Applied Sports Science newsletter – August 13, 2015

Four months after his latest foot surgery, Oklahoma City Thunder forward Kevin Durant says that he “can go 100 percent” but hasn’t played in any 5-on-5 games yet as he takes a measured approach to this latest comeback.

“I’ve got to play against the guys to really see, but I feel like I’m back to myself,” Durant said after the first day of training at this USA Basketball minicamp.

Asked if he could play in a game if needed, Durant laughed and said, “I haven’t played since February, so of course, I’m human, I’d go through some rust. But I think after two trips down I’d be all right.”

… The ball pops off his arm with more velocity, the end result of hours and hours in the gym, a refinement of his mechanics and the will to want to be whole again.

It would have been easy for Palmer at his age to just say enough is enough. He went through the painstaking, laborious process of ACL rehab 10 years ago when he was young and wide-eyed and early in his career. So when he tore his knee up last November, two days after a contract extension with the Cardinals, he was forced to do it a second time, which is not an easy thing for an aging player.

Bledsoe pulls back the curtain and takes fans on an all-access look at his offseason weight lifting and on court workout.

At the FINA World Championships in Kazan, Russia, last week, 18-year-old Katie Ledecky became the first swimmer ever to win the 200-meter, 400-meter, 800-meter, and 1,500-meter individual freestyle races during a single meet. It may not be the most impressive accomplishment in the history of swimming—other athletes have won more events in a single competition (Michael Phelps’s eight gold medals at the 2008 Olympic Games, for instance)—but those feats included a variety of strokes and relays. No one has ever dominated a single stroke across such diverse distances like Ledecky did in Kazan.

While simultaneously beating everyone at just about every distance involving freestyle, Ledecky set three world records and swam an impressive 1500m/200m double—with less than 30 minutes between races. Her world championship week “ranks right up there with Jim Ryun’s sub 4-minute high school mile, Eddie Merckx’s cycling dominance, and Secretariat’s Triple Crown as among the most remarkable endurance performances ever,” says Michael Joyner, a physiologist at the Mayo Clinic and world-renowned expert on health and human performance.

I asked Joyner to help me, a non-swimmer, wrap my head around Ledecky’s world championship week. “Imagine a runner sets a world record in the 5K, then 30 minutes later, runs a world-class 800-meter sprint, and then a day later, wins world championships in the mile and 800.” What Ledecky did, Joyner says, was simply “insane.” The fact that she won long distance events like the 1500m and 800m as well the shorter 200m in the same meet puts Ledecky’s accomplishment “on a different level than even what Michael Phelps has done.”

This study analyzed training loads of youth soccer players, and examined the influence of match-related contextual variables in internal training load and fatigue. A secondary aim was to investigate the variability of these parameters throughout the season.

The contribution of chronological age, skeletal age (Fels method) and body size to variance in peak velocity derived from the Carminatti Test was examined in 3 competitive age groups of Brazilian male soccer players: 10–11 years (U-12, n=15), 12–13 years (U-14, n=54) and 14–15 years (U-16, n=23). Body size and soccer-specific aerobic fitness were measured. Body composition was predicted from skinfolds. Analysis of variance and covariance (controlling for chronological age) were used to compare soccer players by age group and by skeletal maturity status within of each age group, respectively. Relative skeletal age (skeletal age minus chronological age), body size, estimated fat-free mass and performance on the Carminatti Test increased significantly with age. Carminatti Test performance did not differ among players of contrasting skeletal maturity status in the 3 age groups. Results of multiple linear regressions indicated fat mass (negative) and chronological age (positive) were significant predictors of peak velocity derived from the Carminatti Test, whereas skeletal age was not a significant predictor. In conclusion, the Carminatti Test appears to be a potentially interesting field protocol to assess intermittent endurance running capacity in youth soccer programs since it is independent of biological maturity status.

hile we’re still early in the series, I think it’s important to clarify my target. This is an important piece for me because it’s required I embrace a different path in how I go about making a change with the interest of a performance benefit.

It’s about being more concerned with the underlying habit beneath a new skill rather than any sort of target result of chasing a new skill. In other words, in my talks with Brian MacKenzie, Valerie Hunt and Nicholas Romanov on how to smartly go about something as complicated as changing running form, the first thing you have to let go of is the notion you can change running form as easily as you can change a pair of running shoes. There’s no going to a weekend Pose workshop and believing you’ve finished something by Sunday night. Rather, you’ve just begun. “There’s no finish line” is a philosophy that applies well to the pursuit of a moving better when you’re running.

… U-23 MNT head coach Andi Herzog spent three days working with the group of 28 collegiate players, which allowed the coaching staff to scout a new crop of talent as they continue preparations ahead of October’s qualifying tournament for the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.

“It was the first time that U.S. Soccer has had college camp like this,” Herzog said. “I got the chance to learn more about all of these players. After an intra-squad scrimmage and especially after the game against Tijuana, I was really pleased because I saw a lot of talent. We will certainly be watching.”

… Reece Oxford gained many plaudits and much acclaim for his performance on the weekend, and rightly so. However a few worrying trends emerged on this opening weekend. Only 33.2% of players who started the 10 games this weekend were English, that is 73 of 220. Some may hold that up to be positive, yet that same 30% area keeps on being hit. Remember Germany’s Bundesliga gets above 50% of German’s playing.

Another one I saw was that of the 23 man squad for England’s 21’s only four of those players started; they were Jack Butland, John Stones, Harry Kane and Matt Targett. Now let’s just touch on these players and get a sense of what has helped these players get to where they are now.

We’ve all heard the adage: practice makes perfect! In other words, acquiring skills takes time and effort. But how exactly does one go about learning a complex subject such as tennis, calculus, or even how to play the violin? An age-old answer is: practice one skill at a time. A beginning pianist might rehearse scales before chords. A young tennis player practices the forehand before the backhand. Learning researchers call this “blocking,” and because it is commonsensical and easy to schedule, blocking is dominant in schools, training programs, and other settings.

However another strategy promises improved results. Enter “interleaving,” a largely unheard-of technique that is capturing the attention of cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists. Whereas blocking involves practicing one skill at a time before the next (for example, “skill A” before “skill B” and so on, forming the pattern “AAABBBCCC”), in interleaving one mixes, or interleaves, practice on several related skills together (forming for example the pattern “ABCABCABC”). For instance, a pianist alternates practice between scales, chords, and arpeggios, while a tennis player alternates practice between forehands, backhands, and volleys.

… You anxiously return to the playing field, you twist and turn in pursuit — POP 🙁 Your heart is pounding, your mind is racing … and that feeling at the bottom of your stomach is telling you that you may have injured your ACL once again.

Why Did I Tear My ACL Again !!

There are many potential reasons why you find yourself on the examing room table of your Orthopedic Surgeon once again. Let’s review them with the hope that you will never have to deal with this horrific injury ever again.

… When an ACL is torn, it is not repaired, but instead is reconstructed. Instead of being sewn back, it is rebuilt with graft tissue. That graft needs to incorporate and new tissue must grow up into it like ivy up a lattice. Another way to look at it is the graft is the stake that supports the sapling tree, but ultimately the tree trunk itself must become strong.

This process takes well over a year and is why I tell my patients it takes over 18 months after surgery for the ACL to be as strong as you can be. Despite my cautions to them, Rivers and McMillan still chose to push the envelope for early return. It worked for them, but there is risk It is probably safest to sit out up to two years after an ACL but no one has the time to do it. When they see Peterson’s return, everyone thinks it is without risk and pushes ahead.

PURPOSE:

To quantify the prevalence of biomechanical deficit patterns associated with ACL injury risk and their inter-connections in a large cohort of female athletes during an unanticipated cutting task.
METHODS:

High school female athletes (N=721) performed an unanticipated cutting task in the biomechanics laboratory. Trunk and lower extremity 3D kinetics and kinematics were measured and entered into a latent profile analysis model.
RESULTS:

Approximately 40% of female athletes demonstrated no biomechanical deficits and were categorized into the low risk group. The second most prevalent profile (24%) demonstrated a combination of high quadriceps and leg dominance deficits and was labeled as quadriceps-leg. The third most prevalent profile (22%) demonstrated a combination of trunk and leg dominance deficits and to lesser extent ligament dominance deficits, and was labeled as trunk-leg-ligament. Finally, the fourth profile (14%) demonstrated very high ligament dominance deficits only and it was labeled as ligament dominance profile.
CONCLUSIONS:

This is the first study to identify the most common biomechanical profiles associated with ACL injury during a cutting task in a large cohort of female athletes. Approximately 60% of female athletes belong to one of the high-risk profiles. With the exception of the ligament dominance profile, the current analysis indicates that risk profiles consist of a combination of biomechanical deficits. The findings provide important insight into the prevalence of biomechanical deficits and future directions for the development of injury prevention programs. The findings can be used to guide the development of quick and easy tests that accurately categorize athletes into one of the profiles and subsequently prescribe tailored injury prevention programs that will be more effective and efficient than the current generic ones.

… Choosing what to measure, how to measure it, how to value it, and so forth – those are all important decisions that can have huge impacts on what lessons you draw from the output the computer gives you.

We need to be honest about this, because not all data is good or valuable. Just because you have a number doesn’t mean you have an insight. I often return to this paragraph from economist Paul Krugman, which explains why data needs to be backed up by theory:

But you can’t be an effective fox just by letting the data speak for itself — because it never does. You use data to inform your analysis, you let it tell you that your pet hypothesis is wrong, but data are never a substitute for hard thinking. If you think the data are speaking for themselves, what you’re really doing is implicit theorizing, which is a really bad idea (because you can’t test your assumptions if you don’t even know what you’re assuming.)

What makes teams effective? People have been trying to find out for centuries, but researchers looking into that question recently discovered something new. According to psychologists at MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and Union College, groups take on a character of their own that’s distinct from the individual natures of their members. In other words, they become living things. Which raises a second question: If groups have an intelligence all their own, how can we measure it?

Measuring General Intelligence

The idea is especially intriguing because individual general intelligence as measured by an IQ test is a concept that wouldn’t necessarily even have to exist. An IQ test isn’t just one test; it’s 10 subtests that require the test taker to perform widely different tasks. You have to demonstrate the extent of your vocabulary and do arithmetic and solve visual puzzles and even demonstrate hand-eye co-ordination, among other things.