Applied Sports Science newsletter – January 23, 2016

… Although Bouchard lost, 6-4, 6-2, to fourth-seeded Agnieszka Radwanska on Wednesday, she played freely and sharply, with the aggression that powered her up the rankings two years ago.

Radwanska said that Bouchard was on her way back, “playing much better tennis,” and that she thought Bouchard would be going deeper in Grand Slam tournaments in a few months.

That would be familiar territory for Bouchard, who in 2014 reached the semifinals of the Australian Open and the French Open and the final of Wimbledon. By that year’s end, she entered the top five and landed a lucrative management deal with IMG.

The influence of Sir Alex Ferguson lives on at the top of the Premier League, according to the Leicester City defender Danny Simpson, who has said his club are benefiting from the winning mentality bred by the former Manchester United manager.

Simpson, like his team-mate Danny Drinkwater, is a graduate of United’s academy and he went on to spend four years as a professional on the Old Trafford books before being sold in 2010. Drinkwater left Manchester two year later but that pair, along with Kasper Schmeichel – the son of Peter – retain the attitude cultivated by Ferguson. Simpson believes that is one of the reasons why Leicester have not faded from this season’s title race.

“There are a few of us who have that mentality from the manager, Sir Alex,” said Simpson. “Losing hurts and even when Aston Villa scored that goal [against Leicester last week to claim a 1-1 draw], that hurt us.

As a two-time Pro Bowl tight end and Super Bowl champion for the New York Giants from 1985 to 1990, Mark Bavaro’s eye is naturally drawn to the position when he watches games. The combination of Rob Gronkowski’s athletic skills, size, and how defenders usually attempt to tackle him low produce a trifecta that is unlike anything Bavaro has seen before.

It can lead to explosive offensive results. And it can also leave the 6-foot-6, 265-pound Gronkowski more vulnerable to injuries than most.

“There’s nobody like him, really just because of that size. You don’t see tight ends that big that can move like him,” said Bavaro, an all-time Bill Belichick favorite. “So the only way to tackle him is to go low. It’s not cheap. It’s not dirty. It’s just a matter of survival.

… “I want to play longer, to be a more effective player into my mid-to-late 30s,” says Lowry, who has logged the 10th-most regular-season minutes in the league since 2013-14, with 6,807. “I don’t want to be a guy that’s just out there to be out there; I want to play and contribute. So for me it’s just maintaining it. Now I’m at a point to where it’s, ‘How do I get even better?’ I’m at a point to where I want to be even better.”

LA Galaxy manager Bruce Arena feels MLS needs to slow its expansion plans and that the league is losing focus on developing domestic players.

Since the end of the 2004 season, MLS has doubled in size from 10 to 20 teams. Four more clubs are set to come on board by the end of the decade and last month MLS announced plans to expand to 28 teams, though the timeline has not been spelled out.

“I think we need to slow down a little bit,” Arena told ESPN FC in a wide-ranging interview. “What we’re not prepared for yet is the size of the league. As the league continues to grow and get bigger, there are issues with travel, there are issues with suitable facilities, things that don’t make it easier.

A major survey of NCAA student athletes released this week reveals what critics of youth sports have been saying for years: The system is really whacked.

College athletes reported specializing in their sports before the word teen is added to their ages. Many regret doing so, the survey found. The athletes think they play in too many games at too young an age. And their parents totally think they are going pro.

This was the first time that youth sports questions were added to the NCAA’s survey examining the well being of college athletes. And it might unintentionally prove to crazy sports parents that early specialization and year-round play is exactly what their children need to play in college.

OBJECTIVE:

To explain statistical significance and clinical meaningfulness and to provide guidance in evaluating the clinical meaningfulness of a study.
BACKGROUND:

Understanding the results and statistics reported in original research remains a large challenge for many certified athletic trainers, which in turn, may be among the biggest barriers to integrating research into athletic training practice.
DESCRIPTION:

Statistical significance reflects the influence of chance on the outcome, whereas clinical meaningfulness reflects the degree to which the differences and relationships reported in a study are relevant to athletic training practice. As consumers of original research, athletic trainers must understand the core factors, most notably sample size, that influence statistical significance.
RECOMMENDATIONS:

To assist clinicians in evaluating the clinical meaningfulness of a research study, authors should provide the core elements necessary for interpreting statistical significance and discuss the clinical meaningfulness of statistically significant findings.

… Where do you stand as a coach on the use of performance analysis?

“I like it. I need it. I won’t necessarily throw it in front of the players all the time. I’ve had some coaches that did and some coaches that didn’t. I think it can work both ways depending on how you use the data, but I think it’s important to have the data as a coach. There are definitely certain correlations with certain types of outputs that will correlate with injuries. And I think it’s really important, especially when you get into international soccer, these events where you have games every three or four days and you only have 23 players to choose from, you can’t afford to have three, four, five injuries.

Clinicians or strength and conditioning professionals who prescribe training workloads aim for workloads that are high enough to improve fitness (ie, performance), but not so high as to risk injury. At the extremes, no training results in an unprepared athlete, whereas an overuse injury is, by definition, an error in training prescription. Banister et al first described an athlete’s training state as the difference between positive (ie, ‘fitness’) and negative (ie, ‘fatigue’) influences. To quantify this concept, ‘fitness’ was represented as the workload (an arbitrary ‘training impulse’) of the athlete over a 3–6?weeks period and ‘fatigue’ was represented by the workload performed over a shorter time frame of 1?week. We recommend the terms ‘chronic workload’ for the longer window of training (ie, Banister’s ‘fitness’) and ‘acute workload’ for the immediate window of training (ie, Banister’s ‘fatigue’) (figure 1). High chronic workloads (ie, intense training), combined with reductions in acute workloads before important competition (ie, taper), would be expected to improve sporting performance.

Cooperation is essential for successful organizations. But cooperating often requires people to put others’ welfare ahead of their own. In this post, we discuss recent research on cooperation that applies the “Thinking, fast and slow” logic of intuition versus deliberation. We explain why people sometimes (but not always) cooperate in situations where it’s not in their self-interest to do so, and show how properly designed policies can build “habits of virtue” that create a culture of cooperation. TL;DR summary: intuition favors behaviors that are typically optimal, so institutions that make cooperation typically advantageous lead people to adopt cooperation as their intuitive default; this default then “spills over” into settings where it’s not actually individually advantageous to cooperate.

Alan Clarke tells Sean Gallagher why being the global leaders in elite sports performance monitoring just isn’t enough for these innovators.

I’ve never been a science person. My eyes used to glaze over during biology lessons at school. The same thing has been happening recently with professional cycling and the increasing use of buzzwords and puzzling acronyms. Watts, HRM, BPM – WTF?

More professional riders seem fixated on the numbers from their little black box. The best cycle fitters use lasers to obtain the perfect position. It’s filtered down to us rank-and-file too: Strava means a distillation of times and speeds on every bike ride, be it a century or a commute.

We’re heading into a data revolution in professional cycling, previously a lo-fi sport comparatively uncolonised by metrics and analytics. Knowledge is often power, especially in the fight against doping, and it is good to have precise answers for what we’re seeing. But are we losing something in the process?

Aurora Health Care will invest $40 million in Marquette University’s Athletic Performance Research Center the university is developing on its campus in partnership with the Milwaukee Bucks.

The investment by Aurora in the $120 million facility, which is to be located on 12 acres, bordered by North Sixth, North 10th, and West Michigan streets and the Marquette Interchange, is the largest ever made by the Milwaukee health care system with a partner in its headquarters community. Aurora’s participation was announced Wednesday by Marquette president Michael Lovell during his second presidential address.

A look at the top new products for the soccer market – With more than 300 exhibitors covering 600,000 square feet at NSCAA, this was The Largest Soccer Trade Show in North America. GoalNation Soccer Locker Review picks the best of the show. Here is a close up look at how technology is changing our world and the way we can train youth and professional soccer players.

PLAYERTEK – The world’s first GPS sports tracker designed exclusively for soccer players. You can now measure and analyze every detail of your play – packed with sensors, you can compare your own individual stats against your favorite professional soccer stars.

What is this? The GPS system includes a PLAYERTEK Pod, a base-layer garment with a pocket on the back to hold the pod and a micro USB cable to charge and sync the device. Professional grade sensors within the Pod make almost 2500 measurements every second and track a player’s every movement on the pitch. The sensors include a sophisticated GPS module that measures the speed and position ten times a second and a set of 3D sensors that measure every impact, force, twist and turn
– See more at: http://goalnation.com/playertek-article/#sthash.DynkthPV.nx0euBeL.dpuf

Flexible and stretchable electronics and optoelectronics configured in soft, water resistant formats uniquely address seminal challenges in biomedicine. Over the past decade, there has been enormous progress in the materials, designs, and manufacturing processes for flexible/stretchable system subcomponents, including transistors, amplifiers, bio-sensors, actuators, light emitting diodes, photodetector arrays, photovoltaics, energy storage elements, and bare die integrated circuits. Nanomaterials prepared using top-down processing approaches and synthesis-based bottom-up methods have helped resolve the intrinsic mechanical mismatch between rigid/planar devices and soft/curvilinear biological structures, thereby enabling a broad range of non-invasive, minimally invasive, and implantable systems to address challenges in biomedicine. Integration of therapeutic functional nanomaterials with soft bioelectronics demonstrates therapeutics in combination with unconventional diagnostics capabilities. Recent advances in soft materials, devices, and integrated systems are reviewes, with representative examples that highlight the utility of soft bioelectronics for advanced medical diagnostics and therapies.

Stress fractures are simply a consequence of being active. Our bone is a living tissue. It responds to stress by becoming harder and thicker. When the activity we perform exceeds the capacity of our bones ability to handle the stress, a fracture will occur.

… in this article I will discuss some of the evidence in the literature for various RTP criteria, specifically for hamstring strain injuries. It is a chance to reflect on what RTP milestones we are using and why; have they just been inherited over time, are they based on anecdotal experience and/or do they have support from the evidence base?

… Overuse injuries are caused by repetitive stress on the muscle and skeletal system without enough rest to allow the body to adapt. They are a special risk for developing bodies and immature skeletons and often happen during the adolescent growth spurt. Studies show these injuries account for more than half of pediatric sports injuries and often happen due to intensive focus on a single sport with a heavy practice and competition schedule. Unrecognized and untreated, they can sideline athletes from play and lead to more serious injuries and disability.

Now sports medicine experts are advocating a greater role for athletic trainers like Mr. White, who can help students recover without incurring lasting damage or hampering their sports activities very much. The trainers specialize in sports-related injury and rehabilitation and are licensed or otherwise regulated in 49 states and the District of Columbia.

Background: Knowledge is limited regarding how long improvements in biomechanics remain after completion of a lower extremity injury prevention program.

Purpose: To evaluate the effects of an injury prevention program on movement technique and peak vertical ground-reaction forces (VGRF) over time compared with a standard warm-up (SWU) program.

Study Design: Controlled laboratory study.

Methods: A total of 1104 incoming freshmen (age range, 17-22 years) at a military academy in the United States volunteered to participate. Participants were cluster-randomized by military company to either the Dynamic Integrated Movement Enhancement (DIME) injury prevention program or SWU. A random subsample of participants completed a standardized jump-landing task at each time point: immediately before the intervention (PRE), immediately after (POST), and 2 (POST2M), 4 (POST4M), 6 (POST6M), and 8 months (POST8M) after the intervention. VGRF data collected during the jump-landing task were normalized to body weight (%BW). The Landing Error Scoring System (LESS) was used to evaluate movement technique during the jump landing. The change scores (?) for each variable (LESS, VGRF) between the group’s average value at PRE and each time point were calculated. Separate univariate analyses of variance were performed to evaluate group differences.

Results: The results showed a greater decrease in mean (±SD) VGRF in the DIME group compared with the SWU group at all retention time points: POST2M (SWU [?%BW], ?0.13 ± 0.82; DIME, ?0.62 ± 0.91; P = .001), POST4M (SWU, ?0.15 ± 0.98; DIME,?0.46 ± 0.64; P = .04), POST6M (SWU, ?0.04 ± 0.96; DIME, ?0.53 ± 0.83; P = .004), and POST8M (SWU, 0.38 ± 0.95; DIME, ?0.11 ± 0.98; P = .003), but there was not a significant improvement in the DIME group between PRE and POST8M (?%BW, ?0.11 ± 0.98). No group differences in ? LESS were observed.

Conclusion: The study findings demonstrated that an injury prevention program performed as a warm-up can reduce vertical ground-reaction forces compared with a standard warm-up but a maintenance program is likely necessary in order for continued benefit.

The importance of shared decision making in health care has been increasingly recognized over the past several decades. Consensus has emerged that of the various types of decisions we make, those that involve choosing among more than one reasonable treatment option should be made through a process in which patients participate: clinicians provide patients with information about all the options and help them to identify their preferences in the context of their values.

But there are many ways in which decision making can be shared between clinicians and patients. Physicians describe processes that range from explaining the clinical situation and making a recommendation that the patient can accept or reject to outlining the treatment options and leaving the final decision to the patient.1 In other words, the leeway and responsibility given to the patient for making the decision can vary widely.

… Today, our greatest health problems relate to overeating. People are consuming too many calories and too much low-quality food, bringing on chronic diseases like cancer, obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.

Unlike scurvy, these illnesses are much harder to get a handle on. They don’t appear overnight; they develop over a lifetime. And fixing them isn’t just a question of adding an occasional orange to someone’s diet. It involves looking holistically at diets and other lifestyle behaviors, trying to tease out the risk factors that lead to illness.

Today’s nutrition science has to be a lot more imprecise. It’s filled with contradictory studies that are each rife with flaws and limitations. The messiness of this field is a big reason why nutrition advice can be confusing.

Gluten-free diets are increasingly popular in the fitness community. But a new, carefully designed study of the effects of gluten-free diets on athletic performance suggests that giving up gluten may not provide the benefits that many healthy athletes hope for.

A study last year of almost 1,000 competitive athletes in Australia found that 41 percent currently were following some type of gluten-free diet, many because they thought it was healthier than their previous eating habits. A majority, however, said that they avoided foods containing gluten, a protein found in wheat, rye and barley, because they thought that they were allergic or overly sensitive to it, although only 13 percent had received a formal medical diagnosis of celiac disease, a serious autoimmune condition, or other gluten-related disorders.

Trent Stellingwerff gets straight to the point.

“Pseudoscience kills people,” said Stellingwerff, a Canadian sport physiologist with a keen interest in performance nutrition. He’s responding to an article I wrote about a viewpoint that suggests doping should be allowed in sport.

“There is a lot of pseudoscience studying only one athlete. It seems every week some marketing guy emails me some N=1 exercise study.”

FRONTLINE, The New York Times and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation examine the hidden dangers of vitamins and supplements, a multibillion-dollar industry with limited FDA oversight. [video, 54:11]

… A match-fixing epidemic, however, is not necessarily the big scandal that many people around the tennis world anticipated or feared. A greater concern has been the possibility of a steroid controversy. Given the rampant steroid use in other sports, particularly baseball, many people have wondered if tennis might have a similar problem, a worry heightened by the way in which the sport has evolved. Finesse still matters, but tennis these days is really about power and endurance, both of which can be artificially enhanced, and with so much money on the line, it is hard not to be a little suspicious. A number of lower-ranked players have been suspended for steroid use, and in 2013, one marquee name was nailed: Marin Cilic tested positive for a banned stimulant and was suspended for nine months. (The suspension was subsequently reduced to four months after he convinced the Court of Arbitration for Sport that he had taken the substance by accident.) In 2014, Cilic won the U.S. Open.

But many people around the game, notably Federer, believe that tennis’s governing bodies have not been nearly as vigilant as they should be regarding doping. At a press conference in London in November, Federer said there needed to be much more testing. “I’m always surprised,” he said. “I win a tournament, I walk off the court, and it’s like, ‘Where’s the doping guy?’ Whenever you make the quarterfinals of a tournament, when the points are greater, the money is greater, you should know that you will be tested.”

The tennis serve has been reported to be one of the most important strokes for winning a match. This stroke is a sequence of motions referred to as a ‘‘kinetic chain’’ that begins with lower limb actions and is followed by rotations of the trunk and the upper limb. This kinetic chain allows the generation, summation, and transfer of mechanical energy to generate high ball velocity.

From the perspective of sport performance, it has been suggested that an effective energy flow during the serve would allow the player to produce a high ball velocity, which is a key element of successful play. However, the energy flow through the kinetic chain during the tennis serve has not been documented, and it is still unknown whether ball velocity is related to the quality and magnitude of the energy flow through the upper limb kinetic chain during this stroke.

It is believed that injuries occur when mechanical energy is transferred or absorbed by the joints in amounts or at rates that exceed the threshold of human tissue damage. It is hypothesized that upper limb joint injuries could be caused by alterations in the energy flow across segments during the tennis serve. If the action of one joint in the kinetic chain is altered, then the contribution of the other joints increases to accommodate the loss of energy, which may lead to increased joint loadings and, consequently, overuse joint injuries. However, the relationships among energy flow, upper limb joint kinetics, and overuse joint injuries have never been assessed.

Traditional biomechanical analyses of human movement are generally derived from linear mathematics. While these methods can be useful in many situations, they do not describe behaviors in human systems that are predominately nonlinear. For this reason, nonlinear analysis methods based on a dynamical systems approach have become more prevalent in recent literature. These analysis techniques have provided new insights into how systems (1) maintain pattern stability, (2) transition into new states, and (3) are governed by short and long-term (fractal) correlational processes at different spatio-temporal scales. These different aspects of system dynamics are typically investigated using concepts related to variability, stability, complexity, and adaptability. The purpose of this paper is to compare and contrast these different concepts and demonstrate that, although related, these terms represent fundamentally different aspects of system dynamics. In particular, we argue that variability should not uniformly be equated with stability or complexity of movement. In addition, current dynamic stability measures based on nonlinear analysis methods (such as the finite maximal Lyapunov exponent) can reveal local instabilities in movement dynamics, but the degree to which these local instabilities relate to global postural and gait stability and the ability to resist external perturbations remains to be explored. Finally, systematic studies are needed to relate observed reductions in complexity with aging and disease to the adaptive capabilities of the movement system and how complexity changes as a function of different task constraints.

No but really though. That’s how Tinder’s algorithm treats your dating life. In an interview with Fast Company, Tinder’s CEO Sean Rad revealed that Tinder uses an Elo score to rate people’s desirability within the system. Tinder then uses that rating algorithm to show you potential partners in your desirability league.

Chess players will be familiar with the concept of Elo scores, which are now used in a variety of contexts from sports to video games in addition to chess. In short, whenever someone wins a game, they take rating points from the loser. So if your Tinder score is 1200 and the person on your screen is 1100 and you swipe right but they swipe left – you lose. And your rating goes down while there’s goes up.

It’s easy (as a high-school coach of mine used to say) to tell the difference between a cart-horse and a thoroughbred. But if you line up a bunch of thoroughbreds, can you predict which one will win the race?

That’s a much harder proposition, and one that exercise scientists have been struggling with for decades. It has become axiomatic that measures like VO2 max can distinguish between couch potatoes and athletes, but it can’t pick the winner from among a group of athletes of roughly similar ability.

Still, it’s an obvious fact that some athletes consistently beat other athletes—so what gives them their edge? Is it physical or mental? Is there something we can measure?

Exclusive: Assistant coach Peter Krawietz explains how half-time videos, hard work and laughter are integral to the Anfield revolution