Applied Sports Science newsletter – April 9, 2016

… The unprecedented origin story of Lonzo Ball as an elite prospect makes him especially tough to scout — not just as a recruit but also as a long-term prospect. His incredible success has come within a gimmick system that he’s unlikely to ever play in again. At the same time, his frame, three-point stroke and playmaking ability will immediately make NBA teams take notice.

“His vision is absolutely elite,” said Josh Gershon, a national scout for Scout.com. “There haven’t been too many players in high school basketball history that have come along with his skill set, his versatility, his size for the position. He’s a tough eval just in that he’s a really unique player.

The only sound at the top of the Entoto Mountains is the thwack of a cowherd’s staff against the tree trunks as he leads his small herd of oxen home. I am doing my best to keep pace with Tirunesh Dibaba, 30, and her younger sister, Genzebe, 25, two wisplike Ethiopians with wide smiles and a fiercely close bond who may be the most formidable female track stars in the world. In the late-afternoon light high above central Addis Ababa, we zigzag between the majestic eucalyptus trees, paying heed to the uneven ground below and staying alert for the not-uncommon hyena sighting—no problem, the sisters assure me, as long as you clap loudly and throw a rock in the animal’s direction.

The Dibabas’ dominance in the field of distance running has captivated the track-and-field community. “There are a few running families, but not like the Dibabas,” says the Ethiopian track legend Haile Gebrselassie.

Arsène Wenger has revealed that the Arsenal players are regularly tested for alcohol and is adamant that injuries rather than lifestyle are the only barrier to Jack Wilshere realising his football potential.

“Jack is not a drinker at all,” said Wenger. “I don’t even have that worry. Of course drinking alcohol is bad. We test our players regularly. We don’t have a drinking problem. Scientifically we control very well our players. The drinking problem was much bigger when I arrived.”

You can never eliminate an athlete’s ‘natural way’ of moving, because it was never taught in the first place. It’s always been there. You can overwrite it, you can attempt to coach it out, but it never entirely goes away, and will reemerge under stressful contexts.

Some of the state’s better boys soccer players have been forced to make a difficult decision: continue playing for their high school or pay to play exclusively for one of the state’s academy programs.

Players can’t do both. In February 2012, the U.S. Soccer Development Academy program moved to a 10-month season, making players selected to an academy team — an elite level team for athletes from around the region — ineligible for the high school season.

If there’s one thing we cyclists love, it’s data – max heart rate, peak power output, cadence – the market is flooded with gadgets that measure, record and assess. There is one key figure you can’t get from an onboard bike computer, though. Your VO2 max – or the maximum amount of oxygen your body can use in one minute – was for a long time considered the benchmark for aerobic fitness, not just for cycling but also for pretty much every sport where endurance performance is fundamental to success.

‘Broadly speaking, VO2 max is a measure of how efficient your body is at getting oxygen from the air you breathe to your muscles,’ says Chris Easton, lecturer in clinical exercise physiology at the University of the West of Scotland. ‘It’s a good measurement of aerobic fitness and theoretically represents the maximum amount of energy you can produce during exercise.’

…

One topic that’s often debated is whether you should do any faster running, like interval workouts, during your base training period. Does running intervals have an opportunity cost, since you’re missing the opportunity to do another long run? Or, worse, is there something about hard anaerobic running that actually prevents you from building the endurance you’re supposed to?

That last idea—speedwork hurts endurance—always struck me as unlikely. I’ve generally included intervals during my base training periods, albeit relatively long and relaxed ones with short recoveries, which isn’t necessarily inconsistent with Lydiard’s approach. Still, a recent, seemingly unrelated study reminded me of the debate.

Balance, strength and power relationships may contain important information at various maturational stages to determine training priorities.
PURPOSE:

The objective was to examine maturity-specific relationships of static/dynamic balance with strength and power measures in young male athletes.
METHOD:

Soccer players (N=130) aged 10-18 were assessed with the Stork and Y balance (YBT) tests. Strength/power measures included back extensor muscle strength, standing long jump (SLJ), countermovement jump (CMJ), and 3-hop jump tests. Associations between balance with strength/power variables were calculated according to peak-height-velocity (PHV).
RESULTS:

There were significant medium-large sized correlations between all balance measures with back extensor strength (r=.486-.791) and large associations with power (r=.511-.827). These correlation coefficients were significantly different between pre-PHV and circa PHV as well as pre-PHV and post-PHV with larger associations in the more mature groups. Irrespective of maturity-status, SLJ was the best strength/power predictor with the highest proportion of variance (12-47%) for balance (i.e., Stork eyes opened) and the YBT was the best balance predictor with the highest proportion of variance (43-78%) for all strength/power variables.
CONCLUSION:

The associations between balance and muscle strength/power measures in youth athletes that increase with maturity may imply transfer effects from balance to strength/power training and vice versa.

… There are now 2000 gene therapies where you’ll take a little piece of engineered DNA, put it inside of a viral coat so all the viral genes are gone, and you can put in, say, a human gene or you can have nonviral delivery, but the important thing is that you’re delivering it either inside of the human or you’re taking cells out of the human and putting the DNA in and then putting them back in. But you can do very powerful things like curing inherited diseases, curing infectious diseases.

For example, you can edit out the receptor for the HIV virus and cure AIDS patients in a way that’s not dependent upon vaccines and multidrug resistance, which has plagued the HIV AIDS story from the very beginning. You’re basically making a human being which is now augmented in a certain sense so that, unlike most humans, they are resistant to this major plague of mankind—HIV AIDS.

There are now people walking around who are genetically modified: There are some that are resistant to AIDS because they have had their T cells, or more generally, their blood cells modified. There are children that have been cured of blindness by gene therapy. None of this is CRISPR, but it’s in the same vein. CRISPR is overtaking it very quickly and it’s drafting behind all the beautiful work that’s been done with delivery of DNA, delivery of genetic components to patients.

GEORGE CHURCH is a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and director of the Personal Genome Project. George Church’s Edge Bio Page

I worry about a lot of things. I encourage people to worry about a lot of things, but worry in the sense of taking action, doing something about it and being cautious as you do something about it—doing safety engineering. Every field of engineering has a safety component, eventually. You have civil engineering, aerospace, and so forth; huge amounts of their budgets go to safety components, and biology is no exception. Certainly in pharmaceuticals a huge fraction of the budget for bringing a new drug to market is not the research and development that produces the first prototype drug; it’s all clinical trials—toxicity efficacy testing.

Some of the technologies that we come up with are pretty transformative—disruptive, in a good sense. The more transformative they are, the more important it is to consider safety upfront—ideally, talk about it before it’s on the streets. The counterexample is the influenza “gain-of-function” research where they brought to influenza some pretty scary new capabilities and didn’t discuss it with anybody who could have modulated, blocked, or cautioned them in their research until they were ready to publish it, which is a little too late. It’s the sort of thing that should have been regulated before the first grant proposal was made, much less the first research or the first paper.

Some of the things that we want people to worry about, in an enabling way these days going forward, are a lot of new applications of a new technology: CRISPR.

Keeping your star players fit and injury-free is often the difference between winners and also-rans. That’s where former Leinster rugby rehab chief Stephen Smith comes in with his medical tech expertise, our Technology Editor discovers.

The Stanford football team’s Rose Bowl championship season might have ended differently without the help of technology that employs virtual reality goggles to quickly diagnose concussions.

Throughout last season, trainers used eye-tracking technology called Eye-Sync to test Cardinal players who showed symptoms.

Instead of taking the usual 30 to 40 minutes to run through subjective concussion tests that can be inconclusive, Eye-Sync provided solid data in just 30 to 60 seconds.

… Processes over a TCP/IP network and threads over shared memory seem like two very different ways of dealing with one problem—communication between concurrent workflows. Both are arguably antiquated for this new computer. TCP/IP was designed for unreliable global networks and carries significant overhead for fast local interconnects. Shared memory does not scale to a large number of CPU cores. But all we really want is to send a message from workflow A to workflow B.

Enter Erlang.

Erlang was designed in the 1980s by group of engineers at Ericsson. They specifically were trying to address the shortcomings of existing languages with respect to handling highly-concurrent telephony applications with extreme reliability requirements. Concurrency meant handling millions of small processes that would occasionally communicate with each other. Reliability meant guarding against hardware failure and, more importantly, against bugs in the program. Erlang designers made a great tradeoff from the outset: immutability and single assignment (very uncommon in conventional programming languages), enforced by the VM.

The U.S. Defense Department is teaming with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on a manufacturing initiative to create a new high-technology infrastructure in fiber and textile manufacturing. A broad range of products will emerge from these new fiber technologies, which will revolutionize items ranging from clothes to building materials.

Biologic therapies, including stem cells, platelet-rich plasma, growth factors, and other biologically active adjuncts, have recently received increased attention in the basic science and clinical literature. At the 2015 AOSSM Biologics II Think Tank held in Colorado Springs, Colorado, a group of orthopaedic surgeons, basic scientists, veterinarians, and other investigators gathered to review the state of the science for biologics and barriers to implementation of biologics for the treatment of sports medicine injuries. This series of current concepts reviews reports the summary of the scientific presentations, roundtable discussions, and recommendations from this think tank.

At the recent NFL owners meetings, a total of 10 new rules were announced for the 2016 season. The league often touts its health and safety improvements. Four of the new rules were enacted with player welfare in mind; however, did the league go far enough?

Four rules changes for safety

1. All chop blocks are now illegal

Background: The risk of injury associated with American football is significant, with recent reports indicating that football has one of the highest rates of all-cause injury, including concussion, of all major sports. There are limited studies examining risk factors for injuries in the National Football League (NFL).

Purpose: To identify risk factors for NFL concussions and musculoskeletal injuries.

Study Design: Case-control study; Level of evidence, 3.

Methods: Injury report data were collected prospectively for each week over the 2012-2013 and 2013-2014 regular seasons for all 32 teams. Poisson regression models were used to identify the relationship between predetermined variables and the risk of the 5 most frequent injuries (knee, ankle, hamstring, shoulder, and concussion).

Results: A total of 480 games or 960 team games (TGs) from the 2012-2013 and 2013-2014 regular seasons were included in this study. A trend to an increasing risk of concussion and TG ankle injury with decreasing mean game-day temperature was observed. The risk of TG concussion (incidence rate ratio [IRR], 2.16; 95% CI, 1.35-3.45; P = .001) and TG ankle injury (IRR, 1.48; 95% CI, 1.10-1.98; P = .01) was significantly greater for TGs played at a mean game-day temperature of ?9.7°C (?49.5°F) compared with a mean game-day temperature of ?21.0°C (?69.8°F). The risk of TG shoulder injury was significantly increased for TGs played on grass surfaces (IRR, 1.36; 95% CI, 1.02-1.81; P = .038) compared with synthetic surfaces. The risk of TG injury was not associated with time in season, altitude, time zone change prior to game, or distance traveled to a game.

Conclusion: This study evaluated extrinsic risk factors for injury in the NFL. A hazardous association was identified for risk of concussion and ankle injury with colder game-day temperature. Further research should be conducted to substantiate this relationship and its potential implication for injury prevention initiatives.

… Kerr had back surgery in July, just weeks after Golden State won the 2014-15 NBA championship. The surgery created a fluid leak in his spine, which needed to be repaired by a second surgery in September. In late September, Kerr and Margot had a joint 50th birthday party (their birthdays are a day apart). “He put on a really good face,” Margot says. “But you could see he was in a ton of pain.”

For months, he was a shell of himself, battling intense pressure headaches and searing pain behind his eyes. The worst of it was not understanding what was wrong or knowing whether it would ever get better. As an athlete, you break a bone and the doctor tells you it will heal in four to six weeks. This was different. Kerr had no answers. It wasn’t his back that hurt, it was his head. He felt sick, weak, tired and dizzy. He sat out the first 43 games of the season, leaving 35-year-old assistant coach Luke Walton in charge of the best team in the league.

“Of course I get angry and pissed off sometimes,” Kerr says. “But I can’t hang on that. It does you no good.”

… Head of Academy Performance, Grant Downie, joined City four and a half years ago, having previously been Head of Sports Medicine at Middlesbrough FC and Head Physiotherapist at Glasgow Rangers FC.

With over 25 years’ experience in professional football, he is now focused on helping players aged from six to 21 develop both medically and as people.

Can you give us an overview of you role?

My job is to look after the Academy Performance staff, which includes medicine, science and performance analysis.

Despite the current ‘war on sugar,’ carbohydrate energy is a consumer need in sports nutrition, backed up by the most recently EU-approved health claim related to carbohydrates and recovery from exercise.

Whether training in a professional sports stadium or neighborhood park, all athletes require fuel and hydration to keep them going — however, based on age, health, and workout intensity, their intake needs may vary greatly. Like leading sports brands Nike and Under Armour, Gatorade’s innovation strategies for 2016 and beyond focus on personalizing offerings to the training needs and goals of each consumer, in order to help them to make the most of their workout.

At the Gatorade Fuel Lab, Xavi Cortadella, Gatorade’s Global Innovation Director, discussed the company’s personalization initiatives—including customized formulas, complimentary meals, and organic offerings—designed to transform Gatore from a sports drink brand into a holistic sports fuel solution.

… App State has made a department-wide commitment to nutrition, an oft-overlooked part of strength and conditioning, through its new program, AppFuel, designed to ensure that athletes are properly fueled for whatever coaches throw at them.

With two “fueling stations” located in the Appalachian Athletics Center and Owens Fieldhouse, athletes have access to whatever they need for a morning lift, or whatever they need to recover from a grueling track workout in August.

Many National Basketball Association executives and analysts claim that the best way to contend for a championship is to get very high draft picks, which may require losing many games. We test whether building through the draft promotes winning in several ways. We test whether having more and higher draft picks promotes improvement and whether giving draft picks more playing time helps teams win more. We find that the draft is not necessarily the best road to success. An excellent organization and General Manager better enable teams to succeed even without high draft picks.

One of the chief benefits conferred by the epicly great seasons currently unfolding in Golden State and oh-by-the-way San Antonio is the ability to set themselves up for a deep playoff run. Almost like a baseball manager juggling the pitching rotation to ensure maximum postseason impact for a team’s top arms, Steve Kerr and Gregg Popovich have the luxury of resting stars, experimenting with alternative lineup combinations and basically doing everything possible to ensure their respective teams are at their absolute peak come May and June.

Even the pressure imposed by the Warriors’ pursuit of the alltimes single season wins record1 is mitigated by their extreme degree of inseason dominance. As first discussed here, the Dubs spend more time leading by double digits (approximately 37% of game time as of this writing) than any team since at least 1996-1997. This naturally turns into a lot of blowouts, which in turn means a lot of 4th quarter rest for Curry.

… So what are the lessons of the Sam Hinkie era? There are five:

– Chip Kelly proved it and so did Hinkie: In sports, innovation is overrated. Keep that in mind and tread lightly, new Phillies front office.

Between 2008 and 2012 Barcelona and Spain’s possession-heavy playing style led to unparalleled domestic and international success. Tactically, the game across the continent shifted, led by an effort to mimic some of the best aspects of these teams.

What people also noticed was that Spain and Barcelona were winning trophies with players well under six foot (183cm) tall, and consciously or otherwise other national teams followed suit. The chart below shows this trend; the average height of international footballers has fallen by a couple of centimetres in recent years.

Many people think of visualization as a plug-in tool that spits out something to look at. Microsoft Excel comes to mind. Some think of visualization as just that final chart to put on a presentation slide. However, there’s always a backstory about how it was made, who made it, why it was made, and most importantly, how the data came about. This is often more important than the finished product.

Artist Jer Thorp wrote about this a while back — about how visualization is a process. More recently, Jake Porway, the director of DataKind, wrote more about the process and how it ties into more rigorous analyses.

When data visualization is used simply to show alluring infographics about whether people like Coke or Pepsi better, the stakes of persuasion like this are low. But when they are used as arguments for or against public policy, the misuse of data visualization to persuade can have drastic consequences. Data visualization without rigorous analysis is at best just rhetoric and, at worse, incredibly harmful.