Applied Sports Science newsletter, February 28, 2015

… There’s an oft-repeated phrase in sports, its recurrence having washed away its origin, but the premise is this: Athletes die twice, and the first death comes in retirement.

… For me, playing two games per week has so many positives.

It keeps the players sharp and fit. It stops poor coaches breaking players with badly planned and boring training sessions leading to injury.

The U.S. under-17 men’s national team failed to reach the 2013 World Cup, but coach Richie Williams believes a new qualification format and a talented team will help his team succeed.

The International Business Times explored how NFL hopefuls prepare for the NFL Combine to advance their career in football. The article points out that the IMG Academy Combine/Draft Training Program is among the ‘cream of the crop,’ and our own Loren Seagrave, Director of Speed & Movement, gives his insights on the importance of speed at the Combine.

… There are five primary ways that a new habit can be triggered. If you understand each of them, then you can select the right one for the particular habit that you are working on. Here’s what you need to know about each trigger…
Trigger 1: Time

… “Our lives—not to mention our sanity—depend on our ability to fully experience each stage of sleep,” says Gary Kaplan, DO, author of Total Recovery. “Ironically, the sleeping pills many people rely on do not support the quality of their sleep in the night and may be heightening their experience of pain the next day.”

… According the FC Dallas Academy’s website, their system “…is driven by the game and its players, coaches and referees. This game-centric approach allows for long-term development to occur through a deep understanding of what makes players successful around the world. As the sport of soccer grows in the United States, young players in our country need the proper environment to compete against the world’s elite.”

The US Soccer Development Academy program provides the optimum developmental environment for the nation’s top youth soccer players, coaches and referees by emphasizing development through quality training and limited, meaningful competition. Currently, FC Dallas has three Development Academy teams: U-13, U-14, U-15, U-16 and U-18 boys teams referred to as the FCD Academy. At the heart of the FC Dallas Academy philosophy is preparing players for the first team to compete in Major League Soccer.”

In this session at ESC Boston 2015, Adrian Fernandez from Texas Instruments will live-build a complete end-to-end Internet of Things (IoT) system using open source hardware and software tools.

Remember life before high-speed Internet, or when having a smartphone was considered a luxury? Every few years, a new technology comes along, gains enough traction to become its own category, and has the potential to change how we live.

Enter wearables. Some expect wearable devices to repeat the growth pattern of smartphones. The category has increased its global market value by over 1,000% since 2012. More importantly, the amount is predicted to double over the next three years, reaching U.S. $12.6 billion and establishing wearables as the de facto product category for the connected world. But the prevailing wisdom among many purveyors of wearables that their products simply need to be cool—A ring that turns on your microwave! A necklace that triggers fake phone calls!—is plain wrong. The future of wearables is decidedly pragmatic. Wearables will care for the elderly, aid the disenfranchised, and maybe even help save lives.

… “A key challenge is designing these circuits with extremely low standby power, because most of these devices are just sitting idling, waiting for some event to trigger a communication,” explains Anantha Chandrakasan, the Joseph F. and Nancy P. Keithley Professor in Electrical Engineering at MIT. “When it’s on, you want to be as efficient as possible, and when it’s off, you want to really cut off the off-state power, the leakage power.”

This week, at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ International Solid-State Circuits Conference, Chandrakasan’s group will present a new transmitter design that reduces off-state leakage 100-fold. At the same time, it provides adequate power for Bluetooth transmission, or for the even longer-range 802.15.4 wireless-communication protocol.

If you follow the subject of sports-related concussions, you’ve probably seen a flurry of news on the subject of impact sensors in the last couple of weeks. As someone who has been writing about and beta testing impact sensors for the past five years, I have, of course, been monitoring developments, too.

Physio-Control, a 60-year-old Redmond firm, launched a partnership over the weekend with USA Football to make its LIFEPAK CR Plus heart defibrillators and training on their usage widely available to youth coaching staffs to deal with sudden cardiac arrest on the field.

For any athlete, representing their country is often the pinnacle of their career. For all without exception comes pride, and an overwhelming sense of personal achievement. Early mornings, late nights, social sacrifice and often minimal funding – successful athletes are born out of a foundation of commitment, dedication and an intrinsic drive to achieve.

The kudos of representing Team Great Britain (GB) is by no means exclusive to athletes. Ask any Physio, doctor or coach with an interest in working in sport: covering a Team GB event is a dream. When the opportunity to travel with Team GB to Sao Paulo in Brazil came through, to say I was excited, proud and astonished is no exaggeration. Thankfully, it didn’t disappoint. However, exciting as the trip was, and at the risk of this sounding like a shamelessly narcissistic bio, it’s important to understand the processes involved in reaching the dizzy heights of national representation; this is rarely realised independently. In sport, coaches, managers, physiotherapists, often play a significant role in the making of both successful individuals and teams.

Importance Patellofemoral pain (PFP) is both chronic and prevalent; it has complex aetiology and many conservative treatment options.

Objective Develop a comprehensive contemporary guide to conservative management of PFP outlining key considerations for clinicians to follow.

…
Results Multimodal intervention including exercise to strengthen the gluteal and quadriceps musculature, manual therapy and taping possessed the strongest evidence. Evidence also supports use of foot orthoses and acupuncture. Interview transcript analysis identified 23 themes and 58 subthemes. Four key over-arching principles to ensure effective management included—(1) PFP is a multifactorial condition requiring an individually tailored multimodal approach. (2) Immediate pain relief should be a priority to gain patient trust. (3) Patient empowerment by emphasising active over passive interventions is important. (4) Good patient education and activity modification is essential. Future research priorities include identifying risk factors, testing effective prevention, developing education strategies, evaluating the influence of psychosocial factors on treatment outcomes and how to address them, evaluating the efficacy of movement pattern retraining and improving clinicians’ assessment skills to facilitate optimal individual prescription.

Conclusions and relevance Effective management of PFP requires consideration of a number of proven conservative interventions. An individually tailored multimodal intervention programme including gluteal and quadriceps strengthening, patellar taping and an emphasis on education and activity modification should be prescribed for patients with PFP. We provide a ‘Best Practice Guide to Conservative Management of Patellofemoral Pain’ outlining key considerations.

As part of his proposed precision medicine initiative, President Barack Obama has called for enlisting at least 1 million American volunteers in a long-term study of genes, environment, and health. The idea is to mine all kinds of information, from participants’ DNA and medical records to their physical activity tracked by Fitbits, to accelerate the development of treatments tailored to individual patients. It may sound straightforward, but not so, concluded nearly 90 scientists and company, industry, and patient representatives who met at the National Institutes of Health last week to begin planning this massive U.S. cohort study. Still, by the end of the 2-day meeting, most of the participants seemed enthusiastically on board, if somewhat daunted by the challenges of designing a project that could cost a billion dollars or more and last a decade or longer.

… Each of us harbors a teeming ecosystem of microbes that outnumbers the total number of cells in the human body by a factor of 10 to one and whose collective genome is at least 150 times larger than our own. In 2012 the National Institutes of Health completed the first phase of the Human Microbiome Project, a multimillion-dollar effort to catalogue and understand the microbes that inhabit our bodies. The microbiome varies dramatically from one individual to the next and can change quickly over time in a single individual. The great majority of the microbes live in the gut, particularly the large intestine, which serves as an anaerobic digestion chamber. Scientists are still in the early stages of exploring the gut microbiome, but a burgeoning body of research suggests that the makeup of this complex microbial ecosystem is closely linked with our immune function. Some researchers now suspect that, aside from protecting us from infection, one of the immune system’s jobs is to cultivate, or “farm,” the friendly microbes that we rely on to keep us healthy.

If you’re looking for a reason to drink more coffee, look no further. A new report released last week by the 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC) states that there is strong evidence that drinking three to five cups of joe per day, or up to 400 mg of caffeine, is not associated with long-term health risks among healthy individuals, and that it may even have some health benefits.

… In the years since his body and his production began to decline, Teixeira, 34, has become the master of reinvention. He will try anything to get back to where he once was, the mashing perennial MVP candidate whom the Yankees signed to a $180 million deal before the 2009 season.

He has become a devotee of obscure workout methods and has sought nutritional aids on every shelf.

ESPN The Magazine’s annual “Analytics” issue includes an ambitious ranking of all 122 teams in the four major pro sports based on the strength of each franchise’s analytics staff, its buy-in from execs and coaches, its investment in biometric data and how much its overall approach is predicated on analytics.

Five MLB teams ranked in the top 10 — the Astros (second), Rays (fourth), Red Sox (fifth), Yankees (sixth) and Athletics (ninth). The Marlins rank 116th and the Phillies dead last at No. 122. (The top 10 included no NFL teams and just one NHL team, as MLB and NBA franchises have put much more emphasis into crunching data.)

With the 2022 World Cup expected to take place in November and December, football officials around the world have already started examining their planning schedules to assess what impact it will have on their domestic competitions. Here we take a look at the world’s leading leagues and what they might need to do in order to accommodate the first winter World Cup.

In the weeks leading up to the mother of all football events, the Super Bowl, there was no shortage of defining moments for me to tell my 13-year-old twin athletes: “Be humble — first, last and always.” The experience from which I draw wisdom is active involvement in my boys’ seven years of youth football.

When I witness egregious behavior by a few professional athletes, my blood boils. I tire of bad examples set by a few. I’m not sure why, on the football stage, athletes are more susceptible to displays of appalling conduct than other sports — from what football players say to what they wear to how they act. There appears to be a lack of respect for self, women and authority. Why do some high profile athletes’ filters seem to be broken?

Ball screens are one of the most frequently used tactical behaviour in elite basketball games. The aim of the present study was to identify their predictors of success related to time, space, players, and tasks performed. The sample was composed of 818 ball screens corresponding to 20 close games (mean differences in score of 3.1 ± 0.8 points) randomly selected from the playoff games of the Spanish Basketball League (2008–2011). Classification tree analysis (CHAID) was used to analyse which variable or combination of variables, better predicts effectiveness during ball screens. The main results allowed identifying interactions with dribbler actions after the screen and the orientation of the screen on the ball. The results showed no interaction with game quarter and quarter minute temporal-related variables in both analyses. The present findings allow improving coaches’ strategic plans that involve selecting the most appropriate offensive approach when performing ball screens.

Parental education is the strongest measured predictor of offspring education, and thus many scholars see the parent–child correlation in educational attainment as an important measure of social mobility. But if social changes or policy interventions are going to have dynastic effects, we need to know what accounts for this intergenerational association, that is, whether it is primarily environmental or genetic in origin. Thus, to understand whether the estimated social influence of parental education on offspring education is biased owing to genetic inheritance (or moderated by it), we exploit the findings from a recent large genome-wide association study of educational attainment to construct a genetic score designed to predict educational attainment. Using data from two independent samples, we find that our genetic score significantly predicts years of schooling in both between-family and within-family analyses.