Applied Sports Science newsletter – January 19, 2016

Jack Harrison may be little known in England but that is all about to change.

The former Manchester United academy player will soon line up alongside Frank Lampard, David Villa and Andrea Pirlo after New York City FC went out of their way to sign the midfielder after he was named the No 1 pick in the MLS SuperDraft.

Harrison, who was born in Bolton, was initially selected by the Chicago Fire in the high-profile event but was later traded to NYCFC for the fourth pick and general allocation money.

“I don’t know what comes next.”

Connor Halliday sits in front of the fireplace at his mother’s home in the leafy South Hill neighborhood of Spokane, Washington. Outside, the world is blanketed in a white sea of serenity, the aftermath of an overnight snowfall. Inside the two-story dwelling, the former Washington State quarterback, the holder of three NCAA passing records, is restive.

Despite everything he has accomplished on a football field, Connor Halliday is just another 23-year-old college grad back living with his mom and looking for a job. “It’s very stressful,” says Halliday, “when you have to be someone you’re not used to being.”

Mayer and Salovey (1997:5) defined Emotional Intelligence (EI) as “the ability to perceive emotions, to assess and generate emotions so as to assist thought, to understand emotions and emotional knowledge, and to reflectively regulate emotions so as to promote emotional and intellectual growth”. Petrides (2011:657) states that there are two EI constructs (trait and ability), differentiated by the methods used to operationalise them. Trait EI is measured via self – report questions, whilst ability EI is measured using maximum performance tests, i.e. questions that have ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answers (Petrides, 2011:657). Trait EI is formally defined as a “constellation of emotional self-perceptions located at the lower levels of personality hierarchies” (Petrides, Pita, and Kokkinaki 2007:283). The table below presents a list of the 15 trait EI facets and what they mean.

Focus on the swing of your arms…I can hear my golf pro telling me that. “Focus on the swing of your club.” There might have been that too. The thing is, the latter in novices and experts alike, increased their shot accuracy, in a study done in 2007. So the why of that is largely the focus of this blog that I will build towards.

Most coaches who have taken IMPACT learned that a coach’s feedback/feed forward is the most important form of changing an athlete’s skill set. In the see/do/tell loop of a simple motor program loop (as in goal/skill/feedback), the best form of feedback is intrinsic, and the worst is extrinsic, as in when a coach simply tells a player what to do. This classic form of coaching of “Do this as I am the coach” is the worst remembered and does not develop the player’s ability to problem solve novel situations. Retention shows something is learned, not simply being able to do it the same day as it is “learned.” This area of motor learning has not been studied as long as same-day testing of what is acquired. Checking retention takes patience, which too many coaches only have in short supply.

It pains me to see players err, then quickly turn to the bench to get the “answer” or feedback from the coach, showing they cannot problem solve on their own. To combat this, I have long been studying Socratic methods of coaching (questioning/exploring) over that of sophism (debating, convincing).

Grit is the term psychologists use to describe abiding perseverance. It’s sort of motivation writ large?—?not just the energy it takes to push through a difficult task, but the energy needed to push through years of difficult tasks.

As I’m starting in on my fourth book in five years, I’ve been thinking about grit a lot lately. I’ve also been talking to a ton of folks about it. In fact, pretty much everyone I’ve spoken with over the past six months has fielded a question or two.

So this is a best-of list?—?seven lessons on grit from SEAL team commanders, elite-level performance psychologists, big-wave surfers, astrophysicists, neuroscientists, chess champions, screenwriters, dead writers, and a few personal tidbits woven through.

As I sit down to speak to Jen Welter, an NFL highlights reel is running in my head. It’s fast, it’s brutal, it’s dramatic. And most of all, it’s macho.

Indeed, the only women to be seen are the lithe, leotard-clad all-American girls waving their pom-poms. NFL is a sport that would seem unlikely to take orders from a 5ft 2in doctor of psychology, and Welter is well aware of the ground she’s broken.

“For a very long time, we would all say ‘football is the final frontier for women in sport,'” the 38-year-old told BBC Sport. “There was always that line and I never really saw that I would cross over it.” [video, pre-roll + 2:56]

One of Australia’s leading tennis umpires Tom Sweeney took part in a 4 day workshop in Canberra, the final component of the Australian Sports Commission’s (ASC) 2015 National Officiating Scholarships (NOS) program.

The NOS program works across high performance sports to increase the number of quality Australian officials and establish self-sustaining systems within sports to develop officials.

Scholars are deeply gratified when their ideas catch on. And they are even more gratified when their ideas make a difference — improving motivation, innovation, or productivity, for example. But popularity has a price: people sometimes distort ideas, and therefore fail to reap their benefits. This has started to happen with my research on “growth” versus “fixed” mindsets among individuals and within organizations.

To briefly sum up the findings: Individuals who believe their talents can be developed (through hard work, good strategies, and input from others) have a growth mindset. They tend to achieve more than those with a more fixed mindset (those who believe their talents are innate gifts). This is because they worry less about looking smart and they put more energy into learning. When entire companies embrace a growth mindset, their employees report feeling far more empowered and committed; they also receive far greater organizational support for collaboration and innovation. In contrast, people at primarily fixed-mindset companies report more of only one thing: cheating and deception among employees, presumably to gain an advantage in the talent race.

In the wake of these findings, “growth mindset” has become a buzzword in many major companies, even working its way into their mission statements. But when I probe, I often discover that people’s understanding of the idea is limited. Let’s take a look at three common misconceptions.

By recent standards, the crowd was relatively small. There were only about 500 people at the theatre, deep in Sweden’s far north, waiting for Graham Potter and his players to emerge on to the stage. In previous weeks, Ostersunds FK and their English coach had grown used to performing in front of more than 6,000 as they chased their first promotion to the country’s top flight.

That brought with it an intense pressure, of course, but this was substantially more nerve racking. Potter and his squad were not here to do what they are paid to do, to play and win football matches. No, they were here for something else entirely. They were here to dance. “A performance of Swan Lake, in fact,” says Potter, a thoughtful, intelligent 40-year-old with just a trace of a west Midlands accent.

We rarely grow alone. In fact, some psychologists have made a compelling case that we only grow in connection with others. However, we don’t need to learn with others in formal training or development programs: we can architect our own opportunities to gain insight, knowledge, and skills that move us on an upward trajectory. We can have more control over our learning at work if we make building high-quality connections a priority.

What are high-quality connections? They’re the connections with other people in which we feel positive regard, mutuality, and vitality. Positive regard is the sense that someone sees the best in us, even if we are only connected for a short time. Mutuality means we feel a sense of responsiveness and openness from another person. Finally, vitality captures the heightened sense of energy we feel when deeply connected to someone else — as if we are more alive in the moment.

Purpose: To quantify the mean daily changes in training and match load and any parallel changes in indicators of morning-measured fatigue across in-season training weeks in elite soccer players.
Methods: Following each training session and match, ratings of perceived exertion (RPE) were recorded to calculate overall session load (RPE-TL) in 29 English Premier League players. Morning ratings of fatigue, sleep quality, muscle soreness, as well as sub-maximal exercise heart rate (HRex), post-exercise heart rate recovery (HRR%) and variability (HRV) were also recorded. Data were collected for a median duration of 3 weeks (range: 1-13) and reduced to a typical weekly cycle including a weekend match day. Data were analysed using within-subjects linear mixed models.
Results: RPE-TL was approximately 600 AU (95%CI: 546-600) higher on match day vs the following day (P<0.001). RPE-TL progressively decreased by ˜ 60 AU per day over the 3 days prior to a match (P<0.05). Morning-measured fatigue, sleep quality and soreness tracked the changes in RPE-TL, being 35-40% worse on post-match day vs pre-match day (P<0.001). Perceived fatigue, sleep quality and soreness improved by 17-26 % from post-match day 1 to day 3 with further smaller (7-14%) improvements occurring between post-match day 4 and pre-match day (P0.05).
Conclusions: Morning-measured ratings of fatigue, sleep quality and muscle soreness but not HR-derived indices are sensitive to the daily fluctuations in session load experienced by elite soccer players within a standard in-season week.

New biosensors and bioelectronics systems work with smartphones and wearables. How are you designing with these sensors and where can we find the best information about them?

The NCAA’s major conferences approved a rule Friday requiring that school medical professionals have autonomous and final authority in deciding when an athlete may return to play after a concussion or other injury, a move lauded as a significant health and safety protection.

Although schools are already required to have concussion protocols, the move defines who are the primary medical providers in key decision-making roles and sets a strong wall between medical professionals and coaches, officials said. Schools will be required to ensure that no coach have hiring, retention or dismissal authority over the team doctors or trainers.

“I believe it’s the most important piece of legislation in the history of the NCAA,” said Brian Hainline, the NCAA’s chief medical officer and a neurologist. “It really defines who the primary athletics health care providers are.”

From a strategic standpoint, the NBA is in constant flux. Rotations, matchups, offensive sets, defensive values?—?new wrinkles are constantly being added and experimented with in search of marginal advantages. Some of those wrinkles work, catch on, and become the status quo, which then changes the dynamics of the league and adds openings for new adjustments to add value.

Looking at the recent past, much of this adaptation and evolution has been focused on shot selection and lineups?—?player combinations that facilitate certain styles of play, for instance. (The Golden State Warriors are perhaps the perfect example of the extreme in both areas.) However, the way coaches manage minutes for players also has changed over the past few seasons, albeit a bit more quietly, and the way they’re handling it has opened up several possible counter-advantages which have yet to be fully exploited.

(Growth, Opportunities, Aspirations and Learning of Students in college) … GOALS is an NCAA study of the experiences and well-being of current student-athletes. Previous versions of the study (2006 and 2010) provided NCAA committees, policymakers and member institutions with the most detailed information to date on a range of important issues.

Purpose: This study aimed to assess soccer-specific impairment of mechanical properties in accelerated sprinting and its relation with activity profiles during an actual match. Methods: Thirteen male field players completed four sprint measurements, wherein running speed was obtained using a laser-distance-measurement system, before and after the respective halves of two soccer matches. Macroscopic mechanical properties (theoretical maximal horizontal force, F0; maximal horizontal sprinting power, Pmax; theoretical maximal sprinting velocity, V0) during the 35-m sprint acceleration were calculated from speed–time data. Players’ activity profiles during the matches were collected using global-positioning-system units. Results: After the match, while F0 and Pmax did not significantly change, V0 was reduced (P = .038), and the magnitude of this reduction correlated with distance (positive) and number (negative) of high-speed running, number of running (negative) and other low intensity activity distance (negative) during the match. Moreover, Pmax decreased immediately before the second half (P = .014). Conclusions: The results suggest that soccer-specific fatigue probably impairs more the maximal velocity capabilities of players rather than their maximal horizontal force production abilities at initial acceleration. Furthermore, a long distance running, especially at high speed, during the match may induce relatively large impairment of the maximal velocity capabilities. In addition, the capability of producing maximal horizontal power during sprinting is presumably impaired during half-time of a soccer match with passive recovery. These findings could be useful for players and coaches aiming at training effectively to maintain sprinting performance throughout a soccer match when planning a training program.