isn’t a formula for drawing the human figure that works for everyone, we can still take a structured approach to drawing the figure with some accuracy.
Before we get into the step by step approach, I’ll remind you that regular sketching practice should be a part of your artistic development. By spending just a few minutes each day with your sketchbook, you’ll notice improvement in your drawing skills. Drawing is a skill that can be learned by anyone, but it does require a commitment to learning and practice.
Gettin’ Sketchy is designed to provide you with a little drawing instruction through a fun drawing challenge. If you missed the previous episodes of Gettin’ Sketchy, you can check out the last three episodes here…
- Gettin’ Sketchy – Sketching a Rose
- Gettin’ Sketchy – Sketching a Boat on the Water
- Gettin’ Sketchy – Sketching a Crab
Here’s the step by step process for drawing the soccer player…
- We begin with a line from the head to the feet. This will ensure that we get the entire figure within the picture plane.
- Next, we’ll draw a couple of loose lines – one for the shoulders and another for the waist. In this case, these lines are at a slight diagonal.
- Using these guidelines, we can draw the bone structure. If it helps, you can think of this as a “stick figure”. For the hands, feet, and head, we’ll draw basic shapes.
- With the bone structure in place, we can thicken things up by drawing the contours of the arms, legs, and torso.
Since this is a simple sketch, we’ll only use basic drawing supplies – a graphite pencil and a sketchpad is sufficient.
Materials
- Staedtler Mechanical Drawing Pencil (2B Graphite) *Affiliate Link
- Drawing Pad
The photo reference for this drawing exercise comes from Pixabay.com. The original image was in color, but the color was removed to make recognizing shapes of value a little easier. Here’s a look at the reference image…
Here’s a look at the finished sketch of the soccer player with graphite pencil…
“Gettin’ Sketchy” a semi-regular event. We broadcast live on YouTube (whenever possible) on Wednesday evenings somewhere between 8:00 PM EST to 8:30 PM EST.
Make sure that you’re a subscriber to the YouTube channel so that you won’t miss an episode. You can subscribe here.
If you’re thinking of taking your drawing skills to the next level, you may want to check out our membership program or one of our courses. You may consider starting with the “25 Days to Better Drawings” video course. You can check out this course by clicking on the link below…
25 Days to Better Drawings
Learn a new drawing concept and skill every day for 25 days. Each drawing concept taught includes a short drawing exercise (less than one hour) that reinforces the concept taught.
VIEW COURSE
Like This Lesson?
If so, join over 36,000 others that receive our newsletter with new drawing and painting lessons. Plus, check out three of our course videos and ebooks for free.
YES! I’M IN!
Take preparation seriously
Even when your off-season strength and conditioning programme comes to an end, careful consideration needs to be taken to keep your body in peak condition to aid your improvement as a player.
Preparation for upcoming games should work in a 3-4 day cycle prior to your next game. This includes eating and drinking the right foods in 4-5 small meals per day and engaging in activity that isn’t quite as strenuous as high-intensity pre-season training.
Even on match day, you can make up that extra 2-3% by preparing your body as thoroughly as possibly by eating the right meal and undertaking a light physical exercise on the morning of the match.
A healthy body gives you a greater chance of optimal performance on the pitch, whilst again reducing the chance of injury to keep you out there for longer.
Understand the game better
Thanks to the progression of elite levels of sport, you can really go deep into the tactical and strategic levels of your chosen pass time. Video analysis of the pros, coaching advice and even philosophical musings of how to be a success in sport are all widely available to those who seek to enhance their understanding.
On the pitch, it pays to know the finer workings of your sport. It will enhance the understanding of your role on the pitch and how it contributes to the success of those around you.
Without a knowledge of sport, you can’t fully appreciate how you as an individual can grow within it.
Get some expert advice
To further enhance your understanding of the how the very best succeed in sport, watch them. Consuming sporting content on your TV or online is easy, and can help you learn how the very best do it.
When doing this, don’t limit yourself to the sport you participant in. In all sports, there are winners that dedicate their lives to being the best. Many of them adopt the same attitude and determination to achieving sporting greatness – and you could do a lot worse than taking a leaf out of their book.
You don’t even have to go too far to get into the minds of the very best. We have a superb video coaching resource, the Pitchero Coach Academy that draws on some of the greatest minds in football, rugby and cricket.
