Applied Sports Science newsletter – April 20, 2015

oy Hibbert is an awkward fit in today’s pace-and-space NBA. He doesn’t shoot well near the basket or from distance, he isn’t a particularly gifted passer, and he can’t sprint up and down the court repeatedly. When the Pacers expected to play the Heat in the Eastern Conference Finals every year, Hibbert’s severe shortcomings on offense were worth putting up with because he was their best chance of beating LeBron James. But the league has changed, and the Pacers are being left behind. Increasingly, it doesn’t seem like Roy Hibbert is part of their future.

Juergen Klinsmann doesn’t have to think long or hard to remember how he felt when the U.S. was eliminated during the group stage of the Olympic qualifying tournament three years ago.

“I was furious,” he said. “So now we want to learn [from] that mistake.”

Jason Biles finds himself in the trenches of NBA competition as head athletic trainer/director of performance rehabilitation for the Houston Rockets. He was honored with the 2013-14 National Basketball Athletic Trainers Association Assistant Athletic Trainer of the Year Award. Biles spent three seasons as head strength and condition coach and assistant athletic trainer for the Memphis Grizzlies before joining Houston in 2010. Biles has spent the season preparing James Harden, Dwight Howard and the Rockets for the postseason grind.

It’s spring. By now, you’ve either broken your New Year’s resolutions or successfully integrated them into your routines.

If you’re in the former group, you’re in luck. This is actually a terrific time to create new habits or to shed old ones. That’s because the important elements of habit change aren’t tied to a season. Moreover, the experience of failing to change can actually give you crucial information that will ensure victory the next time around.

The beautiful color of a sunset might be more than just a pretty picture. It could be a signal to our bodies that it’s time to reset our internal clock, the biological ticktock that governs everything from sleep patterns to digestion. That’s the implication of a new study in mice that shows these small rodents use light’s changing color to set their own clocks, a finding that researchers expect will hold for humans, too.

“I think this work opens up how we’re just starting to scratch the surface and look at the environmental adaptations of clocks,” says Carrie Partch, a biochemist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was not involved in the new study.

Fitness bands and other activity trackers have fared well despite the entrance of smartwatches into the race to occupy human wrists, but that’s about to change. As smartwatch ownership rises at a quick pace, activity tracker ownership has begun to plateau, according to a new report from The NPD Group.

Smartwatch ownership in the U.S. will reach 9 percent of the country’s adult (ages 18+) population by 2016, according to The NPD Group’s Connected Intelligence Wearables Forecast. Meanwhile, by the end of 2016, activity tracker ownership will peak at 32 million.

With the best record in the NBA, the Golden State Warriors are cruising into the postseason. MVP candidate Stephen Curry and his ‘splash brother’ Klay Thompson have dominated the competition with their stellar playmaking, emerging defensive player of the year candidate Draymond Green has led the way defensively, and the rest of the role players have efficiently held down the fort on both ends of the floor. The team’s dominance not only lies in their record, but in the fact that they’re outscoring opponents by 12 points per 100 possessions – a feat that over the past 15 seasons, only the 2007-2008 Celtics (who won the title) and 2012-13 Thunder share.

So how have the Warriors been able to make that leap to elite team this season? It all starts with one of the most overlooked and underrated aspects of sports – training. The innovative Golden State Warriors have been looking for data-driven ways to improve their training regimen. As the San Francisco Business Times recently pointed out, the Warriors’ extensive search led them to a Redwood City-based tech startup called Athos.

Let’s say you’re playing a video game. Instead of using a controller to pick something up, what if you could reach out your hand and just grab it?

Or, let’s say you speak sign language and are trying to communicate with someone who doesn’t. Imagine a world in which a computer could track your hand motions to such a detailed degree that it could translate your sign language into the spoken word, breaking down a substantial communication barrier.

Researchers at Microsoft have developed a system that can track – in real time – all the sophisticated and nuanced hand motions that people make in their everyday lives.

Bayern Munich doctor Hans-Wilhelm Müller-Wohlfahrt and his team of physios have quit with immediate effect. The Munich-based doctor cited a “damaged relationship of trust” as the reason for his departure.

Eating healthy is sometimes a challenge on its own, so technology should ease that burden – not increase it – according to new research from the Georgia Institute of Technology and University of Washington. Researchers studied how mobile-based food journals integrate into everyday life and specific challenges when using food journaling technology. Their research suggests how future designs might make it easier and more effective.

At Cornell, the benefits of having an on-campus dairy extend beyond a diverse dining hall menu to helping change workout recovery habits.

Placebos have helped to ease symptoms of illness for centuries, despite their lack of active ingredients. They have also been a fundamental component of clinical research to test new drug therapies for more than 70 years. But why some people respond to placebos and others do not remains under debate.

With the advent of genomic sequencing, researchers are learning that placebo responses may be modified by a person’s genetics, a discovery that raises important new questions regarding the role of the placebo in patient care and in drug development: How many genetic biomarkers exist? Can the medical field harness the placebo response to enhance personalized medical treatment? What might be the impact of placebo-drug interactions? And what will this new information mean for randomized clinical trials, which depend on placebo controls to test the efficacy of new drug candidates? Should a “no treatment” control be added to future trials?

Here is an interview with one of the greatest physiologists in the United Kingdom – Professor Andrew Jones, now Associate Dean Research in the College of Life and Environmental Sciences at the University of Exeter. The first time I met Andy was probably when we both served on a sport science panel for UK Athletics (some time ago). I knew Andy as a physiologist, who primarily studied VO2 kinetics (how rapidly your body can take up oxygen) and worked with elite athletes, including Paula Radcliffe. Andy tested Paula from a young age and of course several years later Paula went on to run a record for the marathon that still stands today. Nowadays Andy is known by many people for his work with beetroot juice. So I wanted to ask Andy a few questions.

A new study of intercollegiate football rivalries suggests that competition for scarce resources influences fan opinions. The researchers found that geographic proximity and a shared history of comparable success determine rivalrous and sometimes hostile feelings.