Applied Sports Science newsletter – December 11, 2015

There is a saying among many coaches that tends to suit so many competing triathletes woes: The paralysis of analysis. We tend to refer to this phrase when met with an athlete who is highly motivated, extremely detailed focus, holds a strong work ethic, yet fails to accomplish racing results near to their effort applied. The accumulation of thought and effort makes their training recipe so complicated, that they are paralyzed in search of finding improved performance.

It is all too common, but it doesn’t need to be this way. Let’s investigate.

For the past 15 years, Will Hicks has led the strength and conditioning program for the Syracuse football team, the last eight of which as an assistant athletics director for athletic performance.

He’s beloved by the football alumni, many of whom come back to train at SU each offseason, and well connected within NFL circles. But with a new head coach bringing a new hurry-up, spread offense, training methodology is about to change.

The gifted New York Giants wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr. is spending a lot of time doing things with his left hand. I don’t mean catching footballs, I mean he is doing many of his normal daily activities left-handed. His reasoning is pretty simple. Mr. Beckham figures if the overall dexterity of his left hand improves it will let him make even more spectacular fingertip catches in tight situations.

I think Beckham is on to something and here are some of the reasons why:

1. One of the most effective ways that physical and occupational therapists have helped patients recover from strokes is to literally tie up their “good” limbs so they are forced to do as much as possible with their “weak” sides.

… Justin Cochrane, Tottenham Hotspur’s assistant head of development 11-16, stresses that a concerted effort has been made to understanding the various issues linked to growth and maturation during the complicated teenage years of a young players journey.

“Nobody has a crystal ball, but John McDermott [Spurs’ Head of player development ] has had a lot of experience dealing with late maturing players and has helped to educate all the coaches here not just to look at now,” explains Cochrane.

Even as my glasses have gotten smaller and hopefully cooler over the years, I am still a proud member of Nerd Nation. As such, I read a lot of books—usually more than 50 a year. Many of the books I review on Gates Notes are recent releases, because I figure people are generally more interested in hearing about newer works. But I also like to revisit older books that feel especially important or relevant. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (2006), by the Stanford psychologist Dr. Carol Dweck, is one of those books.

Vicis has more cash to help the company finish developing its high-tech football helmet.

The company, which spun out of the University of Washington last year, was awarded with a $250,000 grant after again being named a winner of the recent Head Health Challenge II, a $40 million initiative organized by the NFL, Under Armour, and GE that gives research teams funding to develop new ways to prevent, measure, and detect brain injury.

MIT engineers have designed what may be the Band-Aid of the future: a sticky, stretchy, gel-like material that can incorporate temperature sensors, LED lights, and other electronics, as well as tiny, drug-delivering reservoirs and channels. The “smart wound dressing” releases medicine in response to changes in skin temperature and can be designed to light up if, say, medicine is running low.

When the dressing is applied to a highly flexible area, such as the elbow or knee, it stretches with the body, keeping the embedded electronics functional and intact.

The key to the design is a hydrogel matrix designed by Xuanhe Zhao, the Robert N. Noyce Career Development Associate Professor in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering.

The humble mouthguard—that C-shaped piece of plastic that protects an athlete’s teeth—has remained relatively unchanged for the past 60 years. But today, the most unassuming part of a football player’s gear is poised for a technological makeover that would place it squarely in the middle of the most important phases of the game.

Mouthguards won’t look too different from the outside, but they may soon gain the ability to help assess head injuries, tell you when you’re becoming dehydrated, or even transmit instructions directly from the sideline.

The Seattle Sounders FC is adding yet another technology tool to its arsenal of gadgets and software that help players perform at their highest level while preventing injury.

The soccer club today announced a new partnership with Kitman Labs, an Ireland-based company with an office in Silicon Valley that develops biometric measurement technology to help identify players at risk for injury.

kitmanlabs111This is Kitman’s first partnership with an MLS team.

… When you’re a professional athlete, and reach the point when your mind and body are no longer on the same page, that usually means you’re done.

I tried to calm myself down. I just had to make it through that season. The New Zealand Rugby Union had granted me a six-month sabbatical, just to get away from the game. It was kind of a reward for the decade I had spent playing for the All-Blacks. I just needed to make it to that point and then give myself some time to evaluate my next step, whatever that may be.

While there are many risks of injury associated with elite and collegiate sports such as the pace of play and player-to-player contact, one of the most common types of injury happens as the result of overuse.

The rehab and training processes implemented post-injury are what ultimately determine whether or not a player can return to the game at their full potential. Many times, a player may return to the game stronger than before they were injured. This is commonly due to the fact that through injury, a weakness was identified within an athlete’s body, and through rehab, they were able to vastly improve the strength of that weakened area.

A great example of this is former Georgia Bulldogs Running Back, Todd Gurley, who tore his ACL late in the 2014 college football season when he planted his left leg awkwardly during a run.

If football is going to exist in 50 years, we are going to need to solve the problem of brain trauma. Five high school players have died this year from head injuries. Chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease linked to repetitive brain trauma, has so far been found in the brains of more than 100 deceased ex-NFL players. As popular as the NFL might be, this crisis is shaking its foundations. In April, a Harris Poll of 2,012 adult Americans found that 89% believed concussions were a moderate to severe health concern, and 25% would not let their children play some contact sports because of a fear of concussions.

History, though, offers football fans a glimmer of hope. Back in the 1900s, football survived a similar existential crisis. Players were being crushed and were dying from head trauma. On the East Coast, Columbia abolished football and Harvard threatened to do the same. On the West Coast, Berkeley and Stanford switched out football for rugby. But radical changes—including the forward pass—saved the game. And less than two decades later, the NFL was born.

So can today’s league solve the concussion problem? Not exactly, says Alvaro Pascual-Leone, a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School.

Professional investors are circling clubs such as Crystal Palace and Bournemouth as the Premier League becomes a place where ‘it’s quite hard not to make money.’

The hockey world has spent the past few weeks discussing the NHL’s scoring rates, and what (if anything) the league should be doing about them. I’ve covered the topic from a few different angles, and each time I do I get a big dose of feedback from readers. Some are pining for the high-scoring days of the 1980s and ’90s. Others aren’t sure there’s really much of a problem at all. And almost everyone has an idea about what’s behind the league’s two-decade drop in scoring.

The usual suspects show up often: The goalies are too big and too good; their equipment is out of control; defensive systems are too well-coached; the rulebook isn’t enforced properly; the rinks are too small; and the loser point has left everyone playing for the tie.

But there’s another culprit that comes up surprisingly often, so much so that it’s easily one of the most common I hear from fans: talent dilution. There are too many teams and not enough players.

With less than a year remaining on the existing contract between Major League Baseball’s owners and players, the executive director of the MLB Players’ Association, Tony Clark, had this to say about the sport’s revenue: “The quote-unquote ‘player share’ is as close to 50/50 as it has been in a long time.” Which is a curious thing for a man in his position to say: Clark is going to be sitting across from owners at the negotiation table relatively soon. As the head of the Players’ Association, he shouldn’t be weakening his position by essentially calling the current arrangement equitable.

Yet Clark’s tactical blunder belies the bigger story. The notion that ownership and players are sharing revenue at the same rate is completely wrong—owners are getting richer far faster than players. Payroll data from the independent statistics site Baseball Reference and Forbes’ annual valuations of teams clearly show that while payrolls have grown over the four-year course of the current labor agreement, ownership has seen far more growth in its assets (thanks largely to heavily-inflated television deals) over the same period, with last year being the most unbalanced. To be fair, valuation is not the same as revenue, but the latter greatly informs the former—and, aided by these television deals, almost every team saw significant revenue growth last year as well. Given the trajectory from 2014 into 2015, Clark’s statement that players and owners are closer to 50/50 than ever is likely to only get more wrong over time—or at least until the cable-sports bubble propping up these valuations pops.