Applied Sports Science newsletter – April 28, 2016

It’s a rare thing in football that a player who only appeared 30 times for a club becomes an unquestioned legend. But then again, Stuart Holden is rare and special altogether. He was a footballer and man who played, lives and breathes by the ‘never say die’ mantra. A player who, for a fleeting moment, was one of the best central-midfielders in the whole Premier League. A player who near single-handedly elevated Bolton Wanderers back to their previous lofty heights and one whose loss was they never truly recovered from.

Stuart Holden officially retired from football earlier this year, on 3 February, posting an emotional and heartfelt letter on ussoccer.com, which detailed how becoming a father for the first time helped him realise the time was right to call it a day and let his body rest from football’s harsh reality. He reminisced on his many career highs and thanked all those who offered a helping hand and support without question during all the lows.

What was not present at all in his farewell letter was even a hint of sadness or regret. He retired from the game as he played it: smiling.

… it’s one thing to paint yourself as a leader, but making players, fans and press believe it is very different. After all, there are various managers who talk of leadership and sacrifice, but few have gatecrashed at football’s top table with such a prolonged and impressive lack of etiquette.

It’s clear, then, that the man has a rare ability to motivate, and his use of language is a big part of that. But while his Atlético side still feel fresh in the world of football, Simeone’s modes of persuasion are time-honoured, and can be traced back to the Ancient Greeks.

The Football Association has made a bold move to shake up old notions of coaching by appointing full-time coaches specialising in “in-possession” and “out-of-possession” phases for its junior teams, despite huge cuts elsewhere to the governing body’s staff.

The former Everton and Birmingham City midfielder, and Republic of Ireland international, Lee Carsley, most recently Brentford manager, is to be one of the “out of possession” coaches. So too Colin Cooper, formerly a player at Middlesbrough and Nottingham Forest, and once a senior England international.

Mike Marsh, the former Liverpool and West Ham midfielder, is to be an “in-possession” coach, as is Mark Robson, once of West Ham and Charlton Athletic and most recently one of Tim Sherwood’s assistants at Aston Villa. Coaches Lee Skyrme and Aaron Danks are also to be appointed to the “in-possession” category, and all have been assigned to work with one of the head coaches of the seven junior England teams, from Under-15s to Under-21s.

Aims

We investigated whether sprint interval training (SIT) was a time-efficient exercise strategy to improve insulin sensitivity and other indices of cardiometabolic health to the same extent as traditional moderate-intensity continuous training (MICT). SIT involved 1 minute of intense exercise within a 10-minute time commitment, whereas MICT involved 50 minutes of continuous exercise per session.
Methods

Sedentary men (27±8y; BMI = 26±6kg/m2) performed three weekly sessions of SIT (n = 9) or MICT (n = 10) for 12 weeks or served as non-training controls (n = 6). SIT involved 3×20-second ‘all-out’ cycle sprints (~500W) interspersed with 2 minutes of cycling at 50W, whereas MICT involved 45 minutes of continuous cycling at ~70% maximal heart rate (~110W). Both protocols involved a 2-minute warm-up and 3-minute cool-down at 50W.
Results

Peak oxygen uptake increased after training by 19% in both groups (SIT: 32±7 to 38±8; MICT: 34±6 to 40±8ml/kg/min; p<0.001 for both). Insulin sensitivity index (CSI), determined by intravenous glucose tolerance tests performed before and 72 hours after training, increased similarly after SIT (4.9±2.5 to 7.5±4.7, p = 0.002) and MICT (5.0±3.3 to 6.7±5.0 x 10?4 min-1 [?U/mL]-1, p = 0.013) (p<0.05). Skeletal muscle mitochondrial content also increased similarly after SIT and MICT, as primarily reflected by the maximal activity of citrate synthase (CS; P<0.001). The corresponding changes in the control group were small for VO2peak (p = 0.99), CSI (p = 0.63) and CS (p = 0.97).
Conclusions

Twelve weeks of brief intense interval exercise improved indices of cardiometabolic health to the same extent as traditional endurance training in sedentary men, despite a five-fold lower exercise volume and time commitment.

Heard of Ryan Flaherty?

My hunch is you probably haven’t, but he’s about to have a unique distinction. After Thursday’s NFL Draft, the 33-year-old former Utah State wide receiver-turned-strength/speed coach will have trained the top two overall picks in each of the past two drafts. Last year it was Jameis Winston and Marcus Mariota. This year, Flaherty’s proteges are Cal’s Jared Goff and North Dakota State’s Carson Wentz.

The first time I’d met the Southern California-based coach was in early 2014. I spent a lot of time around Prolific, Flaherty’s training center for my book “The QB” as he worked with Johnny Manziel and his Texas A&M teammate Mike Evans. The big wideout would soon become Flaherty’s first Top 10 draft pick after he clocked a 4.53 40 and vertical jumped 37 inches while weighing 231 pounds at the NFL Combine.

People can diminish how much these pre-draft training camps help these players (I suspect some are rolling their eyes thinking about a QB running a 40), but Flaherty’s work, especially with Goff is noteworthy.

Selflessness can be sexy. Generosity has been shown to pique the fancy of people seeking long term partners. It seems understandable that generosity to others might promise generosity in a relationship, but beyond identifying love interests, helping others seems to strengthen all human relations. Without selflessness, the logic goes, we as a society would devolve into chaos. Those who do not share at the metaphorical sandbox are not invited back to play.

So where does selflessness come from? This question, sustaining centuries of philosophical debate, is whether selflessness is an effort or a default. Recent research hints at the neural answer, locating specific areas of the brain which seem to rein in our better nature. This suggests that selflessness is the default option. Your conscience aside, surrendering your seat on the train for someone else might be a little less effort for your brain.

Clint Dempsey shuffles toward the sideline at Starfire Sports Complex, another training session in the books. Before the Seattle Sounders’ Designated Player heads back to the locker room, he pulls off the harness wrapped around his chest and drops it off with the training staff. If you didn’t know better, you might think Dempsey was training in a bra.

But the harnesses aren’t for support, and they certainly aren’t bras. They hold the heart-rate monitors and GPS trackers that are strapped to Dempsey his teammates every day during training, spitting out a mountain of real-time and historical data that gives Dave Tenney, the club’s manager of performance and sports science, and his staff a window into each player’s fitness, fatigue and injury risk.

That data flows into the in-house platform that former Microsoft employee and, since 2012, Sounders’ sports science data analyst Ravi Ramineni built to turn GPS coordinates and heart-rate fluctuations into actionable reports. The goal? To maximize each player’s output, giving Seattle’s coaching staff a foundation to put a winning product on the field.

“It’s almost like a risk portfolio that you are managing,” Ramineni says. “You have a final goal of what you want to achieve and then you have to weigh all these factors with the risk.”

If you aren’t asleep when the clock strikes three in the early morning, your eyelids get heavy and your brain feels like mush. You still have that paper to finish writing and you want to stay awake but staying awake is a struggle, a fight against our own brain. We have all been there (especially during finals week). With today’s post, lets look at how our brain regulates sleep and why we spend our days alternating between sleep and wakefulness?

The wearables market is getting increasingly complex, particularly as would-be participants spot opportunities to apply their devices to remote patient monitoring. That’s leading to some interesting collaborations and aspirations. Biosensor developer LifeQ has agreed to work with semiconductor manufacturer Analog Devices to develop a new line of smarter sensors for medtech applications, according to a company statement.

LifeQ’s approach involves Computational Systems Biology — using sensors to pick up chemical changes in people’s bodies. Analog Devices has applied its technology to areas such as diagnostics, clinical monitoring equipment, life science and medical instrumentation, and health and wellness device designs, according to the statement.

The sensor collaboration will be aimed at flagging up changes that call for early intervention before an emergency situation develops for at-risk patients. The sensors will be designed to cover customized, continuous and accurate tracking for heart rate, sleep, blood lactate, 24-hour calorie intake and stress markers, such as salivary cortisol, according to the statement.

… “One internal milestone we now want is to work with more than 100 teams, not just for an ego boost, but more so for our data set, because the larger the data set we have, the more we can help our clients.”

Smith said that he expects the momentum behind the company to get even stronger over the next few years.

“At the start, people were buying into the idea of where we were going as a business, but now we have some immense findings and now we are able to really deliver on what we talked about at the start.

Although Under Armour raised revenues overall by about 30 percent this quarter, the company’s Connected Fitness business — made up in large part by its 2015 fitness app acquisitions — is still not turning a profit. UA says it lost $16.5 million in Q1 on Connected Fitness, more than the $15 million it lost in Q1 2015.

“While we are still in investment mode, we believe that the future of Connected Fitness is very bright for our brand,” CEO Kevin Plank said in prepared remarks on a recent investor call. “In 2016, we will continue to move our digital strategy forward as we focus on driving even better consumer engagement while also building our math house to drive insights to make better decisions and ultimately build better products for our consumer.”

In longer remarks during the Q&A, Plank argued, as he has before, that the real value of the Connected Fitness business is in the data — which the company continues to collect — and the opportunities to leverage that data into increased apparel sales.

Designing a wearable for elite athletes like LeBron James is no small feat. The Cleveland Cavaliers forward needs the ability to precisely measure his performance on and off the court, share that data with his coaches and trainers, and visualize it to make sense of everything—all at an extreme level of detail that would be overkill for regular users. That requires a wearable he can wear literally 24/7—one that’s lighter, more accurate, and fits better than any other wearable on the market.

So James doesn’t wear an Apple Watch, a Nike FuelBand, or a Fitbit. He wears a Whoop, a wearable aimed at helping athletes track their progress as well as predict their future performance. This so-called “performance enhancement system” designed and marketed for elite athletes has some serious design cred behind it, including MIT Media Lab’s Nicholas Negroponte, data viz maestro Martin Oberhaüser, and Rinat Aruh and Johan Liden of the boutique studio Aruliden.

Together, they’ve created a wearable for the sporting gods, not us flabby norms. But to do so, they had to solve some of wearables’ biggest design problems: It had to not look like tech masquerading as fashion, and it had to be something you could wear all day, every day, without recharging.

… My having cheated death does not make me an authority on luck. But it has motivated me to learn much more about the subject than I otherwise would have. In the process, I have discovered that chance plays a far larger role in life outcomes than most people realize. And yet, the luckiest among us appear especially unlikely to appreciate our good fortune. According to the Pew Research Center, people in higher income brackets are much more likely than those with lower incomes to say that individuals get rich primarily because they work hard. Other surveys bear this out: Wealthy people overwhelmingly attribute their own success to hard work rather than to factors like luck or being in the right place at the right time.

That’s troubling, because a growing body of evidence suggests that seeing ourselves as self-made—rather than as talented, hardworking, and lucky—leads us to be less generous and public-spirited. It may even make the lucky less likely to support the conditions (such as high-quality public infrastructure and education) that made their own success possible.

… One of the proverbial “pink elephant in the room” issues with offensive line evaluation is, rarely does anyone ask “how?”. Every player entering the draft is walking in to the NFL with a bag of key performance inhibiting traits. The popular school of thought says, the higher draft pick, the less inhibiting traits. Well, the fact is, it’s not the quantity of performance inhibiting traits, it’s the type. Some inhibiting traits run much deeper than others. I like to say, some are surface, others are systemic. It’s the systemic issues that make or break player development. Ironically, these are the most overlooked traits by the “experts” when evaluating offensive line talent. These traits are overlooked because they distract from all of the other bells and whistles the evaluator has “fallen in love” with. Remember, the higher draft picks are normally the guys that will check the box of every testing metric presented. They’re going to run, jump, and measure within a respectable range of their previously highly drafted counterparts. This is where the trap is laid.

… The Wonderlic Personnel Test has long been used by NFL teams to get a measure of the psychological parameters of potential professional athletes. The scores on those tests, many which are posted online, are often debated when it comes to NFL prospects, particularly quarterbacks. Ryan Fitzpatrick, a Harvard grad, had one of the highest scores ever on the test, but has been only a marginal NFL starting quarterback. Such outcomes have led many to question the value and importance of such evaluations.

While the NFL and other professional sports organizations may use similar evaluations in an attempt to gain a better psychological understanding of future players, the value of these tests has been questioned. For example, the field of sport psychology discusses personality traits versus states. A trait is a more long-standing personality characteristic not easily susceptible to quick change. A “state” is a typical behavior that can change in various situations.