Applied Sports Science newsletter – July 7, 2015

… If success is to come to Arsenal then Sanchez, their outstanding player for much of last season, will be a big part of that. However, the concerns about his fitness that were there in the second half of last season — and covered in this column from January — will raise themselves once again.

“I will watch but with a little bit of fear because Sanchez has played 50 games for us and goes there again, having already played in the World Cup last summer,” Wenger said before the Copa America. “You are a little bit concerned and I feel this competition is a bit too much. I am really surprised that FIFA authorised that.

… Why did he ultimately decide to walk away from football?

“Just a combination of my own experience, along with a lot of data that is out there regarding long-term health effects of head injuries,” he said. “And I play a position and a style of play where I was susceptible to the worst of it.

… To effectively and efficiently coach speed development, you need to observe your athletes in speed sessions or in game play to identify performance deficiencies, and then implement strategies to correct these faults.

Are your athletes physically deficient in maximal strength or power? Do they lack the required mobility or range of movement in certain joints? What technique errors do they exhibit? How can you tackle these deficiencies? Is the solution in the weight room, targeted flexibility work, technical refinement, or even physical therapy intervention?

Training Stress Balance (TSB), the yellow line on the Performance Management Chart, is merely a way of describing what we call “Form.” What is Form? In a single phrase, it is race readiness.

So how is Form determined? It’s the result of subtracting today’s Fatigue (Acute Training Load, or ATL)from today’s Fitness (Chronic Training Load, or CTL). Both Fatigue and Fitness are expressed as Training Stress Score, or TSS per day (TSS/d). Once the software has done the math, the remainder is your Form (by the way, the resulting Form value is for tomorrow—not for today.) It can be either a negative or a positive number depending on which is greater- Fitness or Fatigue. If Form is negative you are likely to be tired and probably not race ready. If Form is positive then you are probably rested and perhaps on form— if it doesn’t get too high.

So what do the Form numbers mean and how can you use them to be race ready? Let’s dig a little deeper using exact Form numbers as guidelines.

In the back of every athletes mind is the haunting risk of injury. Sport related injuries can occur as a result of physical contact with another player or due to improper movement or technique. PhysiMax, an Israeli sports technology company, is a new start-up dedicated to helping athletes prevent and recover from movement-based injuries, while inherently guiding them with corrective training to boost their athletic performance.

PhysiMax recently launched an Athletic Movement Assessment, which provides a real-time evaluation of an individual’s injury risk level and movement performance. Ram Shalev, CEO and co-founder of PhysiMax, explained to us that the solution utilizes high-end computer video analysis and kinematic machine-learning algorithmic software. This cloud based service is able to assess quality of movement by providing reliable 3D body calculations, multimedia reports and validated scores.

“The technology weighs and extracts the 3D video data streams, continuingly composing a full 3D body kinematic map,” said Shalev. “The accuracy level of relative body angle has been proven to be in almost perfect correlation to experts’ scoring with up to a few degrees of variance.”

… The APIs that made it to our top 10 sports APIs list provide a wide range of capabilities and data, including activity tracking, fantasy sports, event tickets search, event tickets price comparison, live sports scores and statistics, and online sports bookmaking.

While members of the U.S. team will no doubt play their hearts out during the Women’s World Cup final against Japan, a coach on the sideline will be receiving real-time data about their actual hearts.

Credit forward-thinking coaches who embraced sport science to improve performance: Each U.S. player wears a heart rate monitor — not unlike one you’d find at your local sporting goods store — when she trains and plays games. But what makes these special is where the information goes and how it’s used.

Whereas a commercial monitor (or “wearable”) is designed for information to go to a wrist unit, an iPhone or iPad, and be used by the individual, for the U.S. women, there is a receiver that simultaneously collects the heart rates of 28 athletes to be analyzed by a coach.

“What evolved [with the technology] was the ability for coaches to not only record the data, but be able to see it live,” says Josh Simonsen, a training specialist for Polar, the company that supplies the U.S. team with its heart rate system.

… By aggregating individual sleep data across an entire sports team, doctors and coaches can analyze how long it takes for players, on average, to fall asleep after a game, how much the team is sleeping when they have days off compared to when they’re playing and traveling, and how all of this effects game-time performance.

[CEO Sean] Kerklaan tells me that the U.S. Men’s National Soccer team used the band to measure which players were mature about their sleeping habits before going to the World Cup in Brazil this year.

… When used in cycling mode, the insoles provide power data for each leg and can even identify if your foot is pronating or supinating through your pedal stroke. There are several advantages to an insole-based power system (over a hub- or crank-based power meter), such as the ability to easily swap the inserts between shoes. The price—ranging from $700 to $750—also makes it one of the cheapest power-measuring products available.

RPM² also has run functionality, which measures ground contact time, flight time, cadence and sequential force strike, which shows where you land on your foot as well as how much you pronate. The insoles measure bilateral range of motion to analyze ankle dorsiflexion, knee extension and hip flexion and extension. The system works through an app on your phone and has the goal of improving efficiency by revealing imbalances.

PURPOSE:

Tendon mechanical properties are linked to sports performance and tendon-related injuries, such as tendinopathy. Whether habitual loading, such as participation in regular jumping activities, would induce adaptation on tendon mechanical properties remains unclear.
METHOD:

Forty healthy subjects (10 sedentary, 15 volleyball players, and 15 basketball players) aged between 18 and 35 years were recruited. Supersonic shearwave imaging was used to measure the shear elastic modulus and thickness and cross-sectional area (CSA) of the proximal patellar tendons of both knees at 30° of flexion.
RESULT:

Significant group differences in tendon shear elastic modulus were found among the three groups. In the dominant leg, reduction in tendon shear elastic modulus by 18.9 % (p = 0.018) and 48.7 % (p = 0.000) were observed in the basketball and volleyball players, respectively, when compared with sedentary subjects. In the non-dominant leg, reduction in tendon shear elastic modulus were 27.3 % (p = 0.034) and 47.1 % (p = 0.02) in the basketball and volleyball players, respectively. The athlete groups were found to have larger CSA but with similar tendon thickness than sedentary group. The CSA were larger by 24-29 % and by 22-24 % in the basketball players and volleyball players, for the dominant and non-dominant legs, respectively (all p < 0.05). Age and body mass are related to tendon stiffness and CSA, particularly in the sedentary subjects.
CONCLUSION:

The proximal patellar tendon can undergo substantial adaptation on tendon mechanical and morphological properties when exposed in jumping sports. Intrinsic factors such as age and body mass could influence tendon properties.

Remaining injury-free shouldn’t be rocket science, says Dr Jason Karp

Around 50% of runners deal with at least one injury a year, but there isn’t a good reason why this figure should be so high.

The main reason is that runners don’t train intelligently or they follow programmes that are not designed properly. Simply, injuries happen because the physical stress from running is too much for the body to handle at that time.

A recent paradigm shift in medicine started with the finding that several medical conditions, previously not envisioned to have much in common at the molecular level, share sustained inflammatory processes in various organs as a common mechanism of pathogenesis.

Amidst these advances, the inflammasome, a collection of multimeric cytosolic protein complexes, is assuming a central position in understanding pathogenesis and in developing therapeutic strategies.

Background: Focal cartilage defects of the knee are a substantial cause of pain and disability in active patients. There has been an emergence of randomized controlled trials evaluating surgical techniques to manage such injuries, including marrow stimulation (MS), autologous chondrocyte implantation (ACI), and osteochondral autograft transfer (OAT).

Purpose: A meta-analysis was conducted to determine if any single technique provides superior clinical results at intermediate follow-up.

Study Design: Systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials.

Methods: The MEDLINE, EMBASE, and Cochrane Library databases were systematically searched and supplemented with manual searches of PubMed and reference lists. Eligible studies consisted exclusively of randomized controlled trials comparing MS, ACI, or OAT techniques in patients with focal cartilage defects of the knee. The primary outcome of interest was function (Lysholm score, International Knee Documentation Committee score, Knee Osteoarthritis Outcome Score) and pain at 24 months postoperatively. A meta-analysis using standardized mean differences was performed to provide a pooled estimate of effect comparing treatments.

Results: A total of 12 eligible randomized trials with a cumulative sample size of 765 patients (62% males) and a mean (±SD) lesion size of 3.9 ± 1.3 cm2 were included in this review. There were 5 trials comparing ACI with MS, 3 comparing ACI with OAT, and 3 evaluating different generations of ACI. In a pooled analysis comparing ACI with MS, there was no difference in outcomes at 24-month follow-up for function (standardized mean difference, 0.47 [95% CI, –0.19 to 1.13]; P = .16) or pain (standardized mean difference, –0.13 [95% CI, –0.39 to 0.13]; P = .33). The comparisons of ACI to OAT or between different generations of ACI were not amenable to pooled analysis. Overall, 5 of the 6 trials concluded that there was no significant difference in functional outcomes between ACI and OAT or between generations of ACI.

Conclusion: There is no significant difference between MS, ACI, and OAT in improving function and pain at intermediate-term follow-up. Further randomized trials with long-term outcomes are warranted.

Protein is usually thought of as the number one recovery ingredient. A lot of talk is about how protein will help repair the muscle and many marketing claims also communicate this. There is also a lot of talk about the need to ingest carbohydrate soon after exercise. These messages combined have resulted in the birth of a myth!

There is little or no evidence that protein does anything to help immediate recovery. Of course there is a wealth of evidence that protein is important for protein synthesis and this is important for longer term training adaptation (and improvements in performance), but this is a process that takes many hours/days or even weeks and it is unlikely to influence performance only a few hours later.

Five years ago, the writer and director Pete Docter of Pixar reached out to us to talk over an idea for a film, one that would portray how emotions work inside a person’s head and at the same time shape a person’s outer life with other people. He wanted to do this all in the mind of an 11-year-old girl as she navigated a few difficult days in her life.

As scientists who have studied emotion for decades, we were delighted to be asked. We ended up serving as scientific consultants for the movie, “Inside Out,” which was recently released.

Our conversations with Mr. Docter and his team were generally about the science related to questions at the heart of the film: How do emotions govern the stream of consciousness? How do emotions color our memories of the past? What is the emotional life of an 11-year-old girl like? (Studies find that the experience of positive emotions begins to drop precipitously in frequency and intensity at that age.)

This blob over here is your “fear circuit,” they say, or this other blob “computes anger.” And every time you experience an emotion, your corresponding blob of neurons supposedly leaps into action, triggering your face and body to respond in a consistent way. Your Fear blob makes you freeze with widened eyes. Your Anger blob makes you scowl and your heart speed up. And so on.

The thing is, this science of “blob-ology” is no more realistic than detonating test tubes and hovering coyotes. Today’s neuroscientists finally have the technology to peer into a living brain without harming its owner, and it’s clear that the brain doesn’t operate even remotely in this cartoonish fashion. We might perceive Joy, Fear, and Anger as separate entities — even gloriously rendered in 32-bit color — but the evidence from neuroscience is overwhelmingly against it.