Applied Sports Science newsletter – March 30, 2016

Chris Robshaw, sacked as the England rugby captain but retained as a player, has helped England to win the Six Nations. Against Wales last week, Robshaw’s sustained supportiveness allowed others to take the limelight. Unflashy but quietly influential, it was Robshaw’s career in miniature. It was also a superb example of an underrated quality (especially impressive coming from a recently deposed captain): followership.

Klay Thompson said the Warriors are appreciative of coach Steve Kerr leaving it in the players’ hands as to whether they can play down the stretch or get rest before the playoffs.

The 66-7 Warriors with at least seven wins in the final nine games in the regular season can break the 1995-96 Chicago Bulls’ single-season record of 72 wins.

“Our vets really appreciate it,” Thompson said. “I think they’ve earned that right just with all the hard work and the way they act every day. They never take a day off, and for us young guys though, we pride ourselves on playing as much as possible. When we’re older, that’s something we’ll think of. But for me and guys my age and younger, we just want to get out there and hoop as much as we can.”

Despite flourishing interest in the topic of fatigue-as indicated by the many presentations on fatigue at the 2015 annual meeting of the American College of Sports Medicine-surprisingly little is known about its impact on human performance. There are two main reasons for this dilemma: (1) the inability of current terminology to accommodate the scope of the conditions ascribed to fatigue, and (2) a paucity of validated experimental models. In contrast to current practice, a case is made for a unified definition of fatigue to facilitate its management in health and disease. Based on the classic two-domain concept of Mosso, fatigue is defined as a disabling symptom in which physical and cognitive function is limited by interactions between performance fatigability and perceived fatigability. As a symptom, fatigue can only be measured by self-report, quantified as either a trait characteristic or a state variable. One consequence of such a definition is that the word fatigue should not be preceded by an adjective (e.g., central, mental, muscle, peripheral, and supraspinal) to suggest the locus of the changes responsible for an observed level of fatigue. Rather, mechanistic studies should be performed with validated experimental models to identify the changes responsible for the reported fatigue. As indicated by three examples (walking endurance in old adults, time trials by endurance athletes, and fatigue in persons with multiple sclerosis) discussed in the review, however, it has proven challenging to develop valid experimental models of fatigue. The proposed framework provides a foundation to address the many gaps in knowledge of how laboratory measures of fatigue and fatigability impact real-world performance.

Emotional Muscle, what is it? PDP Contributor & President of New Edge Performance, John Haime discusses the importance of emotional state on performance and provides some practical advice for building emotional muscle in football.

At each of Purdue football’s spring practices, three players in bright yellow jerseys cycle through their turns under center.

Boilermaker quarterbacks David Blough, Elijah Sindelar and Aaron Banks try to make the most of the snaps they receive every day. With each practice lasting about two hours and recurring a couple of times per week, physical reps come at a premium.

Now, Purdue’s three young quarterbacks will take unlimited virtual reps the same way a lot of college students spend their free time — playing video games on their phone.

Marcos Dantus says he likes a good challenge. How else does a chemistry professor end up trying to protect millions of young athletes from concussions? … The result after more than 200 prototypes is a headband equipped with three removable Band-Aid-sized strips capable of detecting and differentiating between the impacts football players withstand in practices and games. There’s one strip on each side and one in the front, locations where players said high-impact events are most likely to occur. The strips are equipped with ink that displays differently depending on the amount of force withstood.

… Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Quanterix has a new approach to detecting proteins—picking them out of the blood one at a time. “We’ve invented a way to make proteins as sensitive as DNA,” says Quanterix CEO Kevin Hrusovsky. “It’s rocket science in the blood.”

To get a peek at this “rocket science,” we visited Quanterix’s headquarters in a suburban town northwest of Boston—a nondescript gray building tucked in the rear of a business park.

The company’s technology, called Simoa for Single Molecule Array, is a white and blue box the size of an extra-large refrigerator. Inside is a system sensitive enough to detect even a single protein in a vial of blood, says Hrusovsky. That’s like locating one grain of sand in 2,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools, he adds.

BACKGROUND:

Previous injury is a well-documented risk factor for football injury. The time trends and patterns of recurrent injuries at different playing levels are not clear.
AIM:

To compare recurrent injury proportions, incidences and patterns between different football playing levels, and to study time trends in recurrent injury incidence.
METHODS:

Time-loss injuries were collected from injury surveillance of 43 top-level European professional teams (240 team-seasons), 19 Swedish premier division teams (82 team-seasons) and 10 Swedish amateur teams (10 team-seasons). Recurrent injury was defined as an injury of the same type and at the same site as an index injury within the preceding year, with injury 2?months as a delayed recurrence. Seasonal trend for recurrent injury incidence, expressed as the average annual percentage of change, was analysed using linear regression.
RESULTS:

13?050 injuries were included, 2449 (18.8%) being recurrent injuries, with 1944 early (14.9%) and 505 delayed recurrences (3.9%). Recurrence proportions were highest in the second half of the competitive season for all cohorts. Recurrence proportions differed between playing levels, with 35.1% in the amateur cohort, 25.0% in the Swedish elite cohort and 16.6% in the European cohort (?2 overall effect, p<0.001). A decreasing trend was observed in recurrent injury incidence in the European cohort, a -2.9% average annual change over the 14-year study period (95% CI -5.4% to -0.4%, p=0.026). Similarly, a decreasing tendency was also seen in the Swedish premier division.
CONCLUSIONS:

Recurrence proportions showed an inverse relationship with playing level, and recurrent injury incidence has decreased over the past decade.

While Roger Goodell continues his draconian approach to off-the-field substance abuse, a much larger elephant roams the room unabated.

The New Orleans Pelicans were without seven players because of injury Monday against the New York Knicks.

After losing Alonzo Gee in the third quarter to a right quad injury and Jrue Holiday in the waning minutes to a right eye injury, Pelicans coach Alvin Gentry put out an SOS for any and all help to their season-long injury woes.

By: NYU Langone Orthopedics Center for Ethics and Policy

Tuesday, April 5, starting at 5 p.m., Loeb Auditorium, NYU Langone Hospital for Joint Diseases (301 East 17th Street)

… Researchers at McMaster University wanted to look into gaining muscle while trying to lose weight, and in doing so, their findings are being called the “holy grail” of diet and exercise – their diet diet and exercise routine allowed their research participants to lose fat and gain muscle.

In their recently published a paper titled “Higher compared with lower dietary protein during an energy deficit combined with intense exercise promotes greater lean mass gain and fat mass loss: a randomized trial” was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Researchers looked at body composition changes in overweight young men who were put through intensive exercise and diet for about a month.

After England’s encouraging 3-2 win against Germany yesterday the English are predictably getting excited about the prospects for Euro 2016. Readers of this blog are no doubt familiar with one of the best chapters in Soccernomics, which provided the original title of the UK edition- ”Why England Lose”. In this Simon hilariously described the eight-phase progression from excessive optimism to ultimate humiliation that accompanies most England campaigns.

So before we get going for Euro 2016, I would like to pre-empt accusations against one of the usual suspects paraded in the scapegoating phase (no 7). As I watched on US TV yesterday the commentary team was already pointing the finger- the English players might do well as long as they are not too exhausted by the excessive demands of the English season.

… Let’s explore 3 possible sources for the increase in NBA 3 pointers: 1) Players tend to take more 3s as they get older and more experienced. 2) 3 shooting has been increasingly valued in the draft, allowing more high-volume 3 shooters into the league. 3) Team strategy has evolved to emphasize 3 pointers.

“Physics is not conceptually super-interesting anymore, not as interesting as biology and evolution and all things social — at least for me,” says Luis Bettencourt, a physicist at the Santa Fe Institute who once studied the origins of the universe and now studies the growth of cities.

In many cases, these new collaborations have been fueled by an explosion of data pouring in from DNA sequencing, cellphone records and other sources, filled with latent patterns that could reveal more about the systems that created them. “It’s an opportunity for people that are fluent with dealing with data, and modeling data” — in other words, certain kinds of physicists — “to come in and say something,” Bettencourt says.