Applied Sports Science newsletter – April 6, 2016

One of the reasons it is difficult to see precisely what makes Katie Ledecky perhaps the greatest athlete in America, and maybe the planet, is that when she comes out of her house it is dark, as in very dark, as in 4:25 in the morning. Naturally, conversation at this hour is limited: The swimmer is under the hood of her parka and savoring those last few moments before the 5:00 a.m. plunge, while her father, David Ledecky, who is ferrying her to practice, is DJ-ing a little classic rock, as fathers driving their nineteen-year-old daughters anywhere typically do.

Ninety minutes and thousands of strokes later, at the pool at Georgetown Prep, in Bethesda, Maryland, where Ledecky trains six days a week, it’s easy to spot the swimmer who has broken her own world record in the 800-meter freestyle an astounding four times since 2013. She is the six-foot-tall woman powering through her laps alongside the men, a few lanes away from the rest of the women. Seated in the stands is the swimmer’s mother, Mary Gen (short for Mary Genevieve), who doesn’t get into the particulars of her daughter’s technique. “You should ask Katie,” she says. “I wonder what she’ll say. We try to stay out of strategies. We just try to make sure she’s happy.”

Elite soccer players are at risk of reduced recovery following periods of sleep disruption, particularly following late-night matches. It remains unknown whether improving sleep quality or quantity in such scenarios can improve post-match recovery. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate the effect of an acute sleep hygiene strategy (SHS) on physical and perceptual recovery of players following a late-night soccer match. In a randomised cross-over design, two highly-trained amateur teams (20 players) played two late-night (20:45) friendly matches against each other seven days apart. Players completed an SHS after the match or proceeded with their normal post-game routine (NSHS). Over the ensuing 48 h, objective sleep parameters (sleep duration, onset latency, efficiency, wake episodes), countermovement jump (CMJ; height, force production), YoYo Intermittent Recovery test (YYIR2; distance, maximum heart rate, lactate), venous blood (creatine kinase, urea and c-reactive protein) and perceived recovery and stress markers were collected. Sleep duration was significantly greater in SHS compared to NSHS on match night (P = 0.002, d = 1.50), with NSHS significantly less than baseline (P 0.05); although maximum heart rate during the YYIR2 was significantly higher in NSHS than SHS at 36 h post-match (P = 0.01; d = 0.81). There were no significant differences between conditions for perceptual “overall recovery” (P = 0.47) or “overall stress” (P = 0.17). Overall, an acute SHS improved sleep quantity following a late-night soccer match; albeit without any improvement in physical performance, perceptual recovery or blood-borne markers of muscle damage and inflammation.

… The training load was fairly constant during the 3 week intensive period and reduced by 40% for the last week. The perceived fatigue level followed suit, being 32% lower in the 4th week.

As can be seen in the chart, resting HR of the study group increased slightly during the 3 weeks of intensive training, and decreased below the starting point following the week of tapering.

HRV showed a progressive decrease during the first 3 weeks followed by a marked increase in week 4.

… Self-control actually exhausts us — it’s a limited resource. The more you use it, the less you have it. Researchers have found that it literally depletes your blood sugar. Ever wondered why you are more likely to binge on ice cream at night? Self-control literally gets depleted as the day goes on.

… If your testosterone, free or total, is elevated by 10%, it doesn’t mean that your muscle mass will increase by 10%. What the science on hormones tells us is that the these markers are great indicators of fatigue, and not muscle synthesis (repair or building of muscle). A better way of thinking about this is to consider trends in your free and total testosterone as hinting at fatigue, rather than growth.

Pro Tip: It’s ok to fluctuate within the “optimal zone,” but when chronically low, or below the zone, you should start to think about how lifestyle factors like sleep and overtraining can be contributing to the problem. Use a sleep tracker and commit to hitting 7-8 hours of quality sleep before blaming a workout program.

Wearable technology is coming to Major League Baseball.

The sport’s playing rules committee approved two devices for use during games this season, two people familiar with the decision told The Associated Press. The Motus Baseball Sleeve measures stress on elbows and the Zephyr Bioharness monitors heart and breathing rates.

In addition, the committee approved a pair of bat sensors for use on field during workouts, one from Blast Motion and the other from Diamond Kinetics.

Proteus Digital Health announced interim study results from a randomized control study of its Proteus Discover timed with the American College of Cardiology event, ACC.16, in Chicago this week. The study included 96 patients with uncontrolled hypertension and type 2 diabetes and showed that a majority of the patients using the digital offering achieved the blood pressure target at week four.

The Proteus digital medicine platform is a medication management and adherence system that includes measurement tools like sensor-enabled pills, a peel-and-stick biometric sensor patch worn on the body, and companion smartphone apps. The patch records when a pill is ingested and can also track other things like sleep patterns and physical activity levels. The ingestible sensor component secured FDA clearance in July 2012, while the company’s sensor-laden patch got FDA clearance in 2010.

The ingestible sensor is made up of an integrated circuit, two “active” layers, “excipient materials” that provide adhesive, and a “skirt, which contains ethyl cellulose, hydroxypropyl cellulose, and triethyl citrate.” The company explains in the paper that the pill is made entirely of ingredients found in the food chain.

Research has elucidated various “performance genes” that have a moderate impact on an athlete’s true potential. Yet an endurance athlete’s risk for injury may still be found on the chromosomes. Although still in its infancy, genetic testing can provide athletes and coaches with information to guide their training and nutrition. In particular, the last several years have seen an increase in research regarding the rate of soft-tissue injury as related to genetics.

The specific genes in question are responsible for the correct production of collagen, the body’s major structural protein. Essential for the health of all connective tissues, collagen is a long, thin fibrous protein that possesses remarkable ability to resist tensile stress. This is especially important for tendons, ligaments, and articular surfaces (joints) that are often the site of injury in runners and triathletes1.

Tony Ressler was adamant about the state of the Hawks’ practice facility. It was, according to the franchise’s principal owner, simply unacceptable.

That is about to change.

The Hawks and Emory Healthcare announced plans Tuesday to partner on a long-awaited sports medicine center and training facility at a news conference at Philips Arena. The 90,000-square-foot complex will cost $50-plus million, according to a person familiar with the situation, and be privately funded. It will be located on Executive Park Drive in Brookhaven. Plans for the facility are complete and the groundbreaking is expected in mid-May to be ready for the 2017-18 NBA season.

… We spent some time talking with him about keeping the Rockets upright during the playoff push.

ESPN: Can all the technology be overwhelming?

Gillett: I think you have to know what you’re looking for. The key to our program, and what we’re trying to accomplish, is to individualize their conditioning program, making sure they’re getting the proper amount of training. You get some guys who are undertraining, you get some guys who might be overtraining and we have to identify that first and adjust their conditioning portals over the course of time — season preseason, in-season, depending on the goals. I don’t think it’s overwhelming; it’s about knowing what you’re looking for. You have these questions you want to answer and you’re using this information to answer those questions.

At the request of coach Mike Riley, Boyd Epley — the author of “Husker Power” and now Nebraska’s associate athletic director for strength and conditioning — will have an expanded role with the football program focused on injury prevention.

Riley confirmed Thursday he’d reached out in recent weeks to Epley — Nebraska’s head strength coach for 35 years — to come up with some ideas on injury prevention, specifically the groin and hamstring issues that have dogged Husker wide receivers, defensive backs and linebackers over the last calendar year. Riley said his teams have struggled with those injuries at the beginning of any training period and he’d like Epley’s input.

Skeletal muscle is critical for human health. Protein feeding, alongside resistance exercise, is a potent stimulus for muscle protein synthesis (MPS) and is a key factor that regulates skeletal muscle mass (SMM). The main purpose of this narrative review was to evaluate the latest evidence for optimising the amino acid or protein source, dose, timing, pattern and macronutrient coingestion for increasing or preserving SMM in healthy young and healthy older adults. We used a systematic search strategy of PubMed and Web of Science to retrieve all articles related to this review objective. In summary, our findings support the notion that protein guidelines for increasing or preserving SMM are more complex than simply recommending a total daily amount of protein. Instead, multifactorial interactions between protein source, dose, timing, pattern and macronutrient coingestion, alongside exercise, influence the stimulation of MPS, and thus should be considered in the context of protein recommendations for regulating SMM. To conclude, on the basis of currently available scientific literature, protein recommendations for optimising SMM should be tailored to the population or context of interest, with consideration given to age and resting/post resistance exercise conditions.

For several decades sociologists have speculated that the performance of firms and other organizations depends as much on the networks of information flow between employees as on the formal structure of the organization [1, 2].

This argument makes intuitive sense, but until recently it has been extremely difficult to test using data. Historically, employee data has been collected mostly in the form of surveys, which are still the gold standard for assessing opinions, but reveal little about behavior such as who talks to whom. Surveys are also expensive and time consuming to conduct, hence they are unsuitable for frequent and comprehensive snapshots of the state of a large organization.

Thanks to the growing ubiquity of productivity software, however, this picture is beginning to change. Email logs, web-based calendars, and co-authorship of online documents all generate digital traces that can be used as proxies for social networks and their associated information flows. In turn, these network and activity data have the potential to shed new light on old questions about the performance of teams, divisions, and even entire organizations.

At the loftiest echelons of sport, the margin separating the champions from the also-rans can be measured in milliseconds or in million-dollar endorsement deals – or in sick days.

That’s one of the insights gleaned from a recent in-depth analysis of the training records of 37 elite Norwegian cross-country skiers over a nine-year period. The 16 athletes in the group who had won individual medals at the Olympics or World Championships reported an average of 14 days a year with symptoms of respiratory or gastrointestinal infection, compared with 22 days a year among the non-medalists.

… “In the last 10 years, analytics has gone from just poring over box scores or play-by-play logs in a different way to now it’s kind of extruded into the collection of the information,” Zaidi said. “So you have PITCHfx, Statcast, all that stuff.

“The reach of analytics has extended onto the field. And like anything that’s analyzed at this level, the better the quality of the data the better you can look into things. That’s really the biggest difference between 10, 15 years ago and now – the ability to collect that data. And the richer the data that’s collected, there’s a lot more you can do once you’re in the office and looking over things.”