Applied Sports Science newsletter – March 18, 2016

Wait, how and when did Jerryd Bayless become one of the best 3-point shooters in the NBA? … “I have always believed I was pretty good at it (shooting threes),” Bayless said. “Last season I just couldn’t make a shot, honestly. I was struggling with it. Last summer I worked on it, and just got better at it.”

… I’d like to focus on two issues in this article: firstly, whether the squat is a good exercise for developing both the quadriceps and hamstrings; and secondly, whether the squat can develop each individual muscle within the quadriceps.

Dan Micciche has a reputation as an innovator and someone who encourages creativity in player development. Player Development Project was lucky enough to have 90 minutes with Dan to discuss his own story and pick his brains around session design, creativity, positive learning environments and more. In part one of this two-part feature interview we went on a journey inside the mind of one of The FA’s most talented young coaches.

After a number of years working his way through the academies of Crystal Palace and Tottenham Hotspur, Dan became Assistant Academy Manager at MK Dons. Working under Mike Dove (Academy Director), Dan was responsible for working with a number of players who have gone on to professional careers, including Dele Alli – a young man taking the Premier League by storm with Tottenham in season 2015/16 after learning his trade at MK Dons.

In 2014, more than three million young Americans played for youth soccer clubs and ESPN estimates that 30% of young Americans play the game at some level. The Aspen Institute believes that approximately five million young Americans play soccer – that’s roughly equivalent to half the population of Portugal. It’s trite and presumptuous to ask why the US has not produced a Lionel Messi, but you’d think that we could consistently turn out a Joao Moutinho or two. Yet we don’t. Why?

I interviewed youth soccer club coaches, scouts, parents and many others about the current state of player development in the US. Everybody agrees that progress has been made over the last 20 years, but disagree over the big next step forward. Here’s why.

When you hold in mind a sentence you have just read or a phone number you’re about to dial, you’re engaging a critical brain system known as working memory.

For the past several decades, neuroscientists have believed that as information is held in working memory, brain cells associated with that information fire continuously. However, a new study from MIT has upended that theory, instead finding that as information is held in working memory, neurons fire in sporadic, coordinated bursts.

Positive mind-set allows performance levels to increase because it facilitates direction and focus. The relationship between mental preparation and sport psychology therefore becomes important and there is evidence of its use in cricket, golf and tennis. It is therefore not surprising that football has also introduced sport science to their mapped programme of which sport psychology is an integral part. Given the contention that sport psychology plays an integral role within football it would be purposeful to argue of its merit for football coaches in performance settings.

One key concept that resonates closely with football is emotion and its impact during the competitive season. Football coaches will invariably elicit a range of emotions that have the potential to impact players. Therefore, football coaches need to understand the complexity of emotions and regulate these accordingly. Effective emotional regulation could lead to more effective and facilitated performance levels. The regulation of emotion can be understood through the theory of emotional intelligence (Goleman, 2004; Mayer & Savoley, 1990).

Classical descriptions present tennis as a prolonged activity (2-4 hours) of repeated, high-intensity bouts interspersed with standardized rest periods. Such description establishes that the sport is physically and physiologically demanding. However, tennis can last more than 5 hours in some extreme cases like Grand Slam and Davis Cup matches. There’s a lack of literature when quantifying such extended matches. Professional players mainly would benefit in having knowledge of fatigue development in these conditions and how it evolves during matchplay, as well as during competition weeks. To try to contextualize these doubts, Reid & Duffield (2014) offer us an interesting review on fatigue, putting together information and possible future areas of study for unanswered questions.

Professional players should be prepared for a typical situation that happens during tournament weeks and especially when playing Grand Slams. This involves scenarios of the potential of 4-5+ hour matches and the possibility of playing 7 matches in a two week period, with only 24-49 hours of rest between each match. Fatigue occurs: the challenge for everyone is to determine the amount of fatigue and the impact it has on performance, recovery and possible injury. It’s unclear if players experiment movement changes, poor technique or reduced cognitive performance.

In every living person, even the healthiest, death abounds. Cells throughout a person die naturally all the time, shedding fragments of DNA into the blood. When injuries or illness damage specific parts of a body, cell death generates even more of this so-called circulating DNA. Several research teams are now developing ways to trace it to the tissue from which it originated, hoping to detect early stages of a disease or monitor its progression.

“Noninvasive measurement of cell death is a super exciting area with endless applications,” says developmental biologist Yuval Dor of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Dor’s own group reports this week that its technique for tracing the origin of circulating DNA detected the expected type of cell death in people with pancreatic cancer, type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and brain injuries. Two more groups have reported preliminary but encouraging results for other cancers.

… Our partnership with EXOS continues our path to sport digitization, leading the way to bring wearables, sports and fitness closer. We are committed, to transform, together, the fitness and health industry leveraging a data driven approach.

Nike is creating a personalized retail experience to appeal to athletes and fitness enthusiasts.

The nation’s largest sportswear maker on Wednesday unveiled a revamped Nike+ app at its annual Nike Innovation Summit event in New York.

… Liverpool have just introduced their latest weapon in the battle against player injuries – beaming instant replays of collisions instantly back to medical staff on the bench.

The club have introduced a new system called myplayXplay ((my-play-by-play), the first Premier League club to do so.

Reds doctor Andy Massey said the deal for myplayXplay was a “great collaboration” which “enables us to view replays of injuries pitchside.”

… One of the most pivotal moments of my research life was working with the peerless Neurologist Dr Bernhard Voller as a Research Fellow at the National Institutes of Health in Washington DC, fifteen years ago, when he showed me how to perform the technique of fine wire invasive recording of skeletal muscle activity (known as electromyography). When we had placed the electrode in a muscle (we examined the nerve firing in eye muscles for the particular experiment), and the subject blinked, one heard the firing of the nerves controlling the muscle via a speaker attached to the electrode recording device, and the rate of firing increased rapidly each time the subject blinked with greater force. What was such a ‘wow factor’ for me, was that what we were listening to was the information ‘code’ going down from the brain to the specific muscle we were studying, in order to make it contract with the required force. If you put a similar electrode into any nerve in the brain or travelling from the brain to the body, you will see or hear a similar firing rate change happening, which is the ‘code’ used by the brain to generate commands and induce changes in function of any organ the nerves target. One of the most interesting studies I have ever read looked at single neuron firing in the motor cortex of a monkey’s brain when its arm was being moved in different directions around its elbow joint. Each movement created a different ‘code’ of firing which was unique to each specific movement, and if one looked at the graph plots of the generated data after learning the different ‘codes’ for each movement, one could predict with a high degree of certainty which arm movement had occurred to produce each specific trace. So certainly at the physical nerve firing level, information is generated, and function regulated, by discrete coded information that was evident and could be ‘decoded’ when examining a particular nerve’s firing rate.

This numerical coding of information is also evident across a variety of body systems

Background Ice hockey and football players suffering concussions might have an increased risk for injuries afterwards. We aimed to investigate if concussions predisposed athletes for subsequent sport injuries.

Methods Patient data were obtained from a data base established at the University Hospital in Umea, Sweden. Athletes who had suffered a concussion were included if they had been aged between 15 and 35?years of age, and played ice hockey, football (soccer), floorball and handball. They were studied in terms of all new or previous injuries during 24?months before and after their concussion. Results were compared with a control group of athletes from the same four sports with an ankle injury.

Results Athletes with a concussion were more likely to sustain injuries compared with the control group, both before (OR 1.98. 95% CI 1.45 to 2.72) and after the concussion (OR 1.72. 95% CI 1.26 to 2.37). No increase in frequency of injury was found after a concussion compared with before. This was true for athletes in all four sports and for both sexes.

Conclusions This study indicates that athletes sustaining a concussion may have a more aggressive or risk-taking style of play than their counterparts. Our data do not suggest that a concussion injury, per se, leads to subsequent injuries.

Nutrition plays a key role in recovery, not just from day-to-day training, but also from injuries and surgery. Although many people focus on the physical side of surgical recovery, nutrition is equally important. That’s because healing after an injury or surgery is a complex process, and nutritional deficiencies can impede and slow recovery. Not only that, but healing tends to increase the requirement for certain nutrients, depending on the nature of the injury. While recovering from an injury or surgery it’s important to continue fueling with nutrient-rich foods, as well as adding foods that can kick-start healing. Here are some specific areas to consider when it comes to nutrition following an injury or surgery.

Every March since 2012, sabermetricians have gathered in Phoenix for their own version of spring training: the SABR Analytics meeting, which serves as a showcase for some of the latest developments in baseball analysis.

I made the pilgrimage to the desert for this year’s edition, expecting the modern baseball research conference’s usual emphasis: how to communicate sabermetric insights to coaches, players and executives — a worthy (if not groundbreaking) endeavor. However, the conference brought sabermetrics back to its roots in the data instead. And the game’s newest methods of collecting information, including such diverse offerings as the radar tracking system Statcast and neurological monitoring, have the potential to upend a number of sabermetric truths we once thought settled.