Applied Sports Science newsletter – December 21, 2015

In 2008, Miguel Ibarra was struggling for playing time at a junior college in Southern California. In 2015, he completed a seven-figure transfer to Club León and received three call-ups to the U.S. national team. Wes Burdine charts the speedy winger’s unexpected journey.

… With the help of Pro Soccer Development and their advanced analysis tool known as the PSDSystem – used by top clubs the world over, we are going to investigate just how effective Jamie Vardy has become as a player in 2015 and question why he was lost to the system before finding his own way back.

There’s much that we share with our primate ancestors: opposable thumbs, ability to eat many kinds of food, living in large social groups, and so on. Yet, it is perhaps one trait we don’t share with them that has made us the top species of the planet: a weird sleeping pattern.

Across populations and different ages, on average humans sleep about seven hours. That is, a new study published in Evolutionary Anthropology argues, exceptionally short when compared to other primates.

While the Premier League is still going strong, the majority of the European soccer leagues are heading to the winter break during some of the coldest months of the year. This period of a break varies between the leagues from two weeks up to two months. The break allows the teams to build their strategies, work with their conditioning elements and enables the players to recover from their demanding schedule. From a conditioning point of view the question arises: What should the teams and players consider to gain maximum benefits from the break?

The worlds of professional football and rugby are finally waking up to the injustices of the far from level playing field that confronts many young players.

Premier League teams in both sports are experimenting with “bio-banding” – the practice of grouping young players together according to their physical maturity, rather than their age. The worlds of cricket and gymnastics are taking a close interest and a similar approach in ballet is set to be the subject of a major academic study.

“When we’re grouping children for sports, we do it by age groups, but the problem is that, within those age groups, we get huge variations in biological age,” said Dr Sean Cumming, senior lecturer at the University of Bath’s department for health, which is helping Premiership rugby union side Bath conduct a six-month study evaluating bio-banding. “You can get a boy who is an early maturer, who is biologically 16, competing in an under-14 age group. Likewise, you get another kid playing in the same age group who is biologically 12 and is a late maturer. There are four years’ difference between the two of them biologically, but still we expect them to train together and compete together.”

When Brad Friedel was growing up in suburban Cleveland a generation ago, youth soccer was more an afterthought than an organized activity.

“There was nothing there,” he remembers.

So he was a bit surprised when he moved back to the U.S. after spending most of the last 20 years playing in the English Premier League.

“The entire landscape and scope of what soccer is today doesn’t compare, doesn’t even look remotely similar, to the landscape that I left,” he said.

Your company has a project they you want to complete, and your boss wants to give you a deadline for it. When coming up with a timeline for the project, your boss might break it down into steps you’ve done before, figure out how long, on average, those steps take to complete, and then add them up to get your overall project timeline.

However, your boss may be setting you up for failure.

While this is a completely common-sense way to estimate a timeline for a multi-step project, it would be a terrible method to adopt if you consider the basic statistics of interdependent processes. It’s part of the reason why so many projects don’t make their deadlines; the deadline was unrealistic.

Judging from his boyish appearance and his voracious curiosity, it’s easy to imagine Malcolm Gladwell as some sort of child prodigy. And he was. But not the way you imagined.

As a teenager growing up in rural Ontario, the bestselling author of Blink and The Tipping Point was a champion runner, the number-one Canadian runner of his age. He was encouraged to dream of Olympic gold, and indeed was flown to special training camps with the other elite runners of his generation — on the assumption that creating future world-class athletes meant recognizing and nurturing youthful talent.

Precocity was the subject of Gladwell’s “Bring the Family Address” at this year’s APS Convention, and the account of his own early athletic success served as a springboard. “I was a running prodigy,” he said bluntly. But — and this “but” sounded the theme of his talk to the rapt audience filling the Marquis Marriott’s Broadway Ballroom — being a prodigy didn’t forecast future success in running. After losing a major race at age 15, then enduring other setbacks and loss of interest, Gladwell said, he gave up running for a few years. Taking it up again in college — with the same dedication as before — he faced a disappointing truth: “I realized I wasn’t one of the best in the country … I was simply okay.”

The fall from childhood greatness to a middling state of “simply okay” is, Gladwell suggested, a recurring theme when the cherished notion of precocity is subjected to real scrutiny. [video, 51:38]

If you follow the latest innovations in sports performance, you have seen the use of force plates moving from the research world to professional teams and colleges. Some private facilities tout them as ways to decode what causes injuries and what holds the key to improved performance. The use of pressure mapping to solve complex foot and lower extremity injuries among elite soccer clubs is even more intriguing. I have used specialists who leverage the technology to add more insight to their craft since 2001, and seen how the research and clinical experience can really make a difference. On the other hand, a lot of bogus claims keep us stuck in the mud as a profession.

Objectives

The effect of maturity on Functional Movement Screen (FMS) scores in elite, adolescent soccer players was examined.
Design

A cross-sectional observational study was completed.
Methods

Participants were 1163 male English Football League soccer players (age 8–18 years). Players were Mid-Foundation Phase (MF) (U9); Late Foundation Phase (LF) (U10 and U11); Early Youth Development Phase (EYD) (U12 and U13); Mid-Youth Development (MYD) Phase (U14 to U15); Late Youth Development Phase (LYD) (U16) and Early Professional Development Phase (EPD) (U18). Age from peak height velocity was estimated and players were categorized as pre- or post- peak height velocity (PHV). To analyse where differences in FMStotal score existed we separated the screen into FMSmove (3 movement tests); FMSflex (2 mobility tests) and FMSstab (2 stability tests).
Results

FMStotal median score ranged from 11 at MF to 14 for EPD. There was a substantial increase (10%) in those able to achieve a score of ?14 on FMStotal in those who were post-PHV compared to pre-PHV. This was explained by a substantial increase in those achieving a score of ?4 on FMSstab (21%). There was a substantial increase in the proportion of players who achieved the FMStotal threshold of ?14 with an increase of 47.5 (41.4 to 53.6) % from the MF phase to the EPD phase due to improvements in FMSmove and FMSstab.
Conclusions

PHV and maturity have substantial effects on FMS performance. FMS assessment appears to be invalid for very young players. Findings are relevant to those analyzing movement in soccer players.

The Patriots, in an unusual departure from National Football League practice, have created a revenue stream for a private business owned by their franchise quarterback, Tom Brady, and a partner who faced federal sanctions after falsely presenting himself as a medical doctor and deceptively promoting nutritional supplements.

One notable product that Brady’s partner, Alejandro “Alex” Guerrero, promoted — and the quarterback enthusiastically endorsed — was marketed as helping to prevent and heal concussions, a grave health issue for NFL players and a challenge to the sport’s image. The Federal Trade Commission effectively shut down sales of Guerrero’s “neuroprotective’’ drink, Neurosafe, in 2014, repudiating his “extraordinary claims.’’

Nine years earlier, the FTC sanctioned Guerrero, who doubles as a fitness specialist, for marketing a beverage made largely of organic greens that he falsely claimed could help prevent or cure cancer, heart disease, arthritis, and diabetes.

Guerrero’s past has not dissuaded the Patriots from forging a business relationship with the company he owns with Brady, the TB12 Sports Therapy Center, at the Patriots Place complex adjacent to Gillette Stadium. Since the center opened in 2013, the team has paid the company for Guerrero and his staff to provide treatment services and nutritional advice to multiple Patriots players.

The Giants are tied for first place in the mediocre NFL East thanks in large part to Odell Beckham Jr.’s stupendous catches week after week. His two touchdowns on Monday night helped New York beat the Miami Dolphins and remain within striking distance of its first playoff berth in four years.

If you ask the players, the postseason push might be impossible were it not for a procedure that has become increasingly common across the NFL: Before most games, more than a dozen Giants line up in the trainer’s room to have a needle stuck in their arm and a saline solution delivered directly into their bloodstream. Beckham, battling a cold, had two intravenous infusions on Monday—one before the game, and another during the second half.

But medical professionals interviewed recently reported that there is scant evidence to suggest this practice offers any measurable benefit over simply drinking water and, in fact, presents unnecessary risks.

… Arsène, you have said before that there’s a lot more data available to managers. What do you mean by this, and what areas of the game have been enhanced?

I just compare now to when I started, when I was on my own with my players. Today I have a team of about 20 people around me who take care of the players but also give me information: statistics, the analysis of the game, the quantification of the players’ work rate and their performances.

Modern managers have so much information available to them. Where the quality comes in is where they can choose three or four strands of information that are vital for them, and the modern manager is a guy who selects what is important and leaves what is less important.

This study sought to determine the association of relative age and performance of young elite basketball players. The distribution of the birth dates, heights, positions, classification and performance of the male and female participants (n = 2395) of the U16, U18 and U20 European Basketball Championships were analysed. We found an over-representation of players born during the initial months of the year in all groups, with the relative age effect being more evident in players of the U16 and U18 groups, than of the U20 teams, particularly in male squads. Nevertheless, in the U20 championships, those teams that had the oldest players performed the best. In all championships, the oldest participants played more minutes. In addition, relatively older male players scored better in total points and in performance index rating when results were normalised to played time. This effect was not found for female players. Regarding playing position, different distributions of birth dates were observed due to each position’s physical requirements. Thus, basketball coaches and managers should keep these results in mind when they select players because if not, they might subject players who are born towards the end of the year to a negative selection bias.

Background The effect of fixture congestion on injury rates and patterns has received scarce attention in elite football and existing investigations have not accounted for player rotation or examined the temporal distribution and potential cause of injuries.

Aim To prospectively investigate the epidemiology of injury during short periods of fixture congestion in a professional football club.

Methods Over a six-season period, exposure time and injury data were compared in the same players (n=25 (14 individuals)) when participating in two frequently occurring short congested fixture cycles in comparison to match-play outside these cycles. (1) two successive matches separated by an interval totalling ?3?days calculated immediately from the end of play in match 1 to the beginning of play in match 2; (2) three successive matches separated by ?4-day intervals starting the day immediately after each match.

Results In two-match congestion cycles, incidence rate ratios (IRR) showed that there was a higher risk of injury in the final 15?min of play in the second match in comparison to match-play outside the cycles (IRR: 3.1 (95% CI 1.1 to 9.3), p=0.0400). A greater risk of injury overall (IRR: 2.0 (95% CI 1.1 to 3.8), p=0.0345) and in the first-half of play (2.6 (1.1 to 6,5), p=0.0386), and risk of ankle sprains (10.4 (95% CI 1.9 to 57.9), p=0.0068) and non-contact injuries due to a ‘change in direction’ (IRR: 7.8 (1.3 to 46.8), p=0.0243) were observed in the final match of three-match congestion cycles in comparison to match-play outside the cycles.

Conclusions Injury rates and patterns were affected in the same elite football players when competing in short congested fixture cycles in comparison to match-play outside the cycles.