Applied Sports Science newsletter – May 9, 2016

It was only about a month ago that DeMarre Carroll worried that he’d never bounce back in time to play in the post-season.

Now, he’s finding his rhythm at just the right time.

The athletic forward was a huge part of the Raptors’ overtime Game 2 victory Thursday night. Now that the second-round playoff series is in Miami tied at one win apiece, with Game 3 set for 5 p.m. ET on Saturday.

“It feels real good, man,” Carroll said. “For me to be able to be back, and miss that many games, and only play, what … a total of 10 games (since his return), to finally get my rhythm back, it’s amazing.”

… His rookie season with the Magic was encouraging, starting 59 games and averaging 8.2 points and 4.4 rebounds, but his playing time diminished greatly the next two seasons. Last season, he started just four times, and appeared in only 45 games.

His attitude, however, didn’t change. He was with the Magic’s summer league team each of the last two summers. He rarely came back to New York during the offseason, staying close to the facility instead. After games, he always made sure to either lift weights or get up extra jump shots.

“He was going to get his sweat in no matter what,” said Nate Blue, a family adviser and Harkless’ youth coach. “Everything makes you what you are. He wouldn’t be where he’s at today without Orlando.”

After Nashville Predators center Mike Fisher scored midway through the first period of Thursday night’s playoff game against the Sane Jose Sharks, another 100 minutes of game time passed before he scored again, this time to win the game in triple overtime.

In those intervening 100 minutes, there were three goals, a possible Sharks winner in the first overtime was controversially disallowed due to goalie interference, and nearly 4 hours and 40 minutes ticked off the real-world clock, with the winner netted just after 2 a.m. Eastern time.

As for the toll on Fisher personally, consider this: he averaged nine shifts per period in that game for 41 seconds per shift. Those 100 minutes represent five periods of play, so that’s 45 shifts lasting 30 minutes and 45 seconds of ice time. According to data from PowerScout Hockey, the average center skates 128 meters for every 30 seconds of five-on-five ice time in the regular season, which gives a reasonable approximation of what Fisher’s FitBit would have tracked last night.

Most sleep studies get their data from government questionnaires and subjects hooked up to wires in labs, which—duh—aren’t great at quantifying real-world shut-eye. You’re probably not going to send that work email at 1:00am when you’re in a sleep lab, or own up to it on a questionnaire. That’s why the University of Michigan decided to pull sleep data from the very thing keeping people up at night—a smartphone app.

“We wanted people to want to help us,” says Daniel Forger, one of the scientists behind the study, released in Science Advances. “So we thought, ‘If we give them a useful app then maybe they’ll want to give us data.’” With this in mind, Forger and his team launched Entrain in 2014, a free jet lag-hacking app that helps users align their circadian clock to the time zone they’ve traveled to by recommending different lighting scenarios.

The influence of the circadian clock on sleep scheduling has been studied extensively in the laboratory; however, the effects of society on sleep remain largely unquantified. We show how a smartphone app that we have developed, ENTRAIN, accurately collects data on sleep habits around the world. Through mathematical modeling and statistics, we find that social pressures weaken and/or conceal biological drives in the evening, leading individuals to delay their bedtime and shorten their sleep. A country’s average bedtime, but not average wake time, predicts sleep duration. We further show that mathematical models based on controlled laboratory experiments predict qualitative trends in sunrise, sunset, and light level; however, these effects are attenuated in the real world around bedtime. Additionally, we find that women schedule more sleep than men and that users reporting that they are typically exposed to outdoor light go to sleep earlier and sleep more than those reporting indoor light. Finally, we find that age is the primary determinant of sleep timing, and that age plays an important role in the variability of population-level sleep habits. This work better defines and personalizes “normal” sleep, produces hypotheses for future testing in the laboratory, and suggests important ways to counteract the global sleep crisis.

… As he worked to rehab in the fall of 2014 and as other schools tried to recruit him away from Ohio State, Miller hatched a covert plan. His recovering shoulder wouldn’t stop him — he wouldn’t let it. The most decorated quarterback in Big Ten history decided to switch to a position where it didn’t matter that his shoulder wasn’t healthy enough to throw the football more than 45 yards.

That change, his willingness to adapt, gave Miller an advantage for his NFL career. Many college quarterbacks attempt this transition. Some do it by choice and some by necessity. It doesn’t always work, but Miller is determined to make it work. The Texans, too, think it will. They’re expecting Miller’s ability as a receiver to grow and to add a dynamic dimension to their offense.

“I’m working toward something special here,” Miller said. “I’m ready to showcase my talents. I’m ready to be one of the best draft picks they’ve picked. … No time to waste.” [video, 1:55]

… As Supervalu’s senior manager of talent management, Rank learned quickly how challenging it would be to integrate educational opportunities into the busy schedules of her organization’s workforce. “Many of my company’s employees work on the sales floor or in a distribution center,” she says. “They have limited time to devote to learning.”

That’s one reason she implemented a Web-based training solution that uses microlearning techniques—that is, it breaks lessons into small chunks of information that employees can absorb on the job. It might take the form of a 4-minute video tutorial or a series of brief online learning modules that employees work through at their own pace. Compared to offsite training, “microlearning is a very welcome alternative,” Rank says.

Whether recent converts or veterans with sacks of finisher’s medals, we expect our training miles to be rewarded with improvement in both how we run and how we feel. But what if those miles don’t deliver? Maybe lately your body has become the in vogue destination for every illness and infection around. Or you can’t shake injuries and niggles, or you’re exhausted by day but can’t sleep at night. And that PB you’ve been chasing is slipping ever further into the distance.

Overtraining, unexplained underperformance, burnout, call it what you will, it’s the athletic equivalent of chronic fatigue syndrome. And while you may think it’s only a concern for elites or ultra-junkies clocking three-figure weekly mileage, you are not immune to it.

Training seriously without paying proper attention to nutrition, sleep and recovery, and failing to factor in the demands of a busy, stressful life outside running could be setting you up for burnout. ‘What we’re seeing is a ‘professionalisation’ of the amateur athlete – a rise in intensity, volume and seriousness – but without removing the life stressors non-pros experience,’ says Greg Whyte, former Olympian and Professor in Applied Sport and Exercise Science at Liverpool John Moores University.

Milan 2016: in our next movie from Nike’s The Nature of Motion exhibition, architect Greg Lynn explains how his body temperature-regulating chair could help athletes significantly improve their performance. [video, 2:20]

How much protein can your body digest and use at a time? If you you eat the right amount of protein at every meal you’ll supposedly hit the sweet spot – maximum muscle growth and satiety (fullness) without wasting food or money. General guidelines based on short term trials and one cross-sectional study suggest adults need regular meals including 25 – 45 grams of protein per meal to maintain or build muscle mass and maximum strength (1, 2, 3). However, it is possible that more protein per meal may be beneficial in some instances while the per meal amount might not matter very much in others. Your body can and will digest all of the protein you eat in a sitting (it might take a while) and it doesn’t just discard any excess that isn’t used to build structures in the body.

Leicester City’s Barclays Premier League title victory has been hailed as the most extraordinary in the history of the competition, and their feat is all the more remarkable for the fact that they barely altered their starting line-up throughout the course of 2015/16.

In partnership with sports science experts at Loughborough University, the Nissan Excitement Index utilises data gathered through physiological reactions of football fans watching UEFA Champions League matches. Based on these reactions, a formula – the Nissan Excitement Index – has been developed.

Nissan and Loughborough University have been conducting live ‘excitement experiments’ on pairs of football fans in the stands during six UEFA Champions League matches. Fans were fitted with wearable technology to monitor and gather a combined index of data, including: heart rate, breathing rate and electro-dermal activity, in order to examine the physiological effect excitement has on them. Loughborough University combined this data with official match statistics from Opta in order to develop the formula at the heart of the Nissan Excitement Index.

… This is a triumph of the collective over the individual, of Claudio Ranieri’s if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it style of management. Earlier this season the Italian told Gazzetta dello Sport, “I always thought the most important thing a good coach must do is build the team around the characteristics of his players. So I told the players that I trusted them and would speak very little of tactics.”

Ranieri and his team share an office with the performance analysts at Leicester, which allows for ideas to be shared and aired in an informal setting.

“The coaches, along with the players, are our primary audiences, so sharing an office with them makes a huge difference,” first-team analyst Pete Clark told Opta Sports. “It means with just the turn of a shoulder we can discuss ideas and talk things through. And it’s the same with the recruitment team.”

One of the things that really got me into baseball around 2009, when I was enjoying my first season watching literally every Phillies game I could, was reading old columns at Fire Joe Morgan. I expect that blog doesn’t need much of an introduction for this audience, but just in case: Fire Joe Morgan was a blog that ripped apart the mainstream sports media of the early-to-late 2000s, exposing it—actually, no, I was right, it doesn’t need an introduction. It was and is wonderful.

One of the major misunderstandings the blog tried to correct was sports media’s systemic inability to understand what the book Moneyball was about, and, consequently, what the general philosophy of Moneyball actually was. More often than not, commentators and journalists, particularly the titular Joe Morgan, would argue that Moneyball meant teams being cheap, privileging walks over batting average, and losing in the playoffs like the Oakland A’s. As Ken Tremendous and company would insist over at Fire Joe Morgan, though, the idea behind Billy Beane’s strategy as documented by Michael Lewis in Moneyball was the exploitation of market inefficiencies. Especially for teams that did not have the capital to spend like the New York Yankees or Los Angeles Dodgers, Beane’s philosophy—which Lewis gave the shorthand of “Moneyball”—was essentially a leveling technique, a way of attacking a hopeless mismatch by finding a completely different resource to pursue. No money? No problem!

Leicester’s story is one of the most, if not the most, remarkable in sporting history. At 5,000/1 to win the Premier League at the start of the season, the bookies thought it was more likely that Elvis would be found alive (2,000/1) or that the Loch Ness monster would turn up (500/1). There has been much discussion about the spirit in the squad, but it’s worth nailing down exactly what we mean here using the latest research in team psychology. It helps tell us how such a long shot can transpire, but only if all the psychological pieces fall into place.

Research I have been conducting with Rupert Brown and Vivian Vignoles suggests that team identity can be used to predict perceived and actual team performance. Using a unique sample of amateur and elite level teams including Olympic, military and Premier League squads, we suggest potentially six psychological foundations – or what are termed identity motives – that can cause individuals to identify with a team. Leicester City, knowingly or not, appears to have the lot.

… Three rooms were prepared with each hosting three 45 minute discussions on different topics. First up for me was Ted Knutson‘s talk on ‘the death of traditional scouting’. Having founded StatsBomb and then led recruitment efforts at Smartodds, owners of Brentford FC and FC Midtjylland, it was no surprise that Ted’s talk focussed mainly around the use of statistics and analytics as the basis for a modern scouting strategy.

As two clubs with relatively limited budgets, Ted discussed how his team of two analysts and six part-time scouts used analytical models to identify and create a more focussed short list of players, allowing the scouts to spend less time watching unsuitable players and more time to look in-depth at potential targets, their character and what they can bring to the squad.