Applied Sports Science newsletter – July 30, 2015

… There was nothing divine about the first month after Matthews’ March 11 surgery.

The pain was overwhelming, and his crutches and need to elevate his leg 20 hours a day threatened his identity as an alpha male. Making matters worse, the Blazers crumbled in his absence, finishing the season 11-16 and with a feeble playoff exit against Memphis.

But somewhere between the pain and the frustration, and somewhere between the rehabilitation and planning for free agency, Matthews rediscovered a part of himself.

Just two days in to pre-season training, Brentford FC came down to the GSK Human Performance Lab to undergo a series of assessments to ensure their 2015/16 campaign gets off to the best possible start. The club’s fixture list begins with some intensity, five games in fourteen days for the promotion hopefuls, this includes four league games which will no doubt be crucial in order to set the standard for the rest of the season.

To enable them to get the edge over their rivals, pre-season testing at the GSK HPL occurred over two days consisting of cognitive and physiological assessments, taken in pairs. Computer based tasks formed the majority of their time in the cognition lab, whilst a thorough warm up, swiftly followed by a jump test, lactate threshold and VO2 max test, turned the thinking into action.

… He described Reine-Adelaide as something special. “He needs to work with us for a year,” Wenger added. “He needs to be in and out, to play with the under-21’s and develop. There’s fantastic potential there, and he will stay with us, not go out on loan to anyone.”

With Wenger, what often matters more is not the words, but the look in his eyes when he says them.

The patience to build while others rush to buy is perceived, by some, as Wenger’s strength. Others view that as a weakness, an unwillingness to spend the club’s money.

… Pressure isn’t a bad thing, it’s how we react to it that can be maladaptive. Do we stay calm and collected, or start to overthink our performance?

So how can you stop choking when under pressure? Here are some tips:

Slow down the game by taking your time.

“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong”?—?H. L. Mencken

Yes and no. For coaches that have little experience, base their practice on “what has always been done” and without critical reflection, then I would say this potentially rings true. For others that have embraced, navigated and “marinated” in these complex problem spaces for a period of time, the “clear and simple” solution may in fact be very much effective. This respects the nature of dealing with complexity, where relatively simple solutions (generated from rules of thumb & principles) can be highly effective. A recent example of this was an experienced manager opting to “do nothing” for the time being in relation to the next action in dealing with a complex (uncertain) problem. Unfortunately we often confuse complex with the need for complicated solutions and drift off into a futile search that, as a coach I used to work with would say, has us “flat out doing f***k all”, and often accompanied by a significant time & resource cost.

A great way to learn about quality coaching is to listen to coaches and athletes talk about the coaching styles they believe are most helpful for achieving success. Coverage of recent sporting events such as the women’s World Cup, and the NBA and NHL finals, provided many opportunities to hear some of the world’s most successful athletes and coaches share their insights on this topic.

Over ten years ago, XML was all the rage in information technology. XML was what the cool kids used to store, exchange and process data. By 2005, all the major computer science conferences featured papers on XML technology. Today, XML might safely be considered a legacy technology…

In any case, back in 2005, I decided to offer a course on XML that I still offer today. I got criticized a lot for this choice of topic by other professors. Some felt that the subject was too technical. Other felt that it was too easy.

Though the course is technical at times, I think it is fair to say that very few students felt that it is an “easy” course. And here I come to my first realization:

1. Technical depth is hard.

Groupthink is routinely used to explain episodes of disastrous group decision making ranging from the Bay of Pigs fiasco to the Enron scandal. Yet, despite being a fixture of the business press and the popular consciousness alike, the concept has seldom received the rigorous scrutiny it deserves.

Cass Sunstein and Reid Hastie’s new book Wiser is devoted to the subject. Wiser outlines how the explosion of discoveries about cognitive biases in decision making described by Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow enables us to put the intuitive notion of groupthink on a scientific foundation. A key theme is that poorly structured groups, rather than dampening or canceling out individual-level cognitive biases, often amplify and cascade them.

Leave as little as possible to chance, so is the vision. Top clubs work together with long analytics company, to get to the planned success. Also the FC Basel has jumped on the train.

Laboratory tests drive 70% of all clinical decisions in health care. They’re used to determine whether a patient should start taking medication and, if so, which one. They help doctors decide whether a patient should undergo medical procedures or be admitted to the hospital. And they’re used to identify an individual’s risk of developing health conditions such as diabetes or heart disease.

Yet many of us get lab tests only when we’re showing symptoms, which means we may already be sick. And too many of us find out we’re sick when it’s too late to change the course of these conditions.

It’s time to move away from reactive health care. Individuals instead need to be empowered to be proactive, take control of their own health, and work with physicians to detect diseases early or before they take hold. This empowerment will usher in a new era of preventive health care.

… Research published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine highlighted the alarming incidence of medication abuse at major football tournaments, which has not declined despite several preventative campaigns. Nearly half of all players at the 2010 World Cup took some sort of medication and more than one-third of the players were prescribed at least one NSAID before a match, regardless of whether or not they went on to feature in the match. Worryingly, in a similar vein to the NFL players mentioned earlier, a large proportion of the medication prescribed was for players who had not fully recovered from injury or may have received “prophylactic pain-treatment”. This is in spite of the fact that NSAIDs, in particular, may adversely affect the healing of muscular and bone injuries. Furthermore, the players could potentially have consumed over-the-counter medications without the physicians’ knowledge and, hence, the actual intake reported in studies might be underestimated.

The high use of medication is not purely limited to ball-based sports; similar use of medication was reported at the Sydney Olympics in 2000. Moreover, a study in the American Journal of Sports Medicine found that while medication use wasn’t as prevalent in track and field compared to team sports, nearly half of all athletes (44%) studied had taken at least one medication. Cycling has long been plagued by doping scandals, and there is anecdotal evidence to suggest that medication abuse exists within the sport. Significantly, a 2010 study found that using paracetamol increased pain tolerance, and consequently, improved time-trial time in cycling, suggesting that there may be a performance-enhancing effect of taking pain medications too. Nevertheless, long term abuse of medications by athletes is not without its side-effects, as former cyclist Jesus Manzano noted, with particular reference to anti-depressants.

Almost 7,000 athletes from 41 different countries gathered in Toronto over the past two weeks to compete in the Pan American Games. The buzz around this awesome city has been incredible and last week I went on Breakfast Television to talk about nutritious foods from around the Americas…yuca, amaranth, macadamias being some of my favourites (not to mention coffee and dark chocolate!).

A highlight of the Pan Ams for me was our men’s basketball team getting one over the U.S.A. in the semi-finals (something we’ve been waiting to do for more than 17 years!) but I also got to check out some of the other competitions. Seeing the fittest athletes in the Americas was awe-inspiring, with so much strength, speed and power. However, even the fittest people on earth can have deficiencies. In many athletes I was working with, I was surprised to see one particular insufficiency cropping up…vitamin D (despite it being mid-summer!).

Approximately 77% of the American population has insufficient levels of vitamin D, and it’s a frequent finding in lab tests for athletes. Even in the summer months, the hottest and longest days of the year, athletes who train outside all day can still be deficient. What is going on here?

This study examined the effects of post-exercise chocolate milk (CM) or water (W) consumption during 5 days of intensive judo training with concomitant weight loss on salivary cortisol and testosterone, salivary secretory immunoglobulin A (SIgA), delayed-onset muscle soreness (DOMS) and judo-related performance. Twelve trained male judo athletes engaged in 5 days of intensive judo training followed by a simulated judo competition, on two separate training weeks interspersed by 14 days. Immediately post-training, the athletes consumed 1000 ml of W on week 1 and the equivalent volume of CM on week 2. During both weeks, athletes were instructed to “make weight” for the upcoming competition. Judo-related performance in the timed-push-ups and the Special Judo Fitness Test improved by 14.6% and 6.8%, respectively, at the end of the training week with CM consumption (both p<0.001). Decreased salivary cortisol (p<0.01) and a trend for increased salivary testosterone/cortisol ratio (p=0.07) were also observed mid-week in the CM condition. Saliva flow rate was higher during the week with CM intake compared with W (p<0.001). DOMS (p<0.001) and mood disturbance (p0.05). Body mass decreased by 1.9% in the W condition and by 1.1% in the CM condition, with no significant differences between drinks. This study indicates that post-exercise CM consumption during short-term intensive judo training is beneficial for enhancing aspects of recovery, without affecting intentional weight loss.

Future NBA players aren’t born ready to enter the league.

Sure, height and natural ability help along the way. But rising high enough in the basketball hierarchy to make the Association takes plenty of hard work over a lengthy stretch of time. Even a non-household name in the NBA experiences an astronomical rise in status at some point; it just happens earlier for some.

Beyond that, we don’t know with any semblance of certainty that a youthful prospect is going to turn into something special. The LeBron Jameses of the world are exceedingly rare.

Discovering a rare talent … The Milk Cup, an internationally renowned youth football tournament held in Northern Ireland, has seen such luminaries as David Beckham, Robbie Fowler and Sergio Busquets taking early steps on the road to stardom. So, as scouts flock to this year’s tournament, what are the main attributes they are searching for when assessing a player and how does it feel to find a genius?