Applied Sports Science newsletter – April 11, 2016

After 22 years and eight teams, the Panthers’ Jagr is bound for another playoff appearance and seems unlikely to retire any time soon.

… “It was really crushing for her not to make” the World Cup roster, the United States co-captain Becky Sauerbrunn said. “But you saw that great reaction from her in the N.W.S.L. She used that time to get better. She got confident, and that translated over to the national team, and she has kept that confidence. She’s played herself into a really great spot right now.”

Ellis said: “A lot of it, for Crystal, hinges on the confidence piece. I think she’s in a good place mentally in terms of what she thinks she can add to this team.”

… “The transition was a lot tougher than I expected,” says Pugh, a high school senior headed to UCLA. “Just the training load and intensity was so much more than the youth teams. I knew the pace and speed of play would be fast, but you can’t really understand how fast it is until you are in training with them.

“Before I went into my first game, I was standing next to Kelley O’Hara on the sideline and she said ‘be intense in your defense and good things will happen’ and that was great advice. You have to be intense every day, but there were no challenges fitting in. All the players have been great to me and really helpful.”

… The first ‘physical’ component of the cool down process includes a gradually reduction of intensity of activity over 5-10 minutes and extensive whole-body static stretching held, individually, for >45 seconds for developmental purposes and use of PNF (Proprioceptive Neuromuscular Facilitation) when necessary on major/at risk muscle groups (the hip flexors, adductors or hamstrings for example).

Why?

For us, rather than a reduction of muscle soreness, this is an excellent opportunity for subsequent injury prevention and enhanced performance by significantly improving range of motion.

It’s a question all runners face when the mind is tired, the legs are heavy and a scheduled session is feeling like one huge struggle: should I suck it up and keep going, change the workout or just call it a day?

In a ‘no pain, no gain’ world, that can be a difficult question. But getting the answer right is vital if you want to train successfully, says Pete Pfitzinger, an exercise physiologist and Olympic marathoner. ‘There’s a fine line between pushing hard to succeed and setting yourself back,’ he says. This is especially true in a month like ‘Monster March’, when those training for spring marathons are working through the toughest weeks in their schedules.

… Zardes has used the TOCA first touch training system, which was developed by former USMNT member Eddie Lewis, since the beginning of 2014. He gives it a lot of credit when it comes to the strides that he has made for club and country over the past two seasons. The TOCA, which looks like a motorized push lawnmower with a spiral of soccer balls on it, fires soccer balls based on height and direction-specific orders that Zardes gives with his iPhone. At its fastest, TOCA can fire balls every two seconds, a pace which Zardes says he can now keep up with when working on his first touch rapid fire style, which he does on occasion. In general, he favors the slower, but still demanding, four-second interval.

David Cutcliffe says this offseason had the greatest amount of change at Duke since he arrived in 2008, but the key was to make sure the value system didn’t change.

Cutcliffe lost some coaches and staffers to promotions or retirements. He continued a tradition of promoting from within at Duke with offensive line coach Marcus Johnson, but he also added two new coaches in special teams coordinator Jim Bridge and defensive line coach Ben Albert. On Thursday, he explained what he looks for in an outside hire, and why it’s the same baseline.

“I like (promotions), because they understand the value system of the program. When you go outside and you make changes, you start with the value system of the program when you’re looking for candidates,” Cutcliffe said. “You’re fortunate to have people like Jim Bridge and Ben Albert, who fit that role, that are exceptionally gifted and experienced.

Before each game, student athletes at Baylor put in hours of work behind the scenes, training to be in top shape to improve their athletic performance on the field or on the court. Baylor University’s Athletic Performance department works side-by -side with all the athletes to help them maximize their workouts. However now, the Athletic Performance department has gone one step further and found a new way to improve an athlete’s training.

Working with Athletigen, a sports genetics organization, the Athletic Performance department is working toward being able to tailor an athlete’s workout based on the genetic makeup of their DNA.

“Our job is to help our athletes,” said Chris Ruf, the director of athletic performance. “They may have a goal to get to a certain place athletically in four or five years and that’s good to have a goal like that, but we need to take care of the everyday things. We need to train hard, train smart and make sure we are doing the most appropriate things for an athlete to help them get better.”

At the top level, football is highly demanding, with players enduring substantial pressure to perform at their best every game. Indeed, the congested match fixture schedule combined with heavy performance expectations, exposes players to significant physical and psychological stress. Combined, these stressors can result in fatigue which can affect performance.

Fatigue is a complex state with a multifactorial genesis. Traditionally, fatigue in a football context has been investigated from a neuromuscular/metabolic perspective (Bangsbo, Iaia, & Krustrup, 2007) with relatively little scientific attention examining the impact of mental fatigue on performance. Most commonly, fatigue has been studied within the constraints of physical performance during competition and it has been reported to manifest in reduced distances covered towards the end of the match, and/or following high-intensity periods during the match (Carling & Dupont, 2011; Mohr, Krustrup, & Bangsbo, 2003). Moreover, reductions in quantity and quality of technical performance during match-play have also been suggested to result from “match-related fatigue” (Rampinini et al., 2008).

However, with the exception of military combat, it has been suggested that team sports such as football place more stress on the brain than any other activity (Walsh, 2014). Indeed, football players are required to remain vigilant for long periods before and during matches, adhering to tactical strategies, constantly adjusting to changes in the opposition and their team mates. Players are also required to make quick and accurate decisions accounting for these factors, constantly retrieving and processing information in a dynamic environment. In addition, players have to cope with the mental stressors resulting from the expectations of coaches, supporters, sponsors and media. Therefore, it is likely that players experience mental fatigue in their daily environment and this can negatively affect performance.

Wearable devices, like the Fitbits and Apple watches sported by runners and early adopters, are fast becoming tools in the workplace. These devices offer employers new ways to measure productivity and safety, and give insurers the ability to track workers’ health indicators and habits.

For companies with large workforces, the prospect of tracking people’s whereabouts and productivity can be welcome. But collecting data on employees’ health and their physical movement can trigger a host of potential ethical and legal headaches for employers.

One of the most interesting pieces of health care reporting I have read in the last couple of weeks was Charles Piller’s article in Stat on leadership issues at Verily, Google’s effort to “transform” medicine. As you might be aware, Google has bet that a combination of gene sequencing, biomarkers, intensive monitoring, and big data will give individuals the information they need to stay healthy and/or intervene early and effectively in many diseases. Verily has a slick promotional video touting this vision and the rationale behind it. This might be called Google’s version of P4 medicine. The four Ps are predictive, personalized, preventive, and participatory. The shorthand for these four Ps is “personalized” or “precision” medicine. Clearly there is no shortage of Ps — including a P for “pitching” that health care transformation via technology is a sure thing.

In a couple of recent posts I have discussed some of the hype around this vision and also the fact that assuming things like gene scores will lead to widespread participatory and preventive behavior change is a stretch. But what do we know about monitoring? Specifically what do we know about wearables, apps and mobile devices? [video, 1:54]

OBJECTIVE:

To conduct a systematic review and meta-analysis to synthesize evidence regarding measurement properties of the Knee Injury and Osteoarthritis Outcome Score (KOOS).
DESIGN:

A comprehensive literature search identified 37 eligible papers evaluating KOOS measurement properties in participants with knee injuries and/or osteoarthritis (OA). Methodological quality was evaluated using the COSMIN checklist. Where possible, meta-analysis of extracted data was conducted for all studies and stratified by age and knee condition; otherwise narrative synthesis was performed.
RESULTS:

KOOS has adequate internal consistency, test-retest reliability and construct validity in young and old adults with knee injuries and/or OA. The ADL subscale has better content validity for older patients and Sport/Rec for younger patients with knee injuries, while the Pain subscale is more relevant for painful knee conditions. The five-factor structure of the original KOOS is unclear. There is some evidence that the KOOS subscales demonstrate sufficient unidimensionality, but this requires confirmation. Although measurement error requires further evaluation, the minimal detectable change for KOOS subscales ranges from 14.3 to 19.6 for younger individuals, and ?20 for older individuals. Evidence of responsiveness comes from larger effect sizes following surgical (especially total knee replacement) than non-surgical interventions.
CONCLUSIONS:

KOOS demonstrates adequate content validity, internal consistency, test-retest reliability, construct validity and responsiveness for age- and condition-relevant subscales. Structural validity, cross-cultural validity and measurement error require further evaluation, as well as construct validity of KOOS-PS. Suggested order of subscales for different knee conditions can be applied in hierarchical testing of endpoints in clinical trials.

… if we are dehydrated by as little as 2% of our body weight we don’t start to sweat until our body temp is higher, we sweat less, and our temperature increases more than it should. Dehydration also causes the heart to pump less blood. This can make skin blood flow lower so it is harder to keep things cool and there can be less blood flow going to the muscle doing the exercise. None of these are good things.

In addition to affecting our endurance, dehydration can affect things like the ability to shoot a basketball or other skills in sports. Dehydration also makes thinking and judgment worse. Less is known about exactly how much dehydration it takes to reduce ability in strength and power events, but with enough dehydration performance will surely start to decline.

Public schools are increasingly filled with black and Hispanic students, but the children identified as “gifted” in those schools are overwhelmingly white and Asian.

The numbers are startling. Black third graders are half as likely as whites to be included in programs for the gifted, and the deficit is nearly as large for Hispanics, according to work by two Vanderbilt researchers, Jason Grissom and Christopher Redding.

New evidence indicates that schools have contributed to these disparities by underestimating the potential of black and Hispanic children. But that can change: When one large school district in Florida altered how it screened children, the number of black and Hispanic children identified as gifted doubled.

When teams run out of tangible answers for why they’re not good, they always turn to the same thing: intangibles.

For instance, this week we saw both Vancouver and Colorado turn to issues of leadership, character, and culture for the reasons that these bad teams are bad. The Patrick Roy stuff has been out there more than enough this week, because he thinks that the deficiencies in the quality of the job he’s done coaching, and the quality of the roster he and Joe Sakic have put together (both extraordinarily low) are not to blame for the team’s ongoing woes.

Less publicized has been Jim Benning in Vancouver telling TSN 1040 that the reason the Canucks aren’t good has nothing to do with the roster he’s cobbled together being second-last in scoring and eighth from the bottom in goals allowed. He in fact said that his No. 1 priority for turning the team around is “competing.”