Applied Sports Science newsletter – February 9, 2016

… 1. With the advances in sports sciences and technology, and its application to the modern game, what are your opinions on the physical demands from athletes in modern football, especially the Premier League? Do they have enough recovery time?

DB,”I think 2 days in-between games is just too short. In the interests of player welfare, and ultimately fans getting to see the best players play, there should be a minimum of 3 days break in between games, particularly in the EPL. The EPL is far more physically demanding than any other league and players there have to play more games than any other European league so its especially important in England to have a greater break between games.”

We’ve shown you what it’s like to go behind the curtain of one of the top residencies in Real Salt Lake’s Casa Grande, Ariz. operation. We’ve shown you what a group of Bay Area teens go through in a day to train for the San Jose Earthquakes academy.

Now it’s college’s turn.

Between mornings spent in the weight room and afternoons spent on the training field, college soccer players fit in school and social in equal measure in a way straight-to-pro players in other parts of the world probably can’t quite comprehend. [video, 4:07]

… “We need to improve, or in a few years, all those people we’ve gotten to pay attention [to soccer] will drift away,” says Neil Buethe, the head of communications for the U.S. Soccer Federation, the sport’s governing body in the United States. “A win only happens if our players get better, and our players only get better if the coaches get better.”

This thinking has led U.S. Soccer officials to an unconventional idea: that a teaching expert they first read about in The New York Times Magazine—a man with no professional soccer expertise—might help them advance the sport.

Among teachers, Doug Lemov is a sort of celebrity. He’s spent years studying great educators, creating a taxonomy of techniques they use to manage common challenges (like defiant kids or tired kids or kids who need a lot of time to learn something that other kids learn quickly).

Draft picks weren’t the only important additions that the 76ers made to the franchise at the end of last June. Days after selecting Rookie of the Year candidate Jahlil Okafor and promising power forward Richaun Holmes, the team finalized another key transaction before the month came to a close.

Seeking to further bolster their resources in the realm of sports performance, the Sixers successfully recruited Dr. David T. Martin to be the club’s new Director of Performance Research and Development. The American-born Martin had spent the previous 20 years serving as a Senior Sport Scientist at the forward-thinking, government-funded Australian Institute of Sport, where he garnered international acclaim.

In announcing on June 29th that Martin had joined his basketball operations staff, General Manager Sam Hinkie said in a statement that “none” of the Sixers’ investments in sports science compared to the hiring of Martin.

How does a coach keep the attention span of his players? Gary Andersen says it’s a focal point of this offseason at Oregon State.

With winter conditioning underway, Andersen is working on increasing the focus of his players. Smartphones and other technology have created all sorts of distractions coaches have to work around.

“That’s a major focal point of our football team this offseason — extended period of time being able to be mentally focused,” Andersen told The Bald Faced Truth. “A football game is three hours and change. We are making our kids focus for three hours and change throughout the offseason, and we’ll continue to do it. Some days, up to five hours. We get them for four, but they’ve got to get dressed for practice and what have you.”

You may not think competitive athletes have anything in common with entrepreneurs, but it turns out the same strategies top athletes use to win are the same strategies used to win in business. Dr. Jason Selk helped the St. Louis Cardinals win two World Series while serving as director of mental training. His new book, Organize Tomorrow Today. applies those same winning strategies he used with athletes to the business world.

BYU research shows unexpected immune system cells may help repair muscles

The first time back to the gym after a long break usually results in sore muscles. Fortunately, the return trip a few days later—if it happens—is generally less painful.

Scientists have studied this reduced-soreness phenomenon for decades and even have a name for it—the repeated bout effect. Despite all those years of research, they still can’t figure out exactly why people feel less sore the second time around.

The following story is a case study of my life as an injury prone athlete. I have decided to share my personal experience as an athlete in the sport I love. My hope is you will learn from my mistakes. Both athlete and coach take responsibility when something doesn’t go to plan. In the following story, I have boldfaced different ideas through my experience have allowed me to ponder the best routes personal performance.

Implantable medical devices usually have to trade smarts for size. Pacemakers and other active devices with processors on board are typically about a cubic centimeter in size, and must be implanted surgically. Smaller implantable electronics tend to be passive, lacking computing smarts and the ability to actively broadcast signals, says David Blaauw, a professor of electrical engineer and computer science at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

The hardest thing to shrink isn’t the processor. It’s actually the radio, says Blaauw. Last week at the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco, Blaauw and fellow engineers David Wentzloff and Yao Shi showed a prototype injectable radio with a volume of just 10 cubic millimeters (1 mm x 1 mm x 10 mm) that can send powerful radio signals 50 centimeters away, including through 3 centimeters of tissue.

… behavioral science research suggests that these improvements may not be shielding football players from harm. Ironically, technological advances in padding, helmets, and other protective gear may have negligible—or even counterproductive—consequences for players on the field.

The problem comes down to a phenomenon known as risk homeostasis. First proposed by Gerald Wilde, a psychologist at Queen’s University in Canada, the basic idea is that our psychological tolerance for risk is malleable. We spend our days constantly computing the expected costs and benefits of various risky behaviors—from jaywalking to ordering that second martini. When our environments change, we change our calculations, too.

Objectives: There is an epidemic of anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries in youth athletes. Poor neuromuscular control is an easily modifiable risk factor for ACL injury, and can be screened for by observing dynamic knee valgus on landing in a drop vertical jump test. This study aims to validate a simple, clinically useful population-based screening test to identify at-risk athletes prior to participation in organized sports. We hypothesized that both physicians and allied health professionals would be accurate in subjectively assessing injury risk in real-time field and office conditions without motion analysis data and would be in agreement with each other. Methods: We evaluated the inter-rater reliability of risk assessment by various observer groups, including physicians and allied health professionals, commonly involved in the care of youth athletes. Fifteen athletes age 11–17 were filmed performing a drop vertical jump test. These videos were viewed by 242 observers including orthopaedic surgeons, orthopaedic residents/fellows, coaches, athletic trainers (ATCs), and physical therapists (PTs), with the observer asked to subjectively estimate the risk level of each jumper. Objective injury risk was calculated using normalized knee separation distance (measured using Dartfish, Alpharetta, GA), based on previously published studies. Risk assessments by observers were compared to each other to determine inter-rater reliability, and to the objectively calculated risk level to determine sensitivity and specificity. Seventy one observers repeated the test at a minimum of 6 weeks later to determine intra-rater reliability. Results: Between groups, the inter-rater reliability was high, ? = 0.92 (95% CI 0.829–0.969, p < 0.05), indicating that no single group gave better (or worse) assessments, including comparisons between physicians and allied health professionals. With a screening cutoff isolated to subjects identified by observers as “high risk”, the sensitivity was 63.06% and specificity 82.81%. Reducing the screening cutoff to also include jumpers identified as “medium risk” increased sensitivity to 95.04% and decreased the specificity to 46.07%. Intra-rater reliability was moderate, ? = 0.55 (95% CI 0.49–0.61, p < 0.05), indicating that individual observers made reproducible risk assessments. Conclusions: This study supports the use of a simple, field-based observational drop vertical jump screening test to identify athletes at risk for ACL injury. Our study shows good inter- and intra-rater reliability and high sensitivity and suggests that screening can be performed without significant training by physicians as well as allied health professionals, including: coaches, athletic trainers and physical therapists. Identification of these high-risk athletes may play a role in enrollment in appropriate preventative neuromuscular training programs, which have been shown to decrease the incidence of ACL injuries in this population.

With the Zika virus threatening to undermine the already-troubled Rio Olympics, organizers and Brazilian government officials have been quick with reassurances to athletes and visitors: Unless you are a pregnant woman, you need not worry.

But the spread of the mosquito-borne pathogen, linked to thousands of cases of microcephaly in newborns, raises a suite of practical and moral questions for backers of international sporting spectacles. In the global age, are mega-events like the Olympics and the World Cup hazards to public health around the world? How do you contain that risk? At what point does the welfare of the world’s population trump a country’s desire to stage a great party?

… It continues to amaze me that clubs investment in the personnel and teams looking after their highest value players is often the last thing on the cards. John Orchard mentioned this in an Editorial in the British Journal of Sports Medicine years ago as the Moneyball approach to Sports Performance support. Many soccer/football clubs in the English Premier League have annual player salaries over 100 million GBP but pay less than 0.5% of that for ‘maintenance’ – the sports medicine and science performance team. Seems crazy and I suspect that in Formula 1 the investment in the ‘asset’ would be much higher.

There is a real need to invest in people to build the team exclusivity of success which needs to be built, but it is not about just spending more – as some teams have shown – it is the health of that spend, and in my opinion the team at Leicester City have got it right and should be commended loudly.

Julia Galef mentioned “meta-uncertainty,” and how to characterize the difference between a 50% credence about a coin flip coming up heads, vs. a 50% credence about something like advanced AI being invented this century.

I wrote: Yes, I’ve written about this probability thing. The way to distinguish these two scenarios is to embed each of them in a larger setting. The question is, how would each probability change as additional information becomes available.

… Club visits are the last step of the process, which will have taken about two years by the time the cycle is complete. First, clubs uploaded a vast number of documents that cover every aspect of their operations to Double PASS’s servers for review. Next, one of three Double PASS teams of three assessors interviewed multiple staff members. Observation of multiple training sessions and games, both live and on video, followed to create a complete picture that allows for an accurate assessment.

The general response from clubs has been positive, U.S. Soccer director of sport development and project lead Ryan Mooney said.

“It’s about wanting to know what they need to do to get better. I think that the overwhelming majority of our clubs and their leaders are not adverse to constructive criticism,” Mooney told SI.com in January.