Applied Sports Science newsletter – September 23, 2015

… Whenever Ronaldo retires, he’ll go down as one of the best players we’ve ever seen. He has a list of records and accomplishments that compares with that of almost anybody1 who’s ever played the game, along with a physique and hair-gel game to surpass them all. Once the world’s best winger (who could also score like a striker), he’s since turned into the world’s best pure striker (who can still break you down on the wing if he really needs to). That might seem like a small shift, but the tweaks to his game have allowed the Portuguese superstar to focus on scoring goals while preserving a body that still looks like it’s immune to the progression of time. Sprinting down the sideline and hurdling tackles is for the kids. Peeling off the back shoulder to nod the ball home from point-blank range? That’s a game that knows no age.

Talent evaluation still smacks of more art than science, but the gap is narrowing. How, then, did a point guard with size, vision, and elasticity drift into the final quarter of the 2014 NBA Draft?

Interdisciplinarity has become all the rage as scientists tackle climate change and other intractable issues. But there is still strong resistance to crossing borders.

Every day, scientific breakthroughs change the world we live in and the only way to stay ahead of the competition is to stay ahead of the ever steepening curve. Elite sport is a cutthroat and competitive environment where only the best survive. As a result, sports technology is proving to be the difference in many close contests. CONQA Sport speaks to Mounir Zok, the Senior Sports Technologist at the Unites States Olympic Committee (USOC), and finds out that it is still the human element that ensures success in a world hurtling towards to the future.

aul Silvestri told me to prepare for my last set. Florida’s assistant director of sports health warned me this wouldn’t be easy. After three sets of leg extensions using Blood Flow Restriction training, I was inclined to believe him. Still, nothing he said could have readied me for the first rep of that final set.

“Go!” Silvestri said.

My brain told my left leg to move. It did, reluctantly. My thigh screamed exactly like it does on the final set of a workout using a Hammer Strength leg extension machine with each leg lifting 90 pounds. Yet the weight around my ankle hadn’t changed since the first set. It still weighed three pounds.

Today, coaches rely on a rather more sophisticated approach to help their protégés achieve their potential. An innovative company at the forefront of ‘athlete analytics’ has been selected to represent UK design and creativity at the Global Investment Conference 2015, which takes place at Lancaster House in London today.

Catapult, an Australian company that has its UK base in Aire Street, Leeds, will be showing off its wearable technology for rugby players. The GPS tracker technology is embedded into sports shirts, which enables Catapult to monitor an athlete’s performance, risk and readi-ness.

Whoop, a Boston-based wearable company working on a device for athletes, announced an additional $12 million in funding as it prepares to officially launch its Whoop Strap device and performance optimization system. Two Sigma Ventures led the round. Mousse Partners, Accomplice, Promus Ventures, Valley Oak Investments, and NextView Ventures also participated. This brings the company’s total funding to $22 million.

The Whoop Strap, which is already in beta launch with a number of athletes and teams, is a 24-hour always-on wrist-worn wearable for athletes that tracks heart rate, heart rate variability, skin conductivity, ambient temperature, and movement, and can also deliver insights about an athlete’s sleep quality. The device sends that data via Bluetooth to a smartphone or tablet app used by a coach or trainer.

There are countless watches, bracelets, headbands, and foot pods on the market promising to record every little thing you do. But can any of it make you a better athlete? The author wades through the muck and the mire to data-mine his best self.

If you think back to 2005, wearable tech truly has come a very long way. For a few hundred dollars you can now buy a running watch that will simultaneously measure your heart rate without a strap while accurately calculating your mileage based on stride length and GPS—and subsequently using that info to alert you when your running form is falling apart. On the medical device front, there are now wearables that continuously monitor glucose levels for diabetes sufferers, and inhalers for asthmatics that can alert doctors if a patient is about to suffer an attack. This data is even being used to model high pollution zones for weather forecasters.

Still, we’re only just beginning to understand the potential uses for this growing quantity of trackable metrics. Dr. Iñigo San Millán, Director of Sports Performance at the CU Sports Medicine and Performance Center, in Boulder, Colorado, says that wearable tech may be the best way to take us from the present, “dark ages,” of understanding peak athletic potential, to a place where we recalibrate how we train and what we know based on the data we receive. “What are the chemical markers for overtraining? What’s the right algorithm for heart rate periodization training, to get your own zones, for your own body?” San Millán wonders. “The vast field of data that these sensors will allow will revolutionize what we know about fitness.”

Behrooz Abdi, CEO of fabless MEMS company InvenSense Inc. (San Jose, Calif.), has said MEMS sensor component companies should offer complete IoT application solutions including data analytics.

What ‘s the reason for that?

Because the price of MEMS sensor components is likely to be eroded rapidly and largest part of the value is perceived to be in the services that can be based on the data acquired by those sensors.

You’re about to drive through an intersection when the light suddenly turns red. But you’re able to slam on the brakes, just in time.

Johns Hopkins University researchers, working with scientists at the National Institute on Aging, have revealed the precise nerve cells that allow the brain to make this type of split-second change of course. In the latest issue of the journal Nature Neuroscience, the team shows that these feats of self control happen when neurons in the basal forebrain are silenced.

Sports are the perfect playing field on which data scientists can play their game — there are finite structures and distinct goals. Many of the components in sports break down numerically — e.g., number of players; length of periods; and, taking a broader view, how much each player is paid.

This is why sports and data have gone hand-in-hand since the very beginning of the industry. What, after all, is baseball without baseball cards?

In a new O’Reilly report, Data Analytics in Sports: How Playing with Data Transforms the Game, we explore the role of data analytics and new technology in the sports industry. Through a series of interviews with experts at the intersection of data and sports, we break down some of the industry’s most prominent advances in the use of data analytics and explain what these advances mean for players, executives, and fans.

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Billy Beane walked up to the New York Stock Exchange on Friday morning, handed his driver’s license to a security guard and was reminded once more of his “Moneyball” fame. “You do a good job,” the guard said. “Not this year,” Beane said, with his Oakland Athletics bound for a last-place finish in the American League West. Bill James walked in just behind him, his name and face eliciting none of the same reaction.

They are two of the most influential figures in the evolution of Major League Baseball, and they are inextricably linked. The data-driven decision-making that made Beane a celebrity was rooted in the work of James, whose early writings on baseball statistics formed the foundation of modern statistical analysis.

But until Friday, the two of them had never actually appeared together in public. The occasion was a conference on the disruption of business models hosted by NetSuite, a software company whose board of directors includes Beane, the longtime Oakland GM.