Applied Sports Science newsletter – August 31, 2015

… Few Americans have improved more from the start of the World Cup to now than O’Hara. She registered three goals and two assists in six games for Sky Blue FC since returning from the World Cup, mostly while playing in a more advanced, attacking role which has proven to best suit her.

“The World Cup was a big learning experience and it was definitely the highs and lows,” O’Hara said. “Obviously winning was great, but I’m just really enjoying being back at the club and I’m really enjoying my NWSL experience. Being here and having a routine and having that consistency – kind of feeling free to play how I want to play. Especially being up top, it’s a lot of fun. The players on this team are really great to play with, so yeah, I am having a good time and I’m enjoying myself.”

Decathlon World and Olympic champion Ashton Eaton moves with controlled discipline. His event, comprised of 10 distinct athletic disciplines, requires complete synchronicity of the mind and body. That’s why its winner is traditionally defined as “the greatest athlete in the world.” [video, 2:45]

How do we develop well-rounded athletes? These 10 current and former stars all followed a similar path. Here’s what they did growing up.

Jordan Spieth, PGA

At just 21 years old, Spieth has rapidly climbed the ladder of the golf world. He recently won his second major golf title at the U.S. Open and ranks second in the world. Growing up, Spieth was drawn to golf, but also excelled as a quarterback, pitcher and point guard. Spieth’s mom, Chris, said his talent for golf didn’t emerge until later, but by playing other sports, his athletic prowess was noticeable early on.

It was late spring when Devin Wyman, a former NFL player turned head coach of a minor league indoor football team, tried to get in touch with Arizona Cardinals coach Bruce Arians.

Arians said at the NFL owners meetings in March that he believed a woman could coach in the NFL if she could make players better.

Wyman knew just the person: Jen Welter.

… How did Arkansas reach this point? Bielema opened the doors of his program for two days this spring to provide a glimpse of the intricacies of instilling a winning culture. From bringing kale into the weight room to teaching lessons about Steph Curry in the meeting room, a belief in paradoxical core philosophies—discipline and fun—emerged. They’re the same tenets that allowed Bielema to capture three straight Big Ten titles at Wisconsin, and he plans on using them to win an SEC championship at Arkansas. “I don’t know if it’s gratifying as much as I just knew,” Bielema said in his office in June. “I never flinched. I never felt we weren’t going to be able to do this.”

At what point should the coach or trainer implement a training or lifestyle intervention when an athlete is showing warning signs of excess fatigue?

This is easy to determine when looking back on the data retrospectively, but in real-time this can be a challenging question to answer. Especially when performance remains relatively stable during the early stages. There’s a sometimes blurry line between being too soft (changing the plan at every red flag) and being too hard (ignoring too many red flags).

In observing this athletes trend, it appears that the situation could’ve been easily avoided had some type of intervention been made early enough. The trend for HRV, and perceived measures of sleep quality, fatigue, soreness and stress all indicate that this athlete is heading for trouble.

After talking to coaches about GPS and other measurement options for speed testing, I realized that most of them appeared to regard maximal speed development as an unknown or unnecessary part of training. They seemed more interested in barbell speed than in body speed, so I wanted to write something about the value of maximal speed.

Acceleration is an essential part of every landbased sport, and maximal speed training and assessment has an important role if coaches want to make their athletes better. What follows are six important lessons I learned the hard way from smart coaches who corrected some of my misconceptions. The takeaway is that getting athletes to run mechanically sound and fast is a great investment in time for nearly every sport.

The Titans veteran Wesley Woodyard said he believed every linebacker could benefit from yoga.

That does not quite seem to jibe, given that one of the tenets of football is to be aggressive and not back down.

Yet yoga has made impressive inroads in the N.F.L., and Woodyard is one of several players who are using yoga to help them physically and mentally prepare for and deal with the sport’s collisions.

Jacob Alsadek’s training-camp plan was all set.

Every night after returning home from practice, the UA’s sophomore offensive guard would stretch. He wanted to keep his muscles loose and feel refreshed for the next day’s practice.

The plan worked — for a while.

“And then the second week rolls around and you get tired at night and just want to go to sleep,” Alsadek said.

By 6:15 each morning the past two weeks, Oregon offensive coordinator Scott Frost and quarterback Vernon Adams were together in the Ducks’ football facility, undertaking a crash course in Oregon’s offensive system.

Apparently Adams passed.

On Friday, when he was listed atop the Ducks’ depth chart, it wasn’t exactly unexpected. Since he decided last winter to graduate early from Eastern Washington and transfer to Oregon, it has seemed a foregone conclusion that he would start. The Ducks think — they hope — he might star.

Training camp came to a close on Thursday, and the Giants spent the day having massages, doing yoga and jumping in and out of hot and cold tubs, among other things.

But don’t call it a day at the spa, though. The change of pace was a deliberate one, as the Giants embrace the sports science some have criticized them for neglecting and try to find better ways to keep their players healthy and prepared for game day.

“This is what I call a ‘GPS week,'” head coach Tom Coughlin said. “We’re following that to a ‘T.’ We’ve had two hard practices followed by basically meetings, walk-throughs and a recovery session.”

The Stanford Daily 17 May 1993

Bringing his coaching prowess from the locker room to the lectern, Stanford football coach Bill Walsh described the changing role of the coach as “a facilitator rather than a dictator” during his address at this weekend’s campus sports psychology symposium. The four-day long symposium, “Toward the Further Reaches of Sport Psychology,” stressed an exchange of coaching philosophies with Russian coaches.

Having a high working memory capacity (WMC) generally helps with problem-solving by allowing us to avoid distractions, pull up relevant information, and complete multiple steps in a complex task. But not all problems benefit from that approach.

Previous research has shown that people with high WMC will choose problem-solving strategies that play to their strengths, adding more steps and complexity to the process than are strictly necessary — or efficient. Researchers have also found that high WMC individuals will direct the power of focused attention on activities that are actually performed better without it (such as dribbling a soccer ball or touch-typing).

DeCaro, Van Stockum, and Wieth wanted to examine how working memory capacity influenced a specific type of problem: insight problems. These are problems that don’t benefit from an incremental, step-by-step approach, but instead tend to be solved by reframing the issue. If you’ve ever had an “aha” moment, you may have just solved an insight problem.

Sports like baseball, basketball and football all use an array of advanced analytics like wins above replacement, effective field goal percentage and total quarterback rating.

Tennis may be late to the party, but the WTA is looking to serve up aces with its new iPads, which generate real-time data and deliver it to coaches during a match.

Designed by SAP, the WTA’s technology partner, the tablets offer an overwhelming amount of analysis. Everything from where a player is hitting the ball up 30-15, to how often she goes on to win a game when she wins the first point of a serve.

Advances in technology can be found everywhere.

If you had a mobile phone 30 years ago, odds were you were on Wall Street and the phone could have swallowed your head. Now everyone has a cell phone and you’re able to download an app for things that serve no real purpose.

Such advances have crossed over into sports and contributed to the modern athlete.