Applied Sports Science newsletter – April 29, 2016

… It’s easy to forget, from his serene facial expression, flowing gait, and admirable control of bodily fluids, that you’re watching something that only two humans, ever, in the history of legs, have done. The tricky part to really categorizing this phenomenon is that running is not like other feats that few people have done, like Chinese acrobatics or hucking off the north side of K2. Almost all people have run, at some point in their lives, and run very fast. Run like the wind. Running is so universal that to be accurate, what’s depicted above requires a different word, a new word.

Having established that few people in my neighborhood can do the activity that Kipchoge is demonstrating, let’s visit a neighborhood where in fact lots of folks can do a pretty good approximation: Iten, Kenya.

Golden State Warriors Point Guard Shaun Livingston talks about his reinvention of his basketball game after a devastating injury. Find out how his training, nutrition and basketball skill set has changed and how he embraced the change to become a champion.

Shane Henry is 50 meters from the finish, and his hips ache. He’s sweating. His legs are done. But the 6-foot-6 (198 cm) Henry knows he needs to back up the previous day’s standout performance if he wants to continue to impress the Australian Football League talent managers, so he pushes hard through the finish line and clocks a top-10 time in the 3K run.

That he’d want to impress these guys at all is something even Henry, a forward for the Virginia Tech basketball team, wouldn’t have believed two months ago.

“I’d never heard of Australian rules football before Coach [Buzz] Williams forwarded me an email and told me he thought I should give it a shot,” Henry says, referring to his head coach at Virginia Tech. “At first, I didn’t want to do it. I was focused on basketball. But then I watched some videos, and it looked like a cool sport. It’s diverse, intense. Why not take the opportunity to try?”

?Blood scans, performance quotients, and personalized training programs aimed to help a college football stage walk across that stage just a little sooner.?

… For a while, much of the focus on keeping pitchers healthy centered around workload. Pitch counts are an easy target and part of the puzzle, offering objective, numerical data that’s easy to track and a variable teams can manage. Teams have poured time and money into mechanical analysis—particularly a pitcher’s arm action—to try to unlock any patterns of what leads to a durable pitcher. All sorts of companies have popped up with different wearable gadgets for sale focusing, naturally, on the elbow itself.

Dr. Phil Wagner of California-based Sparta Science, who spoke at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in March, wants to look at the problem from a different angle—one that might seem counterintuitive.

“What if,” Wagner said, “you could predict an injury from a vertical jump?”

Chelsea Ladies won the league and the cup last year, and their injury record was also striking, with a squad that looked the fittest around. Players Gemma Davies and Gilly Flaherty explain to FourFourTwo’s Zoe Hardman how Chelsea use periodisation – a systematic planning of training – to help prevent injury.

While other clubs may be big on pre-season double sessions, the Blues trainers and physios make sure they tailor workouts to each player’s individual needs. Rest, recovery, nutrition and gym work all play a part. It’s good enough for the champions…

… Whether you call it guts or hubris, men like Trump, Berlusconi, and Shkreli certainly do not suffer from a lack of confidence. In fact, their striking and sustained overconfidence is the sort of thing that has puzzled research psychologists for decades.

How does such overconfidence persist? As evolutionary biologist Dominic Johnson and political scientist James Fowler note in a 2011 Nature article, overconfidence “leads to faulty assessments, unrealistic expectations, and hazardous decisions, so it remains a puzzle how such a false belief could evolve or remain stable in a population of competing strategies that include accurate, unbiased beliefs.” When reality intervenes, as it inevitably will, logic dictates that a comeuppance is in order.

… The simple question might be “why do such unlikely coincidences occur in our lives?” But the real question is how to define the unlikely. You know that a situation is uncommon just from experience. But even the concept of “uncommon” assumes that like events in the category are common. How do we identify the other events to which we can compare this coincidence? If you can identify other events as likely, then you can calculate the mathematical probability of this particular event as exceptional.

… At Body Labs, we are focused on creating 3D digital feet that are precise, consistent and scalable. Using our statistical model, we take foot scans and put them in the same alignment every time. With this capability, we always output the same measurements from the same place. Precision becomes simple and not a challenge to maintain. With this, your custom products can now be designed without distractions and optimized for success. With digital foot models, we can explore design in so many different ways that were never even a part of the design process.

When a person takes a sketch into CAD and creates a model, there is a traditional set of steps they take to create their product. Points are laid out, curves are drawn to connect points, curves are connected together to form a surface and then surfaces are stitched into a solid. With a foot model, we can start with the surface of a foot and manipulate geometry to create a truly custom product. Gone are the ideas of measurements and points. Now, surface modeling can start at the foot and then become something truly synonymous.

Athletes have never been more aware of what their bodies need in order to reach peak performance. Fuel Illustrated is a collaboration between Gatorade and the SI Overtime branded content studio exploring how the best athletes in the world manage their daily clock—training, diet, competition and recovery—as they strive for excellence in their chosen sports.

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Halfway through the 2015 college football season, University of Georgia’s director of sports medicine, Ron Courson, noticed something out of the ordinary. Injuries at receiver had forced several of the Bulldogs’ reserve wideouts into starting duty, and one of them had seen his workload increase considerably. “He had run 2,000 yards more than he normally ran,” says Courson. “I went to the coaches and said, ‘We’ve got to pay attention here.’”

Through the digital fitness applications Under Armour has been buying up over the past few years, the Baltimore-based sports apparel maker has collected all sorts of information about users — how much they sleep, exercise and weigh, what they’ve eaten and even how they feel.

For consumers, it’s all about measuring and improving health and fitness on mobile or wearable devices. But just how the data will benefit the brand remains to be seen, Under Armour founder and CEO Kevin Plank told shareholders Thursday.

“What we’ve ultimately built is hard to quantify … the world’s largest digital health and connected fitness community,” Plank said during the company’s annual meeting. “What are we going to do with this data? I’ll tell you, we’re figuring that out.”

… researchers led by the University of Loughborough’s Ron Maughan, along with colleagues from Bangor University and the University of Stirling, recruited 72 subjects to test 13 different drinks (each subject tested water plus three other drinks). At each testing session, the subjects drank a liter of the chosen beverage, then collected all their urine for the next four hours.

The result is a “beverage hydration index” that compares how much of the drink was retained after two hours compared to a liter of water. (They used two hours because most of the urine had been passed by then, and it represents a more realistic time interval between drinks than four hours.)

The National Football League (NFL) Scouting Combine is held each year before the NFL Draft to measure athletic abilities and football skills of college football players. Although the NFL Scouting Combine can provide the NFL teams with an opportunity to evaluate college players for the upcoming NFL Draft, its value for predicting future success of players has been questioned. This study examined whether the NFL Combine measures can predict future performance of running backs (RBs) and wide receivers (WRs) in the NFL. We analyzed the 2000–09 Combine data of RBs (N = 276) and WRs (N = 447) and their on-field performance for the first 3 years after the draft and over their entire careers in the NFL, using correlation and regression analyses, along with a principal component analysis (PCA). The results of the analyses showed that, after accounting for the number of games played, draft position, height (HT), and weight (WT), the time on 10-yard dash was the most important predictor of rushing yards per attempt of the first 3 years (p = 0.002) and of the careers (p < 0.001) in RBs. For WRs, vertical jump was found to be significantly associated with receiving yards per reception of the first 3 years (p = 0.001) and of the careers (p = 0.004) in the NFL, after adjusting for the covariates above. Furthermore, HT was most important in predicting future performance of WRs. The analyses also revealed that the 8 athletic drills in the Combine seemed to have construct validity. It seems that the NFL Scouting Combine has some value for predicting future performance of RBs and WRs in the NFL.

Matthew Salganik, Princeton University https://simons.berkeley.edu/talks/tbd-15 New Directions in Computational Social Science & Data Science.

The spreadsheets on Lucy Rushton’s Mac laptop would read like hieroglyphics to those not versed in analytics, but they will play a crucial role in the construction of Atlanta United’s first roster.

Rushton is the MLS expansion team’s head of video and technical analysis, a role that means she works with numbers, videos, theories and scouts on the ground, all in equal importance. The information they gather will assist president Darren Eales and technical director Carlos Bocanegra when they decide which players to sign and who may take the field for the inaugural 2017 season.

“Analytics will hopefully give us the edge for every roster spot we pick to make it the best we can,” Eales said.