Applied Sports Science newsletter – December 10, 2015

Idan Ravin is one of the most sought-after private basketball trainers around, and has worked with most of the NBA’s biggest stars, including Stephen Curry, Kevin Durant, James Harden and LeBron James.

He also works with younger players before they make it to the pros, and courtesy of his partnership with Dove Men+Care, Ravin spoke with FOX Sports about what he saw in his time with Jahlil Okafor, and whether or not his pairing with Nerlens Noel can sustain long-term success.

When Wesley Matthews tore his left Achilles’ tendon in a March game against the Dallas Mavericks, the then-Portland Trail Blazers shooting guard declared he would be ready for the start of the 2015-16 regular season. To virtually everyone else, it seemed like a foolish proclamation. Even with the revolution all of professional sports has undergone over the past couple decades in the area of medical care and rehabilitation of athletes, tearing your Achilles’ is arguably the most difficult to come back from — and certainly the one that has derailed the most careers.

But, then again, most people aren’t like Matthews, the son of two-time NBA champion Wes Matthews. The younger Matthews has turned himself into one of the league’s finest two-way wing players after going undrafted out of Marquette in 2009.

At the center of perhaps the most unlikely Venn Diagram ever drawn, an even more unlikely group of humans overlap. There’s a former governor/bodybuilder/actor (Arnold Schwarzenegger), a hip hop star (LL Cool J), an Irish tennis pro (James McGee), an NFL lineman (Garrett Gilkey, Bucs), a renowned sideline reporter (Michele Tafoya, NBC), an Olympian (cross-country skier Chandra Crawford), a performance coach (Andy McKay, Mariners), a baseball manager (Joe Maddon, Cubs) and a college basketball coach (Shaka Smart, Texas). That’s just to start.

They’re connected by a book, The Obstacle Is the Way, by Ryan Holiday. It’s a book they’ve digested, drawn inspiration from and applied to their careers. It’s a book about stoicism, the ancient Greek philosophy and its principles, and it has sold more than 100,000 copies, been translated into 17 languages and reverberated in one place not even Holiday expected it to—the wider world of sports. He describes that as a “happy accident.”

In Parts one and two we discussed what jet lag was and how athletes can incorporate simple interventions to help cope with the symptoms of phase advances and delays. In Part three we will outline strategies for time-zone shifting and provide advice on designing a comprehensive time-zone management plan. Specifically, pre-travel activities, in-flight activities, and post-flight activities will be discussed, as well as a sample of a time-zone equivalence table to help visualize what’s involved in a time-zone management plan.

In September, researchers from Austria and the Netherlands published a study titled “Why GPS Makes Distances Bigger Than They Are,” which explored the fallibility of navigation devices. But while the paper points out some interesting facts, those facts, one expert says, are neither revelatory nor particularly useful for GPS users.

“I don’t know why they’re making such a big deal about it,” says Mohinder Grewal, a professor at California State University-Fullerton who has published several books on GPS and the algorithms used to sort its data. “It’s very well known that there are measurement errors, but they are bounded.”

Quarterly figures released last week by International Data Corporation on sales of wearable tracking devices showed that Fitbit held steady in first position with 22% of the market.

When the Apple Watch was first announced, we expected it would cut into the fitness-tracking market. Instead, the Apple Watch has mostly hurt other smartwatch makers, like Samsung, which fell out of the top five this quarter.

Fitbit’s success stems from a number of factors. Its retail distribution is top-notch, and has been growing outside the US. Its latest trackers, the Fitbit Charge and Fitbit Surge, are selling well. And its signing up big sales to businesses that want to give fitness devices to their employees—like Target, which is including 335,000 workers in Fitbit’s Corporate Wellness program.

The Brazilian Football Confederation (CBF) wants Brazilian football to become a laboratory for the use of new technologies in the game. Fernando Sarney, who has filled Marco Polo del Nero’s position on FIFA’s executive committee, will seek support from FIFA in the next months to implement CBF’s vision.

Hamstring pulls, tears or strains, though 100% preventable, are a common non contact injury amongst rugby athletes. Without thorough rehab they can be an extremely frustrating injury, that can hamper a player’s career for months or even years. Following the positive reception for my guide to ACL rehab, in the following blog post I will be sharing the rough outline of the rehab model that I use for my players following a hamstring pull.

As I stated in my ACL post, what I am sharing here is a result of my experience and knowledge as a strength and conditioning coach. I am writing about when players are released by medical practitioners and I return to being fully responsible for their training. This is not intended to take the place of medical advice from a doctor or physiotherapist.

Background: Prospective studies have reported that abnormal movement patterns at the trunk, hip, and knee are associated with noncontact anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries. Impaired hip strength may underlie these abnormal movement patterns, suggesting that diminished hip strength may increase the risk of noncontact ACL injury.

Purpose: To determine whether baseline hip strength predicts future noncontact ACL injury in athletes.

Study Design: Case-control study; Level of evidence, 3.

Methods: Before the start of the competitive season, isometric hip strength (external rotation and abduction) was measured bilaterally by use of a handheld dynamometer in 501 competitive athletes (138 female and 363 male athletes) participating in various sports. During the sport season, ACL injury status was recorded, and injured athletes were further classified based on the mechanism of injury (noncontact vs contact). After the season, logistic regression was used to determine whether baseline hip strength predicted future noncontact ACL injury. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves were constructed independently for each strength measure to determine the clinical cutoff value between a high-risk and low-risk outcome.

Results: A total of 15 noncontact ACL injuries were confirmed (6 females, 9 males), for an overall annual incidence of 3.0% (2.5% for males, 4.3% for females). Baseline hip strength measures (external rotation and abduction) were significantly lower in injured athletes compared with noninjured athletes (P = .003 and P < .001, respectively). Separate logistic regression models indicated that impaired hip strength increased future injury risk (external rotation: odds ratio [OR] = 1.23 [95% CI, 1.08-1.39], P = .001; abduction: OR = 1.12 [95% CI, 1.05-1.20], P = .001). Clinical cutoffs to define high risk were established as external rotation strength ?20.3% BW (percentage of body weight) or abduction strength ?35.4% BW.

Conclusion: Measures of preseason isometric hip abduction and external rotation strength independently predicted future noncontact ACL injury status in competitive athletes. The study data suggest that screening procedures to assess ACL injury risk should include an assessment of isometric hip abduction and/or external rotation strength.

Gastro-intestinal complaints are very common amongst endurance athletes. An estimated 30 to 50% of distance runners experience intestinal problems related to exercise. Bill Rodgers, marathon legend, with 4 victories in both the Boston Marathon and New York City Marathon in the late 1970s said: “More marathons are won or lost in the porta-toilets than at the dinner table”. This illustrates the magnitude of the problem for endurance athletes and in particular long distance runners and triathletes.

Are you an athlete? Then I’ve got some bad news for you; you’re going to get injured. But you likely knew that already. Estimates of injury rates in sports people vary, but one injury per 100 hours in training or competition is a fairly moderate estimate; anyone doing any sort of training for a length of time will eventually get some sort of injury.

The vast majority of research and articles in this area look at what could be done to prevent injury, or at least reduce the risk, or rehabilitation methods. But can we do anything nutritionally in order to improve our rate of recovery once we have been injured? That is the question I will be trying to answer in this article.

Pete Carroll’s theories tumbled out in rapid succession, about the emphasis he puts on finishing, his willingness to play young players, the way he runs practices and so on.

“I’m reaching,” Carroll said finally, speaking with USA TODAY Sports in the Seattle Seahawks’ fieldhouse after a recent practice. “I don’t really have it nailed. If I did, I wouldn’t tell you, so I don’t mind guessing.”

Very little is currently known about the effects of acute hamstring injury on over-ground sprinting mechanics. The aim of this research was to describe changes in power–force–velocity properties of sprinting in two injury case studies related to hamstring strain management: Case 1: during a repeated sprint task (10 sprints of 40 m) when an injury occurred (5th sprint) in a professional rugby player; and Case 2: prior to (8 days) and after (33 days) an acute hamstring injury in a professional soccer player. A sports radar system was used to measure instantaneous velocity–time data, from which individual mechanical profiles were derived using a recently validated method based on a macroscopic biomechanical model. Variables of interest included: maximum theoretical velocity (V0) and horizontal force (FH0), slope of the force–velocity (F–v) relationship, maximal power, and split times over 5 and 20 m. For Case 1, during the injury sprint (sprint 5), there was a clear change in the F–v profile with a 14% greater value of FH0 (7.6–8.7 N/kg) and a 6% decrease in V0 (10.1 to 9.5 m/s). For Case 2, at return to sport, the F–v profile clearly changed with a 20.5% lower value of FH0 (8.3 vs. 6.6 N/kg) and no change in V0. The results suggest that the capability to produce horizontal force at low speed (FH0) (i.e. first metres of the acceleration phase) is altered both before and after return to sport from a hamstring injury in these two elite athletes with little or no change of maximal velocity capabilities (V0), as evidenced in on-field conditions. Practitioners should consider regularly monitoring horizontal force production during sprint running both from a performance and injury prevention perspective.