Applied Sports Science newsletter – January 7, 2016

Warriors point guard Stephen Curry isn’t interested in sitting out four weeks to let the painful contusion on his left shin heal, and a noted orthopedic surgeon with a specialty in treating sports injuries says that’s just fine.

“He’s not risking his career or anything by this,” said Dr. Brian Schulz, who works for the Kerlan-Jobe Orthopaedic Clinic in Los Angeles. “He’s just going to have to deal with pain, which he’s proven in the past is not a big deal for him.

“It’s not a serious thing, but it’s definitely something that could annoy him.”

… Certainly, the last few years have seen a noticeable downturn in James game-to-game defensive impact from his peak during his two championship seasons with Miami. Some of this is simply energy conservation from a player who has crammed more than a full season’s worth of playoff games (107) into his five consecutive Finals appearances. But the effect has been fairly clear in box score-based stats as 2014-15 saw James post career low Defensive Win Score along with his second lowest Defensive Box Plus Minus. (It should be noted that though the change from Miami to Cleveland makes direct comparison of on/off plus-minus metrics more difficult, James has performed well in ESPN’s Defensive Real Plus/Minus in both 2014-15 and 2015-16 after an indifferent 2013-14).

[Steph Curry did the unthinkable in 2015. He surpassed LeBron James.]

It’s assumed that James would dial the defensive intensity back up in the crucible of the playoffs this season. The 2015 postseason seemed to support this, as Cleveland’s defense went from slightly below average to well above average in per possession efficiency. But what if the decline is just that: a genuine diminution in physical capability?

In particular, James’s ability to overwhelm opponents at the basket with his combination of speed and strength could be on the wane.

… Since 2008, Denmark has been climbing the ranks of hockey. That year, Denmark earned its first promotion to the top 10-team division at the International Ice Hockey Federation’s annual world junior championship for the best hockey players under the age of 20. But when the Danes finished in last place, after being outscored by 23 goals, they were relegated.

The Danish Ice Hockey Union decided it was time to make changes. The federation overhauled its development system by introducing the Age Training Concept, which educates coaches at all levels on the proper way to train each age group to ensure the best development of the players.

… In 2012, the Pentagon’s research division DARPA awarded a $300,000 grant to Alaa Ahmed, a professor of integrative physiology at University of Colorado at Boulder. They asked Dr. Ahmed to look for neurological links between threats and instinctive movements, with the aim of training soldiers to cut those links. The goal was a new breed of soldiers who, in life-or-death moments, would reject emotion and instinct in favor of rational decision making.

Ahmed calls her DARPA research “speculative,” but she’s not the first researcher to dream of fear-free enforcers. Ancient Spartan and Roman military training sought to eliminate the natural instinct to run away in the heat of combat by building strong bonds between the men and harshly punishing any hint of cowardice. Desertion was punished by death in Genghis Khan’s army, Napoleon’s forces, and under some commanders in both world wars. Only recently, though, have commanders sought to understand the science behind the fight-or-flight instinct.

Over the past two decades, militaries and police departments around the world — particularly in the U.S. — have participated in dozens of studies on the neurology and psychology of combat panic.

… We designed the assessment as a self-assessment for personal development, in an effort to minimize the motivation to “look good to others” that is usually found in a proving mentality. We found that 8.3% of respondents had a strong “proving” orientation, 8.4% were divided in their orientation, and 83% had an “improving” orientation. … the data was robust enough to help us identify three factors that influenced respondents’ mindsets:

Misuse of “Power” and other mechanical terms in sport and exercise science research. J Strength Cond Res 30(1): 292-300, 2016-Despite the Système International d’Unitès (SI) that was published in 1960, there continues to be widespread misuse of the terms and nomenclature of mechanics in descriptions of exercise performance. Misuse applies principally to failure to distinguish between mass and weight, velocity and speed, and especially the terms “work” and “power.” These terms are incorrectly applied across the spectrum from high-intensity short-duration to long-duration endurance exercise. This review identifies these misapplications and proposes solutions. Solutions include adoption of the term “intensity” in descriptions and categorizations of challenge imposed on an individual as they perform exercise, followed by correct use of SI terms and units appropriate to the specific kind of exercise performed. Such adoption must occur by authors and reviewers of sport and exercise research reports to satisfy the principles and practices of science and for the field to advance.

CES 2016 is in full swing, and so is Intel. The tech company is now growing its presence in the sports industry and is all set to launch its new product line in partnership with ESPN, Red Bull Media House, and New Balance. With Intel’s PC sales declining by 6.3% in the third quarter of 2015, the chip manufacturer is looking to shift away from its core business towards action sports and BMX stunts.

Gadget company New Balance announced that it will be launching a new division that will measure the performance of athletes. The new division will be called New Balance Digital Sport and the first product of the division is the smartwatch that is all set to launch in 2016. The Digital Sport will consist of three product lines: Wearable devices, Performance Sports products that will analyze and evaluate athlete’s performance, and Embedded Technology in New Balance sneakers that will send sensors to collect data that will be send to your phone app.

ApplySci has long followed the disruptive work of John Rogers and Roozbeh Ghaffari at MC10. At last year’s Wearable Tech + Digital Health NYC conference, Dr. Ghaffari described the company’s bio-medical sensor based wearable electronics, its focus on movement disorder and cardiac monitoring to both measure the impact of medicine and track quality of life, and its plans to develop an ecosystem meant to better inform physicians.

Today MC10 unveiled the BioStamp Research Connect System — a closed loop platform that combines flexible, bendable, stretchable sensors with a cloud system for researchers to share data across several sites in real time.

… the tent is more than just a trinket to signify the opulence of Alabama football or the paranoia of a program that shields most of its inner-workings from public view. With four senior-level mechanical engineering students at Alabama bringing Allen’s idea to life, they have invented something that will likely be on just about every sideline in college football and perhaps the NFL in the next few years.

“We’ve definitely been pulling a thread, and it’s unraveled something we never would have been able to see in our wildest dreams a year ago,” said Jared Cassity, one of the co-inventors who graduated from Alabama in December with a mechanical engineering degree. “It almost seems too simple. You look at it and think, ‘Why didn’t we have this before?’ ”

The event once known as the Consumer Electronics Show, CES, is upon us once again, and once again we’re ringing in the new year with a range of health and fitness device announcements from both established players and new upstarts. We’ve already reported this week on the latest from Fitbit and Withings, as well as Under Armour’s new foray, with HTC, into connected fitness hardware. All that is below, plus many more health and wellness devices that were unveiled at CES this year.

Below you’ll find an app-connected pregnancy test, a non-invasive hemoglobin-sensing device for athletes, a smart bra, and a wearable health product from L’Oreal — not a brand you’d usually associate with connected health. As CES is still ongoing, this list isn’t exhaustive. We’ll update with additional announcements as they come out.

Moximed, a firm with offices in Hayward, California and Zurich, Switzerland, recently won the European CE Mark to introduce its Atlas Knee System. We just got hold of photos of the Atlas and more information on how it works. The device is a knee joint unloader designed to reduce the pressure applied to the joint and to push off the eventual need for a knee replacement. The device works like the shock absorbers in your car, but instead for the knee. It results in less damage to the cartilage within the knee, letting it last longer than it would naturally without the support of the Atlas.

The company hopes the device will allow patients to maintain an active lifestyle they’re used to while improving satisfaction, reducing repeat surgeries, and lowering pain.

Strategies for efficient charge confinement in nanocrystal floating gates to realize high-performance memory devices have been investigated intensively. However, few studies have reported nanoscale experimental validations of charge confinement in closely packed uniform nanocrystals and related device performance characterization. Furthermore, the system-level integration of the resulting devices with wearable silicon electronics has not yet been realized. We introduce a wearable, fully multiplexed silicon nonvolatile memory array with nanocrystal floating gates. The nanocrystal monolayer is assembled over a large area using the Langmuir-Blodgett method. Efficient particle-level charge confinement is verified with the modified atomic force microscopy technique. Uniform nanocrystal charge traps evidently improve the memory window margin and retention performance. Furthermore, the multiplexing of memory devices in conjunction with the amplification of sensor signals based on ultrathin silicon nanomembrane circuits in stretchable layouts enables wearable healthcare applications such as long-term data storage of monitored heart rates.

The Professional Football Athletic Trainers Society (PFATS) announced today that the St. Louis Rams have been named the 2015 NFL Athletic Training Staff of the Year. The award is voted on by the PFATS membership and recognizes one NFL athletic training staff annually for their distinguished service to their club, community and athletic training profession. The honor marks the first time the Rams have been recipients of the award since it was established in 1985.

“Our athletic training staff is invaluable to our team and what’s most important is that they have the trust of our players,” Rams Head Coach Jeff Fisher said. “We rely heavily on their expertise, ingenuity and attention to detail throughout the year and this award is a testament to the great work that they have done.”

As the new year begins, millions of people are vowing to shape up their eating habits. This usually involves dividing foods into moralistic categories: good/bad, healthy/unhealthy, nutritious/indulgent, slimming/fattening — but which foods belong where depends on whom you ask. … Who’s right? It’s hard to say. When it comes to nutrition, everyone has an opinion. What no one has is an airtight case. The problem begins with a lack of consensus on what makes a diet healthy. Is the aim to make you slender? To build muscles? To keep your bones strong? Or to prevent heart attacks or cancer or keep dementia at bay? Whatever you’re worried about, there’s no shortage of diets or foods purported to help you. Linking dietary habits and individual foods to health factors is easy — ridiculously so — as you’ll soon see from the little experiment we conducted.

Allen Campbell has never been anything but a chef. After graduating from Newbury College, the Chelmsford native went on to stints at the Boston Harbor Hotel, the Bay Tower Room, and Mistral. While living in Miami—where he worked at the Gansevoort Hotel—Campbell became obsessed with plant-based diets.

Miami also is where he met his current employers: Tom Brady and Gisele Bundchen.

Ahead, Campbell talks about what it’s like to feed New England’s superhero quarterback and his family, the secret ingredient in his raw vegan version of fruit roll-ups, and the many ingredients he won’t ever touch.

Liverpool must understand injuries are to be expected as they are paying price of change under Jurgen Klopp.

There are multifactorial reasons for Liverpool’s current injury crisis, but they must have expected this with so many changes