Applied Sports Science newsletter – April 13, 2016

ANTAWN JAMISON FEARED for his teammate, who was slumped over in the locker to his right, whose feet were drowning in ice water buckets, knees buried beneath ice bags. Through 14 NBA seasons, Jamison had never seen anyone so worn down, someone who, though four months shy of his 35th birthday, moved, Jamison said, like a “105-year-old woman,” who sounded so exhausted that when Jamison asked, “Bro, you all right?” his teammate, who by then had played more than 54,000 total minutes — nearly 6,000 more than any NBA player ever at that point — could barely even speak.

Others feared too. “We gotta protect him!” Dwight Howard would plead to Lakers coaches, and the coaches tried. “You’ve got to come out,” head coach Mike D’Antoni would beg his star at the end of every first quarter, but the star’s response was always the same: “I’ll tell you when I need to come out.”

The toll mounted.

Liverpool have lined up Bayern Munich’s fitness coach, Andreas Kornmayer, to become their head of fitness and conditioning next season.

Kornmayer, 41, has worked for his home-town club for more than a decade and progressed through the ranks before being promoted to first-team duties in 2010.

PDP Lead Researcher examines the simplicity vs. complexity debate using one of the great quotes from Johan Cruyff and asks if we have misinterpreted its true meaning.

… “I’m trying to hold guys accountable by showing what they’re doing on the board,” says [Jason] Sumerlin, the Pelicans’ head strength and conditioning coach.

A San Antonio Spurs staffer for five years, who was hired as Daniel’s assistant last season before ascending to the head job this season, Sumerlin says the “bread and butter” of his program is rather traditional: Olympic-style lifts, which he says emphasize “power and hips,” done at least two times a week.

But Sumerlin’s short tenure is tinged with modern approaches, including a new dietitian and a yoga coach for team sessions. Pizza has been replaced on the postgame menu with the health-conscious trifecta of a protein, vegetable and carbohydrate. The 34-year-old even lifts weights alongside the players, which Davis says creates a more fun environment. The 23-year-old superstar spent last offseason sculpting his physique under Sumerlin’s watchful eye.

Stress is a major burden in many people’s lives affecting their health and wellbeing. New BBSRC-funded research led by the University of Bristol has found that genes in the brain that play a crucial role in behavioural adaptation to stressful challenges are controlled by epigenetic mechanisms.

What if the next market inefficiency has nothing to do with deep dives into baseball analytics? What if the next edge in building a championship team is in the hands of people with little to no experience in baseball? What if the new way to win is not just in the fundamentals of pitching, hitting and defense, but also in training your players holistically in the manner of Premier League soccer players or Navy SEALs?

Stop imagining such a future, because it’s here. Analytics have become so commonplace as to have lost some of their edge. Every team, for instance, has an analytics department, hates to bunt, shifts its defense, emphasizes pitch framing by catchers, deploys a deep matchup bullpen and limits innings for young pitchers. Information has birthed homogeneity in how the game is played.

The next revolution already is in place: sports science. The edge now is finding the player within, not from without.

Athlete monitoring and sport science teams are making their way into many professional teams and into some big time Division-I schools. This has already started to trickle into DII and DIII schools as well. Many coaches that may not have access to a sport science team or even sport science minded strength & conditioning staff are asking how to get in on the action. Before you decide to go all-in on high dollar technology or invest you or your staff’s time to collecting data, there are a couple of questions you need to ask yourself: “What do I want to know?” and “How will I use this new information to direct training?” If you can’t answer those two questions (at the bare minimum) hold off on the monitoring until you figure that out.

Another minimum threshold that should come before initiating any monitoring is to actually train hard enough for monitoring to be useful. Good training is the basics, athlete monitoring is the complex – walk before you run. If you aren’t doing the basics well and training hard on a fairly regular basis, what would lead you to believe that adding complex monitoring tools to determine when to train could make it any better?

I didn’t preorder the Apple Watch, or stand in line the day it came out. But I read every article about it, and when someone suggested that it would complement my “personal cloud,” I eventually felt compelled to buy one. I wear it every day, possibly out of determination to get something out of the $400 I spent on it, but when someone asks me if I think they should buy one, I usually tell them no.

The Apple Watch was released April 24, 2015. Nearly a year later, it’s become apparent that there really isn’t much of a need to get one.

… we’re continuing to see great innovation from the most unusual of places. It’s not just about smartwatches or fitness trackers either. Wearables are beginning to go beyond the norm, evolving the tech we know and love and taking it to the next level.

We want to pay homage to those innovative minds that don’t all have the big bucks to play with but still manage to give us the kind of wearable tech we love writing about.

In no particular order, these are Wareable’s top startups we think you should definitely be keeping an eye on.

From many different angles, the printed electronics sector is gaining commercial momentum. Large electronic manufacturing services (EMS) companies, such as Jabil and Flex, are investing in technology development with partners in addition to scaling up manufacturing. There have been many investments from VCs to strategic venturing, involving investors such as ARM and Samsung Investment Corporation. Most importantly, more products have come to market, from complete devices, such as the temperature sensing band-aid and infant respiration vest, to companies using printed electronics for part of the device, from the inkjet printed polymer layers used in barrier films on some OLED displays to over one billion printed RFID tag antennas.

Software has lately become much, much better at understanding images. Last year Microsoft and Google showed off systems more accurate than humans at recognizing objects in photos, as judged by the standard benchmark researchers use.

That became possible thanks to a technique called deep learning, which involves passing data through networks of roughly simulated neurons to train them to filter future data (see “Teaching Machines to Understand Us”). Deep learning is why you can search images stored in Google Photos using keywords, and why Facebook recognizes your friends in photos before you’ve tagged them. Using deep learning on images is also making robots and self-driving cars more practical, and it could revolutionize medicine.

That power and flexibility come from the way an artificial neural network can figure out which visual features to look for in images when provided with lots of labeled example photos. The neural networks used in deep learning are arranged into a hierarchy of layers that data passes through in sequence. During the training process, different layers in the network become specialized to identify different types of visual features. The type of neural network used on images, known as a convolutional net, was inspired by studies on the visual cortex of animals.

More than 40 percent of retired NFL players tested with advanced scanning technology showed signs of traumatic brain injury, a much higher rate than in the general population, according to a new study of the long-term risks of playing American football.

The research, presented at an American Academy of Neurology meeting that began in Vancouver on Monday, is one of the first to provide “objective evidence” of traumatic brain injury in a large sample of National Football League veterans while they are living, said Dr. Francis X. Conidi, one of the study’s authors.

… each time I put numbers on a map, I’m struck by how it’s possible to radically alter the appearance of a visualization just by tweaking a couple of basic parameters. And with the proliferation of maps like these, as well as tools that make it easy for just about anyone to make them, it’s helpful to understand just how much these decisions can affect what you see on the printed (or digital) page.

Numbers carry a veneer of authority and objectivity that words can seem to lack. But communicating with numbers is, in many ways, just like communicating with words. You make decisions about what to emphasize and what to downplay, and about how to convey a full understanding of the subject at hand.

I’ve been educated and inspired recently by the best selling design classic The Design of Everyday Things by UX guru Don Norman. You really have to read the entire book, which applies to all types of objects that people design – from chairs to doors to software to organizational structures. It provides thoughtful and practical principles that guide designers to design all of those things well. By “well” he means “products that fit the needs and capabilities of people.” (p.218)

As I read it, it occurred to me that data visualizations are “everyday things” now, too.

True to form, Sam Hinkie was not wrong when he wrote “the NBA can be a league of desperation” in a letter to the Philadelphia 76ers’ equity partners last week. Hinkie, having quit his position with that letter, is now the former president and general manager of the 76ers. And more importantly, he made a career out of not being wrong.

Hinkie was not wrong in noting that the design of the league offered scant rewards for mediocrity; a team on the margins of the playoffs can easily become trapped in that unsatisfying range. Hinkie was not wrong to observe that the league consistently rewards its worst teams with high draft picks. Nor, for that matter, was he wrong in calculating that such picks are the most reliable way to acquire a transcendental player. Hinkie wasn’t even wrong in noting that there’s an arbitrage opportunity in taking on the stupid money contracts handed out by other teams.

There is, however, a crucial difference between not being wrong and actually being right.