Applied Sports Science newsletter – September 14, 2015

New Orleans Pelicans point guard Jrue Holiday is hopeful this upcoming season won’t be anything like the previous two.

He’s aiming to avoid having recurring injury problems with his lower right leg that forced him to miss 90 games over the past two seasons. With training camp set to open on Sept. 29 at The Greenbrier in West Virginia, Holiday has embraced the organization’s cautious approach to bring him along slowly to avoid the possibility of any setbacks.

Arian Foster wishes he could be on the field with his teammates when the Texans open their regular season on Sunday against the Chiefs, but the star running back knows he has to listen to his body.

“When you’re dealing with muscle injuries they tend to re-occur if you’re not careful, so it’s not something you can push through,” Foster said during a candid session with reporters on Thursday. “I’ve played entire seasons with torn meniscus, I’ve played an entire season with a broken collarbone. I’ve played an entire season with things that you can push through but muscle injuries there’s nothing you can do because it literally hinders the movement.

“So as soon as I feel like the movement isn’t hindered and I’m not going to re-injure it, I’ll be out there.”

… At first glance, little has changed about the 6-foot-3, 202-pound Cousins entering Year 4, apart from a beard that hints at a new steeliness.

The overhaul of consequence, Gruden believes, is Cousins’s mental game.

His offseason work included copious film study and tutoring from a private throwing coach, as is common among NFL quarterbacks. But it included unlikely assists from a few dozen high school receivers who ran pass patterns and caught balls during Cousins’s winter vacations in Georgia and Florida and a Michigan-based company called Neurocore that Cousins said “retrained” his brain to operate in a “sweet spot” best suited to peak athletic performance.

The path to a Grand Slam had been weed-whacked of obstacles, and Serena Williams, maybe the greatest women’s tennis player in history having her greatest season, needed to do nothing more than win two matches against two aging Italian players ranked outside the top 20.

But then she got out of the car on Friday in front of Arthur Ashe Stadium three hours before her semifinal match against unseeded Roberta Vinci, ranked 43rd in the world. Patrick Mouratoglou, Williams’s coach, saw the end on her face.

There are two things I consider more important than sleep: air and water. We spend more time sleeping than engaging in any other single activity, but we know very little about how day-to-day sleep behavior is regulated.

My lab uses human genetics to gain a better understanding on this topic. We’ve found that sleep behavior is heavily influenced by our genetic makeup. Just like many other traits — height, weight, body shape — sleep behavior is at least partly inherited.

In 2009, we discovered a mutation in the DEC2 gene that allows some people to sleep only four to six hours a night and feel completely refreshed. We study such efficient sleepers in hopes to understand why sleep is so important!

There are some people who make decisions—such as choosing a car or an apartment to buy from a multitude of options—in a jiffy. And there are other people who spend agonizing hours and minutes trying to find the right shade of lipstick or what to order when eating out. What lies behind their indecisiveness?

Even the most indecisive people are rational, intelligent adults who function perfectly in their daily lives and do not falter when carrying out their duties and responsibilities. Yet, it seems that they cannot do much about their tendency to dilly-dally or make hasty decisions.

According to a recent study, the quality of the flow of information between the various regions of the brain indicates how decisive or indecisive a person is. When the flow of information is disrupted, people show indecisiveness. However, they do not waver on all types of decisions.

This election year has produced 17 Republican presidential candidates, which on its surface may appear to give the party a competitive advantage. Evolution, however, disagrees.

A new study by Michigan State University researcher Arend Hintze and appearing in the current issue of Scientific Reports, says the delicate balance of some, but not too much, competition optimally drives the evolution of decision-making strategies.

A new autonomy proposal concept from the Pac-12 could get rid of the early-morning and late-night practices and lift sessions.

On Friday, the Pac-12 outlined several proposal concepts for the next autonomy conference in January. One of those would “establish a contiguous eight-hour period between 9 p.m. – 6 a.m. where athletic activities cannot be required.”

Wearable technology has been in sports and fitness for a long time. Whenever you watch a high level rugby match you see small boxes at top of each player’s back to allow coaches to check their vitals. In athletics heart rate monitors have allowed coaches to see people’s performance for years. In many other sports having the ability to check perspiration rates and power outputs have all come through the use of wearable tech.

However, each of these things simply record the data, they don’t allow the athlete themselves to see the data in real time through a wearable device.

One of Ireland’s top sports physical therapists, Anthony ‘Star’ Geoghegan, has said this country is backward in terms of adopting new techniques which could help track and field athletes.

Carlow man Geoghegan has worked with athletes such as Usain Bolt and David Oliver and is organising a major sports therapy conference in Carlow this Sunday where many of the recent World Championship medallists will be in attendance, including Blanka Vlasic, Tori Bowie and Curtis Mitchell.

To almost all sports fans, doping in sports is an issue of near-religious importance, says Julian Savulescu. According to the Australian bioethicist and moral philosopher, fans celebrate people of extraordinary physical ability who dedicate themselves to training to perform an athletic feat to perfection—but when they augment their abilities with drugs and enhancers, fans can feel personally wronged as if a crime has been committed against them. Just look at what happened to Lance Armstrong.

Time to wake up and smell the steroids, he says. As director of the Uehrin Centre for Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford, Savulescu has garnered quite the reputation for his controversial views on subjects ranging from cloning to the end of the world, as this previous interview in Nautilus details—and sports are no exception. On his radar since 2000, Savulescu has come to the conclusion that doping shouldn’t be a moral question at all—in fact, he’s for it. He spoke to Nautilus about why Lance Armstrong was right to use doping and why we are living in a “fairyland” if we think it isn’t going on—even if testing doesn’t catch it.

Unless Paddy McNair makes a very surprise appearance, Saturday will be the first time in the fixture’s history that neither club will name an academy graduate in their starting XI.

There was a time not so long ago when the Los Angeles Lakers didn’t have to discuss the inner workings of their storied franchise.

Championships have a funny way of giving teams that luxury, with fans and media too busy celebrating and chronicling the success to worry about anyone not named Magic, Shaq, or Kobe. But a .292 winning percentage over the course of two seasons has a funny way of changing things, and there was no better sign of this reality than the Lakers’ press release sent Friday that detailed a number of changes to the team’s front office.

From the founding of an NBA statistics website to being part of a championship coaching staff in Dallas, Roland Beech has had quite the journey from a basketball fan to an integral part of the Sacramento Kings.

We recently spoke with Roland about his beginnings in basketball, his experiences with the Mavericks, and his future moving forward with the Kings.