Applied Sports Science newsletter – January 18, 2016

… Holden’s soccer career lingers somewhere in the grey area between active and over, and that even though the future seems bright—with a baby and a business and other opportunities in front of him— Stu Holden isn’t quite sure how he feels about moving forward.

The only soccer Holden plays now is in a weekly pickup run in Los Angeles, where he and Karalyn live. It’s no ordinary pickup game, though. Italian legend Alessandro Del Piero, Donovan, Steve Nash and several soccer players-turned-pundits like Kyle Martino and Alexi Lalas participate as well.

Holden figures his body is ready to return to pro soccer. “I feel 100 percent healthy,” he told VICE Sports in late November . “I’m not favoring my knee or thinking about it too much.

… Some believe that Hall was born at altitude and born to greatness. There is a kernel here, but only that. While raised at high-altitude Big Bear, California, he was actually born at sea level in Washington. As a young teen, he wanted to be a baseball player like his father, Mickey. But dad was also a triathlete, so one day young Ryan joined him for a 15-mile run around a lake. Fifteen miles! In basketball shoes. On his first serious run. Yes, he had talent.

And he loved to go hard—always hard. Something drove him. In high school, even with his father looking on protectively, he trained past his peak several times. At Stanford, his more-laid-back college teammates didn’t appreciate the brash way he attacked every workout. Once he launched into a marathon career, his long tempo runs attracted a YouTube following. He was always trying to beat last week’s or last season’s times. This is not a recipe for long term progress; ask any experienced coach. It makes you wonder if his current medical issues—his wife, Sara, told Runner’s World of his crushing fatigue; Hall told Competitor last October that he has clinically low testosterone—have deep roots.

Throughout their record-setting doubles careers, Bob and Mike Bryan have been paragons of professionalism. But last year, they decided they were not professional enough — at least for their advancing age.

The 2015 season was uneven by their standards, marked by bouts of niggling injuries. It had the 37-year-old Bryans rethinking their training methods, off-season habits and travel needs.

When they contacted their trainer in September to prepare for this year, the message was clear: Take us to a new level.

Bradley Beal likely will available for the Wizards when they play the Milwaukee Bucks tonight at Verizon Center, ending a streak of 16 consecutive missed games, as he has been cleared to return.

“The trainers and doctors gave me the OK,” Beal said after morning shootaround. “It’s just a matter of me being confident in myself and my body.”

Beal would come off the bench and be on a minutes restriction after a stress reaction in his lower right leg. It’s a dark spot on the MRI that’s a precursor to a season-ending fracture, and it’s the fourth year in a row that Beal has developed the reaction on different spots on the same bone.

It is well known that telling a kid she is smart is wading into seriously dangerous territory.

Reams of research show that kids who are praised for being smart fixate on performance, shying away from taking risks and meeting potential failure. Kids who are praised for their efforts try harder and persist with tasks longer. These “effort” kids have a “growth mindset” marked by resilience and a thirst for mastery; the “smart” ones have a “fixed mindset” believing intelligence to be innate and not malleable.

But now, Carol Dweck, the Stanford professor of psychology who spent 40 years researching, introducing and explaining the growth mindset, is calling a big timeout.

A former world-class kayaker, sports physiologist Ken van Someren now leads a human performance lab outside London for the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline. After a 20-mile bike ride to the office, he spends his workdays helping elite athletes perform better on the rugby pitch, Tour de France, and glaciers of Antarctica. He talked with STAT about his views on ice baths, when to eat protein, and what we can learn from people who push their physical limits.

What does a human performance lab do?

We want to innovate and extend not just our own, but the scientific community’s understanding of human function and human performance.

When Angela Duckworth returned to Philadelphia last May, friends and colleagues wanted to know who she had met during her visit to the Seattle Seahawks’ practice facility.

Russell Wilson? Marshawn Lynch? Richard Sherman?

Unfortunately, Duckworth wasn’t quite sure how to answer.

“I didn’t even know who the quarterback was,” she said.

… The problem is, the mistake has already happened. You can’t go back and change it – so we should try to get something positive out of it. In my case, having accepted that I was to blame, I had to try and figure out why I had made that mistake, so that I could avoid making it again. This was a period of analysis and self-reflection, not just by myself but with technical staff who had data on hand to help. In the Olympics, I left about 3 metres early, which is criminal. But going back to all the pre-Olympic training camps, I could see that I was consistently leaving 1-2m early there also. My mistakes in training had spilled over into competition.

Finding this out was actually very positive, as it gave me a focus for future training sessions; never leave early. And I didn’t. In fact, in every single relay race after the Olympic Games, I left almost exactly on the checkmark (a standard error of leaving 0.5m early or late is deemed acceptable; in the 2011 World Championship final I left exactly on the checkmark). So, making mistakes is good – provided you learn from them.

Researchers at Australia’s RMIT University have developed an electronic pill that senses the chemical composition of the gases inside the GI tract and relays the information wirelessly to an external receiver. The device was tested on pigs who were put through different diets to see how the pill recognizes the effects of eating lots or little dietary fiber.

Because one can tell the region of the GI tract that the pill is in, the gasses detected can be evaluated with greater understanding of the local environment. This is something new because there’s lots of misconception about what really goes on inside the gut, and this pill may help answer many interesting questions.

One already surprising finding from the study is that unlike what was expected, a high fiber diet actually produces lower levels of hydrogen than a low fiber diet. Hydrogen being a product of fermentation, additional fiber was thought to cause additional fermentation that would lead to high hydrogen concentration. No one actually looked since monitoring gases deep inside the body is quite difficult, but the new pill has already reversed the long held assumption.

Football clubs and national associations, as well as the scientific community at large, will benefit from the information contained in UEFA’s Elite Club Injury Study for 2014/15.

The report has been established on behalf of the UEFA Medical Committee by the committee’s first vice-chairman Professor Jan Ekstrand, and provides crucial football-specific data that should help in the daily work of treating and preventing injuries.

Results are compiled from the period between July 2014 and May 2015 from 23 clubs that qualified for the 2014/15 UEFA Champions League group stage. Data is given on, among other things, exposure, general injury patterns, training injuries, match injuries, severe injuries, muscle injuries, ligament injuries, re-injuries, and squad attendance/availability and absences.

Background: Injury to the ipsilateral graft used for reconstruction of the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) or a new injury to the contralateral ACL are disastrous outcomes after successful ACL reconstruction (ACLR), rehabilitation, and return to activity. Studies reporting ACL reinjury rates in younger active populations are emerging in the literature, but these data have not yet been comprehensively synthesized.

Purpose: To provide a current review of the literature to evaluate age and activity level as the primary risk factors in reinjury after ACLR.

Study Design: Systematic review and meta-analysis.

Methods: A systematic review of the literature was conducted via searches in PubMed (1966 to July 2015) and EBSCO host (CINAHL, Medline, SPORTDiscus [1987 to July 2015]). After the search and consultation with experts and rating of study quality, 19 articles met inclusion for review and aggregation. Population demographic data and total reinjury (ipsilateral and contralateral) rate data were recorded from each individual study and combined using random-effects meta-analyses. Separate meta-analyses were conducted for the total population data as well as the following subsets: young age, return to sport, and young age + return to sport.

Results: Overall, the total second ACL reinjury rate was 15%, with an ipsilateral reinjury rate of 7% and contralateral injury rate of 8%. The secondary ACL injury rate (ipsilateral + contralateral) for patients younger than 25 years was 21%. The secondary ACL injury rate for athletes who return to a sport was also 20%. Combining these risk factors, athletes younger than 25 years who return to sport have a secondary ACL injury rate of 23%.

Conclusion: This systematic review and meta-analysis demonstrates that younger age and a return to high level of activity are salient factors associated with secondary ACL injury. These combined data indicate that nearly 1 in 4 young athletic patients who sustain an ACL injury and return to high-risk sport will go on to sustain another ACL injury at some point in their career, and they will likely sustain it early in the return-to-play period. The high rate of secondary injury in young athletes who return to sport after ACLR equates to a 30 to 40 times greater risk of an ACL injury compared with uninjured adolescents. These data indicate that activity modification, improved rehabilitation and return-to-play guidelines, and the use of integrative neuromuscular training may help athletes more safely reintegrate into sport and reduce second injury in this at-risk population.

I wanted to highlight this post at Five Thirty Eight, because it makes an important point about something that chemists, biologists, and MDs get to hear a lot about: nutritional science. Headlines have been produced for decades about how you should eat this superfood, and avoid that toxic one, and how this berry will protect you from Alzheimer’s and that vegetable from colon cancer, and how eating X is associated with Bad Disease Y, and so on and so on.

And you know what? The scientific rationales behind most of these are pitiful. Have a look. And have a look at how the numbers are generated – food diaries, attempts at recalling what you’ve had to eat over the past three months, that sort of thing. No one locks up five hundred people in a warehouse and feeds them precisely measured portions of People Food Mix, and without that, the numbers are always going to be fuzzy. Really, really fuzzy, to the point that the great majority of all these eat-this stories are noise, sheer noise.

… “According to multiple, peer-reviewed studies, simply being in an open network instead of a closed one is the best predictor of career success,” he writes. “In fact, the study shows that half of the predicted difference in career success (i.e., promotion, compensation, industry recognition) is due to this one variable.” … what exactly is an “open network”? To define the term, it’s helpful to understand its opposite. “Most people spend their careers in closed networks; networks of people who already know each other,” Simmons writes. “People often stay in the same industry, the same religion, and the same political party.” This type of closed network, he concedes, has some obvious advantages.

Background

Relative age effects (RAEs) typically favour older members within a cohort; however, research suggests that younger players may experience some long-term advantages, such as longer career length. The purposes of this study were to replicate previous findings on RAEs among National Hockey League (NHL) ice hockey players, National Basketball Association (NBA) basketball players and National Football League (NFL) football players and to investigate the influence of relative age on career length in all three sports.
Methods

Using official archives, birthdates and number of games played were collected for players drafted into the NBA (N?=?407), NFL (N?=?2380) and NHL (N?=?1028) from 1980 to 1989. We investigated the possibility that younger players might be able to maximize their career length by operationalizing career length as players’ number of games played throughout their careers.
Results

There was a clear RAE for the NHL, but effects were not significant for the NBA or NFL. Moreover, there was a significant difference in matches played between birth quartiles in the NHL favouring relatively younger players. There were no significant quartiles by career length effects in the NBA or NFL.
Conclusions

The significant relationship between relative age and career length provides further support for relative age as an important constraint on expertise development in ice hockey but not basketball or football. Currently, the reason why relatively younger players have longer careers is not known. However, it may be worth exploring the influence of injury risk or the development of better playing skills.

… Education is experiencing its own version of measurement fatigue. Educators complain that the focus on student test performance comes at the expense of learning. Art, music and physical education have withered, because, really, why bother if they’re not on the test?

At first, the pushback from doctors and teachers was dismissed as whining from entitled and entrenched guilds spoiled by generations of unfettered autonomy. It was natural, went the thinking, that these professionals would resist the scrutiny and discipline of performance assessment. Of course, this interpretation was partly right.