Applied Sports Science newsletter – January 4, 2016

Jurgen Klopp reveals plans to prevent Daniel Sturridge getting injured anymore in this cartoon by JJ Bull

Arsène Wenger believes that any team have their own identifiable personality and his certainty that this latest offspring has the character to again win the Premier League remains evident in every nuance of his decision-making.

The start of Arsenal’s FA Cup defence looms but, just as he did at the beginning of the European campaign in September, the Premier League is being prioritised both in the team’s preparation and selection. And so, having beaten Newcastle United on Saturday to extend their lead over Leicester City at the top of the Premier League table to two points, Wenger promptly granted the players a mini mid-season break.

… interim coach Sam Mitchell gave long, candid postgame answers about the state of his team. This season, he’s reiterated time and time again that the Wolves are young, and stated that everyone’s expectations need to be adjusted accordingly. But last night he expounded upon what that youth really means, and the kinds of challenges it presents to the coaching staff, in very specific ways.

For example, he turned a pretty basic question about offensive struggles into to a long explanation of the young players’ bad habits and where they come from.

… I often see leaders and managers fall into predictable spirals with their employees. It usually starts with unfulfilled expectations (“what were you thinking?”) and ends in anger, frustration, sadness, and loss of confidence on both sides. Maybe not crying. But the professional equivalent.

I’m always inclined to ask: Why do I react the way I do? The answer is a complicated fusion of reasons including my love for my daughter, my desire to teach her, my low tolerance for messiness, my need to be in control, my longing for her success, and the list goes on.

But it doesn’t really matter.

Because knowing why I act a certain way does not change my behavior. You would think that it would. It should. But it doesn’t.

why do violinists have mentors, sportsmen have coaches and doctors (usually) have neither? That was the starting point for Atul Gawande’s examination of his career as an elite surgeon. A similar question inspired a series I made for bbc Radio 3 when I was a professional cricketer. It explored the parallels between athletes and classical musicians. I was struck by how much was shared: the art of concentration, the importance – and dangers – of nerves, the tension between instinct and self-awareness, the pursuit and limits of technical mastery, the balance between professional analysis and escape. Listening to musicians speak – if I swapped over the terminology of our respective disciplines – I heard back my own thoughts as a sportsman.

… Along with practices, UT coach Holly Warlick said team-building exercises also are scheduled before classes resume.

“They don’t have to be great friends off the floor,” she said. “But they have to respect each other. … Understanding kids come from different backgrounds. They think different. They talk different. So to try to get us all on one playing field and understanding each other, that’s our goal.”

Nared referenced Sunday’s outing in saying the players enjoy each other’s company. But there’s a difference between dinner conversation and in-game discourse.

Collaboration is taking over the workplace. As business becomes increasingly global and cross-functional, silos are breaking down, connectivity is increasing, and teamwork is seen as a key to organizational success. According to data we have collected over the past two decades, the time spent by managers and employees in collaborative activities has ballooned by 50% or more.

Certainly, we find much to applaud in these developments. However, when consumption of a valuable resource spikes that dramatically, it should also give us pause. Consider a typical week in your own organization. How much time do people spend in meetings, on the phone, and responding to e-mails? At many companies the proportion hovers around 80%, leaving employees little time for all the critical work they must complete on their own. Performance suffers as they are buried under an avalanche of requests for input or advice, access to resources, or attendance at a meeting. They take assignments home, and soon, according to a large body of evidence on stress, burnout and turnover become real risks.

What’s more, research we’ve done across more than 300 organizations shows that the distribution of collaborative work is often extremely lopsided. In most cases, 20% to 35% of value-added collaborations come from only 3% to 5% of employees.

Subjective assessment of athletes’ movement quality is widely used by physiotherapists and other applied practitioners within many sports. One of the beliefs driving this practice is that individuals who display ‘poor’ movement patterns are more likely to suffer an injury than those who do not. The aim of this review was to summarize the reliability of the movement screens currently documented within the scientific literature and explore the evidence surrounding their association with injury risk. Ten assessments with accompanying reliability data were identified through the literature search. Only two of these ten had any evidence directly related to injury risk. A number of methodological issues were present throughout the identified studies, including small sample sizes, lack of descriptive rater or participant information, ambiguous injury definitions, lack of exposure time reporting and risk of bias. These factors, combined with the paucity of research on this topic, make drawing conclusions as to the reliability and predictive ability of movement screens difficult. None of the movement screens that appear within the scientific literature currently have enough evidence to justify the tag of ‘injury prediction tool’.

… Akervall Technologies Inc. of Saline has built a lighter, thinner, stronger mouthguard, both for athletes and for those who grind their teeth while sleeping. So far, the innovation is paying off.

The company was officially founded in 2008 but started getting traction in 2010 after taking part in an entrepreneurial boot camp hosted by Ann Arbor Spark.

In the mind of former Stanford professor Vijay Pande, software is on the verge of transforming medicine, making it not just better and safer but also less expensive.
…

One promising application, he said, is using machine learning or artificial intelligence to try to teach computers to perform tasks such as spotting tumors in medical scans. The idea is not to replace doctors but to give them the tools to work more accurately and efficiently, he said.

In a soundproof room at the Dallas Cowboys’ training facility, players can pull on a pair of goggles and get instantly transported to the practice field. The Cowboys are one of six NFL and 10 college teams using virtual reality technology to give players more of what Dallas coach Jason Garrett called “mental reps”: Opportunities to recognize plays, formations and opponents’ movements in a realistic setting (and without worrying about whether you’re going to be tackled).

From inside the Oculus Rift headset, players get a 3-D look at the field while headphones provide realistic sound. Teams capture the footage by filming their practices with 360-degree cameras, so the experience inside the VR headset looks and sounds like the real thing rather than a video game.

The setup is provided by STRIVR Labs, which has grown over the past year with the speed of the best startups in Silicon Valley. That’s not necessarily surprising, given that STRIVR was born where many startups begin, on the campus of Stanford University.

Despite numerous attempts to discover genetic variants associated with elite athletic performance, injury predisposition and elite/world-class athletic status, there has been limited progress to date. Past reliance on candidate gene studies predominantly focusing on genotyping a limited number of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) or the insertion/deletion variants in small, often heterogeneous cohorts have not generated the kind of results that could offer solid opportunities to bridge the gap between basic research in exercise sciences and deliverables in biomedicine. A retrospective view of genetic association studies with complex disease traits indicates that transition to hypothesis-free genome-wide approaches will be more fruitful. In studies of complex disease, it is well recognized that the magnitude of genetic associations is often smaller than initially anticipated and, as such, large sample sizes are required to identify them robustly. Thus, alternative approaches involving large-scale, collaborative efforts, within which high-resolution genome-wide data is generated and interrogated using advanced bioinformatics approaches, are likely necessary for meaningful progress to be made. Accordingly, a symposium was held on the Greek island of Santorini from 14-17th May 2015 to review the main findings in exercise genetics and genomics and to explore promising trends and possibilities. The symposium offered a forum for the development of a position stand. Among the participants, many were involved in ongoing collaborative studies. A consensus emerged among participants that it would be advantageous to bring together all current studies and those recently launched into one new large collaborative initiative, which was subsequently named the Athlome Project Consortium.

Advanced algorithms that leverage computer vision and signal processing concepts are used to estimate vital signs from small changes in skin color.

… We think we understand eating as a functional process that moves from flavour perception to swallowing, from digestion to nutrition. But it is more than that. Diet influences not only our physical health, but also our mental state, our intelligence, our character and confidence.

We are only beginning to understand this journey. But we do know it starts before birth. A huge amount is learnt in the womb. The flavours of the foods a mother eats, for example, find their way to the unborn child through the amniotic fluid, and after birth those flavours are preferred.

Your brain is predictive, not reactive. For many years, scientists believed that your neurons spend most of their time dormant and wake up only when stimulated by some sight or sound in the world. Now we know that all your neurons are firing constantly, stimulating one another at various rates. This intrinsic brain activity is one of the great recent discoveries in neuroscience. Even more compelling is what this brain activity represents: millions of predictions of what you will encounter next in the world, based on your lifetime of past experience.

Many predictions are at a micro level, predicting the meaning of bits of light, sound, and other information from your senses. Every time you hear speech, your brain breaks up the continuous stream of sound into phonemes, syllables, words, and ideas by prediction. Other predictions are at the macro level. You’re interacting with a friend and, based on context, your brain predicts that she will smile. This prediction drives your motor neurons to move your mouth in advance to smile back, and your movement causes your friend’s brain to issue new predictions and actions, back and forth, in a dance of prediction and action. If predictions are wrong, your brain has mechanisms to correct them and issue new ones.

If your brain didn’t predict, sports couldn’t exist. A purely reactive brain wouldn’t be fast enough to parse the massive sensory input around you and direct your actions in time to catch a baseball or block a goal. You also would go through life constantly surprised.