Applied Sports Science newsletter – February 2, 2016

… Ali won the greatest era. And for that, he is almost universally regarded as the only thing he ever wanted to become: The greatest of all time.

More and more, it looks like Novak Djokovic will be this tennis era’s Ali.

… When asked if, because it was a great final, it made it easier to absorb the loss, Williams gave a rare insight into the isolation at the very top of the game. She said: “It’s interesting. I mean, every time I walk in this room, everyone expects me to win every single match, every single day of my life. As much as I would like to be a robot, I’m not. But, you know, I do the best that I can. I try to win every single time I step out there, every single point, but realistically I can’t do it. Maybe someone else can, but I wasn’t able to do it.

… “Lee came in a little bit different than last year — he was really prepared for this camp,” Klinsmann said after Nguyen’s deft touches and dangerous combination play tormented Iceland’s defense for 90 minutes. “From day one on, he set the tone … he was unquestionably in the starting lineup after a week already for us.”

With vision, skill and a nose for goal, Nguyen’s ability has never been in question. His physical condition was a different story. Because the demands of the modern game at the highest level require top-notch athleticism, that’s what the undersized (5-foot-8) Texan focused on during his brief offseason.

“I just came in fitter than I was before,” Nguyen said. It showed.

When someone requires physical rehabilitation, it indicates that one or more systems in the body wasn’t resilient to a stressor of some kind. The stressor could be an injury or disease. It could be too much exercise or the wrong exercise. Either the body was unable to fend off the stressor, or it was able to fend it off, but at a very high cost that isn’t desirable.

Traditionally, the way to become more resilient to those stressors is through a fitness strategy – intelligent stressors, intelligent exercise, intelligent nutrition, intelligent sleep, and intelligent decisions about when to engage in intense activities, whether they be physical or mental.

But there’s no reason why we can’t affect what led a person to be injured in the first place, and bring their systems back to minimum standards, using rehabilitation and fitness simultaneously. Unfortunately, most physical therapists don’t know how to deliver them in parallel.

While the idea of going back to basics isn’t groundbreaking, the Union are applying this notion to their training in a way that has never been seen before in MLS. Many of the Union’s offseason changes have affected the organization off of the field, but their newly implemented Sports Performance department is making tangible impacts where it matters most – on the field.

The man at the center of this new department is Bill Knowles, a world-renowned athletic developer whose philosophy of reconditioning is being showcased to the team for the first time this week. Knowles takes over the first 15-20 minutes of training, walking the team through his warmup, which consists of both aerobic and strength development.

Most of us know that success in today’s work world requires continuous growth and learning. You can’t just rely on your current knowledge and expertise if you expect to keep up, let alone advance. But how do you identify the areas in which development efforts will yield the best return on your investment?

In our years coaching executives, my colleagues and I have noticed that people who improve in ways that best support their success look for the overlap between what their organization needs and what will give them the most satisfaction. We’ve discovered that using a version of Jim Collins’s “hedgehog” idea, from Good to Great, helps clients think it through. Collins found that great organizations focus on three things: what will drive their economic engine, what they can be best in the world at, and what they are most passionate about. The approach, he has noted, is just as good for figuring out how to become “great” individually. Here’s how it works.

Movidius, an ultra-low-power computer vision-processor startup best known for its partnership with Google on Project Tango, has extended its relationship with Google. This time, the collaboration is focused on neural network technology, with plans to accelerate the adoption of deep learning in mobile devices.

In an interview with EE Times, Remi El-Ouazzane, CEO, Movidius, called the agreement “a new chapter” in the partnership.

In Project Tango, Google used a Movidius chip in a platform that uses computer vision for positioning and motion tracking. The project’s mission was to allow app developers to create user experience that works on indoor navigation, 3D mapping, physical space measurement, augmented reality and recognition of known environments.

Healthcare is undergoing a technological transformation, and it is imperative for the industry to leverage new technologies to generate, collect, and track novel data. With the wealth of new data, the onus is on the system to turn it into relevant information that helps researchers, clinicians, entrepreneurs, and consumers better understand states of both disease and health. Digital biomarkers are an opportunity to translate new data sources into informative, actionable insights. In this report, we provide an overview of and glimpse into the emerging space of digital biomarkers.

The path to adoption is not an easy one. Digital biomarkers will, at a minimum, face the same regulatory challenges as traditional biomarkers. But not all digital biomarkers are created equally. There is great potential to apply digital biomarkers to medical domains that are not well understood, such as psychiatry and neurology, especially if digital biomarkers are combined into phenotypic signatures. Establishing insightful relationships is only the first step before the industry can truly capitalize on the value of digital biomarkers. Challenges around evidence generation, infrastructure, incentives, and workflow remain.

The question remains to be answered—will digital biomarkers be better tools to help understand health and disease?

The soccer ball is one of the important pieces of equipment in the game of soccer. It undergoes various forms of impact during the game. In order to numerically investigate the occasions of ball impact such as soccer heading, a validated finite element model of a soccer ball is required. Therefore, a model was developed incorporating material properties obtained from literature. To ensure the accuracy of the model, it was validated against an established soccer ball model and experimental data of the coefficient of restitution, contact time, longitudinal deformation and reaction force. In addition, a parametric study of the mesh density was also performed to determine the optimal number of elements. The developed soccer ball model was found to be in a good agreement with the literature and experimental data. This suggests that, the soccer ball model is capable of replicating the impacts of interest. This article details the development of the model and the validation processes.

Muscle regeneration through mechanical stimulation may one day replace or enhance drug- and cell-based regenerative treatments, according to a new study by a team of engineers and biomedical scientists at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University and the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS).

The study suggests that mechanically driven therapies that promote skeletal muscle regeneration could augment or replace methods currently being used. The finding was published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Biomarkers of inflammation, muscle damage, and oxidative stress after high-intensity exercise have been described previously; however, further understanding of their role in the postexercise recovery period is necessary. Because these markers have been implicated in cell signaling, they may be specifically related to the training adaptations induced by high-intensity exercise. Thus, a clear model showing their responses to exercise may be useful in characterizing the relative recovery status of an athlete. The purpose of this study was twofold: (a) to investigate the time course of markers of muscle damage and inflammation in the blood from 3 to 72 hours after combined training exercises and (b) to investigate indicators of oxidative stress and damage associated with increased reactive oxygen species production during high-intensity exercise in elite athletes. Nineteen male athletes performed a combination of high-intensity aerobic and anaerobic training exercises. Samples were acquired immediately before and at 3, 6, 12, 24, 48, and 72 hours after exercise. The appearance and clearance of creatine kinase and lactate dehydrogenase in the blood occurred faster than previous studies have reported. The neutrophil/lymphocyte ratio summarizes the mobilization of 2 leukocyte subpopulations in a single marker and may be used to predict the end of the postexercise recovery period. Further analysis of the immune response using serum cytokines indicated that high-intensity exercise performed by highly trained athletes only generated inflammation that was localized to the skeletal muscle. Biomarkers are not a replacement for performance tests, but when used in conjunction, they may offer a better indication of metabolic recovery status. Therefore, the use of biomarkers can improve a coach’s ability to assess the recovery period after an exercise session and to establish the intensity of subsequent training sessions.

With about 500,000 people expected to visit Brazil for the Olympics here this year, researchers are scrambling to figure how much of a risk the Games might pose in spreading the Zika virus around the world.

Infectious disease specialists are particularly focused on the potential for Zika to spread to the United States. As many as 200,000 Americans are expected to travel to Rio de Janeiro for the Olympics in August. When they return to the Northern Hemisphere and its summer heat, far more mosquitoes will be around to potentially transmit the virus in the United States.

Brazilian researchers say they believe that Zika, which has been linked to severe birth defects, came to their country during another major sports event — the 2014 World Cup — when hundreds of thousands of visitors flowed into Brazil. Virus trackers here say that the strain raging in Brazil probably came from Polynesia, where an outbreak was rattling small islands around

The Golden State Warriors seem to have everything an NBA team could ever want. Until recently, though, they still felt there was something missing from another dream season: peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches.

In an effort to defend their NBA title, Golden State’s training staff all but eliminated sugar on the team’s private plane this season. The idea was to make the Warriors eat healthier, and the players were willing to accept the changes, saying goodbye to soda, cookies and candy while in the air.

What they weren’t prepared for was a PB&J ban. And that began a months-long battle by the Warriors to save their beloved peanut butter and jelly.

Championship’s latest signing ranks highly in an analytical model devised by Craig Kline an American analyst brought in by Fulham.

Winners don’t gloat, abstain from drugs, and, according to a recent book, they never cheat—except for guys like Lance Armstrong, Rod Blagojevich, and Walter Keane. They were all cheaters, and all winners (well, until they got caught). Why did they cheat? Perhaps there’s something addictive about winning—but in any case, winning makes us feel more entitled and more likely to cheat, a new study finds.

“Honesty and dishonesty can affect the chances of winning a competition, but is an opposite causal relationship also possible? Namely, does beating a rival generate subsequent (dis)honest behavior?” write psychologists Amos Schurr and Ilana Ritov. In a series of experiments, they show the answer is yes, partly because winners feel more entitled.