Applied Sports Science newsletter – September 18, 2015

Matt Harvey returns from the ligament protection program on Sunday. And gee, it’ll be great to see him, even if his pitch-count buzzer goes off in, say, the third inning.

But where he goes from here is one of those topics that matters to more than just the New York Mets, or the people who live and die with them and dream those wacky October dreams.

We know what the Mets are trying to do in an attempt to preserve this man’s elbow. But is this what they should be doing? Running him out there for a bunch of tuneup mini-starts every five days?

Detroit Pistons point guard Brandon Jennings is not expected back from his Achilles injury until mid- to late-December — at least a month and a half after Detroit’s season starts Oct. 27.

Pistons coach Stan Van Gundy said Thursday what role Jennings will play is unclear.

The mind of a champion isn’t something you’d normally expect to be able to detect in a brain scanner. But that’s what researchers at the University of California, San Diego have been pursuing for the last few years—and their latest results, published last month in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, suggest that it’s even possible to train your brain to be more champion-like.

The new study, by UCSD clinical psychiatry professor Lori Haase and her colleagues, put seven members of the U.S. BMX cycling team through a specially designed mindfulness training program tailored to enhance peak performance, adding unusual elements like an ice-bucket challenge to the breathing exercises and meditations techniques of typical stress-reduction mindfulness routines. By the end of the seven-week study, the athletes scored higher on assessments of self-awareness and reported feeling more “present” in competition. And more intriguingly (and concretely), their brains responded differently to the stress of a sudden shortage of oxygen while performing cognitive tasks in an fMRI scanner.

< “We all meditate. When I first went to an actual meditation class… the same feeling that you have when you want to stop in a race, when you think you’re going to quit at the end of an interval or whatever, that – to me – that feeling, I recognized when I was sitting trying to stay still and continuously come back to breathing.” – Simon Whitfield, TRS Radio

Simon Whitfield knows what he’s talking about.

The NBA is putting its own money into the study of wearable GPS devices, with the likely end goal of outfitting players during games, according to several league sources. The league is funding a study, at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, of products from two leading device-makers: Catapult and STATSports.

The league declined comment on the study. Most teams already use the gadgets during practices, and Catapult alone expects to have about 20 NBA team clients by the start of the 2015-16 season. The Fort Wayne Mad Ants wore Catapult monitors during D-League games last season in an obvious trial run for potential use at the parent league.

Doesn’t it sometimes seem like wherever you look – in the office, on the T or in the grocery store – chances are you’ll see a FitBit-clad wrist? Fashion nightmares aside (no, neon rubber isn’t the new black), people have started sporting these wearables en masse over the past year or so.

Some folks feel better about their general well-being knowing they’re strapped in and keeping track of their daily steps. Other people, though, are left looking for more.

Enter Brad Goldsberry and Mike Nackoul, two MIT grads pushing fitness wearables a step further. They’re working on a software platform that could forever change the way athletes train.

The big news that seems to have come from our match against Plymouth on Saturday was the seven-minute delay in kicking off because of the GPS tracking devices that we have started wearing.

… Every team of medics and physiotherapists will enter the field of play to treat a player at some point, effectively having a ‘patient’ to deal with while surrounded by 30 burly blokes running at each other.

And Lewindon, who was previously a physiotherapist at Northampton, says the medical team’s training means they know exactly what to do in these highly-charged moments.

“Because we’re well rehearsed and well trained it’s quite simple to go to task with these things,” he said. “The first thing we do is to ensure we are safe to approach a player, that we won’t get clattered.

Aim/Hypothesis

The etiology of plantar fasciitis (PF) has been related to several risk factors, but the magnitude of the plantar load is the most commonly described factor. Although PF is the third most-common injury in runners, only two studies have investigated this factor in runners, and their results are still inconclusive regarding the injury stage.
Objective

Analyze and compare the plantar loads and vertical loading rate during running of runners in the acute stage of PF to those in the chronic stage of the injury in relation to healthy runners.
Methods

Forty-five runners with unilateral PF (30 acute and 15 chronic) and 30 healthy control runners were evaluated while running at 12 km/h for 40 meters wearing standardized running shoes and Pedar-X insoles. The contact area and time, maximum force, and force-time integral over the rearfoot, midfoot, and forefoot were recorded and the loading rate (20–80% of the first vertical peak) was calculated. Groups were compared by ANOVAs (p<0.05).
Results

Maximum force and force-time integral over the rearfoot and the loading rate was higher in runners with PF (acute and chronic) compared with controls (p<0.01). Runners with PF in the acute stage showed lower loading rate and maximum force over the rearfoot compared to runners in the chronic stage (p<0.01).
Conclusion

Runners with PF showed different dynamic patterns of plantar loads during running over the rearfoot area depending on the injury stage (acute or chronic). In the acute stage of PF, runners presented lower loading rate and forces over the rearfoot, possibly due to dynamic mechanisms related to pain protection of the calcaneal area.

Tens of thousands of Americans sprain an ankle every year. But ankle sprains get little respect, with most of us shrugging off the injury as inconsequential and soon returning to normal activities.

Several new studies in people and animals, however, suggest that the effects of even a single sprained ankle could be more substantial and lingering than we have supposed, potentially altering how well and often someone moves, for life.

Methodological considerations of football injury epidemiology have only scarcely been described. The aim of this study was to evaluate the inter-rater agreement in injury capture rate and injury categorization for data registered in two different prospective injury surveillance audits studying the same two Norwegian male professional football clubs for two consecutive seasons, 2008–2009. One audit used team-based exposure (TBE) recording and the other individual-based exposure (IBE). The number of injuries recorded and corresponding injury rates (injuries/1000?h exposure) were compared between audits. Cohen’s kappa and prevalence-adjusted bias-adjusted kappa (PABAK) coefficients were calculated for injury variables. Of 323 injuries included, the IBE audit captured 318 (overall capture rate 98.5%, training 98.9%, match 97.8%) and the TBE audit 303 injuries (overall capture rate 93.8%, training 91.4%, match 97.1%). Agreement analysis showed kappa and PABAK coefficients regarded as almost perfect (>?0.81) for 8 of 9 injury variables, and substantial (? 0.75) for the variable injury severity. In conclusion, the capture rate for training injuries was slightly higher with IBE recording, and inter-agreement in injury categorization was very high.

Eran Gronich invited me over to breakfast at MassChallenge’s waterfront offices a few weeks ago. I brought an iced coffee, and Gronich supplied a spread of crackers, rice, marinara sauce, and flour – all made from fruit fly larvae.

It would have been rude not to at least have a few bites, right?

Gronich’s business, The Flying Spark, is one of two insect protein companies participating in the MassChallenge startup competition; the other is Six Foods, which raised $70,000 on the funding site Kickstarter last year.

Analytics in health care is yet an undiscovered territory, but due to IoT devices it is estimated to grow to $53 billion in the next three years. Here we explain the current status of industry, its future potential and key drivers.

Gerrit Cole and Francisco Liriano’s innings totals this season have them headed into territory they’ve scarcely charted. Cole is likely to throw over 200 innings this season after only accumulating 240.1 in his first two seasons combined. Liriano will likely approach his career season high of 191 innings.

The high number of innings pitched by the Pirates’ top two starters has led reporters to ask Clint Hurdle and Neal Huntington about their workloads. Hurdle consistently says the situation is monitored internally and both pitchers are “in a good place.” Sunday, Huntington basically said the same thing, while adding some limited insight into how the Pirates measure fatigue.

Technology changing players is something researchers from the University of Bath identified when investigating the technologies used in professional rugby union. They warned against Big Brother style data regimes which, if over reliant on technology, could stifle players’ creativity, undermine team trust and promote ‘machine mentalities.’ They also found the surveillance technologies used dampened players’ enthusiasm for the game, which in time could lead to negative effects on their health and well-being.

With football the Guardian also recently published an interesting article about technological advancements in football. It cited the Women’s World Cup Final as a landmark moment for the sport. Not because it was the most watched match in US history. But because it was the first major international match which allowed players to wear small performance tracking devices during the game.