Applied Sports Science newsletter – January 20, 2016

… “I don’t talk about it too much,” DeRozan told Sportsnet this week. “But mentally that injury was tough on me. It took a lot out of me just to accept that I was hurt and I was going to be away from the game that long.”

But DeRozan used his downtime wisely. In fact you could argue the seeds for a career-best season that should result in an Eastern Conference All-Star nod were planted when he was laid up on his couch, killing time.

Have you ever walked out of a store with a shiny new gadget and wondered, “Why did I buy this? I can’t afford it. I don’t need it. What made me buy it?” Maybe you’ve asked yourself similar questions after you broke your diet with a tempting dessert, or fell back into the arms of someone who broke your heart: “I knew I shouldn’t have done this. Why can’t I make smarter decisions?”

Neuroscientists have studied questions like these for decades, and they’ve produced a wealth of answers, as well as some tips to catch yourself in the midst of self-deception. Here are three simple ways to avoid deceiving yourself, and turn bad decisions into learning experiences.

… Over the last decade, there has been a rush to start children in competitive sports as early as possible. Many believe that the early start in a single sport gives the children an advantage as they develop. Some blame the research of K. Anders Ericsson, who introduced the 10,000-hour rule that was popularized by journalists such as Malcolm Gladwell, Dan Coyle, and others. Ericsson’s research into expert performance in disciplines such as chess and violin suggested that 10,000 hours was needed to reach an expert level. Based on this research, and its generalizing to all disciplines, parents pushed children into sports at earlier ages. Numerous year-round sports leagues and teams have cited the 10,000-hour rule as a reason for year-round sports participation, and coaches sell their teams by telling parents that their child will not have a chance to make a high-school team if he or she has not started year-round competitive sports by eight years old.

The problem with early specialization is the specialization. As Rene Wormhoudt from the Netherlands Football Federation said, “Children become good movers; good movers become good athletes; and good athletes become specialists.” When a child specializes in one sport, she attempts to reverse this order: She becomes a specialist first and attempts to develop athleticism and movement skills later. When I start with varsity and college athletes, I often have to teach them how to skip. They have specialized skills, but they lack movement skills. They are not athletic. Consequently, childhood injury rates have increased.

The below are a collection of thoughts and observations acquired through 40 plus years of coaching and interaction with Championship Performers from across the globe. Championship Performance is no easy feat … I hope some of these points may offer clarity on the reality of what it takes:

1. Risk taking is a common trait among champions. Learning to be comfortable taking calculated risks to drive positive change – whether that be in mindset, mechanics, strategies, tactics or training methods is essential. Perpetual residency in the familiarity of comfort zones and associated risk avoidance will consistently blunt your progress. If you want to be a Championship Performer, get comfortable being uncomfortable.

For all users of new technology – especially tracking technology – there’s a trap that exists which coaches must avoid: collecting data for the sake of collecting it. Tracking an athlete’s performance, heart rate, training load and other data points is fairly useless if you don’t apply the knowledge derived from the data.

Dan Wilcox, nutritionist and owner of Elite Fueling, helps BYU track performance data on its football players. Using tools like the Polar Team 2system and Polar V800 GPS Sports Watch, Wilcox is not only able to grab the raw data from player testing, but he is able to apply that data to generate real-world results.

“As a coach, you really have to have an exercise physiology background to really understand the makeup of what’s going on,” says Wilcox. “Otherwise, it’s just data on a page. You may understand that this guy can run this fast and what his heart rate is, but you really have to understand what the athlete’s VO2 Max is and how it reacts to the data.”

Cam Chambers was the first of Michigan State’s 2016 recruiting class to commit, so it only made sense the receiver from New Jersey was also first to initiate a voluntary workout.

It happened around 10 p.m. last Tuesday, after Chambers — who committed on Aug. 1, 2014 — and his roommate, midterm quarterback enrollee Messiah deWeaver, had gone to bed.

“I’m looking over and I’m like ‘Are you up?, ” Chambers said. “He’s like, ‘yeah, what’s up?’ I’m like, ‘You want to go work out?'”

Many procedures in modern clinical medicine rely on the use of electronic implants in treating conditions that range from acute coronary events to traumatic injury. However, standard permanent electronic hardware acts as a nidus for infection: bacteria form biofilms along percutaneous wires, or seed haematogenously, with the potential to migrate within the body and to provoke immune-mediated pathological tissue reactions. The associated surgical retrieval procedures, meanwhile, subject patients to the distress associated with re-operation and expose them to additional complications. Here, we report materials, device architectures, integration strategies, and in vivo demonstrations in rats of implantable, multifunctional silicon sensors for the brain, for which all of the constituent materials naturally resorb via hydrolysis and/or metabolic actioneliminating the need for extraction.

The NBA and STATS LLC today announced an expansion of their long-standing partnership that will provide media outlets around the world with an opportunity to use much of the same STATS SportVU Player Tracking data used by NBA teams for scouting, player development and training.

As the Official Player Tracking Partner of the NBA, STATS SportVU data will now be used by ESPN, NBA on TNT, and Bleacher Report. The data will also be made available to other media outlets around the globe to provide fans with more insight into lineups, substitutions, and play calling, as well as analysis on player and team performance including shooting, passing, and rebounding. Previously, the NBA’s SportVU data was only available to NBA teams and through NBA Digital assets.

The results are in for the Scripps Translational Science Institute’s Wired For Health study, and there’s no sugar-coating it: they’re disappointing for those working in digital health. The six-month randomized control trial found no short-term benefit in health costs or outcomes for patients monitoring their health with connected devices.

“It was a bit disappointing, but remember, this was the first multisensor trial that’s ever been reported, so in that respect it was a pioneering effort,” study author and STSI Director Dr. Eric Topol told MobiHealthNews.

It looks like the Gear S2 might be getting a little brother. Leaked images suggest Samsung is preparing to release a new fitness tracker with detachable bodies and a few new tricks – including measuring your body fat.

Called the SM-R150 (probably not the final name), it looks like a fitness-oriented device running a version of the company’s proprietary Tizen OS.

Do athletes truly understand their hydration as well as they should? Probably not. Gatorade thinks there’s room for improvement.

After consulting with Smart Design and the Gatorade Sport Science Institute on innovation and blueprints, Gatorade launched the first smart cap, to monitor an athlete’s hydration. From sodium and electrolyte deficiency to sweat production, Gatorade’s turbine censored smart cap and band-aid like microchip are individually linked to each player, retrieving and sending data back to a software program after each sip and sprint.

Applied Nanodetectors is in the early stages of developing a noninvasive breath sensor for diabetics to monitor daily glucose levels. By measuring the levels of volatile organic compounds in breath, if accurate, this could replace finger pricking for disease sufferers, and create a simple diagnostic test.

The company has a related product that monitors the concentration of exhaled trace gas chemicals in an asthma patient’s breath, before symptoms develop, for early warning of attacks.

… Female athletes are more likely to suffer a noncontact anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury during sports compared with male. Studies suggest that females exhibit movement and loading patterns that place them at a greater risk for ACL injury. Some of these patterns, such as greater peak external knee abduction moments and peak abduction angles, prospectively predict ACL injury risk in female athletes. Despite the considerable amount of evidence that implicate movement and loading patterns as part of the noncontact ACL injury mechanism, it is not well understood how other aspects such as central processing, environment, and physical abilities influence biomechanical patterns during movement tasks.

Experimental paradigms that use unanticipated tasks to study lower extremity kinematics and kinetics may provide better insight into movement and loading patterns that athletes would encounter during competition. When compared with anticipated tasks, lower extremity biomechanics during unanticipated tasks are consistent with kinematic and kinetic profiles known to increase the risk of ACL injury. The use of unanticipated landing paradigms may therefore offer better insights into possible “worst-case scenarios” of lower extremity movement and loading patterns that one could expect to experience during a practice or game situation.

If, like me, you grew up watching tennis in the late-1970s and early-1980s, you’d remember numerous teenage players at the top of the women’s game. At Grand Slam tournaments during those years, it was perfectly common for around one third of the seeds in the Ladies’ singles to be teenagers. However, at this year’s Australian Open there is one seed yet to celebrate her 20th birthday, the maximum there has been at each of the last seven editions of the year’s first Grand Slam.

Back in 1981, five of the 14 seeded players in the Australian Open draw were teenagers with 19-year-olds Tracy Austin, Hana Mandlikova and Pam Shriver accompanied by Andrea Jaeger (16) and Bettina Bunge (18).

Even the best teams have a weak link. In “The Numbers Game”, Chris Anderson and David Sally suggest that a soccer team is only as good as its worst player. I’m not quite ready to sign on to their “O-ring” theory yet, but I do have a tool for finding the players who drag down their teams or simply don’t fit.

Shapley values are a sort of sophisticated plus-minus or with-or-without-you metric. I use them to create a series of statistical hypotheticals that answer the question, “If I formed this team in every possible order, what would the average contribution of each player be, at the moment he joined, to the team’s overall results?” The most important thing to keep in mind about Shapley values is that they’re contextual, just like every other metric taken from match data. This affects their interpretation.