Applied Sports Science newsletter – September 16, 2015

A few months ago Shaun Suisham never imaged he would be a spectator when the Steelers opened the 2015 season against the New England Patriots. His vision was what it’s been for the past 10 years; that he would be on the field with his teammates, ding his part like he always does.

But that all changed when the Steelers played the Minnesota Vikings in the NFL’s Hall of Fame Game, and he suffered a season-ending ACL injury.

“This is the first time I have had a significant injury since I was a freshman in college,” said Suisham. “It’s very…”

He paused, the look on his face saying it all. He didn’t have to share the feeling, the emotion that came after “It’s very.” His eyes, the tone of his voice, his heart said it all.

A number of years ago I was asked to give a talk in Boston to a group of medical and fitness professionals. In that presentation I explained for the first time the methodology I use for sport-specific fitness and skill ratios. In other words, as a comparison, the outcome of a game in soccer is arguably 20 per cent determined by the fitness of the two teams, and 80 per cent determined by the skills of players.

In NFL, it is the inverse. Rugby too. Having been the only person to work full-time across all those codes I saw it at first hand. Yet the impact of the presentation shocked me. Stuart McGill, a world-leading expert in injury and performance, said that in 27 years on the road it was the first time he had seen that theory presented. The ratios involved are a little complex and detailed but you get the point: rugby, like NFL, is a game where the influence of skill and fitness are finely balanced. So overcook the fitness and skill is the victim; overdo the skills work and the opposition will batter you to a point where you can’t compete physically.

… According to the Fulbright Commission, almost 11,000 British students were at American colleges in the past academic year – an increase of 21% in the past 10 years.

Although the number of soccer scholarships is not recorded (there’s no American equivalent of Ucas, the organisation through which applications are processed in England and Wales) it is clear they are becoming more popular.

Chris Cousins, who runs Sports Recruiting USA, went to Illinois on a soccer scholarship in 2003.

“I was probably one of a dozen going to America, if that,” he says.

… The changes occurred despite the Warriors combining to have players miss only 80 games due to injury and beating the injury-plagued Cleveland Cavaliers in the NBA Finals.

“They did a great job,” Warriors assistant general manager Kirk Lacob said Thursday at the Sports Analytics Innovation Summit of last season’s staff. “Obviously we did a lot of things really, really well. For various reasons, most people aren’t back this year. All of their contracts were up anyways, so it’s not like anyone was fired.

“But we kind of had a vision and Steve (Kerr) had a vision too of the way we wanted to structure that whole department. It was going to be with or without those guys regardless. We were perfectly happy to have them as part of that or not.

Tabener is Head of Sport Science at Everton FC.

Also see The Importance of Match Day Data With Matt Taberner

The St. Louis Rams conquered the defending NFC champion Seattle Seahawks on Sunday in the early surprise of the season. Their spectacular special teams and run defense, which stuffed Seattle star Marshawn Lynch on a fourth down in overtime, had something to do with it.

So did their innovative plan for teaching millennials.

The Rams have the youngest team in the NFL. Like most workplaces, the Rams were inundated with employees whose habits were vastly different from those of their the bosses. As coach Jeff Fisher put it: “Our players learn better with two phones and music going and with an iPad on the side,” he said. “That’s new.”

A growing body of evidence demonstrates that behavioral science insights — research findings from fields such as behavioral economics and psychology about how people make decisions and act on them — can be used to design government policies to better serve the American people.

Where Federal policies have been designed to reflect behavioral science insights, they have substantially improved outcomes for the individuals, families, communities, and businesses those policies serve. For example, automatic enrollment and automatic escalation in retirement savings plans have made it easier to save for the future, and have helped Americans accumulate billions of dollars in additional retirement savings. Similarly, streamlining the application process for Federal financial aid has made college more financially accessible for millions of students.

To more fully realize the benefits of behavioral insights and deliver better results at a lower cost for the American people, the Federal Government should design its policies and programs to reflect our best understanding of how people engage with, participate in, use, and respond to those policies and programs.

Background Monitoring athlete well-being is essential to guide training and to detect any progression towards negative health outcomes and associated poor performance. Objective (performance, physiological, biochemical) and subjective measures are all options for athlete monitoring.

Objective We systematically reviewed objective and subjective measures of athlete well-being. Objective measures, including those taken at rest (eg, blood markers, heart rate) and during exercise (eg, oxygen consumption, heart rate response), were compared against subjective measures (eg, mood, perceived stress). All measures were also evaluated for their response to acute and chronic training load. …

Results Subjective and objective measures of athlete well-being generally did not correlate. Subjective measures reflected acute and chronic training loads with superior sensitivity and consistency than objective measures. Subjective well-being was typically impaired with an acute increase in training load, and also with chronic training, while an acute decrease in training load improved subjective well-being.

Summary This review provides further support for practitioners to use subjective measures to monitor changes in athlete well-being in response to training. Subjective measures may stand alone, or be incorporated into a mixed methods approach to athlete monitoring, as is current practice in many sport settings.

The Georgia Tech Wearable Computing Center (WCC) is a hub and connection point for wearable technology research on campus. The WCC acts as a conduit between industry and cutting edge interdisciplinary academic research. Wearable computing projects require expertise from many different engineering and design disciplines and the WCC is in a unique position to create research teams from across all of the colleges and departments at Georgia Tech.

Following last year’s success, the WCC Forum is now an annual endeavor. The WCC Forum is an opportunity to hear from pioneers in wearable technology about the state of the art in the field. Experts in important application areas will also speak to how wearable technology might help solve problems unique to these areas, healthcare or wearables in the workplace for example.

LifeWatch, a Swiss remote cardiac monitoring company that has been connecting to mobile phones since 2009, has received FDA clearance for a new version of its Ambulatory Cardiac Telemetry (ACT) system that will run on Android devices. Currently, the system runs on Microsoft Windows phones. Patients use the mobile software to answer a couple questions related to symptoms and, if they want, to capture and send manual readings off for analysis.

The initial clearance will allow the system to work with the Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini, but according to a press release the company plans to get clearance for additional Android phones in the future.

Visible fat people fear, yet, this fat might not be the only villain with health and human performance. There is a more dangerous factor than just body fat percentage, the distribution of fat, linked to numerous health risks. In this blog, we will explore the importance of body fat distribution, and, how it affects our health. We will evaluate the research on waist circumference (WC) – not weight – and how it affects biomarkers such as fasting glucose, high-sensitivity C-reactive protein, testosterone and sex hormone binding globulin.

… No longer is describing the mechanical aspects of a goal good enough; modern football audiences expect to be educated on a more fundamental level. How, then, do you become a mini G-Nev? Years of study is the answer, but there’s never a better time than the present to go about gaining a deeper awareness of what’s happening on the pitch. Here are some fundamental elements of the game that you should look out for… [commercial video autoplays in right column]

… In sports, genius is often ascribed to those who re-invent some facet of the game they play. LeBron James has helped usher in a new era of basketball, where traditional positions have been eroded by lavish athleticism and abstract versatility. James can win games on either side of the ball, from the wing, or in the post, with power or grace. It’s a trope to say his game defies definition but essentially it does, he is unparalleled. Similarly, Lawrence Taylor’s strength and athleticism altered the path of football. “He changed the way defense is played, the way pass-rushing is played, the way linebackers play and the way offenses block linebackers,” said John Madden, his former coach. In hockey, Wayne Gretzky shredded previous notions of offense, and often credited his success to a simple rule—“I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” Despite being lithe in a physical game, he became hockey’s greatest player by mastering an anticipatory style, rooted in spacial awareness.

These are just some examples. Innovation, of course, arrives in different forms, but beyond athleticism and intellect, or obsession and creativity, what other factors go into the equation? In sports, who gets appointed genius and why?

The maxim “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” certainly describes the work of Mariana G. Matus: The fourth-year PhD student in computational and systems biology at MIT is part of a team collecting samples of sewage to understand community health and behavior.

Although sewage is something most people prefer to leave out of sight and out of mind, Matus says that it is a gold mine of information. A small sample of sewage is likely to contain a variety of biomarkers that can yield data on infectious and chronic diseases such as influenza and inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).

“It’s not something that people really like to talk about,” Matus says. “But human waste can actually tell us a lot about health.”