Applied Sports Science newsletter – December 31, 2015

The Bulls got some good news at practice Tuesday.

Joakim Noah, Mike Dunleavy and Doug McDermott all were in varying stages of rehabilitations trying to return to the court, though perhaps only McDermott was given just a slight chance to play Wednesday against Indiana after being diagnosed with a sprained knee.

That’s the good news? Three guys out!

In the classic Hans Christian Andersen story, everyone tells the Emperor what he wants to hear – that his new clothes are beautiful. No one wants to anger the Emperor, so they won’t tell him he’s wearing nothing. It isn’t until a child names the truth that the Emperor learns he’s been fooled by the weavers who were supposed to make him a special set of clothes.

What happened to the Emperor isn’t just the stuff of fairy tales, it’s the real-life experience of many high-level leaders who surround themselves with people who won’t report negative information for fear of repercussions. As leaders rise through the ranks, the less honest feedback they receive. High-level executives can become isolated and not understand the reality of their situation. Such leaders may not walk down the street naked, but lack of information can lead to poor decisions and missed opportunities.

Athletes chasing excellence are increasingly crossing a fine line between what their bodies can and cannot tolerate.

Since Bill Bowerman popularized the idea of alternating hard workouts with easy days, runners have fallen in love with the back-and-forth nature of that formula. It’s no wonder that this strategy has stuck around—it’s exactly how the body applies a stressor and then takes a few days to translate that work into a useable adaptation.

However, in creating this two-tiered system of hard and easy, are we missing something in between?

This article was penned in the summer yet I never got round to finalising it and posting it. However I thought I would re-visit it as I was recently asked my opinion on SAQ work in sessions for young players, along with the clear issues of training methods prevalent in the Premier League and highlighted with the vast injury situations at clubs like Man City, Man Utd and Arsenal.

During the summer periods football revolves around the word ‘fitness’. The often dreaded ‘pre-season’ period means fitness tests and boot camps for many players, young and old. Grassroots coaches seek to replicate what they did in yesteryear, or look at the ‘pro’s’ and seek to replicate. It is a flawed and potentially damaging mentality in the development of players. Yet the ‘boot camp’ fitness regimes can also be damaging for the top players also. In this article I wish to discuss this key part of the season and touch on the growing disdain for boot camp type activities with footballers.

The job of strength and conditioning coach has come a long way since the first one was hired in 1969. That’s when Boyd Epley was given the position to help bulk up Nebraska players at a wage of $2 an hour.

Today, some of the biggest names in the business at the top college programs are making quite the living doing their job. Just a few weeks ago, Alabama and Georgia battled for the services of popular strength coach Scott Cochran, who ultimately stayed in Tuscaloosa and is expected to get a big pay bump next year from his already-high salary.

Dr Peter Vint, former Senior Director of Competitive Analysis, Research & Innovation with the United States Olympic Committee, has been appointed Academy Director. He will take up his post at Everton on January 4.

Amongst many notable achievements, Peter headed up a team of leading sports science and medical professionals, in support of five national governing bodies, including USA Track and Field and USA Swimming, that went on to win 64 medals during the 2012 Olympic Games in London.

His detailed understanding of all aspects of performance and development, accumulated over the course of his career, has allowed him to develop performance-impacting initiatives that have delivered positive competitive outcomes. Over a long period of time, he has also provided guidance to coaches in skill acquisition, feedback and practice design, as well as in many other areas of performance and development.

… Many college athletes spend their spare time playing video games, booting up everything from Halo — the science-fiction, first-person shooter preferred by Mayfield — to the always-popular Madden NFL.

On the surface, it’s just the modern-day version of athletes sitting around playing cards, an obvious conduit for bonding with teammates and satisfying that competitive drive away from the field.

But for some, it’s more than just fun and games.

They’ve become the new benchmark. The envy of small but aspirational football countries the world over.

A country with a population that’s 50 per cent bigger than ?Aberdeen and half the size ?of Glasgow.

So how DID Iceland climb 100 places in the FIFA rankings in five years? Why WERE they the first team to make Euro 2016?

The world’s most popular online course is a general introduction to the art of learning, taught jointly by an educator and a neuroscientist.

“Learning How To Learn,” which was created by Barbara Oakley, an electrical engineer, and Terry Sejnowski, a neuroscientist, has been ranked as the leading class by enrollment in a survey of the 50 largest online courses released earlier this month by the Online Course Report website.

The course is “aimed at a broad audience of learners who wanted to improve their learning performance based on what we know about how brains learn,” said Dr. Sejnowski, the director of the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif.

Derek Belch isn’t one for bold predictions. The co-founder of STRIVR Labs, a Stanford-based virtual reality company that has exploded in popularity since debuting at the NFL combine last February, says that it’s ironic he’s in charge of a technology business, because he doesn’t even like technology that much.

So it’s tough to get him to look into the future and imagine how virtual reality will grow, change and continue to intersect with football in the next 50 years. Part of that, he says, is because VR is already growing and changing at an exponential rate, with new data and content available on a daily basis.

“We talk about certain things and they sound really far away,” says Belch, a former graduate assistant with the Stanford football team who left coaching in January 2015 to immerse himself in VR. “But in reality, some of those things are three years out.”

Like what? It’s a longer list than you’d imagine—and not all of it is quarterback-related.

… After spending the past year reporting on loopholes and lax enforcement of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, the federal patient-privacy law known as HIPAA, I’ve come to realize that it’s not just celebrity patients who are at risk. We all are.

Over the course of my reporting, I’ve talked to hundreds of people who said their medical records were hacked, snooped in, shared or stolen. Some were worried about potential consequences for themselves and their families. For others, the impact has been real and devastating, requiring therapy and medication. It has destroyed their faith in the medical establishment.

Food not only provides the body with nourishment but it also effects your body clock, which is vital for sleep and can have an affect on your sporting performance.

“The circadian clock involves two major pathways. The first, which responds to light, has been well characterized. The second, which responds to food, is less understood…”

Growth hormone is in the sports news again, this time as a possible aid in injury recovery. So what is growth hormone? What does it do? Can it aid recovery from injury?

Human Growth Hormone, also known as GH or HGH, is a peptide hormone made up of 191 amino acids, the tiny building blocks of all proteins. It is secreted from the pituitary gland located in the brain. The pituitary gland is one of the areas in the body that helps us respond to stress and also helps regulate metabolism. As the name implies, GH is an anabolic hormone meaning it can cause bone and muscle to grow. It also increases in response to intense exercise.