Applied Sports Science newsletter – February 12, 2016

… The Blazers’ leading scorers came to their highly unusual living arrangements at the beginnings of their NBA careers. A lot has changed since they were rookies—Lillard is the face of Portland’s franchise and McCollum is in the middle of his breakout season—but not their roommates.

“If I eat and leave my plate on the counter, she’ll be like, put your plate in the sink,” Lillard said. “If the trash is right there, she’ll be like, somebody needs to take the trash out. She’s still my mom.”

… There’s a reason, after all, teams play three points per 100 possessions worse on the second day of back-to-backs. And even worse when they play four games in five days. “Basically, it makes the body a mess,” [Steve] Magness says. “What happens when you play 82 games in a 160-day stretch is you don’t give your body time to repair itself and get ready for the next go-round. It just kicks into this stage where it can’t keep up with the demands.”

… To inspire a diverse group of talented individuals, you need more than a willingness to make sacrifices. You need to develop, lead with and live by a purpose. What you do, why you do it and how you prefer to do it need to be understood and embraced by all. Results mattered to Ferguson, of course. Winning was important. As important as the what – winning football matches – was the how – playing attractive, attacking football. As for the why, Sir Alex Ferguson felt it was his job to sell a higher order idea. “My job was to send fans home happy at the end of a match, it was to have that dressing room in delirium,” he says.

Ferguson’s job description? “To deliver delirium”. So, whilst Ferguson, like all modern-day managers, had plenty that might distract him, his obsessive focus was on his players, staff and results that kept United’s fans happy.

… 1. Use Your “Muscle Memory”

Turns out the mantra “practice makes perfect” isn’t really what athletes should strive for—“practice makes automatic” is more apropos, according to Scott Goldman, Director of Performance Psychology for the University of Michigan’s athletic department.

… the Warriors have a secret weapon, a pitch dark place where gravity fades away and magnesium sulfate is absorbed into their bodies. A place where members of one of the NBA’s most elite teams ever can visualize swishing 3 after 3 with no distractions or noise from the outside world. A place that provides an incubator for basketball greatness.

That place is Reboot Float Spa in San Francisco, and the popularity of its service among the Warriors, specifically Curry and Harrison Barnes, makes it poised to become the next big trend in fitness and recovery.

Purpose: To investigate the physical and physiological response to different formats of various-sided games. Methods: Eighteen elite female soccer players wore 15Hz global positioning system (GPS) devices and heart-rate monitors during various-sided games (small: 4v4 and 5v5, medium: 6v6 and 7v7, large: 8v8 and 9v9). Results: Players covered more relative sprinting distance during large-sided games when compared with small- (p < 0.001, d = 0.69) and medium- (p < 0.001, d = 0.54) sided games. In addition, a greater proportion of total acceleration efforts that had a commencement velocity < 1 m/s were observed in small-sided games (44.7% ± 5.5) when compared to large-sided games (36.7% ± 10.6) (p = 0.018, d = 0.94). This was accompanied by a greater proportion of acceleration efforts with a final velocity equivalent to the sprint threshold in large-sided games (15.4% ± 7.7), than small-sided games (5.2% ± 2.5) (p 85% HRmax) was greatest during small-sided games (69.8% ± 2.5) compared with medium- (62.1% ± 2.8, d = 2.90) and large- sided games (54.9% ± 3.1) (p < 0.001, d = 5.29). Conclusion: The results from this study demonstrate that coaches can use small-sided games as an aerobic conditioning stimulus and to develop players’ explosiveness and repeat sprint ability over short durations. Large-sided games can be used to maintain aerobic capacity and develop maximum speed over longer distances.

… for two hours during home games, [Andy] Van Vliet sits and watches on the bench. When the Badgers go on road trips, the 6-foot-11 forward — whose size and outside shooting ability would be helpful to a team lacking in those two areas — must stay behind.

Behind the scenes, Van Vliet has been a pet project of sorts for Erik Helland. The UW strength and conditioning coach is doing everything he can to make sure Van Vliet is ready to contribute when the 2016-17 season begins.

Call it: Building Andy Van Vliet.

Norman Garmezy, a developmental psychologist and clinician at the University of Minnesota, met thousands of children in his four decades of research. But one boy in particular stuck with him. He was nine years old, with an alcoholic mother and an absent father. Each day, he would arrive at school with the exact same sandwich: two slices of bread with nothing in between. At home, there was no other food available, and no one to make any. Even so, Garmezy would later recall, the boy wanted to make sure that “no one would feel pity for him and no one would know the ineptitude of his mother.” Each day, without fail, he would walk in with a smile on his face and a “bread sandwich” tucked into his bag.

The boy with the bread sandwich was part of a special group of children. He belonged to a cohort of kids—the first of many—whom Garmezy would go on to identify as succeeding, even excelling, despite incredibly difficult circumstances. These were the children who exhibited a trait Garmezy would later identify as “resilience.”

In sports, some people are famous for “making other players better.” Magic Johnson, the great basketball player and winner of five National Basketball Association (NBA) championships, was not merely a terrific scorer, passer, and rebounder; he also transformed his teammates—some of them ordinary players—into stars. Early in his career, Michael Jordan was known to be great, maybe even the greatest of the great, but his teams just didn’t win. People wondered whether he could ever win a championship, because he “wasn’t a team player.”

In business, some people are thought to be like the young Michael Jordan—individual superstars who, apart from their own skills, don’t add much to team efforts. But there are others, like Magic Johnson, who are widely thought to make others better. Is it possible to say something about what kind of person does that? Not something impressionistic, intuitive, and anecdotal, but something that is actually based on evidence? Intriguing answers are starting to emerge, and they involve something called Factor C.

… it’s important to understand the user experience. At POSSIBLE Mobile, we’ve built connected fitness apps for Runner’s World, WeGo. If there’s one thing we’ve learned, when it comes to connected fitness and users, the apps we build are only as good as the data we collect and the uses we find for it.

Our users want to get into their workout as quickly as possible. They want to open the app, start their workout, track their performance, and then brag about it with their friends. Our KPI for success during a workout is how little time we spend on the screen.

Implicit in the tracking of data is the need to do something with the data.

Before we build an app we ask ourselves, “How do we make it useful, beautiful, understandable, and actionable?”

It should come as no surprise that Bill Walsh saw how technology would affect the game he loved the most. Walsh was a consultant and speaker for Silicon Valley firms after his historic tenure as the 49ers’ head coach came to an end in 1989, and in 2001, he spoke with Bain & Company, a leading management consulting firm, to get advice on how to better scale the NFL draft. At that time, Walsh was the 49ers’ Vice President and General Manager, and out of those talks with Bain came the hire of Paraag Marathe as the team’s COO. It was a high-tech, Moneyball move. Long before computers were common, Walsh sought to run his team with a technological level of perfection. He often referred to the offenses he developed as a “machine,” and at their best, they certainly seemed like that.

In truth, football and computers have had an alliance for decades, but it’s only recently that the partnership has been obvious. Today, the league strives to be as technically conversant as possible, but the start of this story was far more humble.

Introduction

Sport injury prevention studies vary in the way compliance with an intervention is defined, measured and adjusted for.
Objective

The objective of this systematic review was to assess the extent to which sport injury prevention randomised controlled trials (RCTs) have defined, measured and adjusted results for compliance with an injury prevention intervention.
Methods

An electronic search was performed in MEDLINE, PubMed, the Cochrane Center of Controlled Trials, CINAHL (Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature), PEDro (Physiotherapy Evidence Database) and SPORTDiscus. English RCTs, quasi-RCTs and cluster-RCTs were considered eligible. Trials that involved physically active individuals or examined the effects of an intervention aimed at the prevention of sport- or physical activity-related injuries were included.
Results

Of the total of 100 studies included, 71.6 % mentioned compliance or a related term, 68.8 % provided details on compliance measurement and 51.4 % provided compliance data. Only 19.3 % analysed the effect of compliance rates on study outcomes. While studies used heterogeneous methods, pooled effects could not be presented.
Conclusions

Studies that account for compliance demonstrated that compliance significant affects study outcomes. The way compliance is dealt with in preventions studies is subject to a large degree of heterogeneity. Valid and reliable tools to measure and report compliance are needed and should be matched to a uniform definition of compliance.

Despite over 50 years of research, the field of sports nutrition continues to grow at a rapid rate. Whilst the traditional research focus was one that centred on strategies to maximize competition performance, emerging data in the last decade has demonstrated how both macronutrient and micronutrient availability can play a prominent role in regulating those cell signalling pathways that modulate skeletal muscle adaptations to endurance and resistance training. Nonetheless, in the context of exercise performance, it is clear that carbohydrate (but not fat) still remains king and that carefully chosen ergogenic aids (e.g. caffeine, creatine, sodium bicarbonate, beta-alanine, nitrates) can all promote performance in the correct exercise setting. In relation to exercise training, however, it is now thought that strategic periods of reduced carbohydrate and elevated dietary protein intake may enhance training adaptations whereas high carbohydrate availability and antioxidant supplementation may actually attenuate training adaptation. Emerging evidence also suggests that vitamin D may play a regulatory role in muscle regeneration and subsequent hypertrophy following damaging forms of exercise. Finally, novel compounds (albeit largely examined in rodent models) such as epicatechins, nicotinamide riboside, resveratrol, ?-hydroxy ?-methylbutyrate, phosphatidic acid and ursolic acid may also promote or attenuate skeletal muscle adaptations to endurance and strength training. When taken together, it is clear that sports nutrition is very much at the heart of the Olympic motto, Citius, Altius, Fortius (faster, higher, stronger).

Edamam, a company providing structured food and nutrition data to businesses in the health, wellness and food industries announced today the release of its new Nutrition Data API.

The Nutrition Data API will allow businesses to do real-time analysis of the nutrition of any food or ingredient in a recipe. Customers will be able to enter, in free text, the information about the food and Edamam’s proprietary natural language processing algorithms would extract and analyze the food; providing information for more than 30 key nutrients, including calories, fat, carbs, cholesterol, sodium and all vitamins and minerals. In addition, the food will be automatically tagged for allergen and its appropriateness for all major food diets, including paleo, vegan, gluten-free and over twenty more.

The conceptual, practical, and ethical issues surrounding “big data” and data in general begin at the very moment of data collection. Particularly when the data concern people, not enough attention is paid to the realities entangled within that significant moment and spreading out from it.

I try to do some disentangling here, through five theses around data collection?—?points that are worth remembering, communicating, thinking about, dwelling on, and keeping in mind, if you have anything to do with data on a daily basis (read: all of us) and want to do data responsibly.

1. Data sets are the results of their means of collection.