Applied Sports Science newsletter – May 13, 2015

When a player plays through an injury in the playoffs, he’s described as: brave, tough, competitor, warrior, etc, etc, etc. All very nice things to be called, sure. But as Chris Paul and Kyrie Irving battle through injuries, there’s one team that’s taking the long term view with their point guard. That’s the Washington Wizards and John Wall.

Instead of having John Wall play through five fractures on his left hand/wrist, the Wizards are choosing to hold John Wall out.

The Milwaukee Bucks today announced that Suki Hobson has been added to the team’s training staff as Senior Strength and Rehabilitation Specialist. Hobson brings over 15 years of experience working with elite athletes in the fields of strength, power and injury rehabilitation to the Bucks organization.

… FIFA.com: You promised a new style when you took over the USA post in 2011 – more proactive and less reactive. Have you achieved it?

Jurgen Klinsmann: We started the transition from a reactive style to a more eye-to-eye, proactive style, because that’s what the best teams in the world do. In order to progress you have to look at the best teams and try to get closer to them.

In what ways have we seen it?

We’re not sitting back on our heels. We’re trying to play with the big teams. We moved the whole game a little farther up the field. We pressure high now. Step by step, we’re learning how to play out of the back. All these elements are part of a more proactive style. But we’re still in the phase of piecing it together. It’s likely to take years.

The Golden State Warriors coach is about more than just X’s and O’s; what Big Bird and Al Pacino have to do with the NBA playoffs.

… According to Tracking Football, a web-based service that creates profiles for high school athletes and follows their progress, nearly 90 percent of the players drafted in 2015 were once multi-sport athletes. That figure meshes with the results of ESPN’s 2014 Quarterback Survey — which found that 95 percent of 128 active and retired NFL quarterbacks played at least two sports in high school — and suggests a clear offset to the pressure some parents face to specialize their children in one sport.

I did some reporting on this issue in January, and it wasn’t difficult to find research as well as individual expertise suggesting specialization increases the likelihood of injury and burnout while limiting opportunities for competitive lessons. I also found an important counterargument that limited the cause/effect model. After all, those who advance to the NFL are the elite of the elite athletes — the top .08 percent of high school players, according to NCAA statistics — and don’t always need the extra time and training that specialization provides to reach their goals.

How best to interpret these numbers and put them to work?

The phrase “over-trained” gets thrown round a lot in our industry. It’s true that the cumulative effects of training, competitions, and not enough rest can start to wear down an athlete to a detrimental point. So we should not consider ourselves relegated to the monitoring of exercise prescription and volume management in the weight room, as the most profound effect we can have is regulating and managing what is happening in the sport itself. Yet, without an accurate way to quantify all that stress, how do you know for certain that an athlete is over-trained? Training Stress Balance is a good start.

This week I got a tiny taste of what it’s like to be an elite athlete. It was neither nationwide adulation, nor excelling on an international stage, but I did get to swim in a very tiny swimming pool.

As part of this mad decision to try and become a triathlete in just a couple of months, I was invited down to GlaxoSmithKline’s Human Performance Lab to undergo a battery of tests to determine just how fit and ready I am to take on this ludicrous challenge.

At 42 years old you don’t get to find out too many new things about yourself so it’s been an exciting, albeit slightly nervy week for me.

Perhaps I should explain. Last week my family and I – husband Kenny and my children, Lois and Reuben – sent off a swab to be DNA tested to find out about our genetic make-up.

The test would look at genes that affect fitness and health, what foods we respond best to and perhaps which sports we’re most likely to be good at. If we have the sprinter genes, for example.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics (Germany), VU University Amsterdam (Netherlands) and Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience (USA) succeed in reconstructing the neuronal networks that interconnect the elementary units of sensory cortex – cortical columns.

We have been at the opening of the Global Sports Innovation Center (GSIC), or World Center of Innovation in Sport-enabled in the heart of Madrid space below focusing on the Microsoft binomial and startups and aims to promote entrepreneurship offs and related to sports.

The project has achieved initial investment of 17 million euros of private capital (between direct contributions and indirect contributions assessment) and has the support of large companies, public and academic institutions. Thus, some of the strategic partners are LG, Real Madrid, Barclaycard Center, Cigna or the University Camilo Jose Cela, to which must be added the support of the Community of Madrid.

Polar, a heart rate data provider for many teams and athletes around the world, launched a new sports coaching solution hardware that consists of sensors that enable quick data transferring and a dock that results in quick charging times. At 38 grams, it claims to be the world’s lightest all-in-one sensor that combines GPS capabilities with motion tracking and heart rate.

When I was a kid, my parents refused to let me drink coffee because they believed it would “stunt my growth.” It turns out, of course, that this is a myth. Studies have failed, again and again, to show that coffee or caffeine consumption are related to reduced bone mass or how tall people are.

Coffee has long had a reputation as being unhealthy. But in almost every single respect that reputation is backward. The potential health benefits are surprisingly large.

In an article on Monday, I reviewed the evidence behind coffee consumption and health in an effort to put to rest the idea that coffee is a “vice” or something we all need to cut back on.

We received many comments and questions from readers. In fact, we received so many that we thought it might be useful to respond to some of the most frequently discussed ones.

Ben Swanson, DenverBroncos.com: So I come from a basketball background, where analytics have really taken off and a large part of that is because it’s fairly straightforward in getting the tools to quantify impact: points, rebounds, assists, blocks, steals, etc. But football analytics are tougher for me given the larger number of players and the absence of stats for some positions. In short, what do football analytics focus on?

Mitch Tanney, Broncos Director of Analytics: “In terms of football analytics and how it differs a little bit from some of the other sports, one of the biggest differences is the dependent relationships. So when you have 11 guys on the field on a side, you’re talking about 11 on 11 versus essentially one-on-one in baseball—a pitcher and a batter—and five-on-five in basketball, so it makes things a little more complicated from an analytics perspective, but there’s still information and insights that can be extracted from the data. And that’s really what I’m trying to do is be able to extract information that can provide insight to the coaches, provide insight to personnel and ideally help us make more informed decisions.”