Alex Hutchinson writes great sports science explainers, medium-length articles that take current research and tell why it matters and how things work. His recent Sweat Science blog post talked about Stabilizing Your Foot Core–much like the middle-body core, the foot combines large functional muscles with other, smaller, localized complimentary physiology that promote stability and enable athleticism.
Feet are complex, no surprise, but they are also a critical element for athletic performance. All of that complexity also comes into play in the kinetic chain, a system that integrates everything in the lower body when we move, an even bigger part of the athlete’s machinery.
So when Kevin Durant struggles to come back from a serious foot injury, the process is going to be complex. And so is the explanation when things fail to go smoothly.
The sport of basketball complicates things further, mostly because the size of the athletes. Height is a major advantage, so much that talent assessors advance athletes with more height but lesser coordination. Tall athletes are (let’s assume) no more or less athletic than whatever the distribution is for any given height. It is just that more of the taller athletes advance while among the smaller athletes, only exceptional athletes progress to elite-level competition. Lesser athletes, while tall, seem more likely to have lesser feet because of this selection bias.
But then maybe it is naive to not account for athletes’ size as a variable in the way kinetic chain and foot core function, and how larger athletes might be more prone to overuse injuries. Larger athletes possess greater mass and longer levers, and as a result, a smaller margin for safety than small athletes.
Like I said, complex. The Oklahoma City Thunder do not know when Durant will return to playing, only saying that it will happen when he does not experience soreness in his injured foot. Advances in sports science have led to big changes in the practice of athlete performance training and sports medicine in recent years. The complex reality of what goes on with athletes will not get simpler as researchers and technologists learn more; it only gets more complex.
Sports writers fail when they feel compelled to say something, but then they write something so simple it basically says nothing.
There is no roadmap for exactly where this world of Applied Sports Science is headed. But there is an easy way to understand if an athlete or organization is heading in the right direction–teams and players improve, and that improvement shows in their performance.
The Thunder and Kevin Durant should be confident they are doing things right. A few months ago Oklahoma City was in a similar place with Russell Westbrook, who now seems 100% recovered from serious injury and is playing the best basketball of his life.
The Best Things I Read Last Week
- Is it time to turn our attention toward central mechanisms for post-exertional recovery strategies and performance? Frontiers in Physiology … A call to consider recovery from a brain-centric perspective, as opposed to the current practice that mostly focuses on muscular adaption.
- Cesc education: Why Fabregas slumps at this time every year FourFourTwo … Cesc Fabregas is in the prime of his athletic career, yet he continues to suffer from the same late-season decline he experienced since reaching international soccer’s elite level.
- How wearable technology will shape the future of sports USA Today … Intel device technologist Mike Bell tells us what we can expect at the intersection of sports and mobile technology. One thing: interdisciplinary collaboration will be essential.
- Whoa, Canada: Examining the NFL talent pipeline emerging up north CBSSports.com … Did you know 4 Canadians were drafted by the NFL in 2014, 12 Canadians since 2009? The article offers an in-depth look at why.
- Is peer-reviewed science too slow to track wearable accuracy? MobiHealth News … Research reviews move at one speed. Market adoption moves at another speed. Technology development move at still another speed. At the beginning it is all a bit clunky, but eventually the progress gets more in sync. And this is still the beginning of Applied Sports Science.