Applied Sports Science newsletter – August 24, 2015

Drew Brees revealed Saturday that the oblique injury he suffered last summer bothered him more than he let on.

Although the New Orleans Saints quarterback missed only two weeks during training camp in 2014, he told ESPN’s Ed Werder that he felt his mechanics suffered as a result of the injury. And he spent two months working on those mechanics with longtime throwing coach Tom House this offseason — more time than he has spent with him in years.

We examine Riyad Mahrez’s journey from the French second division to Premier League top goalscorer and the technical scouting that helped make it possible…

… How tired were you at the end of the season after dealing with the NBA schedule for the first time?

Nikola Mirotic: Very tired, to be honest. But overall it was a good year for me. It was a year of adjustment to a new situation and also difficult in the first few months. At the end of the day, you’re a rookie dealing with a different routine even if you have played 5-6 years at the pro level. You start from scratch there. There were plenty of new things for me… New city, new language… It was a little complicated at the beginning, but I was lucky enough to find teammates and a club that had my back. After two or three months, I felt way more comfortable. Then when I got real playing time, I felt really important with the team and also felt respect coming from my teammates. There’s been ups and downs, but that’s normal. Overall it was a good year. Too bad we lost to Cleveland even though we had our chances, but that’s the playoffs. The expectations for next year are even bigger.

In many sports where athletes train hard (let’s say more than 5 trainings-sessions per week), the speed of the recovery process might become a limiting factor in performance. In order to guarantee the next workout to be of high-quality, and to avoid the risk of chronic problems, you want the athlete to recover adequately. But we are facing a few problems here: we can describe the variables of the coming workout, but have very little solid numbers on the level of recovery of the various physiological systems of the athlete, like: the neuro-muscular-system, the nervous systems, the hormonal system, the passive movement apparatus or the metabolic system. So most of the time as coaches we assume, we estimate or we gamble.

Now there are, dependent on where you come from, many ways to speed up the recovery process, e.g. medical-pharmacological methods (this is the forbidden zone in most cases), nutritional recovery like food choices and supplementation, psychological methods like relaxation and biofeedback, physical methods like massages, sauna, thermotherapy, manual therapies and complementary methods like aromatherapy etc.
But there are a few very simple and effective methods, that I hope, are not new to anyone, but that almost everybody tends to overlook.

The last two centuries saw groundbreaking advances in the field of healthcare: from the invention of the vaccine to organ transplant, and eradication of numerous deadly diseases. Yet, these breakthroughs have only illuminated the role that individual traits and behaviours play in the health state of a person. Continuous patient monitoring and individually-tailored therapies can help in early detection and efficient tackling of health issues. However, even the most developed nations cannot afford proactive personalised healthcare at scale. Mobile computing devices, nowadays equipped with an array of sensors, high-performance computing power, and carried by their owners at all time, promise to revolutionise modern healthcare. These devices can enable continuous patient monitoring, and, with the help of machine learning, can build predictive models of patient’s health and behaviour. Finally, through their close integration with a user’s lifestyle mobiles can be used to deliver personalised proactive therapies. In this article, we develop the concept of anticipatory mobile-based healthcare – anticipatory mobile digital health – and examine the opportunities and challenges associated with its practical realisation.

It’s the technology that proved Sri Lanka spin king Muttiah Muralitharan wasn’t a chucker, but Canberra javelin thrower Kelsey-Lee Roberts is using it to make her a better one.

The same motion capture technology Muralitharan used is shaping as Roberts’ secret weapon on the road to Rio.

Roberts has been using the Australian Institute of Sport’s biomechanics facilities to examine her throwing action in the lead-up to the athletics world championships, which begin in Beijing on Saturday.

In December, as Baylor celebrated another Big 12 Conference championship, members of the athletics department’s Applied and Athletic Performance staffs were at NASA headquarters in Houston, studying space travel.

They had lunch with biochemists. Met astronauts and flight surgeons. Picked the brains of psychologists tasked with crew selection. Sat down with rocket scientists — meaning, essentially, that for the first time in human history, football really was on par with rocket science.

This summer, the department played host to a company from Slovenia with a groundbreaking tool: TMG, short for tensiomyography, allows its users to track the performance of specific muscle groups — right leg and left leg, right hamstring and left, and so on — and compare the results. The tool allows skilled eyes to see variance in muscle activity, which can help to accurately predict the risk of injury.

… While the data outputs are incredible, it’s worth reconsidering their value if most users can not use them or do not know how to use them. In fact, I would love to see the next emphasis in R&D go towards creating translatable, useful information rather than pioneering the next new metric. As a part-time coach and science-geek with an affinity for technology, I want to see less and less “magic watches” and more and more data-driven athletes that are training optimally and, of course, finding better performances!

… So far in 2015 alone, there have been more than 32 health data breaches as a result of hacking, according to the U.S. Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights. These breaches typically disclose sensitive personal information, including Social Security numbers, dates of birth and data about patients’ health insurance and other medical information.

“Health records are more valuable to identity thieves than financial records, and they can actually be sold at a premium on the black market,” says David Harlow, a healthcare attorney and author of the blog HealthBlawg.

The pod situated between Alex Smith’s shoulder blades is about the size of a deck of cards, so small that the Chiefs quarterback barely notices it when he slips off his pads.

The information it provides during practices could be worth millions.

In other words, far more than its weight in gold.

The little black device is the brains of the StatSports system, which combined with a heart rate monitor gives the Chiefs the ability to track everything Smith does during every minute he’s on the field. How much he runs, how much of that is sprinting, even the force of impact if one of his teammates forgets he’s wearing a yellow jersey and lays a hit on him.

NBA TV caught up with Dr. Riley Williams from the Hospital for Special Surgery during the USA Basketball Men’s National Team minicamp in Las Vegas.

This article is going to be fairly short and to the point. The simple concept I want you to take away from it is that just because an injury resulted from an acute trauma does not always mean it is an acute injury.

What I mean is simple: two people could get hit in the exact same way during a rugby game, or trip on some black ice in the same manner, and it’s possible that only one of them would walk away with a fracture, tear, or injury of sorts. How can this be? I’m going to show you, it all comes down to movement.

As a faculty member in the University of Southern California’s computer science department and a passionate sports fan, Rajiv Maheswaran decided a few years ago that he wanted to pursue his interest in fusing sports and digital analysis. There is no better breeding ground for such interests than the annual MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in early March in Boston.

Maheswaran, his mind open to ideas, attended the 2011 conference along with co-founder and Sudbury native Yu-Han Chang. They returned to Los Angeles with innovation in their sights. They combined on a work that was voted Best Research Paper at the 2012 Sloan Conference, and shortly thereafter formed the Los Angeles-based Second Spectrum, an analytics firm employed by several NBA teams, including the Celtics. Second Spectrum offers information on hundreds of plays, scenarios, and possibilities for teams seeking more concrete data to maximize their rosters and playing rotations.

Alex Rodriguez’s year away from his job was meant to be the most devastating punishment that Major League Baseball could muster.

Rodriguez’s suspension for the entire 2014 season for performance-enhancing drug use was a historic sanction—MLB’s longest such ban ever—and Rodriguez fought it bitterly. It cost him $25 million in salary, tarnished his reputation and robbed him of a full season at an age when he has few left.

It was also the best thing that could have happened to him.