Applied Sports Science newsletter – September 2, 2015

Tim Lincecum encountered another setback with his hip and back discomfort, forcing him to acknowledge the possibility that he has thrown his last pitch of the season.

And, because he’ll be a free agent, his last pitch as a Giant.

“I really don’t know. I mean, I hope not,” said Lincecum, a two-time Cy Young Award winner and one of the most accomplished players in franchise history. “I can’t predict the future. I have good days and bad days.

… Martin: We started off by discussing the failings of modern periodization methods and you offered an alternative core philosophy based on the process rather than the plan. Good periodization, in your view, is about designing a good process. So then how to we take those general concepts and create a training plan?

John: I’m not a planning guru; I’m not pretending to be and I’m not pretending to have a definitive answer. How could anyone have a definitive answer? But perhaps what I can offer is a series of questions. Questions which, if adapted to our individual coaching contexts, might help us evolve a more insightful means of tackling the training management problem.

Jarryd Hayne’s bold move to try his hand and fast feet in the United States National Football League (NFL) has generated a media storm in recent weeks. That’s not surprising, given he has walked away from an established career as a rugby league player in Australia, and guaranteed dollars, with no guarantee of success in the US.

But Hayne’s encouraging form for the San Francisco 49ers is also not surprising for the those who have an interest in the developmental pathway of expert sport performers.

The average soccer player covers roughly 7 miles per game, according to SportVU.

Multiply that by 20 games, and it’s 140 miles a season. There is, however, no statistic or equation to capture the feeling of practicing and playing in the sizzling, muggy Louisiana heat.

The LSU soccer team is all too familiar with this statistic and the bayou weather. Sophomore forward Jorian Baucom, who hails from Scottsdale, Arizona, is accustomed to playing in triple digit temperatures but says the weather in Louisiana is on another level.

… You have spoken widely about the importance of monitoring sleep with the Australian National soccer/football team, “the Socceroos”, particularly during the Asian Cup success, can you tell us a bit about that?

Sleep and nutrition are the “big rocks” in respect to recovery and I still think we do not devote enough of our work to the key area of sleep. Too often we are looking outside the box at recovery methods that have a limited evidence base when sleep is the #1. I am an advocate of sleep monitoring BUT it is imperative not to only monitor but then educate to advance the “sleep performance” of your athletes. The monitoring is only the first step – the question is what are you doing with that data?

In respect to camp situations and tournaments, players require education on basic sleep hygiene and when they fully understand the importance of good sleep habits then improvements can be made.

Countless entrepreneurs around the world have launched digital health companies in the last decade and more than 100,000 mobile apps are currently on the market—all with the goal of making us healthier. But how many of these companies have concrete evidence to support their health claims?

Not many, says Sean Duffy, co-founder and CEO of Omada Health, a digital health company that develops programs for people at risk for chronic disease. “It’s still rare,” he adds.

In fact, there’s such a lack of clinical and economic evidence on the effectiveness of digital health products and services that a new startup was created just to focus on the problem. Evidation Health works to parse the marketing claims of digital health companies, which are rarely proven using scientific evidence, says CEO Deborah Kilpatrick.

The saliva holds a lot of chemical cues about the state of the rest of the human body, so researchers at University of California, San Diego are working on sensor technology that can be integrated into mouth guards to track these cues. In the latest issue of Biosensors and Bioelectronics, the researchers are reporting on a sensor that is able to detect uric acid in saliva with precision similar to the standard blood draws.

The sensor has been integrated into a prototype mouth guard that also contains a battery, additional electronics, and a Bluetooth chip for wirelessly transmitting readings to a smartphone or other device.

… After completing a Masters in Sports Medicine at the University of Nottingham in the UK, Dr George was snapped up by Manchester United, where a big break (in the literal sense) proved to be the making of him

On April 28, 2006, a nation drew its breath as a challenge from Chelsea’s Tiago left United and England star Wayne Rooney writhing in agony on the Stamford Bridge turf. His fourth metatarsal was broken and his hopes of playing at the upcoming World Cup in Germany seemed dashed.

Dr George, however, had other ideas. With time of the essence ahead of the tournament, surgery was ruled out and a strict regime of rest and rehab drawn up. Remarkably Rooney made it to Germany.

For a minimum price of $15,000, several professional athletes recently received a curious new medical treatment in New York.

It’s called “The Soup” — a mixture of human cells that includes stem cells derived from a patient’s own fat. If it works the way they hope, The Soup can help repair injuries that otherwise might require surgery — damaged knees, elbows, hips, necks and more.

“Traditional medicine and traditional drugs do not work for a lot of patients,” said Steven Victor, founder and chairman of The Soup’s manufacturer, IntelliCell BioSciences. “This kind of cellular therapy can really be a savior to them.”

Here’s an article right across the way here at Science on the contamination problems with dietary supplements. This industry, though, is set up perfectly for this kind of trouble under US law (see below), and it happens constantly. (The law also throws the doors wide open for scam artists of every kind, and we get them by the bushel basket as well).

But this new piece (by Jennifer Couzin-Frankel) is about the people who are actually putting active substances in their pills. That’s actually a step down from the people selling, say, mannitol that some backyard weed has been waved over, because some of these active compounds are a bit too active:

The report was unnerving: At least a dozen supplements sold in the United States for weight loss, enhanced brain function, and improved athletic performance contained a synthetic stimulant. The compound, which Cohen and his co-authors named DMBA, resembled methamphetamine in its chemical structure. It had never been tested in people, only in two animal studies from the 1940s. “Its efficacy and safety are entirely unknown,” they wrote.

DEA officials today announced a nationwide series of enforcement actions targeting every level of the global underground trade of anabolic steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs, the vast majority of which are manufactured and trafficked from underground labs in China.

DEA-led Operation Cyber Juice comprised of over 30 different U.S. investigations in 20 states and resulted in the arrest of over 90 individuals, the seizure of 16 underground steroid labs, approximately 134,000 steroid dosage units, 636 kilograms of raw steroid powder, 8,200 liters of raw steroid injectable liquid, and over $2 million in U.S. currency and assets. In addition, DEA and its partners assisted in foreign steroid investigations in four countries coordinated by Europol. Domestic law enforcement partners include the Department of Homeland Security, and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service.

Canada Basketball will be hosting a series of athlete identification sessions to identify athletes. This year’s athlete identification sessions will be held over four days; Thursday, September 3rd to Sunday, September 6th, 2015. Only Ontario residents can attend these sessions. Sessions for other provinces will be announced at a later date. These sessions are an opportunity for Canada Basketball to evaluate athletes who demonstrate the potential to participate in either the boys Junior Academy Program or the men’s youth National Team Program in the future. These identification sessions are a component of Canada Basketball’s Targeted Athlete Strategy (TAS).

MLS is making strides in player identification and development. Whatever you may feel about the speed at which it’s doing this, things are better now than they were a few years ago, and a few years before that, and on we go.

But if you look at the numbers, those strides are primarily concentrated in clusters. MLS (and specifically our academy, college and club system) has done yeoman’s work developing holding midfielders, defenders, keepers and, in smaller numbers, strikers for the next level. If the USMNT is anything, it’s a mirror reflecting the player pool as a whole. And at each of those positions the U.S. has generated a player worthy of distinction.

The area where the U.S. system has not succeeded, however, is with attacking midfielders.

… Before I speak on it in detail get-Suffice it to say: it has I with particularly careful player observation and a company-owned, kept secret computer software do-will only explain the market, has been stamped for the Double Pass out of the ground.

Double Pass performs audits and accreditations through-something that is associated primarily with the US university system. In the United States provide various independent organizations ensure that the Unis meet certain standards. Once that is the case, they are “certified”, ie obtain a certain mark. Since most American colleges have understood the value of such a quality label to see them, to meet the different requirements.

Also in Double Pass it comes to audits and accreditations-but not from universities, but of youth academies in football field. In Germany there have been over the last ten years a real boom in youth centers, which is directly related with companies like Double Pass. This was triggered by the unprecedented failure of the German national team at Euro 2000 in Belgium and the Netherlands, in which the German team was eliminated under Erich Ribbeck already in the preliminary round as group Last.