Applied Sports Science newsletter – September 17, 2015

Sounders center back Roman Torres will miss the remainder of this season and some — if not all — of next season with an ACL injury.

Below are some comments from general manager Garth Lagerwey, coach Sigi Schmid and captain/sometimes centerback Brad Evans.

Exercise makes you smarter… but how much do you need to maximize its benefits? When it comes to physical health, the general principle according to exercise guidelines is: “Some exercise is better than none and higher doses generally convey greater benefit.” Is the same true for cognitive benefits? That’s what a recent study from the University of Kansas, published in PLoS ONE, set out to discover.

Running six miles per week appears to improve longevity by three to six years and reduces the risk of several chronic diseases, according to a review of research published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings.

A distinguished group of US-based cardiologists, exercise physiologists and epidemiologists collaborated on the review. It contains no new material or research, but summarises results of the best, large-scale studies on runners. All of the studies included at least 500 runners and at least five years of follow-up.

Everyone knows that caffeine can keep you awake, but a new study shows that the world’s most popular drug can actually interfere with your body’s internal sense of time.

“The circadian clock is way beyond ‘sleep and wake,’ ” says Kenneth Wright, a sleep and circadian physiologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “The circadian clock is present in cells throughout our entire body. It’s in your fat cells; it’s in your muscle cells. It’s in your liver, for example, as well as in your brain.” [audio, 2:04]

Had Altis, the elite training centre located in Phoenix, Arizona, entered the Beijing World Championships as a nation, it would have finished just outside the top ten in the medal table. Altis CEO, founder and four-time world shot put champion John Godina gives his ten-step guide to building one of the sport’s most successful training environments.

1. A vision of success

John Godina formed Altis (formerly known as the World Athletics Center) out of the World Throws Center six years ago after noticing a gap in the US system that was hindering athletes’ progression.

… Wayne Diesel, the Dolphins’ new director of sports performance, brings years of experience as a physical therapist and researcher to the organization in an effort to create fitter, stronger and healthier athletes.

Prior to joining the Dolphins, Diesel was the head of medical services for the Tottenham Hotspur Football Club of the English Premier League. In that role, he oversaw a diverse medical group including physicians, physical therapists, sports scientists and nutritionists, among others.

Diesel credits his Premier League experience with shaping his focus on performance improvement.

Fitbit’s Corporate Wellness arm officially became a HIPAA compliant platform, announced Target as a new client, which will offer Fitbits to its 335,000 US employees, and showed off a new software offering that will facilitate fitness competitions among employees in large, distributed companies.

Fitbit Wellness has been around almost since the beginning, but is lately one of the fastest growing parts of the company, according to Fitbit Wellness Vice President and General Manager Amy Donough. She describes the HIPAA audit, which Fitbit sought voluntarily, as a “proactive step” that will broaden Fitbit’s options for who they can work with and what they can do.

Every morning, the Blue Devils open an app on their phones and spend two minutes inputting their energy levels and any areas of soreness so that the Duke coaching staff can devise a customized practice plan to maximize performance.

The technology, Fit For 90, is part of Duke’s new, science-backed approach to training it adopted heading into the season. Adhering to shorter, more intense practices and doing more work off the pitch, the Blue Devils are hoping their new method will pay off by keeping them fresher—and healthier—late into the season.

As Week 1 of the NFL season has concluded with its regular allotment of injuries, it made me once again think of that saying. I heard it all the time while in the NFL. If you’re not on the field, the team has no use for you, and it’s what drives athletes to push their bodies far past the breaking point—especially during the preseason, when competition for a roster spot is fierce.

The NFL takes advantage of that in ways most people don’t know.

See, there’s a thing in the NFL called an “injury settlement,” whereby if a player gets injured during the preseason, and the team wants to get rid of that player, they have to cover his medical costs and salary for the weeks he’s predicted to be injured in a one-time payout. This amount can be in the thousands, if not the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and, well, NFL teams don’t like parting with their money.

As sauerkraut, kombucha, and Greek yogurt pop up everywhere, probiotics—live bacteria and yeasts that supposedly improve gut health—are starting to make headlines. But do these little organisms improve running performance? Lisa Dorfman, a competitive runner and nutritionist based in Miami, says it’s not that simple.

“I would not look at a probiotic as a performance enhancer,” Dorfman says. “What probiotics can do is keep the runner healthier so they can train better.”

As guards were going so far as to check inside NFL fans’ wallets as part of routine security measures before a recent preseason game at Levi’s Stadium, a different form of surveillance was taking place on the inside of the San Francisco 49ers’ 1-year-old, $1.3 billion home here in Silicon Valley.

We’re not talking about facial recognition devices, police body cams, or other security measures likely zeroing in on fans. Instead, employees from San Jose-based Zebra Technologies had recently finished scanning the NFL uniforms of the 49ers and of their opponents—the Dallas Cowboys. All of a sudden, an on-the-field de facto surveillance society was instantly created when Zebra techies activated nickel-sized Radio Frequency Identification Device (RFID) chips that were fastened inside players’ shoulder pads. Every movement of every player now could be monitored within an accuracy level of all but a few inches.

PSCL Sports Analytics Conference (SAC) is the premier Asia-Pacific Sports Analytics Conference, providing a forum for industry professionals, including executives and researchers, to discuss the increasing role of analytics in Australia and the global sports industry.

[3 videos, 31:26, 35:54, 46:52]

Building a good data pipeline can be technically tricky. As a data scientist who has worked at Foursquare and Google, I can honestly say that one of our biggest headaches was locking down our Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) process.

At The Data Incubator, our team has trained more than 100 talented Ph.D. data science fellows who are now data scientists at a wide range of companies, including Capital One, the New York Times, AIG, and Palantir. We commonly hear from Data Incubator alumni and hiring managers that one of their biggest challenges is also implementing their own ETL pipelines.

I’ve wanted to build a match summary dashboard for quite a while. Partly due to dissatisfaction with what I can find out on the web, and partly (along the lines of my player summaries) because I really like the challenge of trying to boil a dashboard down so that it fits onto just one page.

My frustration with existing match dashboards comes in a few different flavours.