Applied Sports Science newsletter – January 14, 2016

With Kobe Bryant continuing to deal with nagging injuries, longtime Lakers trainer Gary Vitti suggested to coach Byron Scott on Tuesday night that they “shut down” Bryant for one to two weeks during what is his 20th and final NBA season.

Bryant, who said he plans to retire this summer, has missed four of the Lakers’ last seven games, and he played just 16 minutes in Tuesday’s win over the New Orleans Pelicans because of a strained right Achilles.

Ben Roethlisberger has been carted off with what appeared to be a season-ending injury three times this season. He returned from a knee and then foot injury. Will he make it back from a throwing shoulder injury next week?

The Steelers quarterback is like a “cat with nine lives” playing through multiple injuries including a significant motorcycle crash in 2006. This season in Week 3, he suffered what many feared to be an ACL tear. Instead, he returned five weeks later from what turned out to be an MCL sprain and bone bruise. In Week 9, Big Ben was carted off again with what could be a season-ending Lisfranc fracture/dislocation but it turned out to be a lesser sprain. This Saturday, he was carted off with an injury to his throwing shoulder.

Some initially worried that it was a clavicle fracture similar to what Tony Romo suffered twice this season. By video, it appeared to be a classic AC joint sprain, which is also commonly called a separated shoulder. Multiple reports now confirm the video impression, but will Roethlisberger make another “phoenix” style rise from the ashes and play in the Divisional Round?

See how top NFL players prepare for the season with EXOS through our three phase offseason training program.

When I was about to turn 40, I started working out regularly after years of inactivity. As I sweated my way through cardio, weights, and dance classes, I noticed that exercise wasn’t just changing my body. It was also profoundly transforming my brain—for the better.

The immediate effects of exercise on my mood and thought process proved to be a powerful motivational tool. And as a neuroscientist and workout devotee, I’ve come to believe that these neurological benefits could have profound implications for how we live, learn and age as a society.

Seven years after his Major League Baseball career ended, John Smoltz made one of his most important pitches Tuesday in Orlando.

Smoltz was joined by former Super Bowl MVP Mark Rypien, nine-time NHL all-star Jeremy Roenick and three doctors Tuesday at the Florida Hospital for Children Youth Sports & Injuries Symposium in Orlando. Their panel discussion about concussions and overuse injuries for young athletes lasted more than 30 minutes in the hospital’s Werner Auditorium.

It boiled down to this: In youth sports, avoid too much, too soon.

Elite athletes require the highest level of body awareness. Given the slim margin between success and failure, it’s surprising that most athletes don’t really understand what they’re doing to their bodies. Even the fittest athletes are susceptible to overtraining, misinterpreting fitness peaks, and misconceptions around recovery and sleep. Coaches and trainers face the challenge of evaluating the status and training plans for 10, 20, or 50 athletes at a time. WHOOP, a Bluetooth®-enabled wearable, aims to solve these training challenges.

Derek Belch sat in the office of Clemson football coach Dabo Swinney last June on the Saturday of the Belmont Stakes.

They had just finished watching the historic race on TV when Swinney texted Arizona Cardinals coach Bruce Arians. He had an idea that Arians might like. Arians called Swinney almost immediately. In the way only Arians can, he asked what the hell Swinney wanted on a relaxing Saturday afternoon.

Swinney then explained why Belch, the founder and CEO of STRIVR Labs, based in Palo Alto, California, was sitting in his office.

The analysis and evaluation of human movement is a growing research area within the field of sports monitoring. This analysis can help support the enhancement of an athlete’s performance, the prediction of injuries or the optimization of training programs. Although camera-based techniques are often used to evaluate human movements, not all movements of interest can be analyzed or distinguished effectively with computer vision only. Wearable inertial systems are a promising technology to address this limitation. This paper presents a new wearable sensing system to record human movements for sports monitoring. A new paradigm is presented with the purpose of monitoring basketball players with multiple inertial measurement units. A data collection plan has been designed and implemented, and experimental results show the potential of the system in basketball activity recognition.

Background: Despite recent restrictions being placed on practice in college football, there are little data to correlate such changes with injuries.

Hypothesis: Football injuries will correlate with a team’s exposure to full-contact practice, total practice, and total games.

Study Design: Descriptive epidemiological study.

Methods: All injuries and athlete injury exposures (AE × Min = athletes exposed × activity duration in minutes) were recorded for an intercollegiate football team over 4 consecutive fall seasons. Weekly injuries and injury rates (injuries per athletic injury exposure) were correlated with the weekly exposures to full-contact practices, total practices, formal scrimmages, and games.

Results: The preseason practice injury rate was over twice the in-season practice injury rate (P < 0.001). For preseason, injury exposures were higher for full-contact practice (P = 0.0166), total practices (P = 0.015), and scrimmages/games (P = 0.034) compared with in-season. Preseason and in-season practice injuries correlated with exposure to full-contact practice combined with scrimmages for preseason (P < 0.008) and full-contact practice combined with games for in-season (P = 0.0325). The game injury rate was over 6 times greater than the practice injury rate (P < 0.0001). Concussions constituted 14.5% of all injuries, and the incidence of concussions correlated with the incidence of all injuries (P = 0.0001). Strength training did not correlate with injuries.

Conclusion: Decreased exposure to full-contact practice may decrease the incidence of practice injuries and practice concussions. However, the game injury rate was over 6 times greater than the practice injury rate and had an inverse correlation with full-contact practice.

… Physicians sense that the clock is always ticking, and patients are feeling the effect. One of our patients recently told us that when she came in for a yearly “wellness visit,” she had jotted down a few questions so she wouldn’t forget to ask them. She was upset and frustrated when she didn’t get the chance: her physician told her there was no time for her questions because a standardized list had to be addressed — she’d need to schedule a separate visit to discuss her concerns.

We believe that the standardization integral to Taylorism and the Toyota manufacturing process cannot be applied to many vital aspects of medicine. If patients were cars, we would all be used cars of different years and models, with different and often multiple problems, many of which had previously been repaired by various mechanics. Moreover, those cars would all communicate in different languages and express individual preferences regarding when, how, and even whether they wanted to be fixed. The inescapable truth of medicine is that patients are genetically, physiologically, psychologically, and culturally diverse. It’s no wonder that experts disagree about the best ways to diagnose and treat many medical conditions, including hypertension, hyperlipidemia, and cancer, among others.

… To be clear, DePodesta will not be doing a ton of number-crunching for the Browns. The Browns already have Ken Kovash on staff; he is one of the top analysts in the NFL and will lead the actual analysis. But NFL teams don’t just already have a lot of useful data, they are also about to be caught under an avalanche of new data. The league has installed chips in every player’s shoulder pads and can now track a player’s location and movements multiple times a second during every play. The teams will be given access to that data soon, and they need to have some way of turning that massive data set into useful information to gain a competitive advantage.

That, or they’ll be left behind.

This is where DePodesta’s experience is exactly what teams need.

The Giants had a reputation for being old-fashioned under Tom Coughlin, the 69-year-old former head coach who in his resignation remarks last week complained that today’s players lacked toughness and begged out of games because of a “toothache.”

Yet despite the Giants’ fusty image, the coach who succeeds Coughlin, who according to a team source will be Giants offensive coordinator Ben McAdoo, will inherit a football program that is among the NFL’s most innovative in the field of sports science.

Let’s do a little comparison on athlete analytics today, and what they could be tomorrow.

Today: Star NFL cornerback has had a strong week of practice, but during an intense game on Sunday he starts to show fatigue. Coaches aren’t sure if it’s the normal rigors of the game or the amount he’s worked covering one of the league-leading receivers. Maybe it was the hard practices and travel. Early in the fourth quarter, this cornerback goes down to the turf. Sprained knee, they say. Out for the rest of the game, they say. And likely to miss next week’s division showdown, too.

Tomorrow: Star NFL cornerback has had a strong week of practice, but by Thursday trainers are pulling him out of certain drills early so as not to overwork his legs. During Sunday’s game, real-time data based on his body’s biometrics and his in-game hits show that an especially active second quarter—and that hit he laid on the running back with 4:13 left in the half—has taken an abnormally large toll on his body compared to previous games.

The NFL may be the most popular and profitable major sport in America, but until recently, it’s lagged behind other leagues in sophisticated use of data analysis. … American football is a special challenge: the field is 53.3 yards wide and 120 yards long. That’s similar to soccer, as is the number of players on the field. What’s different: The profusion of offensive and defensive sets, plus constant player substitution. There’s so much activity and so many variables in game play, says Darryl Lewis, Chief Technology Officer at STATS LLC, that it’s almost impossible for humans to keep up without computer tracking technology.

The role of intuition versus deliberation in human cooperation has received widespread attention from experimentalists across the behavioral sciences in recent years. Yet a formal theoretical framework for addressing this question has been absent. Here, we introduce an evolutionary game-theoretic model of dual-process agents playing prisoner’s dilemma games. We find that, across many types of environments, evolution only ever favors agents who (i) always intuitively defect, or (ii) are intuitively predisposed to cooperate but who, when deliberating, switch to defection if it is in their self-interest to do so. Our model offers a clear explanation for why we should expect deliberation to promote selfishness rather than cooperation and unifies apparently contradictory empirical results regarding intuition and cooperation.