Applied Sports Science newsletter – July 16, 2015

The seeds for the greatest goal in U.S. soccer history were planted 12 years ago on an otherwise deserted field in Lumberton, N.J.

Carli Lloyd and James Galanis, the Jersey Girl and her Aussie coach, began working together in 2003, not long after Lloyd had been cut from the U.S. Under-21 team. Dejected and out of shape, she was about to quit the sport for good. But with Galanis she rekindled her love for soccer, and during their two-a-day workouts he began setting up training sticks around the penalty spot, mimicking a goalkeeper. Then he would ask Lloyd to move back to the center circle and take aim at the goal, bouncing 50-yard shots around his faux keeper into the net.

Lloyd was skeptical: “I’m thinking, ‘Who is going to shoot from midfield?’”

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Overtraining is one of those nebulous catchall terms that coaches and athletes fear like the plague. The problem that coaches face isn’t prodding highly competitive and slightly obsessive-compulsive runners to do more work. Instead, the issue is holding them back—just enough to keep them from entering this unwanted zone where the body has reached its limits to adapt and recover.

Physiologically, overtraining occurs when the muscles don’t fully repair from training-related damage, the hormones rebel, and the nervous system switches into a stressed state. All of these consequences can happen as a result of an imbalance of training stress and recovery. The prescription is usually to rest or reduce the training load.

But from a psychobiological standpoint, this makes little sense.

What is fun? And why is it so important?

Enjoyment is the number one reason athletes play sport. Yet creating an environment that is enjoyable and fun is largely left to chance, rather than meticulously fostered.

I know what you’re thinking, children need enjoyable experiences in their early years to ignite their passion for sport. You’re absolutely right.

However, as they move into their teenage years and things get more ‘serious’, there is a belief that athletes need to prioritise other things like commitment, dedication and mental toughness to ensure that they keep getting better.

This is simply not true.

This month I will be posting about three new books from Bondarchuk. Even though he just turned 75, he has been as busy writing as ever. The first book I will cover is Champion School: A Year to Year Model for Developing Elite Athletes. With the help of Dr. Michael Yessis, who also translated Bondarchuk’s successful Transfer of Training series, he turns his attention to the big picture of long-term development.

Despite the mandatory Wednesday yoga sessions, Missouri’s junior cornerback just wasn’t having it, so he decided not to go. That didn’t sit well with his Tiger teammates, so they took their problem to the National Guard.

No, really.

As part of one of Missouri’s various team-building exercises, 17 players traveled about three hours outside of Columbia for a day and a half of training with the Missouri Army National Guard at Camp Clark in late June. To add another level of difficulty to the Tigers’ time, there was a military tone to all of the exercises.

Professional football is a contact sport with a high risk of injury. This study was designed to examine the contribution of stress and recovery variables as assessed with the Recovery-Stress Questionnaire for Athletes (RESTQ-Sport) to the risk of injury in professional football players. In a prospective, non-experimental cohort design, 22 professional football players in the highest German football league were observed over the course of 16 months. From January 2010 until April 2011, the players completed the RESTQ-Sport a total of 222 times in monthly intervals. In addition, injury data were assessed by the medical staff of the club. Overall, 34 traumatic injuries and 10 overuse injuries occurred. Most of the injuries were located in the lower limb (79.5%), and muscle and tendon injuries (43.2%) were the most frequently occurring injury type. In a generalised linear model, the stress-related scales Fatigue (OR 1.70, P = 0.007), Disturbed Breaks (OR 1.84, P = 0.047) and Injury (OR 1.77, P < 0.001) and the recovery-related scale Sleep Quality (OR 0.53, P = 0.010) significantly predicted injuries in the month after the assessment. These results support the importance of frequent monitoring of recovery and stress parameters to lower the risk of injuries in professional football.

… The patterns we see with untrained elite basketball players can be explained by sport specific adaptations that occur on the court, and which can be unhealthy if the athlete doesn’t train correctly in the weight room. Unfortunately in today’s world, young athletes are driven to early specialization in sports that typically favor late specialization. Also, collegiate recruiting creeps earlier and earlier each year, fueling the desire for complete mastery of one’s craft. But these athletes are practicing harder, not smarter. What we see by the time they reach collegiate athletics is that the benefits they think have derived from high repetitions of sport specific skills have actually created large imbalances. They are not performing the proper exercises to be healthy within their sport.

For example, basketball players come into the weight room tight, stiff and fatigued from year-round practice and competition. In order to produce the healthiest, highest functioning athlete possible, we have to throw out the idea of sport specific training (short, ballistic repetitions) and opt for un-sport specific exercises (long, slow, healthy repetitions). Basketball is an anterior chain (ankle, knee) dominant sport that also demands an upright posture. That makes the athletes’ muscles in the foot tight, and calves stiff, both of which limit ankle mobility. Also, the quads are tight which can anteriorly tilt the pelvis, put a pre-stretch on the hamstring and cause low back pain. Accordingly, we opt for prescribing more un-sport specific exercises that actually work to increase performance and reduce injury risk by developing mobility to dissipate forces more efficiently.

ontreal-based Sportlogiq has announced it’s received an investment of $1.7 million, lead by Tim Tokarsky and includes an investment from famed entrepreneur and owner of the Dallas Mavericks Mark Cuban. Included in this round is follow-on participation from tech incubator TandemLaunch, and an investment from Anges Quebec Capital S.E.C. along with 18 angel investors.

Sportlogiq now has 10 employees and developed technology that provides advanced sports analytics to broadcast media and professional teams, which is why the Cuban connection. According to its site, Sportlogiq has tech “player tracking and activity recognition algorithms generate detailed game statistics using standard, single-camera game footage.”

t’s become the NBA’s latest status symbol: an eight-figure practice facility with all the amenities a potential free agent could want.

The Nets will soon unveil their plans for a practice facility in Brooklyn’s Industry City, a $45 million rehab of the top two floors of a 100-year-old industrial warehouse, complete with spectacular views of Lower Manhattan. Irina Pavlova, president of ONEXIM Sports and Mikhail Prokhorov’s representative in New York, heads up the project, working with David Carlock, a member of the Barclays Center board of directors and an arena consultant.

The Nets aren’t alone in believing a practice facility with a host of player amenities will make a difference in luring players to their team.

Construction of the HSS Training Center in Industry City took a big step forward recently with the “topping out” of the new ceiling above the facility’s two planned practice courts. The steel framework above the eighth floor at 148 39th Street in Brooklyn is now 34 feet high, tall enough to accommodate even the highest arching jump shot … or errant pass.

With the steel in place, construction is now likely to speed up and barring any further delays, it should be ready around All-Star Break. The break and the Nets two-week “circus road trip,” also in mid-February, will provide center planners ample time to shuttle all the team’s equipment and staff from East Rutherford to Brooklyn. Once complete, the center will have 70,000 square feet of space on two floors.

… Let’s start from the top. What does the Achilles tendon do and how can an athlete injure it?

The Achilles tendon attaches the calf muscle to the heel bone. It’s designed to stretch, it’s designed to absorb force when the athlete lands from a jump. It’s designed to provide power for push off when taking a running step. And so, Achilles tendon ruptures are classically the scourge of a 40 to 60-year-old male. It’s uncommon in sports injuries for it to be women or it to be younger athletes. So the unusual Achilles rupture in the basketball player or a female is usually bad luck — landing from a bad position, landing awkwardly hard on the leg. It’s much more common in a 40 to 60 year old. If you don’t mind, I’ll just keep going and tell you the whole story.

With so many voices exalting the virtues of spurious ‘superfoods’ it’s difficult to know what will really help spur us onto faster race times, stronger swims or more fruitful workouts. With a raft of experience honing the diets of elite athletes, sports nutritionist James Collins told us what it’s really worth paying attention to when it comes to eating for exercise…

Stephen A. Smith was a frustrated man on draft night. He tweeted out his dismay for New York’s Porzingis pick saying, “How in the name of decency do you spend the 4th pick on someone who may be a star in 5 years…there are players like Winslow and Mudiay who can do things for you right now?” While there may be some truth to that, as a good stat-head, you probably know that the vast majority of rookies rate very lowly. Assuming that Justise Winslow and Emmanuel Mudiay to both do something immediately that Porzingis cannot is dubious to say the least.

To find out a more detailed look at average rookie quality, I examined the last 10 years of rookies, 2nd-year, and 3rd-year players and found their Basketball-Reference.com’s Box Plus Minus statistic (Minimum of 500 minutes played).

“You gotta roll with it,” blares out Liam Gallagher as the Oasis hit combines with the rain thundering onto the roof of Manchester City’s indoor academy pitch.

The racket threatens to drown out coach Simon Davies.

The City Under-21 assistant coach is using digital technology to explain to a bunch of slightly unfit reporters how he wants a coaching drill involving the use of overlapping players to develop.