Applied Sports Science newsletter – April 23, 2016

… Robert Nkemdiche is 21 years old, jacked, polite and hardworking. But he’s a creative spirit entering a world where creative spirits are looked upon with suspicion and disdain. He was once considered a top-five pick. Now nobody knows. For his part, Nkemdiche can’t fathom how a panther might be an issue, just as he can’t understand why falling out of a hotel room — “one mistake” — coupled with concern over the influence of his older brother Denzel might end up costing him millions. Nkemdiche is more than an immensely talented guy with a mild self-destructive streak. He’s a test case of what happens when a weird guy meets a weird process.

… Now, point guard is the premier position in the league. The game is legislated for guards to move freely around the court, and coaches have welcomed all brands of floor leaders, including scorers once viewed as ball hogs who couldn’t possibly influence winning.

If an embrace could link generations, it was the Archibald-Paul hug. Cousy coached Archibald. When Tiny entered the NBA, he succeeded Oscar Robertson, the first great big and versatile point guard and Magic Johnson’s hero, as the Cincinnati Royals’s lead guard. Paul idolized Allen Iverson, but his playing style makes him a descendant of Isiah Thomas and John Stockton. The little guys — Archibald was listed at 6 feet 1 during his heyday, but he looks much shorter standing next to the 6-foot Paul — embody the position’s evolution.

“I’ll foul you, man, in a second,” Archibald says to Paul. “In my day, with hand-checking, me and you would be wrestling on the court and stuff like that.

Nate Robinson isn’t a big believer in using data and analytics to drive decision-making in sports — which, given how the 5-foot-9 freak athlete has defied statistical odds throughout his career, should not come as a big surprise.

GeekWire this week caught up with Robinson, who is nearly 7,000 miles away from his hometown of Seattle playing professional basketball in Tel Aviv, Israel.

The former University of Washington star and NBA point guard is not only venturing outside his comfort zone in the basketball world, but also flexing his creative and entrepreneurial muscles via a new partnership with Strideline, the Seattle-based startup that sells popular socks.

… For many Americans, the European leagues are like a dream. But for me, Europe wasn’t just about soccer or money. Truth be told, I probably would have made more playing in MLS. I came to Europe in the hopes of learning new languages, meeting new people, seeing new sites and expanding my horizons.

There is more to the world than just playing the sport you love or going to work every day. There is the air you breathe and the sky you see when you look up. If everyone could just take deeper breaths and appreciate all that the world has to offer, it would be a beautiful thing.

I don’t want to sugarcoat it. Those first few weeks were challenging.

It sounds like a game designed for toddlers – throwing and catching a ball to encourage talking – but, according to coaches at Southampton FC, brain-training technique Life Kinetik is the latest weapon in the war to stop modern life ruining the beautiful game.

Sick of his players spending their time glued to social media or with Beats headphones clamped over their ears like grumpy teenagers, Saints manager Ronald Koeman has introduced Life Kinetik to encourage them to talk to each other. Koeman says that young players don’t chat or play cards on the team bus any more, and this lack of chat is affecting their game. “Communication on the pitch is so important, even if it is just to help your team-mates and say ‘time’ or ‘turn!’ … For young players it is all about themselves and less about communication with the rest of the players,” Koeman told a conference in London.

Horst Lutz, the German founder of Life Kinetik, says the technique is about more than forcing friendliness. It aims to make the brain sharper through exercises that test physical, cognitive and perceptual skills. I

… The process of adding bulk has been a staple of college football for decades. Players — particularly linemen — enter college one size and leave a different person in physical stature, sometimes gaining as much as 100 pounds during their transformation.

That process has evolved and become more intricate in recent years as another tentacle of college football’s arms race.

Two years ago, the Gophers football program hired a full-time sports dietitian/nutritionist to manage what players eat and their weight gain, or weight loss.

When we think of bones, a lifeless skeleton usually comes to mind, but our bones are a living organ that grows and changes shape throughout our life. Much of this shaping results from forces which press, pull and twist the skeleton as we move, and the biggest of these forces is caused by our muscles.

Bones experience huge forces during movement. When a triple jumper’s heel hits the ground, the force is around 15 times their body weight – or the weight of a small car. In fact, because muscles normally attach close to joints, muscular forces are even greater than these impact forces (in the same way that you have to push harder to lift someone on a see-saw the closer you get to the middle). As a result bones also experience huge impact and muscle force during daily tasks, totalling more than five times body weight even during walking.

These forces squash, twist and bend bones. The shin bone briefly becomes nearly a millimetre shorter as your foot hits the ground when running. The bone senses these small changes, and can grow dramatically – in the months after starting exercise – in order to reduce the risk of breaking. For example, the racket arm bones of tennis players can be 20% wider and contain 40% more bone mineral than their other arm, while sprint runners have up to a third more bone in their shin bone than people who don’t exercise.

… A good run can sometimes make you feel like a brand-new person. And, in a way, that feeling may be literally true. About three decades of research in neuroscience have identified a robust link between aerobic exercise and subsequent cognitive clarity, and to many in this field the most exciting recent finding in this area is that of neurogenesis. Not so many years ago, the brightest minds in neuroscience thought that our brains got a set amount of neurons, and that by adulthood, no new neurons would be birthed. But this turned out not to be true. Studies in animal models have shown that new neurons are produced in the brain throughout the lifespan, and, so far, only one activity is known to trigger the birth of those new neurons: vigorous aerobic exercise, said Karen Postal, president of the American Academy of Clinical Neuropsychology. “That’s it,” she said. “That’s the only trigger that we know about.”

The other fascinating thing here is where these new cells pop up: in the hippocampus, a region of the brain associated with learning and memory. So this could help explain, at least partially, why so many studies have identified a link between aerobic exercise and improvement in memory. “If you are exercising so that you sweat — about 30 to 40 minutes — new brain cells are being born,” added Postal, who herself is a runner. “And it just happens to be in that memory area.”

In terms of youth development, what is the better approach – to play like Barca or play like Atletico?
After last weeks encounter between Atletico Madrid and Barcelona in the Champions League it understandably generated a good debate, notably in terms of ‘style’. In watching Atleti and Barca you see two very good teams, yet teams who play very different styles of football. It made me think about what we do with young footballers, how we coach them, the style of football we ‘push’ on to our players and the expectations we have for them.

… Manu Kapur has been studying what he calls “productive failure” for most of his career, attempting to turn the general advice to “learn from mistakes” into a clearly defined, specific pedagogical design process that yields strong learning results. Now a professor of psychological studies at the Education University of Hong Kong, Kapur has conducted both quasi-experimental and randomized controlled trials on how teaching through productive failure measures up to both direct instruction as well as more constructivist problem-solving approaches.

For Kapur, productive failure is not just a maxim about persisting through challenges; it’s an effective teaching strategy that enables students to not only do well on short term measures of knowledge, like tests, but also affords better conceptual understanding, creative thinking, and helps students to transfer learning to novel situations.

You may have noticed a trend of major-league players using brightly colored bat grips in recent seasons. Bats that were once adorned only by pine tar buildup and cleat marks were now wrapped with a rubber-like material that was only seen on metal or composite bats to that point. What was once reserved for Little League had made its way to the highest level of the sport.

Behind this transformation in brightly colored grip tapes was a company who first made hay in the cycling industry. Their vision and, frankly, good fortune, have made images like the one below commonplace across the majors. Lizard Skins, a company who saw an opportunity to improve the feel players have with their bats, is now a big player in the baseball world.

To learn more about how Lizard Skins looked at things just a little bit differently, Baseball Prospectus interviewed the company’s General Manager, Brad Barker.

… If you’re like many of us working in a multi-disciplinary position (most of us in the S&C performance coaching profession) the reality is that email is and will be a mainstay in the modern world we live in. The majority of us are use to receiving anywhere from 25-50 emails a day. The more robust you grow your performance staff, the more integrated you become with your sport and medical teams, the more communication is necessary, and the number of emails you will receive daily will rise. We can, however, drastically reduce the number of emails we both send and receive with better technology. This is where Slack enters the picture.

Slack is an communication tool that acts much like irc with different rooms or channels that your team members can join and communicate within. This allows for topic-specific discussion in a number of different channels.

Redwood City, California-based digital medicine company Proteus Digital Health has raised $50 million from undisclosed investors. The company’s existing investors include Medtronic, Itochu, St. Jude Medical, and Kaiser Permanente Ventures. This brings the company’s total funding to at least $450 million.

The Proteus digital medicine platform, called Proteus Discover, 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.

BeBop Sensors, a developer of smart fabrics embedded with sensors that are capable of measuring motion, force, location, weight, size and shape, has raised additional funding through a convertible note, founder Keith McMillen confirmed in an email. … McMillen said the funding would be used to advance fabric research and improve fabric production facilities.

Wearable tech and open data will now be a huge part of the future of Major League Baseball and sports in general. The Sports Playing Rules Committee approved new wearable technology in the beginning of April, allowing players to use devices like baseball bat sensors and heart monitors during practices. Players are not allowed to wear them during games yet.

“We have seen an increase in interest from Major League organizations and an interest and uptake in purchases as well,” Mike Ressler, Director of Engineering at Diamond Kinetics, said.

The SwingTracker of Diamond Kinetics, one of the approved products, analyzes bat swings, looking at roughly 10,000 data points per second to break down the complex motion of a swing.

I was watching a rugby game recently and saw a player land wrongly in a tackle and immediately collapse to the ground clutching his knee joint, and heard later that he had suffered a ruptured anterior cruciate ligament injury that would require nine months post-injury before he would be able to return to his chosen sport. Many years ago in my student days, after a few too many beers at a party, I jumped off a low wall, landed wrongly, and tore the meniscus in my left knee. The next day it had swollen up, but I did not think much of it and tried to drive to University, and always remember the horror I felt when getting to the bottom of the road and I tried to push in the clutch with my left leg to allow use of the brake at the stop street, and my leg would not react at all, and I only avoided an accident by turning off the car while working the brake pedal with my right foot. It always puzzled me afterwards why my leg would not respond at all despite my ‘command’ for it to do so, as even with the injury, I expected, while perhaps it might be painful to do so, that I would still have reasonable control over my leg movements, which appeared okay when walking slowly to the car and taking my weight on my uninjured leg. Perhaps this triggered a ‘deep’ interest in what controlled our muscles and other body functions, and when I started a PhD degree with Professors Tim Noakes, Kathy Myburgh and Mike Lambert as my supervisors at the University of Cape Town in the early 1990’s, I chose to look at neural reflexes and brain control mechanisms regulating lower limb function after anterior cruciate ligament knee injury. So what happens when the knee joint suffers a major injury, and can one ever ‘come back’ from it?

The function of a meniscus is to act as a shock absorber within the knee. We have two menisci. We have a medial meniscus on the inner side of our knee, and a lateral meniscus on the outer side of our knee.

Our knees witness an enormous amount of stress during daily activities. Each step you take can place a force of 4 times your body weight across the knee. If you are exercising or running, that stress can increase beyond that. With a normally functioning meniscus the force of each step is spread evenly across the end of the thigh bone, or femur to your shin bone, or tibia.

Proximal hamstring tendinopathy (PHT) typically manifests as deep buttock pain at the hamstring common origin. Both athletic and non-athletic populations are affected by PHT. Pain and dysfunction are often longstanding and limit sporting and daily functions. There is limited evidence regarding diagnosis, assessment and management, for example, there are no randomized controlled trials investigating rehabilitation of PHT. Some of the principles of management established in, for example, Achilles and patellar tendinopathy would appear to apply to PHT but are not as well documented. This narrative review and commentary will highlight clinical aspects of assessment and management of PHT, drawing on the available evidence and current principles of managing painful tendinopathy. The management outline presented aims to guide clinicians as well as future research.

Expectancy effects are a widespread phenomenon, and they come with a lasting influence on cognitive operations, from basic stimulus processing to higher cognitive functions. Their impact is often profound and behaviorally significant, as evidenced by an enormous body of literature investigating the characteristics and possible processes underlying expectancy effects. The literature on this topic spans diverse fields, from clinical psychology to cognitive neuroscience, and from social psychology to behavioral biology. We present an emerging perspective on these diverse phenomena and show how this perspective stimulates new toeholds for investigation, provides insight in underlying mechanisms, improves awareness of methodological confounds, and can lead to a deeper understanding of the effects of expectations on a broad spectrum of cognitive processes.

Introduction

Placebo and nocebo represent complex and distinct psychoneurobiological phenomena in which behavioural and neurophysiological modifications occur together with the application of a treatment. Despite a better understanding of this topic in the medical field, little is known about their role in physiotherapy.
Purpose

The aim of this review is: a) to elucidate the neurobiology behind placebo and nocebo effects, b) to describe the role of the contextual factors as modulators of the clinical outcomes in rehabilitation and c) to provide clinical and research guidelines on their uses.
Implications

The physiotherapist’s features, the patient’s features, the patient-physiotherapist relationship, the characteristics of the treatment and the overall healthcare setting are all contextual factors influencing clinical outcomes. Since every physiotherapy treatment determines a specific and a contextual effect, physiotherapists should manage the contextual factors as a boosting element of any manual therapy to improve placebo effects and avoid detrimental nocebo effects.

… It’s obvious that steroids help people gain more muscle than they’d have been able to gain drug free … but how much more?

Throughout dining halls this spring, Yale football players can be found taking pictures of their meals and posting them to social media. But they are not doing so in search of Instagram likes.

The Bulldogs’ offseason activities, they hope, will benefit the team in more significant ways. A new sports performance program, which includes a Facebook group in which players can receive feedback from teammates and coaches on the nutritional composition of their plates, intends to improve the team’s strength, speed and injury resistance on the field.

The changes, implemented with the help of external consultant Tom Newman, combine strength and conditioning, nutrition and rehabilitation into one offseason program.

… An interesting question is whether skill-dominant sports are more or less fun to watch than those where luck plays a big role. Tastes obviously differ, but my impression is that, while highly knowledgeable basketball fans can find something to savor in every game, most people find the NBA regular season to be a bit of snooze in its predictability and seeming endlessness. It’s only in the playoffs, when more is at stake and the best are matched up against the best, that the sport comes into its own. This year the Warriors will probably win it all (FiveThirtyEight’s CARM-Elo prediction model currently gives them a 42 percent chance, though I’m willing to chip in at least 9 more percentage points), but if they come up against the San Antonio Spurs — whose record this year tied for seventh best all-time — in the Western Conference finals, it could get pretty interesting.

Background

To date, studies investigating the association between ACTN3 R577X and ACE I/D gene variants and elite sprint/power performance have been limited by small cohorts from mixed sport disciplines, without quantitative measures of performance. Aim: To examine the association between these variants and sprint time in elite athletes.
Methods

We collected a total of 555 best personal 100-, 200-, and 400-m times of 346 elite sprinters in a large cohort of elite Caucasian or African origin sprinters from 10 different countries. Sprinters were genotyped for ACTN3 R577X and ACE ID variants.
Results

On average, male Caucasian sprinters with the ACTN3 577RR or the ACE DD genotype had faster best 200-m sprint time than their 577XX (21.19?±?0.53 s vs. 21.86?±?0.54 s, p?=?0.016) and ACE II (21.33?±?0.56 vs. 21.93?±?0.67 sec, p?=?0.004) counterparts and only one case of ACE II, and no cases of ACTN3 577XX, had a faster 200-m time than the 2012 London Olympics qualifying (vs. 12 qualified sprinters with 577RR or 577RX genotype). Caucasian sprinters with the ACE DD genotype had faster best 400-m sprint time than their ACE II counterparts (46.94?±?1.19 s vs. 48.50?±?1.07 s, p?=?0.003). Using genetic models we found that the ACTN3 577R allele and ACE D allele dominant model account for 0.92 % and 1.48 % of sprint time variance, respectively.
Conclusions

Despite sprint performance relying on many gene variants and environment, the % sprint time variance explained by ACE and ACTN3 is substantial at the elite level and might be the difference between a world record and only making the final.

OK, the strikeouts thing in baseball has gotten a bit out of control. It has only been three weeks, but so far hitters are striking out 22.8 percent of the time, by far the highest percentage in baseball history. That’s a crazy percentage, by the way. We are getting to the point where one out of every four batters is striking out.

True, you can call it small sample size, but this is a continuing trend. Last year hitters struck out 20.4 percent percent of the time, the highest percentage in baseball history. Two years earlier it was 19.9 percent (highest percentage up to that point). Two years before that it was 18.8 percent (highest up to that point). And so on and so on. From 2008 on, hitters have struck out more every single year.

With one game in the book for each of this year’s first round series, the new “Hustle Stats” have survived their first challenge – they were tracked for all 8 games and even updated regularly as the games were proceeding!

As of yet, it’s difficult to draw many conclusions from the new metrics. Sure, the Clippers had far and away the most “screen assists” with 25, but it’s simply too soon to tell if this was a result of unusual shotmaking, poor defense by Portland, something about the Clips’ offensive style or a reflection of good play. On the last point, it’s worth noting the Thunder had the fewest screen assists, with only two. And they did just fine scoring the ball.

So while the sample sizes are too small to use these new numbers for much in the way of team and especially player-level analysis, there are some things to look at in broader terms, most notably with the “shots contested” counts.

This is an audio transcript of my talk at See, Think, Design, Produce in San Francisco on Feb. 11, 2015.

How would you build the perfect MLS roster?

It’s a question that fans, players, coaches and front office executives ask themselves every day. With all the different mechanisms with which MLS teams can bring in players the possibilities are endless.

If you are reading this, you probably will not have to answer that question yourselves, but students at Columbia University and Harvard University did answer that in the only way they know how – through the use of analytics.