Applied Sports Science newsletter – January 12, 2016

About an hour after her record-setting performance in last summer’s Women’s World Cup final, Carli Lloyd called her personal coach, James Galanis, in New Jersey.

“I’m not stopping. I want more,” Galanis said Lloyd told him. “Then the next question was ‘when are we training again?’ ”

For Galanis, the short conversation told him all he needed to know: success wasn’t going to spoil Lloyd.

… That is perhaps the most striking aspect of Messi’s consistent success: his consistent improvement along the way. The initial, obvious manifestation of that was a staggering increase in the number of goals he scored. In his 2008-09 Ballon d’Or-winning season, he put away 38 for Barcelona, but by his 2011-12 win, that number had almost doubled to 73. Then there was the clear bettering of his collective, associative game. The sometimes centre-forward, sometimes central midfielder who drove the Barca team in his 2010-11 win was light years ahead of the exciting but not yet fully rounded right winger of 2008-09.

Along with pushing his strengths even further, terrifyingly, Messi has managed to focus on his weaknesses and successively reduce them to a degree that few remain.

When Jason Kidd left the bench for the operating table, some NBA coaches understood exactly how he felt.

Their bodies hurt, too.

The Golden State Warriors have been playing all season without Steve Kerr, who is recovering from back surgery. Kidd joined him on the injured list when he had to step away from the Bucks in December for right hip surgery, an injury that has far more to do with his outstanding 19 years on the court than his 2 1/2 seasons in the coaching box.

Orlando’s Scott Skiles said all former players experience some kind of pain — and maybe some fears they’ll end up like Kidd.

Arsène Wenger believes Premier League clubs should have the strength in depth to cope with the winter fixture list, despite Jürgen Klopp’s warning to Pep Guardiola about the draining schedule in England.

… What’s next. Every player. The Timberwolves have never done this before. We did it in Toronto. So at the end of the year, when my general manager would ask me questions about this, this, this and this—[picks up Wiggins folder and slaps it down on table] there you go on every player.

Every shot he took for the season, every weight he lifted, everything we talked to him about, everything we worked with him about. So then when someone wants to come in and say, “Hey now, Andrew Wiggins didn’t do this or this or this.” Wait a minute now, hold on. We got it documented. And we show this to the player and they sign it. This is what we have done with you. So they can’t say, “Coach we didn’t do that.” Every day we chart every shot they take in practice, and games. The Timberwolves have never done that. I started doing this in Toronto on every player. Every player. So that at the end of the season when the general manager had questions, I could pull that book out and show him every single day for the season.

And we update this three times a year. We start it at a certain point in the season and then another point and then at the end of the season. And the same thing is going to happen—we are going to have a player development program this summer. This is something the Timberwolves have never done that we have got to do — our summer program. Not summer league. Not come in here four days before summer league and try to do something. We want them here — they have three weeks off and then we need them here. They have got to get bigger, they have got to get stronger — but not just go pack on dead weight, that slow you down and cause injuries. Lean mass that adds proper weight.

… The Coerver conceptual framework is logical. It is based upon a deconstructionist model of education that travels well beyond the field and into the classroom. In many ways it is the base of why we have dissected material into subjects and subjects into chapters and so on. It is also why schools drill the way they do, test the way they do, operate the way they do and too often fail the way they do.

This deconstructionist model works for teachers and coaches trying to manage the complexity of educating children. Unfortunately, it does not work as well for the learner.

Purpose: To determine the time course for physical-capacity adaptations to intermittent hypoxic training (IHT) in team-sport athletes and the time course for benefits remaining after IHT. Methods: A pre–post parallel-groups design was employed, with 21 Australian footballers assigned to IHT (n = 10) or control (CON; n = 11) matched for training load. IHT performed eleven 40-min bike sessions at 2500-m altitude over 4 wk. Yo-Yo Intermittent Recovery Test level 2 (Yo-Yo IR2) was performed before; after 3, 6, and 11 IHT sessions; and 30 and 44 d after IHT. Repeated time trials (2- and 1-km TTs, with 5 min rest) were performed before, after, and 3 wk after IHT. Hemoglobin mass (Hbmass) was measured in IHT before and after 3, 6, 9, and 11 sessions. Results: Baseline Yo-Yo IR2 was similar between groups. After 6 sessions, the change in Yo-Yo IR2 in IHT was very likely higher than CON (27% greater change, effect size 0.77, 90% confidence limits 0.20;1.33) and likely higher 1 d after IHT (23%, 0.68, 0.05;1.30). The IHT group’s change remained likely higher than CON 30 d after IHT (24%, 0.72, 0.12;1.33) but was not meaningfully different 44 d after (12%, 0.36, –0.24;0.97). The change in 2-km TT performance between groups was not different throughout. For 1-km TT, CON improved more after IHT, but IHT maintained performance better after 3 wk. Hbmass was higher after IHT (2.7%, 0.40, –0.40;1.19). Conclusion: Short-duration IHT increased Yo-Yo IR2 compared with trainingload- matched controls in 2 wk. An additional 2 wk of IHT provided no further benefit. These changes remained until at least 30 d posttraining. IHT also protected improvement in 1-km TT.

In recent years, advances in GPS technology combined with a better understanding of the energetics of accelerated and decelerated running [5] have made it possible to estimate: i) the time course of the instantaneous metabolic power requirement of any given player in soccer, as well as in other team sports [12], and ii) to infer from this information the time course of the actual O2 consumption (V?+O2), on the basis of some specific assumptions concerning the VO2 on- and off-responses during metabolic transients (see below and [4]). However, in a recent paper Buchheit et al. compared metabolic power assessment by mean of GPS to direct O2 uptake measurements via a portable metabolic cart, and on the basis of the data obtained, questioned the validity of metabolic power assessment [1]. The following paragraphs discuss Buchheit et al.’s results [1] in some detail, with the aim of arriving at a clear-cut picture of the overall energy expenditure during any given time period of the match or training session. In essence, this exercise will lend further support to the general validity of metabolic power and O2 consumption estimate via GPS, albeit within the limits of the underlying data collection technology and physiological assumptions.

As the cheats become more sophisticated, we ask experts about detecting gene and protein abuse.

At CES last week, the health and wellness halls were overflowing with neuromodulators and laser-actuated balding remedies, Bluetooth breathalyzers and video-enabled ear infection probes, jet lag-busting headsets and Alzheimer’s-tracking apps. The poor publicists had quite a job to do. But you know what helps when you’re touting the next great health gadget? A big, shiny seal of approval from the Food and Drug Administration. Something about that stodgy blue art deco logo just tends to drown out the competition.

And it should! The FDA will never even get its hands on most of the products at CES, because they make squishy claims about wellness and fitness rather than tackle a distinct medical problem. “Frankly, there aren’t many real medical products here,” says Shai Gozani, CEO of NeuroMetrix, which is marketing a pain-relief wearable called Quell. Merely trying to fit into the agency’s rubrics means that a device is aspiring to something loftier than data tracking. But thanks to the arcane way the FDA deals—and doesn’t deal—with certain consumer and medical devices, those claims can mean wildly different things. And some of them don’t mean anything at all when it comes to safety or efficacy.

Dave Marver crouches in his Seattle office, brandishing two black football helmets that look pretty much alike. One is made by Riddell, the nation’s best-selling helmet manufacturer. The other is a prototype made by Vicis, the startup company for which Marver is chief executive.

He slams the crown of the Riddell model onto the concrete floor, producing the familiar violent crack of a strong safety blindsiding a wide receiver. Then Marver bangs his own company’s helmet down. The sound it makes is a flat, squishy thump—not something likely to thrill the average National Football League fan. Marver grins. “It’s up to us,” he says, “to make thump cool.”

To treat football’s concussion plague, Vicis (VYE-sis) has reimagined the traditional helmet. Instead of a rigid outer shell, the company’s debut helmet, called Zero1, has a soft, deformable outer skin with a harder plastic core inside. Like a car’s bumper, the softer carapace gives a little when struck, slowing the impact before it reaches a tailback’s brain.

Every athlete and coach is fully aware of the fact that injuries are part and parcel of all levels of sport. No matter what planning is carried out or how successful a training programme can be, the cost of an injury can be huge for an athlete. A long-term setback will have obvious consequences but even a small niggle can cause enough disruption to throw a schedule into disarray. Ultimately it may prove to be the difference in an athlete failing to get a medal or perhaps missing out on the big event altogether.

Background The ability to predict injury is difficult. Prior injury is the only risk factor that has been reported consistently in multiple research studies. Convenient and easy to perform, physical performance tests (PPTs) have great allure as prognostic factors.

Methods 11 PPTs were issued to 359 participants over the course of three seasons of National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I athletic competition. Injuries were monitored and reported in a centralised university tracking system. Exploratory factor analysis was performed in order to group the PPTs into constructs. The relationship between injury and these PPT-based constructs and other known predictors of injury was explored using univariate and multivariate regression.

Results PPTs clustered into five constructs: (1) active motion, (2) power, (3) hip stability, (4) flexibility and (5) motor control. When these five were placed into a multiple regression equation along with known risk factors (age, body mass index (BMI), gender, excessive flexibility and past injury), hip stability and active motion were predicted injury. In addition, motor control predicted non-traumatic injury. Past injury did not predict injury in the multivariate model.

Summary In college athletes, hip stability, active motion and motor control as assessed through PPTs can be useful as part of preseason screening. These PPT-related constructs seem to have a mediating effect on the relationship between past injury and future injury. This study provides the rationale to test targeted interventions to address these limitations.

Clayton Wilcox, superintendent of a public school system in rural Maryland, says he knows scientists might think he’s “damn nuts.”

But he doesn’t care. He’s planning to buy $25,000 worth of a specific brand of chocolate milk next year and make the drink available to all his student athletes — in the hopes that it’ll speed their recovery from concussions.

The milk is called Fifth Quarter Fresh. And a kinesiologist at the University of Maryland has done preliminary, unpublished research that found high school football players who drank the milk after every practice or game did better on some cognitive and motor tests after a concussion than those who didn’t chug it.

… The brand’s new high-tech focus can be traced back to senior vice president and general manager Brett O’Brien’s decision in 2014 to build an internal innovation unit to look beyond bottle shapes and new flavors and toward a higher mission. After all, something had to be done. Gatorade sales in the first half of 2009 had fallen 18% year over year; new competitors such as VitaminWater, Red Bull, and Monster had gained influence and market share; and the product, born 50 years ago in a University of Florida lab as the original sports specialty drink, had become known more as a hangover helper than a high-performance elixir. O’Brien and the innovation group set about getting Gatorade back into shape, transforming it into an elite sports brand on par with Nike and Under Armour. “It’s not just about capturing a bigger part of a marketplace,” O’Brien says. “It’s about filling a void for your consumer, and ours are athletes.”