Applied Sports Science newsletter – February 1, 2016

Denver Broncos defensive lineman Antonio Smith is a rarity in the NFL: He does not get injured. The Super Bowl will mark his 179th appearance in 180 games since the middle of the 2005 season, a decade of astonishingly good health in a relentlessly violent sport.

Rather than crediting particularly proficient care from the four teams he’s been with, Smith says he managed to suit up week after week after week thanks in large part to what he arranges on his own.

“You’ve got to get yourself a good system. Chiropractor, massage therapist, stretch therapist. A lot of guys are doing IVs now,” Smith said. “Take care of your body. You’ve got to do that. If the team doesn’t supply it, you spend the money.”

Testing is used a lot at all levels of sport – sometimes for the right reasons, and sometimes for the wrong reasons. There are a whole host of reasons why a coach may employ testing of their athlete, and there are also a wide range of tests that are available to the coach to use. In this article, I will examine the pros and cons of testing, the reasons behind it all, and the selection of tests that may or may not be useful.

Want to gain muscle and lose fat? And you want to do it fast? New research from McMaster University says it’s possible, but it won’t be easy. In fact it’s ‘gruelling.’

That’s the word that Stuart Phillips, a professor in the Department of Kinesiology at McMaster and senior investigator on the study, used to describe what he put 40 young men through for the sake of science.

Phillips spoke to the CBC’s Conrad Collaco about how he got one group of the men to lose more than 10 pounds in six weeks and gain muscle while they lost weight. [video, 7:00]

The celebrated marathoner announced his retirement last week after a rough few years. His post-mortem: focusing on speed over volume may have prolonged his career.

… Child prodigies rarely become adult geniuses who change the world. We assume that they must lack the social and emotional skills to function in society. When you look at the evidence, though, this explanation doesn’t suffice: Less than a quarter of gifted children suffer from social and emotional problems. A vast majority are well adjusted — as winning at a cocktail party as in the spelling bee.

What holds them back is that they don’t learn to be original. They strive to earn the approval of their parents and the admiration of their teachers. But as they perform in Carnegie Hall and become chess champions, something unexpected happens: Practice makes perfect, but it doesn’t make new.

William Osler’s ideal of the clinician-scientist-teacher not only set standards for medical education on both sides of the Atlantic more than a century ago, it also holds solutions for the training of the next generation of translational researchers today. Having pioneered modern bedside teaching in Canada and the United States in the late 1800s, Osler was appointed Regius Professor of Medicine at the University of Oxford in 1905. Upon his arrival from Johns Hopkins to Oxford, he discovered that, in England, research and preclinical medical education in universities were dissociated from clinical practice and postgraduate training in hospitals. Because Osler was convinced that future advances in medical education and patient care would come from research, he challenged the English medical establishment to integrate research into medical education and patient care under the auspices of a university professor: “The Professor has three duties—to see that the patients are well treated, to investigate disease, and to teach students and nurses” (1). He argued that great scientific discoveries came from “the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake” and that already in the early 20th century, the hallmark of such discoveries was their translatability into practical applications (1). Thus, the enduring challenge in modern medicine is not only scientific innovation but also translation of scientific discoveries into new therapies for the benefit of humanity.

Robust processes may be appealing but a fragile process can help surface problems when they are still small and quickly fixed.

How we think of time can lead to some odd results. For example, imagine your co-worker says next Wednesday’s meeting has been moved forward two days. When is the meeting going to be held? Your response can be predicted by how you see your relationship to time. If you see time flowing toward you, you’re more likely to say Monday. But if you see yourself wading through time, then you’re more likely to say Friday.

That’s not all: How you relate to time depends on what you’re doing at the moment. If you’re standing at the end of a line, or are in the middle of a train ride, you are more likely to use the time-moving metaphor, and say Monday; as you get toward the front of the line, or are getting on or off the train, you’re more likely to say Friday. If you’re waiting for something, time flows toward you; if you’re not, time’s something you move in.

Wearable sensor technologies are essential to the realization of personalized medicine through continuously monitoring an individual’s state of health. Sampling human sweat, which is rich in physiological information, could enable non-invasive monitoring. Previously reported sweat-based and other non-invasive biosensors either can only monitor a single analyte at a time or lack on-site signal processing circuitry and sensor calibration mechanisms for accurate analysis of the physiological state. Given the complexity of sweat secretion, simultaneous and multiplexed screening of target biomarkers is critical and requires full system integration to ensure the accuracy of measurements. Here we present a mechanically flexible and fully integrated (that is, no external analysis is needed) sensor array for multiplexed in situ perspiration analysis, which simultaneously and selectively measures sweat metabolites (such as glucose and lactate) and electrolytes (such as sodium and potassium ions), as well as the skin temperature (to calibrate the response of the sensors).

Sturridge had an explosive season at a new club, excelling alongside his striking partner. Then injuries begin to plague him and the Englishman’s right-hand-man up front left the club. A year later, the fireworks from their one great season together were nothing but ashes. This has been Daniel Sturridge’s story at Liverpool so far; however, it is not unique. Indeed, it has all happened before at a different club, with another goalscoring partner and in fact, a different Sturridge.

… This is the curse of being employed by one of football’s new-breed of super-rich clubs. While being sacked by Chelsea or PSG or Real Madrid may not do much damage to a manager’s reputation — it is often more rite of passage than damning indictment, and it invariably comes with the added benefit of a nice pay-off — there is a pernicious flipside: Whatever you do while in position is unavoidably, irretrievably undermined by the perception of how it was achieved.

What is intriguing, however, is that there is a breed of managers emerging who are perfectly suited to working in this unforgiving environment. Blanc, certainly, is one of their number; so too is Massimiliano Allegri, who guided Juventus to the Champions League final last season; Manuel Pellegrini, Manchester City’s apparent dead manager walking, can be included; Carlo Ancelotti, erstwhile of thankless tasks at AC Milan, Chelsea, PSG and Real Madrid is probably their high priest.

… We can only speculate as to why so many of these QBs that were well regarded out of high school haven’t found success at the collegiate level but we might as well take a stab at it.

One minor problem that hurt these rankings is the fact that many great high school QBs are also fantastic at baseball and consequently (and quite understandably) choose to pursue opportunities in that game instead. Then there are injuries, reported or not, that slow down a QB and make it harder for him to have success. You can’t blame scouts for those issues.

But for the most part we simply have to conclude that the criterion that scouts are using to judge QBs simply doesn’t do a good job of projecting which players will actually be effective.

Regardless what sport we work with it is often our goal as coaches to try and determine athlete readiness for competitions. Many of us coaches understand that in a sport like track and field there will be meets and possibly many meets where our athletes will not be at peak performance or even ready to throw a respectable distance in comparison to their personal bests. This is normally planned for because the ultimate goal is to throw far, jump high, and run fast at the big meets like the conference championships, regionals, and finals. Planning like this can be called periodization or as Coach Gambetta refers to it as planned performance training.

When working with teams rather then individuals, training can be and in my opinion has to be planned for in a vastly different way. Many times in a team environment the results of the pre-season and in-season will determine if you have an opportunity to move on to the bigger competitions like regionals or finals. If the in-season is not successful then the chances of the team continuing on into the post-season become very low. Taking all this into consideration how do you go about determining your teams readiness for the season and for that matter week-to-week during the season?

… Between the 2015 Waratahs campaign, the Rugby Championship, the Wallabies’ run to the World Cup final and a stint with Japanese Top League side Ricoh, his longest break amounts to roughly a month.

Speaking to rugby.com.au in Japan, Foley says he feels better than ever.

“At the moment the body’s in good nick. Touch wood, there’s been no injuries,” he said

… this is a tricky issue to solve, even assuming that all sports are hellbent on doing so in the first place. Speak to a dozen people and they will have a dozen different plans. Broadly, though, there is agreement that something needs to be done. And, more vaguely, that the ‘something’ requires better leadership from – and greater scrutiny of – sporting bodies as well as a deeper understanding of the complicated and often interlinked issues around governance, anti-doping and match-fixing. Oh, and money. Lots more money.

However, the sports lawyer and chief executive of the London Marathon, Nick Bitel, is blunt. “We have poor governance throughout international sport because no one holds these bodies to account,” he warns. “You might be able to show me one or two that are well run but it’s not very often.”