Applied Sports Science newsletter – July 8, 2015

James Galanis had drafted a text message for Carli Lloyd on Sunday morning, a few hours ahead of the 2015 Women’s World Cup final.

Galanis is Lloyd’s personal trainer and the person whom the U.S. midfielder credits for turning around her career. He exchanges text messages with Lloyd every day, but on Sunday, Galanis decided not to press the “Send” button.

“He started texting me that I would score three goals today, and he deleted it because he thought that I was just going to be focused on scoring three goals and not just letting it happen,” Lloyd told NBC SportsWorld on Monday, after a few hours of sleep and many hours of celebrations.

Andy Murray just can’t stop thinking about tennis.

Murray, who plays in the Wimbledon quarterfinals on Wednesday, is busily sifting through shots, ball trajectories and possible strategies at boggling speeds as he chases a second Wimbledon title. As gifted as he is as an athlete, it’s his overactive mind that makes him good at tennis, and particularly good on grass, where the points are quick and decisions must be made with computer-like efficiency.

No one in tennis obsesses about tactics and styles as much as the 28-year-old Murray does.

Football has evolved from an open, fast paced game where you had more time and space on the ball to a more compact, more tactical game where time and space is the most important thing. Whoever controls the space, win games. Football has become more like handball – one team defends, 11 players behind the ball, other team attacks and tries to exploit spaces. Since space has become such vital part of the game you have less and less time to receive, control and play the ball. Mental speed is one of the most important things because you can be however fast, if your speed of though is slow, you’ll lose the ball and it’s hard to break through the small area of space full of defenders.

When it comes to speed of though, Sergio Busquets is second to none (on Earth). Xavi has said that Busquets is the best one touch player. He doesn’t need more. He receives, controls and passes in one touch because of his mental speed. He doesn’t need more. He is constantly analyzing the field, where to go, when to go, your body movement, how to receive the ball, how to release the ball and whom. All that before you get the ball because when you don’t and start to think about it when you get the ball it’s already too late and you don’t know what to do next.

Our “Day in the Life” series continues as we examine how the Washington Spirit trains for each game and manages to stay in shape all season long. We follow strength and conditioning coach Christopher Gorres as he takes us through the process.

Professor Greg Whyte, sports scientist and author, shares easy ways to cope with life’s difficulties

1. Think big

The biggest barrier to achieving success is often ourselves and those around us.

Here’s what’s supposed to happen when you fall asleep. Your body temperature falls, even as your feet and hands warm up—the temperature changes likely help the circadian clocks throughout your body to synchronize. Melatonin courses through your system—that tells your brain it’s time to quiet down. Your blood pressure falls and your heart rate slows. Your breathing evens out. You drift off to sleep.

That, at least, is the ideal. But going to sleep isn’t always a simple process, and it seems to have grown more problematic in recent years, as I learned through a series of conversations this May, when some of the world’s leading sleep experts met with me to share their ongoing research into the nature of sleeping.

City Football Group, the controlling organization for Manchester City FC, New York City FC, Melbourne City FC and Yokohama F. Marinos, announced a partnership with SAP today that will see SAP become the official “Cloud Software Provider” for the four football clubs, in addition to being an adviser to City Football Group.

Wearable electronic devices for health and fitness monitoring are a rapidly growing area of consumer electronics; one of their biggest limitations is the capacity of their tiny batteries to deliver enough power to transmit data. Now, researchers at MIT and in Canada have found a promising new approach to delivering the short but intense bursts of power needed by such small devices.

The key is a new approach to making supercapacitors — devices that can store and release electrical power in such bursts, which are needed for brief transmissions of data from wearable devices such as heart-rate monitors, computers, or smartphones, the researchers say. They may also be useful for other applications where high power is needed in small volumes, such as autonomous microrobots.

It looks like the NIH may be the next big stakeholder to look to mobile tools for data collection in clinical research, joining the likes of Apple and Google. As part of the White House’s Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI), announced in January during the State of the Union address, the NIH is considering using smartphones and wearables for data collection, according to a new post on the PMI blog. They are seeking public comments on how best to incorporate this technology.

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.

Mental health isn’t necessarily on the agenda in the hyper-masculine world of professional soccer. After all, mental health isn’t really on society’s agenda. However, given the fashion in which football has embraced sports science, statistical analysis and performance technology, it’s odd to see football falling behind other sports in adopting psychology.

Books have been written, TED talks given and testimonies provided by athletes from various other sports who attribute large portions of their success to the way in which their minds have been coached, as well as their bodies. The truth is we can’t measure precisely how emotion and mental stability impact athletic performance. But what happens off the field certainly has an impact on what happens on it.

Background: The medial collateral (MCL) and anterior cruciate ligaments (ACL) are, respectively, the primary and secondary ligamentous restraints against knee abduction, which is a component of the valgus collapse often associated with ACL rupture during athletic tasks. Despite this correlation in function, MCL ruptures occur concomitantly in only 20% to 40% of ACL injuries.

Hypothesis/Purpose: The purpose of this investigation was to determine how athletic tasks load the knee joint in a manner that could lead to ACL failure without concomitant MCL failure. It was hypothesized that (1) the ACL would provide greater overall contribution to intact knee forces than the MCL during simulated motion tasks and (2) the ACL would show greater relative peak strain compared with the MCL during simulated motion tasks.

Study Design: Controlled laboratory study.

Methods: A 6-degrees-of-freedom robotic manipulator articulated 18 cadaveric knees through simulations of kinematics recorded from in vivo drop vertical jump and sidestep cutting tasks. Specimens were articulated in the intact-knee and isolated-ligament conditions. After simulation, each ACL and MCL was failed in uniaxial tension along its fiber orientations.

Results: During a drop vertical jump simulation, the ACL experienced greater peak strain than the MCL (6.1% vs 0.4%; P < .01). The isolated ACL expressed greater peak anterior force (4.8% vs 0.3% body weight; P < .01), medial force (1.6% vs 0.4% body weight; P < .01), flexion torque (8.4 vs 0.4 N·m; P < .01), abduction torque (2.6 vs 0.3 N·m; P < .01), and adduction torque (0.5 vs 0.0 N·m; P = .03) than the isolated MCL. During failure testing, ACL specimens preferentially loaded in the anteromedial bundle failed at 637 N, while MCL failure occurred at 776 N.

Conclusion: During controlled physiologic athletic tasks, the ACL provides greater contributions to knee restraint than the MCL, which is generally unstrained and minimally loaded.

Clinical Relevance: Current findings support that multiplanar loading during athletic tasks preferentially loads the ACL over the MCL, leaving the ACL more susceptible to injury. An enhanced understanding of joint loading during in vivo tasks may provide insight that enhances the efficacy of injury prevention protocols.

Shock absorbance, or force reduction, is the most significant parameter in sport surfaces which has been used as an injury prevention criterion. Many sport federations like the International Association of Athletics Federations, the International Federation of Association Football and the International Hockey Federation have arranged force reduction tests for sport surfaces which are performed by an apparatus called the Artificial Athlete Berlin. As this apparatus has been designed for simulating a normal subject at usual conditions, some major details are neglected. In this article, a finite element model, which included the human lower limb and a standard sport surface, was developed and is capable of extracting force reduction parameters in various sport conditions. The viscoelastic behavior of the sport surface was extracted by compression stress-relaxation tests with various strain rates to import into the finite element model. To calculate the shock absorbance of the sport surface, the contact pressure versus time curves were plotted for the top and bottom layers of the sport surface. The difference between peak values of curves was extracted as the sport surface shock absorbance ability. To validate the proposed model, a finite element model which included the Artificial Athlete Berlin apparatus was simulated. The results present an excellent correlation between the proposed and the Artificial Athlete Berlin apparatus models. Also, the shock absorption value obtained by the proposed model was close to the average value reported by the ASTM F2772 standard which the sport surface meets.

… Is there a physiological reason people in their mid-40’s are no longer able to compete at the professional level in most sports, or is it a constellation of challenges, such as the time devoted to training, motivation, managing kids’ schedules or busy work demands?

“I’m old” is the common refrain for why we get worse at athletics as we age. But here’s what’s really happening in the body through the years to make world-class performance less possible. And, interestingly, there are a few physiological elements that contribute to athleticism that don’t seem as affected by aging.