Applied Sports Science newsletter – February 24, 2016

… [head strength and conditioning coach Matt] Jennings worked on making Sumner stronger and bigger. He estimates the rail-thin Sumner put on about 20 pounds while still trying to alleviate the pressure put on his knees by building up the muscles that support them.

“If you look in a mirror, you train what you see,” Jennings says. “You forget about the backside of your body, so in order for your knees to get healthy and safe, you really have to take a two-to-one approach and the backside of your body with your glutes, your hamstrings, your calves, etc., everything that supports that knee, you have to work that twice as hard as the front side.”

… Morgan is injury-free these days, and she’s also doing more to prevent future injuries from taking place. She now starts warming up at the hotel an hour before every training session, paying attention to her body in ways that she never did before. (Previously, she says, she would start 15 minutes before a practice and just tape her ankles and go.)

What’s more, in October and November Morgan worked six days a week with a personal trainer in Orlando, where she now plays her NWSL ball for the expansion Orlando Pride. One focus of the work was on her first two steps and improving her explosion and changes of direction.

“Even though people think of me as a fast player, my acceleration and decelerations could have improved,” Morgan said. “So I worked on those a lot, the things that you really don’t have time to work on when you’re in a team environment.

… It was a cruel, hard-luck start to the season, complete with a seven-game losing streak in November, and a five-game losing streak in December. But they were streaks laced with lessons, bitter as they were.

“We had to have that experience, that bad taste in our mouth,’’ Damian Lillard said of the early season hardship. “It’s that simple. Sometimes you just have to go through stuff.’’

Through those early season trials, they learned about themselves on and off the court. There were late-game issues on the court, but a developing bond off the court. And a sloppiness with the ball on the court was in stark contrast to their work ethic off the court.

How much has the scouting combine changed?

Now, a reporter must arrive early to an enlarged press room to get a seat and a place to write. In the old days, there were no chairs to be found.

My first combine assignment was in 1990. That was the fourth time Indianapolis hosted the combine. Media coverage of the event was so new the people running the combine didn’t know what to do with us. About eight reporters hung out in the lobby of the downtown Holliday Inn. That’s right, only eight. Now, more than 1,200 media credentials have been distributed.

… Having recently spent a week in Los Angeles leading up to the Olympic Marathon Trials, I wanted to share the top five lessons I learned from the best marathoners in America, many of whom are InsideTracker users!

1. Mental strength wins the race

… After delving into the latest research regarding the importance of sleep for high-level athletes, the Yankees have pushed back the start times for most daily drills here in camp, in the hopes of gaining a competitive advantage. Last year, they experimented with a modified schedule and found positive results, prompting them to make it a regular part of the routine again in 2016, at least until the Grapefruit League slate opens on March 2.

We all make stupid mistakes from time to time. History is replete with examples. Legend has it that the Trojans accepted the Greek’s “gift” of a huge wooden horse, which turned out to be hollow and filled with a crack team of Greek commandos. The Tower of Pisa started to lean even before construction was finished—and is not even the world’s farthest leaning tower. NASA taped over the original recordings of the moon landing, and operatives for Richard Nixon’s re-election committee were caught breaking into a Watergate office, setting in motion the greatest political scandal in U.S. history. More recently, the French government spent $15 billion on a fleet of new trains, only to discover that they were too wide for some 1,300 station platforms.

We readily recognize these incidents as stupid mistakes—epic blunders. On a more mundane level, we invest in get-rich-quick schemes, drive too fast, and make posts on social media that we later regret. But what, exactly, drives our perception of these actions as stupid mistakes, as opposed to bad luck? Their seeming mindlessness? The severity of the consequences? The responsibility of the people involved? Science can help us answer these questions.

In addition to staying current on scientifically endorsed training techniques, coaches must try to accurately reflect on what it was like to be a young athlete. What were your concerns? What would have motivated you? Filter the expectations you create through the lens of your own experience.

Everybody knows what an expert is: it’s somebody like Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan in sports, Albert Einstein and James Watson in science, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Adele in music, or Bill Gates and Warren Buffett in business. However, it turns out surprisingly difficult to provide a formal definition that everybody can agree with. There are in fact many definitions, but most are unsatisfactory (see Gobet, 2015, for a detailed discussion).

A first way to define expertise is to highlight experts’ know how – their ability to carry out actions. This is undoubtedly an important aspect of expertise, for example in sports; however, in some fields, expertise is more about knowing that – that is, it is more about declarative knowledge than procedural knowledge. Such fields include history and philosophy.

A second way to define expertise is to use experience and the amount of time that one has spent in a particular domain.

… [Jay] Farrell and his colleagues have tackled this issue and have developed a way to process data from GPS that delivers accuracy down to a few centimeters. Not only is this method more precise, but it’s also more computationally efficient.

According to UC Riverside, “The approach involves reformulating a series of equations that are used to determine a GPS receiver’s position, resulting in reduced computational effort being required to attain centimeter accuracy.”

Throughout the preseason, photos from training have shown Houston Dynamo players wearing tight-fitting black bibs under—or in some cases over the top of—their training shirts. You may have wondered what those strange additions to the training kit might be. To get the answer, HoustonDynamo.com caught up with Dynamo fitness coach Paul Caffrey.

“Essentially, that’s our GPS system,” Caffrey said. “There’s maybe 200 data points that can be measured, but we ultimately measure or we do pay attention to player distance that they cover during the practices, during the games. We also measure the overall movement of each player, which is represented by a ‘player load’ value, which is essentially their work number. In addition, we measure the intensity and explosion of their movements. It essentially tells us the overall load that they had during the session.”

Mark Melancon’s time as a Boston Red Sox was brief, but the advice he received from a team nutritionist made a lasting impact on the right-hander’s career and lifestyle.

The Red Sox nutritionist at the time, Tara Mardigan, introduced Melancon to a company called InsideTracker, a blood analytics company based in Cambridge, Mass. which uses blood testing to screen for 30 different biomarkers — including vitamins, hormones and other metabolic markers — and determine optimal zones for each level based on a highly personalized questionnaire which looks at a person’s age, weight, activity level, ethnicity, personal goals and more.

It’s four years since the first Nike+ FuelBand went on sale in the US. Despite leaving this mortal coil so soon (two versions, three years) the FuelBand fitness tracker was undoubtedly a pioneer.

And while the wristband won’t be remembered as a sales juggernaut, its importance as a transformative product can’t be understated.

Many children are engaged in sport and some are very talented young athletes. Nutrition is important especially in growing children but are their needs further increased when in training? A question I get asked very often is: “do children need sports nutrition”. As always the answer of the scientists is “it depends”… but let’s break down this question into a number of smaller questions:

Is the physiology of children fundamentally (or significantly) different from adults?

Do children have different nutrition requirements?

Should recommendations for children be different from adults?

… When he arrives from his nearby Harvard office (he’s a fellow at the university’s Radcliffe Institute) I tell him that even the name of this place, Harvest, seems to speak to his work. He parries, modestly: “I guess it’s descended from that line that begins with Alice Waters and Chez Panisse, which is where we’d be eating if I were in Berkeley.”

Pollan was an influence on Waters. After reading his first major article, a biography of a cow called The Power Steer, she resolved never to serve non-grass-fed beef again. “I was Pollanized,” she wrote in 2010, when he was named one of Time’s 100 most influential people of the year, “and I am not alone.”