Applied Sports Science newsletter – February 8, 2016

… I’m curious about the evolution of technology in your athletic career from your days at Wisconsin to this current point in your career. How has your experience with technology as a player changed over this time?

I think technology has changed immensely. It’s still in the phase where it’s feeling itself out and how it can impact the game the most because there’s so many different things that you could technology wise. I think we are just trying to figure out as athletes and as a league in general where it all fits in. So whether it’s the tablets on the sidelines and photos compared to video or it’s Gatorade putting their stamp on things with this new technology that they have, everybody seems to have an idea and we just need to make sure that we get the right ideas out there.

World Soccer: Jurgen Klopp combined winning trophies with breathtaking football at Borussia Dortmund. How significant is it to your trophy ambitions to have him here at Liverpool?

Philppe Coutinho: He created a highly successful side at Dortmund and it is great for Liverpool to have him. In training, we are working hard and enjoying his methods, which are helping to make us better players.

Little by little, it is translating to matches and I think everyone has seen how effective his [gegenpressing] philosophy can be if we adapt it in the right way. It feels like we are moving in the right direction under him and we believe we can fight for the big prizes and enjoy some special moments with the fans.

Read more at http://www.worldsoccer.com/features/face-to-face-philippe-coutinho-368375#1XT8iYI22eyoD9Oe.99

… Over dinner in mid-January, the day after the Pistons upset the Warriors, the NBPA met with Caldwell-Pope for dinner at Ruth’s Chris Steak House in Troy, Mich.—around 15 miles south of The Palace of Auburn Hills—to get inside the defensive mind of one of the most intriguing and under-covered young players in the league. Below are 12 of his defensive tenets gleaned from the conversation, presented in a first-person perspective and edited for clarity and length. He also shared his scouting report on his top five toughest matchups. – See more at: http://nbpa.com/pistons-guard-kentavious-caldwell-pope-breaks-down-the-art-of-perimeter-defense/#sthash.z9VZax4M.dpuf

PURPOSE:

To analyze the match running profile, distance travelled over successive 15 minutes of match-play, heart rates and effindex of professional soccer players with Global Positioning System (GPS) and heart rate (HR) in official competition.
METHODS:

Twenty-six professional players were investigated during full-matches in competitive club level matches (n=223). Time-motion data and HR were collected using GPS and HR technology.
RESULTS:

The relative total distance was 113±11 m·min-1 with substantial differences between halves. For all the playing positions, a substantial decrease in total distance and distance covered >13.0 km·h-1 was observed in the second half in comparison with the first. The decrease during the second half in distance covered >13.0 km·h-1 was substantially higher than in total distance. The average HR recorded was 86.0% HRmax and the relationship between external and internal load value (effindex) was 1.3, with substantial differences between halves in all playing positions, except strikers for effindex. Wide-midfielders reflected substantially the lowest mean HR and highest effindex, while CB showed substantially the lowest effindex than any other playing position.
CONCLUSION:

The current study confirmed the decrement in player’s performance toward the end of match in all playing positions. Wide-midfielders performed the highest and fittest levels of physical and physiological demands, respectively, whereas centre-backs performed the lowest and unfittest levels of physical and physiological demands, respectively. The relationship between external and internal load measures among position-specific confirms that players with more overall running performance during the full-match were the best in effindex.

Remember the UEFA Football European Championship in 2000? The Belgian National Team was eliminated in the first round and Belgian football was in crisis!

The campaign for a better Talent Development System was launched by the former Technical Director, Michel Sablon. As a diligent director should, he instigated the revival by ordering an objective analysis of the Talent Development System and, in particular, of the Belgian First and Second Division Club Academies.

The analysis was conducted in 2002 by the University of Brussels, more specifically by the Sports Department of Paul De Knop and two of their researchers: Jo Van Hoecke and Hugo Schoukens, who subsequently went on to set up the Double PASS company together with Robbie De Sutter.

… Three weeks have passed since the 6-foot-7 quarterback [Paxton Lynch] hunched over a podium and announced that he was foregoing his final season of eligibility at the University of Memphis. Was there really any doubt? For two months, he had been widely projected as one of the first quarterbacks to be selected in the first round of the NFL draft in Chicago on April 28. ESPN analyst Todd McShay’s latest mock draft has him going No. 15 overall to the Los Angeles Rams. Barring a stunning fall, he’ll be one of the highest-drafted players in program history. But there’s still work to do.

Why are we always exhausted at the end of a workday? Why do we come home wiped out, with barely enough energy to make dinner before collapsing for the night?

Normally, when we think about being tired, we think of physical reasons: lack of sleep, intense exercise, or long days of physical labor. And yet, as Elliot Berkman, professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, pointed out to me in an interview, in our day and age, when few of us have physically demanding jobs, we are wiping ourselves out through psychological factors.

After all, the physical effort we exert in our day jobs does not warrant the fatigue we experience when we get home. If you are a construction worker, a farmer toiling in a field, or a medical resident working both day and night shifts, then yes, physical exhaustion might be the reason for your fatigue. But otherwise, Berkman points out, your fatigue is mostly psychological.

This exploratory study of the High Performance Model of Sport Management examines the model’s origins and where these ideas were first applied in the sports industry. This review discusses the evolution of its use in high level sport, and the successes incurred in systems utilizing the model. The investigation discusses the recent spreading of the model throughout Olympic and professional sports organizations throughout the world, where High Performance concepts are being studied and implemented into professional sports franchises in the United States as well as American universities. This study focuses on a particular ingredient important to the success of the High Performance Model at the “meso” and “micro” levels of implementation. This central step is the establishment of an integral operational position titled “High Performance Director” or “High Performance Manager”. The duties, responsibilities, areas of expertise, and traits necessary for success are reviewed and discussed. The inquiry explores the natural evolution of the High Performance Model into the industry of NCAA Division I athletics, where implementation is occurring at the University of Northern Iowa (UNI). Here, the Smith and Smolianov High Performance Model is being applied within UNI Athletics, using strength and conditioning as the median for operation. The infrastructure is being created and organized for proper application of the model. The study looks at how technology is being used to help monitor, track, and adjust training protocols as well as assist in the proper development of athletes. The review will indicate tactics used for selling the concepts internally, within an NCAA athletic, as well as an educational setting, exposing key players and supports, explaining the connection between these pillars of support and the importance of creating synergy, transparency, and an environment of effective communication. This work is the first in a series of exploratory reviews and future research to be conducted by the authors, who are reporting the current, ongoing case study, within UNI’s NCAA athletics/education program.

Kitman Labs is winning over coaches and teams with a unique big-data approach to keeping athletes healthy.

… Last month I reported that the Cincinnati Reds were expanding their use of Trackman in the minor leagues from two stadiums to five. If you’re unsure what Trackman is, be sure to go click the link and read the article for a good explanation of all of the things that the system measures and tracks within a game. The 2015 season was the first that the Reds organization was using the system, and they only used it at the Double-A and Triple-A levels.

With the expansion of the system to all of the non-complex level teams, I asked Graupe what some of the things that the organization uses the system for. One of the bigger things that stood out to me was that the team promoted Charles Leddon, who had previously worked as the athletic trainer for the Pensacola Blue Wahoos to the Director of Sports Science for the organization, “who will be looking at a lot of the data with an eye on injury prevention”.

Panthers linebacker Thomas Davis fractured his forearm just two weeks ago in the NFC Championship, yet he is expected to start in Sunday’s big game. This might not come as a surprise to those who know him, many of whom cite his grit and determination as defining characteristics.

But there is another factor, a very human one, involved in Davis making it back for this potentially once-in-a-lifetime event.

His name is Ryan Vermillion.

It’s probably safe to say that it wasn’t the salmon omelets, doled out by the heaping plateful every morning for breakfast, that got the Carolina Panthers to the Super Bowl. Or the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

Or even the smoothie bar.

But team nutritionist Jennifer Brunelli is confident that the perfectly balanced (and yes, truly enormous) meals her crew prepared all season — some players consume more than 9,000 calories a day — played a role in the Panthers’ success.

… “It is a concern of ours, because we do think that we don’t eat very healthy,” KU coach Bill Self said the day before his team’s road game at TCU. “What we feed them is fine. It’s what guys do on their own that’s not so fine.”

In recent weeks, Self has talked about his team lacking its typical energy. Part of that can come from the grind of a season, though players also can be hurt when they consume foods that aren’t helping them properly recover.

Maintaining a healthy diet and losing weight is the most common New Year’s resolution. However, actually losing weight and keeping it off is the real challenge and a lot of people who start off strong on Jan. 1, start to fade back into old habits by February. To understand more about how to lose weight, keep it off and just plain eat better, I contacted my colleague Dr. Brenda Davy at Virginia Tech.

Brenda is an award-winning professor in the Department of Human Nutrition, Foods and Exercise at Virginia Tech.

Smart organizations have recognized that introducing new technology into the workplace isn’t about hardware or software: it’s about wetware, also known as human beings. If you want to be the kind of nimble business that can make the most of successive waves of tech innovation, you need human beings who can adapt to change.

That means equipping each person in your enterprise with the skills and mindset that will help them successfully adapt whenever you introduce new tools like Slack, Basecamp, or even Google Drive into your workplace. But what exactly are these digital skills? They may be more familiar and low-tech than you think.