Applied Sports Science newsletter – May 11, 2015

… The best example of a promising young athlete paying a steep price for unwisely pushing through injury is Robert Griffin III, the Washington quarterback. Griffin tried to push through a knee injury in 2012 when he should have shut himself down — or been shut down by management — for the season.

Now Griffin has been robbed of the speed and agility that made him so special, and Washington may have lost a once-in-a-lifetime talent.

Injuries are part of sports. Coming back from injuries is part of the glory of sport. If you’re smart.

Four underdog women become America’s medal hope at the London Olympics when the men’s team is banned during the Lance Armstrong drug scandal.

… “I’m always looking at things from how can we long-term get these players better,” said Hackworth, who will also serve as a U-23 assistant to head coach Andi Herzog. “But I really think that learning how to win — while not sacrificing your principles and objectives for a team — is a component of player development. I thought we did that really well in this tournament.

“I really thought being able to play the kind of soccer we played, with our style, sticking to our principles while learning how to win in that environment was important.”

… In recent years, nobody in college football has beget more pros than Fisher, who watched 11 of his players selected in last week’s NFL draft and has had 29 players drafted since 2013 — an unprecedented three-year stretch that set a modern-day NFL record.

There are a number of reasons Jimbo has become the king of the NFL draft, starting with a rather obvious one: He is one of the best recruiters in college football and has lured some of the top talent in the country to Tallahassee in his six years as head coach. His recent string of NFL draft picks can also be attributed to this: Florida and Miami have been irrelevant in recent years, which means Jimbo has further dominated the state in recruiting and lured an even better brand of talent to FSU.

If you use the Performance Management Chart (PMC) on TrainingPeaks web or mobile app, you are familiar with Chronic Training Load (CTL). It’s a rolling, daily average of how much training load, measured by each workouts Training Stress Score® (TSS®), an athlete is managing. The more stress you can handle the greater your fitness is likely to be. If your CTL is rising then fitness is likely rising also. So CTL is a good proxy for “fitness” in the PMC model. … A reasonable ramp rate is one that you maintain for a few weeks before taking a break for a few days. While it depends to a great extent on who the athlete is, I’ve found that an increase in CTL of about 5 to 8 points per week is about right for most.

… In the coaching world, if you’re around long enough, you get to observe different reactions to runners running poorly. You have an empathetic reaction where the coach tries to relate to the athlete, you have a shrugging it off reaction, you have the “that sucked, now let’s try and figure out why it happened” response, and then you have the blame game. The blame game is where the coach blames the athlete, either lack of effort or some variation of it, and is almost always accompanied by either berating the athlete or if the coach is more sly, complaining to other coaches about why the athlete didn’t perform. … The last reaction is the one I’m interested in because I think it happens for a reason.

Objective Although evidence supports the effectiveness of interpersonal Coach Development Programmes (CDPs), which are designed to foster coach–athlete relationships, an intervention’s impact is shaped by numerous factors over and above effectiveness. The purpose of this systematic review was to examine the extent that published articles describing interpersonal CDP trials reported on indicators of internal and external validity, as conceptualised in the RE-AIM framework (ie, Reach, Effectiveness, Adoption, Implementation and Maintenance).

Methods The search strategy was conducted according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses guidelines, involving a database search and supplemental manual search of key articles and journals. After initial screening, the full-text search strategy involved identifying articles describing CDP trials and then selecting a specific subgroup of articles involving interpersonal CDP trials and excluding ineligible articles. Resulting trials were coded using a 47-item sport coaching adaptation of the RE-AIM coding sheet.

Results 17 published articles met eligibility criteria, representing 10 distinct CDP trials. After attaining coder agreement, global ratings of RE-AIM indicators within interpersonal CDP trials ranged from the low to moderate quality. Whereas indicators of effectiveness and implementation were reported to some extent across all studies, maintenance within sport organisations and a number of specific indicators from across dimensions were rarely reported.

Conclusions These findings inform the future design and evaluation of CDPs that have the potential to be adopted in numerous settings and reach athletes and coaches who can most benefit.

Spearheaded by the flood of wearable devices, a movement to quantify consumers’ lifestyles is evolving into big business with immense health and privacy ramifications.

… Last December, at the Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, MIT researchers announced the compilation of the world’s largest database of images labeled according to scene type, with 7 million entries. By exploiting a machine-learning technique known as “deep learning” — which is a revival of the classic artificial-intelligence technique of neural networks — they used it to train the most successful scene-classifier yet, which was between 25 and 33 percent more accurate than its best predecessor.

At the International Conference on Learning Representations this weekend, the researchers will present a new paper demonstrating that, en route to learning how to recognize scenes, their system also learned how to recognize objects. The work implies that at the very least, scene-recognition and object-recognition systems could work in concert. But it also holds out the possibility that they could prove to be mutually reinforcing.

Marquette University is releasing preliminary design concepts of its planned world-class athletic performance research center, which is part of a strategic partnership with the Milwaukee Bucks. The facility, which was first announced by President Michael R. Lovell in his Presidential Address in January, will support elite-level intercollegiate and professional athletics, academic research, and campus health and wellness initiatives.

President Lovell emphasized that the preliminary design concepts may change in scale, appearance and function as the university continues to define the scope of the project. In the coming months, the university will focus on developing more refined design concepts for the facility that complement the character of the existing campus and respect the urban context.

Within the knee, two specialized, C-shaped pads of tissue called menisci perform many functions that are critical to knee-joint health. The menisci, best known as the shock absorbers in the knee, help disperse pressure, reduce friction and nourish the knee. Now, new research from the University of Missouri shows even small changes in the menisci can hinder their ability to perform critical knee functions. The research could provide new approaches to preventing and treating meniscal injuries as well as clues to understanding osteoarthritis; meniscal problems are one of the major causes of joint pain and degeneration.

Background: Osteoarthritis (OA) is a common disease that will affect almost half the population at some point in their lives through pain and decreased functional capacity. New nonoperative options are being proposed to treat earlier stages of joint degeneration to provide symptomatic relief and delay surgical intervention.
Purpose: To evaluate the benefit provided by platelet-rich plasma (PRP) injections to treat knee joint degeneration in comparison with hyaluronic acid (HA), the most common injective treatment currently adopted for this condition. …

Results: Two patients reported severe pain and swelling after HA injections, while no major adverse events were noted in the PRP group. However, PRP presented overall significantly more postinjection swelling and pain. Both treatments proved to be effective in improving knee functional status and reducing symptoms: the IKDC score in the PRP group rose from 52.4 ± 14.1 to 66.2 ± 16.7 at 12 months (P < .0005), and in the HA group it rose from 49.6 ± 13.0 to 64.2 ± 18.0 at 12 months (P < .0005). A similar trend was observed for all the clinical scores used. The comparative analysis of the 2 treatments showed no significant intergroup difference at any follow-up evaluation in any of the clinical scores adopted.
Conclusion: PRP does not provide a superior clinical improvement with respect to HA, and therefore it should not be preferred to viscosupplementation as injective treatment of patients affected by knee cartilage degeneration and OA.

It’s just lunch, right? Not so fast. What and when you eat can mean the difference between optimum fuel and food coma. In the second installment of our three-part series, eight athletes rethink the most difficult meal of the day.

Our lunch expert: Danielle LaFata is the director of performance nutrition at Exos, a Phoenix training facility that works with professional baseball players, triathletes, and weekend warriors. “I want food to fuel your body and your mind,” she says. “Don’t just think of it in terms of carbs, proteins, and fats, but as a complex entity that works together to help support performance and recovery.” For LaFata’s take on each recipe, see “Why it works”.

Cells that relay information from the ear to the brain can change in significant ways in response to the noise level in the environment.

That’s one major finding of a study out today in the Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.