Applied Sports Science newsletter – July 14, 2015

… Like Roddick, former champions Mats Wilander and even Chris Evert, who won two of her 18 Grand Slam singles titles — both at the French Open — at ages 30 and 31, described the biggest obstacles in overcoming age as more mental than physical.

“Because physically,” Evert said, “between 25 and 35, you should be getting into your best shape anyway. I know I did. But mentally, just waking up in the morning and wanting to train, waking up and looking forward to playing a match, being eager, being fresh, being excited, that’s what it is.

“For [Serena and Venus], it’s almost 20 years, and after 15, 20 years, when I was like 32, that’s when I decided, ‘OK, one of every four matches, I’m not motivated.’ That was the first thing to go.”

Wilander, a seven-time Grand Slam singles champion who won his last at age 24 and retired at 32, agreed, saying aging in sports is “all motivation-based.”

The movement demands of the soccer extra time period are unknown despite the importance of this period of play. Data are presented for five English Premier League reserve team players who wore GPS (10 Hz) monitors during an official soccer match that required extra time to be played. Countermovement jump performance (peak power output (PPO) and jump height) and creatine kinase (CK) concentrations were assessed before (?24 h; baseline) and after (+24 h, +48 h) match play. Players covered 14,106 ± 859 m (109 ± 7 m·min?1) throughout the game. From 90 to 120 min, 3213 ± 286 m were covered and 12 ± 6 sprints, 221 ± 14 accelerations and 207 ± 16 decelerations occurred. From 105 to 120 min, acceleration and deceleration parameters reduced by >10% compared to the opening 15 min. At +24 h and +48 h, PPO reduced by 416.1 ± 199.9 W (10.9% ± 4.4%) and 155.1 ± 34.8 W (4.1% ± 0.8%), jump heights decreased by 0.064 ± 0.046 m (17.8% ± 11.2%) and 0.025 ± 0.009 m (7.4% ± 3.2%), whereas CK increased by 586.6 ± 85.1 ?·l?1 (236% ± 92%) and 266.8 ± 134.7 ?·l?1 (107% ± 89%) versus baseline, respectively. Physical performance markers reduced throughout match play and countermovement jump performance was impaired, while CK remained elevated, for at least 48 h after the game. Interventions which maintain performance throughout a game and which enhance recovery in the days after 120 min of soccer match play warrant further investigation.

… It boils down to a basic equation. Training effect = work x recovery. If we take T (training) to be “1” for a typical session, then to make the TE (training effect) actually show the benefits of the training, the R (recovery) needs to be at least equal to 1.

… “While sports science and research tends to focus upon the biological and psychological training necessary to become an elite performer, success in sport is much more complex than this. Underpinning any athlete’s “bio-psycho” make-up is the socio-cultural environment in which they are brought up”. (Dr Martin Toms).

Development is also dependant on the integration of organisational systems (family, team, sporting organisations, governing bodies, communities, cultures). One of my favourite sports interviews appears in the first edition of Blizzard magazine. Speaking with Sid Lowe, Juanma Lillo mentor to Pep Guardiola explains his thinking on clubs, coaching and society. Lillo talks about how people always want to separate things. “It’s as if, if we do not separate them out we are not able to see them. How do you know that the cause was not an effect of something from before and that the effect is not going to cause something else- in the context of countless other variables”.

… PL What we concentrated on in the weeks leading up to the tournament was becoming a team. And when I say team, I don’t mean the 23 footballers. I mean everyone working with or for the national team. I think there were about 70 people in Campo Bahia, our camp on the Atlantic coast. All these people had to subordinate their personal interests to the common goal, which was having success. Historically, this togetherness has almost always been a hallmark of German tournament squads.

TM The foundation was laid even before Campo Bahia, during the training camp in South Tyrol. There was a golf course just a hundred yards from the hotel. Golf is one of my hobbies, so I played the odd round with one of our physios. When you’re holed up for more than 10 days in such a camp, you have to make sure the mood doesn’t go sour. So the physio and I made a bet – the loser of the next round had to serve the team at dinner. Dressed in a skirt. We did it for a laugh, as it made the golf more interesting. But it was also at the back of my mind that it’s good for the team and the atmosphere if there’s a bit of action to liven things up. Well, I lost the round.

You may not realize it, but your brain is working against you. … Here are four all-too-common behavioral phenomena that have the potential to waylay your best professional intentions—along with some advice from psychologists on how to transcend them.

What does it cost to build a research center from scratch these days? Gerry Rubin, who runs the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus in Virginia, estimated that his organization will spend a few billion dollars before it’s clear if HHMI’s research will work out. Ken Herd, who helped set up GE’s new research center in Rio de Janeiro, said the building alone carried a $150 million bill.

The videos for CVPR 2015 is in QA stage until the week of July 13th. CVPR is the leading conference for computer vision researchers.

Stability can be defined as resistance to change. For athletes, particularly small sudden changes require more sensitivity than the human eye. Stability is often separated into static (standing) and dynamic (maintaining a stable position while undertaking a prescribed movement). In addition, most research has identified these as separate qualities with little correlation. Stability is an important characteristic, especially when identifying joint health in return to play (RTP) athletes. But static stability can only tell us so much, especially when used to evaluate a population defined by their dynamic abilities…athletes.

Evaluating static stability has one major advantage; it is the only assessment that can be performed early in return to play (SpartaPoint) when dynamic movement is prohibited (early post surgery, concussion, etc.). A static stability assessment is usually done by the sports medicine team (of our software partners) as both baseline for incoming physicals, and subsequent benchmarks when the normal scan (vertical jumps) is unable to be performed.

Although summer may seem like a time to get in shape, it’s also a time to recover from injuries for many athletes. A serious injury can bring frequent trips to a physical therapist and a long process for bouncing back. With these trips come injury-specific exercises in order to bring strength back to your body. As important as it may seem to come back better than ever physically, recovering mentally is just as important.

For many athletes, an injury can create a traumatic experience that can damage their physical and mental health. This is no reason to discourage any athlete from getting better because there are many things that can help them recover mentally from their injury.

NBPA Executive Director Michele Roberts today announced that Joe Rogowski will become the NBPA’s Director of Physiology and Research. In this role, Rogowski will serve as the Union’s liaison on issues relating to player health and safety and will develop best practices regarding player conditioning and injury mitigation. He will also be available to provide personal training and appropriate referrals to individual members.

“Joe has earned the admiration and respect of a huge swath of the professional basketball community — within the League, among members and coaches and, most importantly, our player,” said Ms. Roberts. “His addition to our staff provides us with the capability to identify and manage the medical and physical challenges faced by our members on and off the court.”

Athletes who’ve had lower extremity surgeries before going on to play in college, might be at a higher risk for another surgery independent of gender and sport, say researchers presenting their work today at the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine’s (AOSSM) Annual Meeting in Orlando, FL.

“This is the first study to look at the relationship between precollegiate surgery and future injury requiring surgery in collegiate athletes. Our results suggest that athletes injured before college might be left with a functional deficit that puts them at risk for future injury,” said lead author, Dean Wang, MD from the University of California at Los Angeles.

Last month I was invited to present at the annual Football Medical Association (FMA) conference by my old boss Dr Bryan English. I was given the somewhat provocative title of ‘Can end stage rehab be assessed truly scientifically?’ and I am going to share a summary of it here.

My emphasis throughout was that the scientific assessment of rehabilitation is just one piece of a very complex puzzle and that it cannot be the sole determinant of Return to Training or Playing, but can help add objectivity to decision making.

Rehabilitation is an important process because there is a 4x greater risk of reinjury compared to the original injury (Fuller et al, 2007) and specifically in football a 5x greater risk of reinjury has been associated with knee and ankle sprains (Arnason et al, 2004). Despite this risk one survey found 35% of experienced team clinicians would ‘clear’ an athlete to participate even if the risk of an acute injury was increased (Schultz et al, 2013). In my opinion this may be down to the complexity associated with end stage rehabilitation. The same research group that conducted the survey had previously published a decision making Return to Play (RTP) Model (Creighton et al, 2010) aiming to help clarify the process and decreased controversy. It splits the decision into three main steps with 19 factors however, each of these have their own level of controversy and complexity.

Creating one of the most widely used hockey analytics websites in North America was never the intent, Sam Ventura and Andrew Thomas insisted.

Yet when the friends, who met through Carnegie Mellon’s statistics program, saw one of the industry’s preeminent advanced stats sites — ExtraSkater.com — shut down, they sprung into action to fill what they perceived to be a gigantic void.

“We knew we had something to share,” said Thomas, 34, of Gainesville, Fla. “But we didn’t know what form that was going to take.”

The form became war-on-ice.com, which launched in August 2014 and is dedicated to the mathematical and analytical side of hockey. In less than a year, the website has gone from local startup to one that has had 4 million page views since November.