Applied Sports Science newsletter – December 7, 2015

Patriots tight end Rob Gronkowski’s knee injury, the result of a low hit from Broncos safety Darian Stewart, has resurrected talk of the impossible dynamic that each player faces on nearly every single snap.

For defensive players, they risk a flag with every upper-body shot, but risk being labeled dirty for anything that lands near the knees. And for ballcarriers, at least more often than not, they know tacklers must aim low, which threatens their bank account, when they’d almost exclusively prefer to get hit up high.

… “I said to him after the game, ‘Now I know what everybody is talking about’,” said Klopp. “I knew about his quality, not live in a stadium, but in an important tournament.

“He can’t play every game. He needs to decide when it’s time to fight and when to rest. The problem with Daniel is we didn’t know how long he could play but, if that’s the case, he has to start.”

The bicycle is a marvelous invention and the most efficient human-powered machine. Bike riding is practical and “green” transportation that can replace automobile driving with beneficial physical activity. Bicycle racing puts athletic power and endurance to the ultimate test in the most grueling physical contests on Earth such as the Tour de France and World Championships.

If you want to see high technology on display, all you have to do is drop buy your local bike shop. There you will see the modern time trial bike as a showcase of space age materials, aerodynamic design, and biomechanics. How did this technology come about and who is responsible for these advancements?

If you were to name one person who advanced bike design from the classic age into the modern era, it would have to be Greg LeMond, a three-time Tour de France winner and three-time world cycling champion. Although LeMond is most famous for these epic wins, his lasting legacy may be the numerous innovations he brought to the sport of cycling.

… It is unlikely that Zobrist, 34, will leave this week’s winter meetings unsigned. The Mets, the San Francisco Giants, the Atlanta Braves and the Washington Nationals are among his suitors. He met with the Mets’ chief operating officer, Jeff Wilpon, and General Manager Sandy Alderson on Wednesday and toured available real estate in Westchester County and Connecticut.

In a free-agent class brimming with nine-figure aspirants, Zobrist is of particular intrigue. He is entering the final chapter of an unlikely but successful career, in which he has combined position flexibility, stellar defense and base-running skills to fashion an Excel column of his own.

Leading personalized health analytics company, InsideTracker started integrating Beddit sleep tracking into their platform. Their results have been super interesting, articulating how the sleep glucose insulin connection is linked to fatigue & fitness management. Here’s a quick synopsis of their recent blog post, “How blood sugar can change your body and brain,” which illustrates the sleep-insulin-glucose relationship nicely.

The main take-home is that extending sleep time and improving sleep quality will make your body and brain healthier by getting the most out of your glucose, the key fuel for brain and muscle function. Too little sleep and poor quality sleep can damage the brain and limit your muscles’ capacity for growth by depriving them of the necessary glucose.

There’s an adage you hear most any time you mention con artists: You can’t cheat an honest man. It’s a comforting defense against vulnerability, but is it actually true?

No, as it turns out; honesty has precious little to do with it. Equally blameless is greed, at least in the traditional sense. What matters instead is greed of a different sort: a deep need to believe in a version of the world where everything really is for the best — at least when it comes to us.

Among the tools proposed to assess the athlete’s “fatigue,” the analysis of heart rate variability (HRV) provides an indirect evaluation of the settings of autonomic control of heart activity. HRV analysis is performed through assessment of time-domain indices, the square root of the mean of the sum of the squares of differences between adjacent normal R-R intervals (RMSSD) measured during short (5 min) recordings in supine position upon awakening in the morning and particularly the logarithm of RMSSD (LnRMSSD) has been proposed as the most useful resting HRV indicator. However, if RMSSD can help the practitioner to identify a global “fatigue” level, it does not allow discriminating different types of fatigue. Recent results using spectral HRV analysis highlighted firstly that HRV profiles assessed in supine and standing positions are independent and complementary; and secondly that using these postural profiles allows the clustering of distinct sub-categories of “fatigue.” Since, cardiovascular control settings are different in standing and lying posture, using the HRV figures of both postures to cluster fatigue state embeds information on the dynamics of control responses. Such, HRV spectral analysis appears more sensitive and enlightening than time-domain HRV indices. The wealthier information provided by this spectral analysis should improve the monitoring of the adaptive training-recovery process in athletes.

Resting high-frequency heart rate variability (HF-HRV) relates to cardiac vagal control and predicts individual differences in health and longevity, but its functional neural correlates are not well defined. The medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) encompasses visceral control regions that are components of intrinsic networks of the brain, particularly the default mode network (DMN) and the salience network (SN). Might individual differences in resting HF-HRV covary with resting state neural activity in the DMN and SN, particularly within the mPFC? This question was addressed using fMRI data from an eyes-open, 5-min rest period during which echoplanar brain imaging yielded BOLD time series. Independent component analysis yielded functional connectivity estimates defining the DMN and SN. HF-HRV was measured in a rest period outside of the scanner. Midlife (52% female) adults were assessed in two studies (Study 1, N?=?107; Study 2, N?=?112). Neither overall DMN nor SN connectivity strength was related to HF-HRV. However, HF-HRV related to connectivity of one region within mPFC shared by the DMN and SN, namely, the perigenual anterior cingulate cortex, an area with connectivity to other regions involved in autonomic control. In sum, HF-HRV does not seem directly related to global resting state activity of intrinsic brain networks, but rather to more localized connectivity. A mPFC region was of particular interest as connectivity related to HF-HRV was shared by the DMN and SN. These findings may indicate a functional basis for the coordination of autonomic cardiac control with engagement and disengagement from the environment.

A shoe insert developed in Utah recently snagged an innovation award from the 2016 Consumer Electronics Show for its ability to help athletes correct their form and avoid injury.

The Mettis Trainer shoe insert, created by Utah-based company Bend Tech, detects forces like balance and weight distribution to send real-time feedback to Android and iOS devices. It can also provide tips for specific sports, such as letting a runner know when he is hitting his heel or toe too much, according to Bend Tech founder Tony DeGreef.

Background: Basketball players are at risk for foot injuries, including Jones fractures. It is unknown how this injury affects the future play and performance of athletes.

Hypothesis: National Basketball Association (NBA) players who sustain Jones fractures of the base of the fifth metatarsal have high rates of return to play and do not experience a decrease in performance on return to competition when compared with preinjury and with control-matched peers.

Study Design: Retrospective cohort study.

Level of Evidence: Level 5.

Methods: Data on 26 elite basketball players with Jones fractures over 19 NBA seasons (1994-1995 to 2012-2013) were obtained from injury reports, press releases, player profiles, and online public databases. Variables included age, body mass index (BMI), player position, experience, and surgical treatment. Individual season statistics pre- and postinjury were collected. Twenty-six controls were identified by matched player position, age, and performance statistics.

Results: The mean age at the time of injury was 24.8 years, mean BMI was 24.7 kg/m2, and the mean experience prior to injury was 4.1 NBA seasons. Return to previous level of competition was achieved by 85% of athletes. There was no change in player efficiency rating (PER) when pre- and postinjury performance was compared. When compared with controls, no decline in PER measured performance was identified.

Conclusion: The majority of NBA players sustaining a Jones fracture return to their preinjury level of competition. These elite athletes demonstrate no decrease in performance on their return to play.

Clinical Relevance: Jones fractures are well-studied injuries in terms of etiology, diagnosis, and management. However, the effect of these injuries on future performance of athletes is unknown. Using the findings of our study, orthopaedic surgeons may be better prepared to counsel and educate elite athletes who sustain a Jones fracture.

… I wait for the beat guys to finish before I approach Cuban. He knows I want to talk about his decision to fund a first-of-its-kind clinical trial that is examining whether human growth hormone can aid recovery from anterior cruciate ligament surgery. The two-year, $800,000 exploratory study at the University of Michigan is backed by a single grant from Cuban’s eponymous foundation and was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration under a special exemption.
… “I love to test and challenge any schools of thought that have not been thought out,” he wrote in an August email to ESPN’s Outside the Lines. “This partnership was a great first step toward finding the facts about HGH.”

The U.S. Soccer Federation introduced on Wednesday “Recognize to Recover,” a health and safety program aimed to reduce injuries in players of all ages and promote safe play.

The program follows up on the heading and concussion guidelines for youth soccer that U.S. Soccer announced early last month.

“Recognize to Recover will lead to better awareness and understanding of player health and safety initiatives and strengthen the role parents, players, coaches and officials play in preventing, protecting and addressing injuries,” said U.S. Soccer Chief Medical Officer George Chiampas. “While U.S. Soccer is launching the framework of Recognize to Recover today, this is just the beginning as more information around specific areas of focus will be rolled out in the coming months.”

Jared Tallent has been poked, prodded and strapped to machines as he searches for the race-walking “clean edge” and Olympic Games redemption.

He’s sick of talking about the Russian drug cheats who denied him gold medal glory.

So instead of getting bogged down in the dark days of athletics, Tallent has turned to food to fuel his bid for Olympic revenge to help ease the pain of competing against corrupt organisations and cheating athletes.

Evans, Boggero, and Segerstrom (2015) try to shed light on the temporal dynamics of self-control by looking to the literature on physical fatigue. Trying to explain how and why mental performance wanes over time, they borrow concepts from the central governor model of physical fatigue, which suggest that exertion is throttled by some central nervous system mechanism that receives information about energetic needs and motivational drives to regulate exertion and, ultimately, to prevent catastrophic failures. Despite our admiration for such integrative, discipline-spanning work, our concern is that the central governor model is in fact a rather poor model of physical fatigue that is not only biologically implausible, but borders on being unfalsifiable, thus contributing very little to our understanding of why people tend to disengage from effortful tasks over time. We note that the latest models of fatigue have actually borrowed concepts and models from psychology to understand physical performance.