Applied Sports Science newsletter – August 1, 2015

… “Last year there was a lot of being uncomfortable,” Gordon said. “This year I’m a lot more comfortable. So it’s easy for me.”

The transformation was only “easy” because Gordon has logged countless hours of hard work inside the Magic practice gym at Amway Center and on the West Coast near his home in San Jose, Calif.

Purpose: To assess the impact of different repeated high-intensity effort (RHIE) bouts on player activity profiles, skill involvements and neuromuscular fatigue during small-sided games. … Results: Following running dominant RHIE bouts, players maintained running intensities during both games. In the contact dominant RHIE bouts, reductions in moderate-speed activity were observed from game 1 to game 2 (ES = -0.71 to -1.06). There was also moderately lower disposal efficiencies across both games following contact dominant RHIE activity compared with running dominant activity (ES = 0.62-1.02). Greater reductions in lower-body fatigue occurred as RHIE bouts became more running dominant (ES = -0.01 to -1.36), whereas upper-body fatigue increased as RHIE bouts became more contact dominant (ES = -0.07 to -1.55). Conclusions: Physical contact causes reductions in running intensities and the quality of skill involvements during game-based activities. In addition, the neuromuscular fatigue experienced by players is specific to the activities performed.

… Most players believe the determining factor is statistical. They believe if they catch more passes, score more touchdowns, complete more passes or throw fewer interceptions than the competition, they’ll secure a spot on the final 53-man roster. Indeed, statistics go a long way in helping to separate one player from another, but based on my experience, the most important factor in snatching up that elusive roster position is learning the playbook.

Invited to Team Sky’s training camp in Tenerife as it goes for a third British Tour de France victory in four years, The Telegraph gains a rare insight into what it really takes to win sport’s toughest race.

Mike Sullivan Director of Player Development for the Chicago Blackhawks, takes us through how athletes acquire and enhance skills. Mike mentions two of my favorite books, The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle and the Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey. These books are a must read if you are an aspiring athlete or coach.

Flashes of light blink across Dynavision’s screen. Athletes must react immediately to see, process and then respond to those lights. It may prove a simple concept, but that’s how you train the brain, Phil Jones, former CFL player and Dynavision founder, tells SI.com.

It can also be how you see if a brain has recovered from a concussion.

Episode one of GU TV features host and pro cyclist Yuri Hauswald, interviewing running athlete Pam Kennedy about how they each incorporate technology in their training efforts.

… In a bid to reverse the trend, Swans physio Richard Buchanan has teamed up with Vald Performance to assess and train the players on a new device called the NordBord.
Vald Performance is an Australian outfit that alongside a team of highly regarded researchers – primarily Dr Anthony Shield from the Queensland University of Technology and Dr David Opar of the Australian Catholic University – has developed a machine that uses advanced miniaturised sensors to quickly asses the strength of a player’s hamstrings.

In recent years, I have been working on signal processing for wearable health monitoring, such as signal processing of vital signs in smart watch and other wearables. Particularly, I’ve applied compressed sensing to this area, and achieved some successes on heart rate monitoring for fitness tracking and health monitoring. So I think you and your blog’s readers may be interested in the following work of my collaborators and me.

Major League Baseball teams hope the mThrow’s instant data analysis will improve performance and prevent injuries

… CU-Boulder graduate student Scott Schafer, who works in Associate Professor Tor Wager’s Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Lab in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, has conducted an intriguing piece of research to advance knowledge about how and when the placebo effect works – or doesn’t. In short, he discovered that the placebo effect still works even if research participants know the treatment they are receiving to ease pain has no medical value whatsoever.

We’re all guilty. We observe a hard hit, followed by unusual movements that may tip off even the untrained eye of a possible concussion. But we sit still. We say nothing. Maybe a cringe or gasp is the only thing we offer.

But inside, our thoughts scream, “IS THAT PLAYER OK?”

Instead of alerting medical personnel or athletic training staff, the sports fans almost always succumb to “The Bystander Effect (link is external).” It’s defined as “…apathy, a social psychological phenomenon that refers to cases in which individuals do not offer any means of help to a victim when other people are present.”

With possible concussions on the line, The Bystander Effect could be a phenomena with life and death hanging on every word or action — as well as those not being said or done.

Objectives

To investigate differences in rigid-foot and multi-segmental foot kinematics between healthy (control) and chronic ankle instability (CAI) participants during running and to evaluate the effect of low-Dye (LD) and high-Dye (HD) taping on foot kinematics of CAI subjects.
Design

Cross-sectional, comparative study.
Methods

Kinematic data of 12 controls and 15 CAI participants were collected by a 3D motion analysis system during running. CAI participants performed barefoot (CAI_BF) running trials as well as trials with taping. A rigid Plug-in gait Model and the Rizzoli 3D Multi-Segment Foot Model were used. Groups were compared using one-dimensional statistical parametric mapping.
Results

An increased inversion, a decreased dorsiflexion between the foot and tibia and a decreased external foot progression angle were found during terminal swing and early stance in the CAI_BF group. With respect to the taped conditions, post-hoc SPM{t} calculations highlighted a more dorsiflexed rearfoot (38-46% running cycle) in the CAI_HD compared to the CAI_LD, and a more inverted Mid-Met angle (6-24% running cycle) in the CAI_LD compared to the CAI_BF condition.
Conclusions

This study revealed significant differences in rigid foot and multi-segmental foot kinematics between all groups. As high-dye taping embraces shank-rearfoot and forefoot, it seems to have better therapeutic features with respect to low-dye taping as the latter created a more inverted forefoot which may not be recommended in this population.

Take a look around the room – what do you see? All those colours, the walls, the windows – everything seems so self-evident, just so there. It’s weird to think that how we perceive this rich milieu boils down to light particles – called photons – bouncing off these objects and onto our eyeballs.

This photonic barrage gets soaked up by approximately 126 million light-sensitive cells. The varying directions and energies of the photons are translated by our brain into different shapes, colours, brightness, all fashioning our technicolour world.

Wondrous as it is, our sense of vision is clearly not without certain limitations. We can no more see radio waves emanating from our electronic devices than we can spot the wee bacteria right under our noses. But with advances in physics and biology, we can test the fundamental limits of natural vision. “Everything you can discern has a threshold, a lowest level above which you can and below which you can’t,” says Michael Landy, professor of psychology and neural science at New York University.

Food is a constant tug-of-war between people and planet. We can’t feed ourselves without doing environmental harm. “Agriculture costs us no matter what,” says Rattan Lal, director of the Carbon Management and Sequestration Center at Ohio State University. “Every option has trade-offs.”

Athletes have a lot to worry about. First and foremost is their sport or task. You need to train, practice your sport, engage in recovery practices, and deal with a host of other issues. Diet is obviously a big piece of the puzzle, but after every other debt is paid, how much time and effort do you have left to put into this?

The goal of this article is to give you simple strategies that will help you create a diet that supports your athletic endeavors without bogging you down and making you feel like food is a full-time job that takes away from your real goal – to be good at your sport.

For the avid coffee drinker bound to a monotonous desk job, there is a moment – perhaps two thirds of the way through a cup – when the unbearably tedious task at hand starts to look doable. Interesting, even. Suddenly, data entry is not something that merely pays the rent, it’s something you’re into. A caffeine-triggered surge of adrenaline and dopamine works to enhance your motivation, and the meaninglessness of it all fades as you are absorbed into your computer screen.

At least until the effect wears off. Then it’s time for another caffeine hit. Except, several thousand of those hits later, you find yourself middle-aged and struggling with a sense that you haven’t quite spent your life as you would have liked.

Unlikely as this may sound, it illustrates a reasonable possibility: drugs like caffeine can positively alter how we experience what we are doing. Taken consistently, they might help us tolerate a long-term circumstance by regularly inducing an artificial sense of interest in what we would otherwise find uninteresting. Absent such a drug-induced interest, we may find ourselves more disposed to alter the course our lives are taking.

I brought together three proven concepts into one plan that takes nutrition, timing, and hormones all into account. This approach works with your body’s natural rhythm and chemistry to ensure you won’t be pounding coffee at 2:00pm just to get through the day. By working with your body instead of against it, you can be effortlessly focused both at your job and the gym, with no pre-workout required.

By using these tactics, we’re using your body’s normal functions intelligently to feel awake, think clearly, and sleep hard.

Although the sport is in a golden age, officials are concerned about pace of play and rules that place too many limits on fans; Experiment in the works.

With a restful duck pond at the main entrance and an arboretum of 1,400 labeled trees and shrubs dwarfing the few ball fields on its campus, Haverford College looks nothing like an athletic powerhouse.

Founded by Quakers in 1833 and located in the Philadelphia suburbs, Haverford, with a student body of only about 1,200, competes in the N.C.A.A.’s Division III, where athletic scholarships are prohibited. And the academically elite Haverford does not offer a major in physical education or sports management, perhaps among the nation’s trendiest fields of study.

Yet in June, when Haverford pitcher Tommy Bergjans was chosen in the eighth round of Major League Baseball’s draft, the selection was made by a Haverford graduate, Josh Byrnes, the Los Angeles Dodgers’ senior vice president for baseball operations. Bergjans’s agent, Jon Fetterolf, was also a Haverford graduate.

… The old cliché about Europe’s unloved second-tier competition is that teams will do just about anything to avoid it because of the number of games — potentially an extra 23 games, from first qualifying round to final — they will have to play the following season and, even if they do get there, a team will usually be forced to go about things with ragtag teams of kids and reserves to save their superstars for more important fixtures in the league.

The cliché, however, appears to ring true because making it into Europe can make a dreadful mess of a lesser team’s league campaign if you take it seriously, as it did for Everton last term.

… The first step in picking the winners and losers of free agency is to figure out each player’s real value — the amount he should be paid if his salary were directly proportional to his contribution to team success.

It’s not hard to calculate the cost — in salary terms — of each NBA win. Teams spent $2.19 billion in cumulative salary in 2014-15, and they amassed a total of 1,230 regular-season wins. That works out to about $1.78 million per win.

In the past 100?years, running shoes experienced dramatic changes. The question then arises whether or not running shoes (or sport shoes in general) influence the frequency of running injuries at all. This paper addresses five aspects related to running injuries and shoe selection, including (1) the changes in running injuries over the past 40?years, (2) the relationship between sport shoes, sport inserts and running injuries, (3) previously researched mechanisms of injury related to footwear and two new paradigms for injury prevention including (4) the ‘preferred movement path’ and (5) the ‘comfort filter’. Specifically, the data regarding the relationship between impact characteristics and ankle pronation to the risk of developing a running-related injury is reviewed. Based on the lack of conclusive evidence for these two variables, which were once thought to be the prime predictors of running injuries, two new paradigms are suggested to elucidate the association between footwear and injury. These two paradigms, ‘the preferred movement path’ and ‘the comfort filter’, suggest that a runner intuitively selects a comfortable product using their own comfort filter that allows them to remain in the preferred movement path. This may automatically reduce the injury risk and may explain why there does not seem to be a secular trend in running injury rates.