Applied Sports Science newsletter – March 29, 2016

Applied Sports Science news articles, blog posts and research papers for March 29, 2016

 

What does it mean to be an athlete?

Yael Averbuch from March 28, 2016

… January of 2014 was the last U.S. National Team event I’ve been a part of. The coaching staff expressed concern that I wasn’t athletic enough to succeed with the team. Competing with and against some of the best athletes in the women’s game, I could completely understand the concern. Nonetheless, it hit me hard because it touched on all my fears that had been instilled in me over the years; no matter what I did, how hard I worked, maybe I just can’t be good enough. Yet while I had these fears, deep down I never truly believed them as truths. I needed to find someone to help me who didn’t believe them either. That’s when I started working with Chris Gorres. I told Chris about myself as a player, my strengths and weaknesses, the current state of my career and my future goals. He didn’t want to know much more, but instead did a physical assessment by having me go through some basic movements. We got right to work.

 

Roy Hodgson backs Daniel Sturridge to prove England fitness – ESPN FC

ESPN FC, PA Sport from March 28, 2016

Roy Hodgson believes Daniel Sturridge still has his edge and challenged the oft-injured England striker to prove his fitness ahead of Euro 2016.

While the 26-year-old’s quality has never been doubt, the striker’s fitness has been as a string of injuries will mean 19 months have separated his 16th and 17th international caps.

Tuesday’s friendly against Holland will be Sturridge’s first appearance since the drab post-World Cup friendly with Norway in September 2014 and offers the chance to shine ahead of the Euros.

 

How Unstructured Runs Can Make You Faster | Runner’s World

Runner's World, Training from March 23, 2016

… scientists have repeatedly shown that people can actually maintain a similar pace for another few reps after completing a prescribed workout. And the benefits can be substantial. In one study, cyclists who were fooled into riding farther than expected were subsequently able to race 13 percent faster when they knew the correct distance. If you don’t have a coach, there are other ways of conducting workouts to introduce uncertainty and surprise that trick you into running farther or faster than you thought possible.

 

20m Sprint Test

Science for Sport from January 16, 2016

Though the 20m sprint test is commonly used to measure acceleration in both track and team sport athletes, there is currently uncertainties to what this test actually measures. As track athletes continue to accelerate beyond 50m, then it can be suggested with a level of confidence that the 20m sprint test does measure acceleration in these athletes. However, the same may or may not apply for team sport athletes. Both handheld stopwatches and electronic timing gates have been proven to be reliable assessment devices. As the distance from the start-line, starting position, and the height of the timing gates have all been shown to effect the test results, it is advised that these are all mandated and kept consistent to avoid testing error. In summary, the 20m sprint test has been shown to be a reliable predictor of linear speed, but its validity is determined by the knowledge of the test administrator.

 

Aspire Academy- Training Load 2016 Conference

Vimeo, Aspire Academy from March 22, 2016

Presenters’ videos from 2nd ASPIRE SPORT SCIENCE CONFERENCE — “Monitoring Athlete Training Loads – The Hows and Whys”

 

Beyond the 10,000-hour-rule: Experts disagree about the value of practice

The Boston Globe from March 27, 2016

In recent years, it’s become a matter of conventional wisdom that if you want to get good at something, you have to practice. A lot. There’s always been some intuitive truth to this idea, but it gained greater influence after the 2008 publication of Malcolm Gladwell’s bestseller “Outliers,” which presented research suggesting that the best people in a field got there because they practiced longer and harder than everyone else.

Among researchers, however, the importance of practice for achievement remains an open and hotly debated question. In particular, a group of researchers argues in a recently published book chapter and a forthcoming paper in Perspectives on Psychological Sciences that the importance of practice has been wildly overstated.

“It’s just not scientifically defensible at this point to say that training history does or could explain all the variation [in talent],” says Brooke Macnamara, a psychologist at Case Western Reserve University.

 

Designing with the patient in mind

Heart Sisters from March 20, 2016

A new report by Accenture reveals that just two percent of patients at hospitals are using the health apps provided for them. The research, which assessed mobile app use among the 100 largest U.S. hospitals, found that 66 percent of the hospitals have mobile apps for consumers and 38 percent of that subset have developed proprietary apps for their patients.

However, a mere two percent of patients at those hospitals are using the apps provided to them. This staggeringly low figure represents an alarming waste of resources in the healthcare industry.

Accenture found that “hospital apps are failing to engage patients by not aligning their functionality and user experience with what consumers expect and need.”

 

Smartwatches and the three-second rule | The Verge

The Verge from March 24, 2016

… The idea was to reduce the number of steps to achieve any function to the absolute minimum, even avoiding the use of the stylus, when possible.” Over at Apple, Steve Jobs had a similar dictate for the iPod: no song should be more than three clicks away.

Hawkins and Haitani and Jobs focused. They focused on what they imagined users would want to do and they focused on what was actually possible on such a constrained device. When I use a smartwatch, I see no such focus. The Apple Watch has 15 different ways to interact and four different kinds of main screens to learn (Home, Notifications, Glances, and Apps). Android Wear also has four zones and requires you to learn taps and swipes and sometimes even confusing physical gestures. Most of all, these don’t feel very zen.

 

Patients key to making sense of medical data

MIT Sloan School of Management from March 01, 2016

From brain activity to muscle performance, the human body produces two terabytes worth of data in a given day. This data provides valuable insight into body and mind activity, said Ben Schlatka, vice president of corporate development and co-founder of MC10 —but no physician today is willing or able to process that much information.

With so many companies trying to provide data analytics services to the health care industry, Schlatka and his fellow panelists spoke about how important it is for firms to build a viable business model.

 

Why Apple and Google are struggling to design simple software

The Washington Post, Hayley Tsukayama from March 28, 2016

… There’s been a recent wave of Apple criticism from long-time supporters, including the very-respected Walt Mossberg, who worry the company’s lost its way when it comes making simple programs that just work. And that may be true. But it would be impossible to expect Apple to keep iTunes as simple as it was when it was first introduced. That’s just not the world we live in anymore.

Companies like Apple and Google are expanding the scope of what they offer — they aren’t hawking one kind of hardware or one type of software, but rather a combination of both, often with several cloud services thrown in for good measure. Apple is no longer a focused iPod-and-Mac company. So the current version of iTunes has to offer so much more than just a way to get digital music. Google (or Alphabet) is no longer just a search bar on a Web page, it’s a whole ecosystem of information, software programs and an expanding universe of devices. The simple designs of the past products from these companies were never meant to accommodate the range of offerings that are now demanded by consumers.

Yet while companies are offering more functionality to their customers, it is true that they’re not presented in a way most of us can use. Even when things are designed to be clean, its often not done clearly enough.

 

Excerpt: In ‘The Arm,’ a search for the new frontier of building healthy baseball pitchers

Yahoo Sports, Jeff Passan from March 28, 2016

The radar gun doesn’t lie. I learned this long ago, never to forget it, even when the numbers didn’t seem real. I was standing in a warehouse in middle-­of­-nowhere Washington state, watching someone named Casey Weathers, a guy whose elbow had no right to be pushing the limits of human performance, throw a baseball harder than any I’d ever seen.

105.8.

 

Fracture epidemiology in male elite football players from 2001 to 2013: ‘How long will this fracture keep me out?’ – PubMed – NCBI

British Journal of Sports Medicine from March 25, 2016

BACKGROUND:

Determining fracture risk and rehabilitation periods after specific fractures in professional football is essential for team planning.
AIM:

To identify fracture epidemiology and absences after different types of fractures in male professional football players.
METHODS:

2439 players from 41 professional male teams in 10 countries were followed prospectively from 2001 to 2013. Team medical staff registered fractures, absences after fractures and player exposure.
RESULTS:

364 fractures were recorded, with an incidence of 0.27/1000?h of exposure (95% CI 0.25 to 0.30). The incidence of traumatic fractures was 0.25 (0.22 to 0.27) and that of stress fractures was 0.03 (0.02 to 0.04). 45% of traumatic fractures and 86% of stress fractures affected the lower extremities. Absence after a fracture was 32?days (1-278) (median (range)), compared to that after a traumatic fracture of 30?days (1-278) and a stress fracture of 65?days (6-168) (p<0.001). Annual fracture incidence was stable during the study period (R2=0.051, b=-0.011 (95% CI -0.043 to 0.021)). Young players had a relative risk of 10.9 (3.3 to 35.6) of sustaining stress fractures compared to old players (p<0.01). The fracture incidence did not differ between individuals in different playing positions (p=0.10).
SUMMARY:

A male professional football team can expect 1 to 2 fractures per season. There are more traumatic fractures than stress fractures; while most fractures affect the lower extremities, stress fractures yield longer absences than traumatic fractures and young players have more stress fractures than old players. There is no difference in risk among players at different playing positions.

 

Design Diary – MK Shot Maps

StatsBomb from March 25, 2016

A long, long time ago – November 2014 to be precise – I was lamenting the state of public shot maps. The ones floating around at the time were okay, but they provided neither the clarity I was looking for, nor the scaling I wanted for use looking across periods of more than one game. This isn’t to say the public ones are bad – more that I wanted to see if they could be done better.

My initial thoughts were that we might be able to do a Goldsberry style approach, adapted for football.

 

The NFL Combine and Pro Day: 30 years of Bad Data

SpartaPoint from March 28, 2016

The College of Business at the University of Louisville conducted a study in 2008 with the goal of determining what (if any) correlation there was between the players’ performance in the combine tests (both physical and psychological), and their performance in the NFL. They found no correlation between the Combine performance and actual game performance, with the exception of sprint tests for running backs.

NFL teams recognize this problem, one GM told me that the medical exams are the only worthwhile information anymore, outside the most obvious criteria which is their ability to play football. Yet still, every NFL hopeful runs through these series of tests that has gone relatively unchanged over the last 30 years. So if everyone knows these combine tests aren’t valid measures of an athlete’s performance on the field, why do we still do them?

 

A scale-based approach to interdisciplinary research and expertise in sports

Journal of Sports Sciences from March 28, 2016

After more than 20 years since the introduction of ecological and dynamical approaches in sports research, their promising opportunity for interdisciplinary research has not been fulfilled yet. The complexity of the research process and the theoretical and empirical difficulties associated with an integrated ecological-dynamical approach have been the major factors hindering the generalisation of interdisciplinary projects in sports sciences. To facilitate this generalisation, we integrate the major concepts from the ecological and dynamical approaches to study behaviour as a multi-scale process. Our integration gravitates around the distinction between functional (ecological) and execution (organic) scales, and their reciprocal intra- and inter-scale constraints. We propose an (epistemological) scale-based definition of constraints that accounts for the concept of synergies as emergent coordinative structures. To illustrate how we can operationalise the notion of multi-scale synergies we use an interdisciplinary model of locomotor pointing. To conclude, we show the value of this approach for interdisciplinary research in sport sciences, as we discuss two examples of task-specific dimensionality reduction techniques in the context of an ongoing project that aims to unveil the determinants of expertise in basketball free throw shooting. These techniques provide relevant empirical evidence to help bootstrap the challenging modelling efforts required in sport sciences.

 

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