Applied Sports Science newsletter – September 3, 2015

… the NHLPA’s Dr. John Rizos was able to get me an appointment with Dr. James Kelly, a military doctor who only sees civilian patients one day a month. After a battery of tests, Dr. Kelly explained that it wasn’t just my head that was the problem, it was my eyes and ears, too. My vestibular system was broken. Basically, the computer chip controlling my spatial awareness, vision, and balance was damaged.

… “I do think that you do have to be a little bit of an asshole sometimes,” he says, with a smile. “But it has to come off from within your own personality. If it’s not, it comes off as phony and disingenuous.”

He explains that at Stanford, his infamously irascible coach, Jim Harbaugh, told him to lead, but within his personality. If you’re a yeller, yell. If you’re not, don’t.

Shaw TV’s Kevin Charach shows us how Canadian athletes train for success.

It has often been said athletes are born with speed and that it cannot be taught. Although I disagree with this statement, it is funny how the same people who make this statement are coaching away an athletes speed with the methods they use. Of course I understand this is unintentional, but none the same the methods are not working.

He is 15 years old, 5-foot-9 and 185 pounds of cartoonish muscles on top of muscles. He had six-pack abs when he was 6. Today, he bench-presses one-and-a-half times his body weight and can leap from a standing position to the top of a car. He averages four touchdowns per game and hasn’t lost a wrestling match since 2012, making him the nation’s top-ranked football player and wrestler for his grade. And even though he doesn’t begin high school for another two weeks, he already is one of the most talked about athletes in New Jersey. … Josh also embodies the runaway free-for-all youth sports have become. Specialized training. High school coaches lining up to woo players. Working out to the point of total exhaustion. Repeating a grade for athletic advantage. Bouncing from team to team. It’s all part of his family’s all-in, college-scholarship-or-bust gamble.

The best coaches take the time to understand their athletes so that they can provide the best environment to help them succeed.

1. Understand your athlete’s readiness to develop

The drug modafinil was recently found to enhance cognition in healthy people. Should you take it to get a raise?

… Five years ago I joined a tiny site, with a struggling software product. I wasn’t sure how long I’d stay. I was coming off 5 intense years helping scale Flickr. But I had some theories about engineering I wanted to test, and Etsy had a nascent team with some great folks who were up for the challenge, though a number of the odds were stacked against us. … Theory 2: Technology is the product of the culture that builds it.

3 years ago we embarked on a project to put computing inside a contact lens — an immensely challenging technical problem with an important application to health. While I am delighted at the progress that project has made, I could not have imagined the potential of the initiative it has grown into — a life sciences team with the mission to develop new technologies to make healthcare more proactive. The efforts it has spawned include a nanodiagnostics platform, a cardiac and activity monitor, and the Baseline Study.

About 200 years ago a French physician rolled a sheet of paper into a cylinder and held it up to the chest of a patient. The creation was crude and simple, but it worked. Rene Laenneac could better hear his patient’s heartbeat, and the stethoscope was born.

Today, the stethoscope remains a fixture in medicine, draped around the shoulders of doctors. It’s also overdue for a makeover.

Now Eko Devices, a Silicon Valley start-up, has received FDA approval for its digital stethoscope, which brings the power of modern technology to an already essential device. The implications could be huge for patient care. It’s also a reminder of the enormous potential for modern technology to improve health care, which still relies on dated technology such as fax machines to play critical roles.

“Smashing,” “rolling,” and “breaking up scar tissue” are all common ways that athletes refer to the practice of self myofascial release. Foam rollers, lacrosse balls, and PVC pipes are more common than ever inside strength and conditioning facilities. More and more, athletes use these tools to take a swing at treating their own pain and dysfunction.

So let’s take a deeper dive into understanding how we can use tools more precisely to stave off the aches and pains of training, find better positions, and feel better, lift more, and go faster.

… solving the cramping problem requires a personalized solution from a highly trained individual who understands the many causes of cramping and appropriate solutions to prepare the athlete and prevent cramping. With the right training and appropriate monitoring and education, limiting and completely avoiding cramping is possible. Below are some initial areas that should be part of a training program to limit the chance of experiencing exercise associated muscle cramps during tennis play.

Dr. Robert J. Butler, interim director of Duke’s Michael W. Krzyzewski Human Performance Laboratory, helped Toronto oversee Stroman’s recovery and confirms that a fanatical work ethic, plus the natural healing ability of a 24-year-old body, played important roles in his progression. … Butler’s team used the Catapult system to search for “the right amount” of stress: Too little and Stroman’s improvement would slow unnecessarily, but too much and he’d risk suffering a setback that could end any hope of a 2015 return. Because the Jays had used the same system in spring training, Butler could compare Stroman’s readings to his pre-injury baseline. But they also tried to factor in the psychological strain of Stroman’s schoolwork and separation from the Blue Jays with Polar heart-rate monitors and Omegawave sensors, which measure heart-rate variability and other indicators of overwork.

… While paddling well offshore, Dr. Rod MacKinnon felt his arms seize up. The chemical-biology professor at The Rockefeller University wasn’t alone in his agony, either. His kayaking partner, Dr. Bruce Bean, a neurobiologist at Harvard, was suffering the same cramping. Both are fit and experienced paddlers who had been paying careful attention to their nutrition and hydration the whole way. They both eventually made it back to shore, but the ordeal drove them to find out what went wrong. For MacKinnon, a serious athlete who had spent the bulk of his career investigating ion channels, his two worlds collided. And when he found out how little we truly understood about cramping, he became obsessed.

MacKinnon’s research started with a look at traditional sports drinks and other electrolyte solutions. His take: They were predicated on replacing what people believed the body lost through sweat—if the body is losing salt or potassium, then restore those levels. But he also came across stories of marathon runners stirring mustard into water and cyclists downing pickle juice to end muscle cramps. He was curious and asked himself, “What’s the story here?”

The more he learned, the more he began to suspect that it wasn’t the muscle that needed help (electrolytes, fluid, carbs), but a short circuit in the ion channels—the system that carries messages among the brain, the nervous system, and the muscle. What the body needed was some sort of stimulation to tell the motor neurons in the spinal cord to, essentially, stop freaking out.