Applied Sports Science newsletter – July 3, 2015

Are MMA fighters the complete athlete? Professor Greg Whyte worked with Conor McGregor to put the theory to the test…

Eugenie Bouchard discusses her abdominal injury, her first-round loss to Ying-Ying Duan and her struggles this year.

Eddie Howe, the Golden Boy of British coaching, has led AFC Bournemouth from League 2 obscurity to the Premier League in just six years.

This season will represent a whole new challenge for the 37-year-old and his players, but given the style in which the Cherries gained promotion last season, Howe will be quietly confident his side can take the top flight by storm.

For years, intense meditation has been part of Carli Lloyd’s soccer game, as important as all of her emphasis on fitness. Getting alone in a room, finding the moment, the big moment in a game, conjuring up scenarios that include the ball on her foot.

On Tuesday night when she was about to take a penalty kick in the 69th minute, a Women’s World Cup semifinal hinging on the moment, Lloyd had been there before.

“I basically zoned out the entire world except for the net, the ball and myself,” Lloyd said Wednesday afternoon over the phone.

… Head Coach Danny Kerry has credited a change in the outlook of his players and staff for the dramatic upturn. “We had some very thorough conversations after the World Cup around why they wanted to be here, what they wanted to achieve and how they wanted to do it,” he said.

“It all sounds a bit clichéd, but it was the whole piece around values, visions and behaviours, and off the back of that they have driven a very high expectation of what their daily training environment looks like.”

Sports coaches and performance consultants are increasingly employing questioning as an avenue to nurture growth and development. Opposed to more traditional approaches to teaching where a coach, typically, provided all of the answers and simply instructed athletes where to go and what to do, a more humanistic and contemporary approach is to facilitate learning and development. Of course there are various ways to accomplish this and no method is going to work all of the time, however, it is important to consider the potential influence that asking an insightful question can have on the development of athletes.

Dividing training objectives into consecutive phases to gain morphological adaptations (hypertrophy phase) and neural adaptations (strength and power phases) is called strength-power periodization (SPP). These phases differ in program variables (volume, intensity, and exercise choice or type) and use stepwise intensity progression and concomitant decreasing volume, converging to peak intensity (peaking phase). Undulating periodization strategies rotate these program variables in a bi-weekly, weekly, or daily fashion. The following review addresses the effects of different short-term periodization models on strength and speed-strength both with subjects of different performance levels and with competitive athletes from different sports who use a particular periodization model during off-season, pre-season, and in-season conditioning. In most periodization studies, it is obvious that the strength endurance sessions are characterized by repetition zones (12–15 repetitions) that induce muscle hypertrophy in persons with a low performance level. Strictly speaking, when examining subjects with a low training level, many periodization studies include mainly hypertrophy sessions interspersed with heavy strength/power sessions. Studies have demonstrated equal or statistically significant higher gains in maximal strength for daily undulating periodization compared with SPP in subjects with a low to moderate performance level. The relatively short intervention period and the lack of concomitant sports conditioning call into question the practical value of these findings for competitive athletes. Possibly owing to differences in mesocycle length, conditioning programs, and program variables, competitive athletes either maintained or improved strength and/or speed-strength performance by integrating daily undulating periodization and SPP during off-season, pre-season and in-season conditioning. In high-performance sports, high-repetition strength training (>15) should be avoided because it does not provide an adequate training stimulus for gains in muscle cross-sectional area and strength performance. High-volume circuit strength training performed over 2 years negatively affected the development of the power output and maximal strength of the upper extremities in professional rugby players. Indeed, meta-analyses and results with weightlifters, American Football players, and throwers confirm the necessity of the habitual use of ?80 % 1 RM: (1) to improve maximal strength during the off-season and in-season in American Football, (2) to reach peak performance in maximal strength and vertical jump power during tapering in track-and-field, and (3) to produce hypertrophy and strength improvements in advanced athletes. The integration and extent of hypertrophy strength training in in-season conditioning depend on the duration of the contest period, the frequency of the contests, and the proportion of the conditioning program. Based on the literature, 72 h between hypertrophy strength training and strength-power training should be provided to allow for adequate regeneration times and therefore maximal stimulus intensities in training. This conclusion is only valid if the muscle is not trained otherwise during this regeneration phase. Thus, rotating hypertrophy and strength-power sessions in a microcycle during the season is a viable option. Comparative studies in competitive athletes who integrated strength training during pre-season conditioning confirm a tendency for gains in explosive strength and statistically significant improvements in medicine ball throw through SPP but not through daily undulating periodization. These findings indicate that to maximize the speed-strength in the short term (peaking), elite athletes should perform strength-power training twice per week. It is possible to perform a single strength-power session with the method of maximum explosive strength actions moving high-weight loads (90 % 1 repetition maximum [RM]) at least 1–2 days before competition because of the shorter regeneration times and potentiation effects. Compared with ballistic strength training (30 % 1 RM), this method has been shown to provide statistically superior gains in maximal strength, peak power, impulse size, and explosive strength during tapering in track-and-field throwers. The speed-strength performance in drop jumps of strength-trained subjects showed potentiation effects 48–148 h after a single strength-power training session. Regarding neuromuscular performance, plyometric exercises can even be performed after strength-power training on the same day if a minimum rest period of 3 h is provided.

CLINICAL depression is, simply put, a dreadful disease. Diagnosing it is anything but simple, however. Its symptoms vary, can shift with the ups and downs of everyday life, and sometimes overlap with those of other diseases. For these reasons, it is common for depression to go unidentified for months, or even to be missed altogether.

Stefan Scherer of the University of Southern California and Louis-Philippe Morency of Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, hope to change this. They are trying to develop a reliable way of diagnosing depression by using a computer to record and analyse aspects of a putative sufferer’s behaviour. They are, they think, 85% of the way there.

Proteus Digital Health has received an update to its FDA 510(k) clearance for its digital medicine platform, adding a new indication to the clearance. The system is now, to the company’s knowledge, the first technology to have an indication in its FDA clearance for measuring medication adherence.

Young female athletes appear to face a far greater risk for repetitive motion injuries than young males do, new research suggests.

The finding stems from an analysis that looked at overuse injuries among 3,000 male and female high school athletes participating in 20 different sports.

Researchers from Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center in Columbus report that the highest overuse injury rate was observed among girls who ran track.

The rearfoot motion during sports activities in patients with the medial tibial stress syndrome (MTSS) is unknown. This study aimed to investigate the difference in kinematics of the rearfoot in MTSS patients (eight male soccer players) and control participants (eight male soccer players) during a forward step. Methods Sixteen male soccer players, including eight players with MTSS, participated. Forward step trials were recorded with cineradiographic images obtained at a sampling rate of 60 Hz. Geometric bone models of the tibia and talus/calcaneus were created from computed tomography scans of the distal part of one lower limb. Following a combination of approaches, anatomical coordinate systems were embedded in each bone model. The talocrural joint motion (relative motion of the talus with respect to the tibia) and subtalar joint motion (relative motion of the calcaneus with respect to the talus) were examined. Results A significantly larger range of internal/external rotation and inversion/eversion motion was observed in the subtalar joint of MTSS patients compared to healthy controls (P?<?0.05) from heel contact to heel off. There were no significant differences between the MTSS patients and healthy participants in the ranges of all talocrural joint angles during the forward step. Conclusion Our results indicate that the range of subtalar joint motion is greater in patients with MTSS during the stance phase of the forward step. The kinematic results obtained of this study may have important clinical implications and add quantitative data to an in vivo database of MTSS patients.

Hamstring strain injury (HSI) continues to present as a huge challenge for those of us working within the sport and exercise medicine field – whether that be in a research or clinical setting. Disappointing figures have recently shown that despite an increasing body of publications over recent years and a perceived improvement in understanding of underlying causes, the epidemiology for HSI in elite sport has not changed over the past 10 years (Ekstrand, Hagglund & Walden, 2009) A worrying reality.

Some will argue that WE HAVE improved our understanding and management of hamstring injuries but the evidence base is not being applied effectively into clinical practice. (Bahr, Thornborg, EKstrand, 2015). Others will state that our ability to influence epidemiological data at elite level, has been affected by the evolution of sporting competition including increased physical application. Take professional football for example, both sprint distance (35%) and high intensity running distance (30%) have significantly increased over the past 7 years, alongside a reduction in recovery times as a result of increased fixture congestion (Barnes et al, 2014) These can all be seen as restraints to our drive for better data around HSI.

These are all factors we should appreciate, however are we missing something else?

The Brazilian football confederation will summon former national team coaches to help find ways of improving football in the country after a series of disappointing results.

The confederation’s announcement that it will form a counsel of former coaches comes less than a week after Brazil was eliminated in the quarterfinals of the Copa America for the second consecutive time. It’s also less than a year since Brazil’s worst loss ever, a 7-1 defeat to Germany in the semifinals of the World Cup on home soil.

The life cycle of consumer products is depressingly predictable. A product becomes a hit because it resonates with a generation. And as time goes on, that generation matures and is inevitably replaced by a fresh set of customers with distinct tastes and perspectives. The product, a victim of its own success, eventually hits a ceiling.

In technology, the cycle is on constant repeat. Once a consumer product starts to gain a large audience?—?it risks disruption from another new solution, one that ups the innovation ante. These usurpers then grow and are themselves eventually displaced. That’s the classic pattern of disruption?—?what Clay Christensen calls the Innovator’s Dilemma.

I’ve had the privilege to witness this cycle thousands of times. After building and growing many Facebook apps, games and mobile apps, I’ve learned that once a product finds or gains a large initial audience, there are two options for achieving large scale growth