Applied Sports Science newsletter – May 14, 2015

In the NBA, team fit is nearly as important as player talent. The saying “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” is rarely more applicable than when discussing a young prospect who never gets the opportunity to carve out a spot in his team’s rotation. Second-year Washington Wizards forward Otto Porter, who’s enjoying a breakout performance this postseason, is a perfect example.

As a rookie, the No. 3 overall pick suffered a hamstring injury during summer league and strained his right hip flexor in mid-September, causing him to miss all of training camp. Those two injuries set him back significantly, as head coach Randy Wittman told Brandon Parker of The Washington Post last June.

Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that one of the best soccer players of this generation has legs that look like tree trunks, but new photos of Cristiano Ronaldo’s lower body have many fans in awe.

Some photos of a Real Madrid practice have leaked in advance of the team’s Champion’s League semifinal matchup with Juventus. Ronaldo’s muscular legs made quite the impression on Twitter.

… It is always a tough sell when training people because no one likes to hear that the intensity of some of their training sessions needs to be regulated. Walter was explaining that the most difficult day of the week for his clients is Tuesday because they have a hard training session on Monday and a hard training session on Wednesday, which means Tuesday needs to be a lighter training day. Most of the clients at the gym dislike this session. When I used to have my gym people didn’t love those days either. I think Walter phrased it best when he said, “We try and educate the clients to understand that we go easier on Tuesday to set you up for success on Wednesday.”

Experienced athletes will tell you there is no secret to racing faster. You have to train at the intensity or speed at which you want to race, in order to meet your competition goals. The magic lies in the training. If you want to run six minute miles on race day, you have to achieve this pace or faster in your run workout.

Many long distance athletes feel that in order to go faster they must simply increase volume in their training, rather than adding intensity (speed and power). For newer athletes stepping up to long distance racing, building endurance is a key component of their program. However, for veterans who want to step up their game, intensity is as crucial as volume.

… The key message here is understanding how learning and performance of PEOPLE can be managed/facilitated in different ways. Assisted by the growth in technology and data, an increasing trend is to take an engineering approach. This implicitly frames the process as “complicated”, when in fact the learning/performance of one or multiple people is almost always “complex”. This distinction between “complicated” and “complex” is critical.

When I was in first grade, I cut the fur pom-poms off of my dad’s mukluks. (If you didn’t grow up in the Canadian North and you don’t know what mukluks are, here’s a picture.) My dad’s mukluks were specially made for him, so he was pretty sore. I cut the pom-poms off because I had just seen The Trouble With Tribbles at a friend’s house, and I desperately wanted some Tribbles. I kept them in a shoebox, named them, brought them to show-and-tell, and pretended they were real.

It’s exactly this kind of imaginative play that a lot of parents are afraid is being lost as toys become smarter. And in exchange for what? There isn’t any real evidence yet that smart toys genuinely make kids smarter.

We know there’s an app for everything, but is there really an app for happiness? The folks at Happify think so, and they say they’ve recorded the user results that prove it.

Happify offers an online service that assesses users’ happiness levels based on both subjective and existing objective evaluations, and walks them through a set of programs and games that push users toward healthier mindsets.

“The patient is an enormous repository of information that needs to be harvested as a partnership not only in clinical care but in discovery. It is the only way we will define wellness and its progression to disease, rather than traditional medicine that defines disease and its progression to death. The ability to stratify the phenotypic expression of wellness and disease will ultimately lead to better validation of human therapeutic targets for drug discovery.”

-Dennis Ausiello, a former Chief of Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and a member of Pfizer’s board of directors.

Over the next two months the basketball world will focus on the NBA, where the NCAAs most talented prospects will seek to showcase their potential ahead of the June 25th draft. This multi-day combine involves a multitude of physical and skill-based tests that are designed to determine each player’s ultimate ability to compete at basketball’s highest level.

Physical tests include objective measurements such as height, weight, and wingspan. Similarly, performance is gauged through strength (bench press), power (vertical jump height), speed (¾ court sprint), and agility (lane shuttles), while skill-based drills include 3 point accuracy and shooting accuracy from dribble (% of 25 shots) and shooting on the move under time constraint (e.g. 35 seconds). The argument has been made for injury screening tests to be included in this process, as they are designed to detect players who may be predisposed to developing specific injuries. This is arguably an important consideration for each team when making selections, but there are some critical factors to take into account before integrating these screens in to the selection process.

The AFL wants to put a stop to grassroots players’ most common injuries, tackling some deep-seated habits along the way.

The league will roll out its new warm-up and training program designed to prevent lower limb injuries to every community football club in the country this year.

Its creators say it is the most ambitious plan of its kind in Australia, a coordinated attack on common injuries — including the ubiquitous pulled hamstring — wherever the game is played.

In wake of Pacquiao not disclosing shoulder problem, does NFL hide injuries too?

Few sporting events rise to the level of the NFL, but last week’s long awaited Mayweather vs Pacquiao extravaganza was hyped like a Super Bowl and ultimately produced even bigger controversy. After defeat, the Manny Pacquiao camp revealed he fought with a rotator cuff tear and needed surgery.

The sports word was abuzz, lawsuits were filed and the Nevada State Athletic Commission postulated sanctions. The reaction was interesting to me as NFL athletes routinely play hurt and hide injuries with little uproar. Sure there are league mandated injury reports but one would be naïve to think that all injuries are disclosed or the magnitude of health issues revealed. We all know NFL players are tough and they play through many small ailments, but I am talking about significant injuries.

… At a technical level, a lot of the problems arise when signal is low and noise is high. Various classical methods of statistical inference perform a lot better in settings with clean data. Recall that Fisher, Yates, etc., developed their p-value-based methods in the context of controlled experiments in agriculture.

Statistics really is more difficult with humans: it’s harder to do experimentation, outcomes of interest are noisy, there’s noncompliance, missing data, and experimental subjects who can try to figure out what you’re doing and alter their responses correspondingly.

Coping with the relentless pace of technological change is challenging organizations more than ever. One way companies can keep up with advances in technology and data science is by creating partnerships with academia.

… James Molyneux, Academy Performance Analyst, London Irish Rugby

‘It is important to have the companies involved when you are developing them [new products]. At the end of the day they are bespoke products. How you use them and how they integrate into your coaching process affects the way you are going to use them as an analyst. By having them there we are going to be able to really narrow down the tools that you need to be able to use analytics.