Applied Sports Science newsletter – July 13, 2015

… [Louis van Gaal} must put his stamp, his reputation, upon the team.

Over the weekend, Germany’s national team captain, Bastian Schweinsteiger, decided to leave the Bavarian club where he has spent his entire career, Bayern Munich, to join United.

Schweinsteiger, who turns 31 on Aug. 1, is — or was — a monumental player and has won every club honor with Bayern, as well as the World Cup in Brazil last summer.

After joining the club as a teenager, he played 500 games for Munich as its leader, an enforcer in midfield and someone who would put his body on the line whenever needed.

… During a question-and-answer session with campers at the Manning Passing Academy on Thursday night, Manning was asked about the importance of speed at the quarterback position.

Not surprisingly, Manning, who has never been described as mercurial, believes speed is overrated, especially when it comes to successful drop-back quarterback play. He used a pair of personal anecdotes to bolster his opinion.

“When I was a senior being recruited by Tulane at the Tulane Football Camp, we ran 40s and they said that I ran a 4.88 (seconds) that day,” Manning said, tongue firmly in cheek. “I’m pretty sure that was (then Tulane coach) Buddy Teevens just doing some good recruiting. I probably ran about a 5.1.

Thomas Hitzlsperger is a retired German professional football player who earned 52 international caps, including matches at the 2006 FIFA World Cup and Euro 2008. Hear his views on sports science in this brief twinterview with @JSSFootball.

The science of sleep can be fuzzy and confusing at times. Researchers are still not sure what our brains are up to, why we dream, or what those dreams even mean. But there are some intriguing things we’ve learnt in recent years about our mind’s journey to the Land of Nod.

Here are 10 surprising facts from the BBC Future archive and elsewhere that shed some light on why we need a restful night’s sleep.

In professional soccer, the benefits of lower limb strength training have been advocated. However, from an aspect of performance development, specifically with respect to expression of fatigue and injury prevention, the advantages of increased lower body strength have received limited attention at the elite level of the game. The primary aim of this cross-sectional investigation was to examine the association between lower body strength and the expression of markers of fatigue as evaluated through muscle damage assessment following match play in professional soccer players. Ten male professional soccer players participated in this investigation (mean ± SD age 26.2 ± 4.3 years, height 181.6 ± 4.8 cm and body mass 78.7 ± 6.1 kg); creatine kinase (CK) was collected 2-days post-match for a 5-month period and at three different time points (Phase 1, Phase 2 and Phase 3); muscular strength (e.g. 4 repetition half-squat) was measured 3-day post-match. No significant change in CK and muscular force across three time points was found (F = 0.60, P = 0.56, ?2 = 0.06 and F = 2.65, P = 0.10, ?2 = 0.23, respectively). Muscular force was negatively correlated (moderate to very large) with CK. It can be concluded that players who produce greater lower body force as a result of being stronger in the lower limbs show reduced levels of CK 48 h post-match.

… Perhaps the greatest metric of how far nanomaterials have come in textiles is the range of work being done by students at Cornell University where they are using a variety of different nanomaterials in combination with cotton to create clothing that kills bacteria, conducts electricity, and serves as a platform for electronic devices.

Roughly two months ago, Cowboys coach Jason Garrett walked around Valley Ranch, apologizing to different departments for the loud noise being made. In what is usually a quiet time of year at the team’s headquarters, employees were hearing the sounds of saws, drills and hammers.

Some probably wondered why construction was taking place in a building that would no longer be the Cowboys home the following year.

Well, Garrett and his staff couldn’t wait for their move to Frisco next fall. If the team was going to be up on the latest technology, it had to start immediately. So the Cowboys constructed a soundproof room designed for players to watch film on a virtual-reality headset.

Computational imaging and illumination plays a central role in many modern three-dimensional imaging techniques. In this talk, I will provide an overview of several 3D imaging technologies pioneered by the NU Comp Photo Lab, highlighting 3 main research projects. First, I will introduce a novel structured light technique called Motion Contrast 3D scanning (MC3D) that maximizes bandwidth and light source power to avoid performance trade-offs in structured light 3D acquisition. The technique allows 3D laser scanning resolution with single-shot speed, even in the presence of strong ambient illumination, significant inter-reflections, and highly reflective surfaces. Next, I will present research on Incoherent Holography, which enables 3D digital refocusing by engineering the camera’s Point Spread Function (PSF). The technique can be used to capture a hologram without illuminating the scene with a coherent laser, making it possible to acquire holograms even for passively illuminated scenes. Finally, I will introduce our work using photometric stereo to measure the surface shape of several of Paul Gauguin’s prints and drawings housed at the Art Institute of Chicago. In this work we characterize surface topology to better understand the artists production methods, helping to resolve longstanding art historical questions about the evolution of Gauguin’s printing techniques. [video, 1:02:04]

The ability to bring internet connection to nearly every type of consumer device will have huge implications for the insurance industry over the next five years. Insurers looking to cut costs, improve business practices, and better assess clients’ risk levels, will increasingly invest in the Internet of Things (IoT).

Some auto and health insurers are already offering a new type of insurance — usage-based insurance (UBI) that uses IoT devices to track clients’ activity and offer discounts or rewards for healthy and safe behavior. We expect 17 million people will have tried UBI auto insurance by the end of this year.

A day after Gerrit Cole starts, there are perfectly circular bruises visible on the back of his right shoulder, as if he were beaten by a spherical object. … Under his jersey is a blinking green light, a feature of a plastic medallion that attaches to the center of a compression shirt.

The debate about hydration usually focuses on the question of how much you should drink during exercise. And the trend lately has been to conclude that you probably don’t need as much as we used to think—in fact, simply drinking when you’re thirsty may be good enough in many contexts. But a key point that’s sometimes forgotten is that this assumes you’re fully hydrated when you start exercising. If you’re already parched when you start, you’ll have a much harder time tolerating temporary dehydration during your workout.

This is the issue that Eric O’Neal and his colleagues at the University of North Alabama have been studying for the past few years. At the ACSM conference in May, they presented some new results looking at 24-hour hydration in runners after a dehydrating run, and testing which measurements can tell you if you’re getting enough.

As most of you know, training load (TL) assessment is vital to injury prevention strategy development. There are various tools of TL assessment, with the Rate of Perceived Exertion being one of the most popular.

In one of our papers (Brito, Hertzog, Nassis 2015), accepted for publication last week, we analysed the TL of highly trained football players daily throughout the entire season. The fatigue index was assessed once per week for the same period.

Our main finding was that training load was affected by a number of factors like previous and next match result and location. In addition, although TL fluctuated throughout the year the fatigue index remains relatively stable. Given the limitations of our methodology, we speculate that highly-trained players choose their pace during training in order to avoid excess fatigue throughout the season.

… Currently, the predominate approach for analyzing player performance with season-end data is to cluster together players based on their statistical output— a technique that helps us group like-players, identify outliers, and address the aforementioned considerations. Moreover, we can even look at player clusters league-to-league and draw some conclusions about the style of players or play. Or at the team level, we can draw conclusions about that individual teams tactics by identifying which clusters its player fall into.

When analytics teams talk about analyzing like-players and performing statistical clustering to analyze season-end performance, they are often referring to widely used techniques like Principal Components Analysis and K-means clustering. In this article, I will introduce these concepts, address some pitfalls of current these approaches for analyzing season-end data, then introduce the more analytically robust techniques of Diffusion Mapping and Spectral Clustering, which improve on current dimensionality reduction and clustering—leading to better footy analysis! I will introduce these topics in a basic manner, but I also talk some stat-nerdiness for readers who love a good statistical model.

… THE GIFT FOR talent-spotting is mysterious, highly prized and celebrated. We love to hear stories about the baseball coach who can spot the raw ability of an erratic young pitcher, the boss who sees potential in the guy in the post room, the director who picks a soloist out of the chorus line. Talent shows are a staple of the TV schedules. We like to believe that certain people—sometimes ourselves—can just sense when a person has something special. But there is another method of spotting talent which doesn’t rely on hunches. In place of intuition, it offers data and analysis. Rather than relying on the gut, it invites us to use our heads. It tends not to make for such romantic stories, but it is effective—which is why, despite our affection, the hunch is everywhere in retreat.