Applied Sports Science newsletter – May 19, 2016

Portuguese star cut a frustrated figure after his side missed out on La Liga to Barcelona and dismissed Zinedine Zidane’s suggestion he suffered a foot injury during the 2-0 win over Deportivo La Coruna

Over the last several years, LeBron James has learned how to construct midseason training camps to address issues with his body.

Whether it was his two-week hiatus last season or his midwinter trip to Miami to work with his offseason trainer in the middle of this season, James has found ways to use downtime to do far more than just stay down.

He did it again during the Cleveland Cavaliers’ eight-day layoff leading into the Eastern Conference finals, and it was quite apparent in his team’s 115-84 Game 1 victory over the Toronto Raptors.

In July of 2015, Australian performance specialist Lachlan Penfold joined the NBA’s Golden State Warriors as Head of Physical Performance and Sports Medicine. The Warriors, led by newly crowned league MVP Stephan Curry, had just won the team’s first NBA Championship in forty years. One frequently cited key to the Warriors new found success was a willingness to put pieces together in new, sometimes unexpected, ways.

Penfold joined the Warriors with little experience working with elite basketball players and no prior experience in the NBA. What he brought to the team was a rich legacy as a successful trainer with expertise in recovery management. Over his 20 year career in Australia, he worked with more than 80 Olympic athletes over 5 different Olympic games. Immediately before joining the Warriors, he held key positions in various football codes, including 7 years in Australian Rules Football with the Brisbane Lions and 3 years in the National Rugby League with the Sydney Roosters, culminating in their premiership run in 2013. Penfold was most recently with the Australian National Sevens squad immediately before joining the Warriors.

Throughout his professional career, Penfold has championed the importance of developing individualized training plans that are easily adapted to the changing needs of athletes.

… the development of young players must make sense from a business perspective. The review has highlighted that, in a football environment where the biggest Premier League clubs seek to sign the best young players before they can graduate through an Academy system, the challenge of developing value through that system is extremely difficult.

Therefore, as a result of this review, the decision has been taken to completely restructure the Club’s Academy system.

eal-time physiological status monitors (RT-PSM) are an important new category of military wearables in the individual Soldier’s technological ecosystem. RT-PSM addresses a gap by providing individual Soldiers and small unit leaders with actionable information needed to ensure individual and squad performance readiness. This summary of accomplishments, requirements and research road-maps identifies what RT-PSM is and is not, how current capabilities can be used in current programs of record, and where future research should focus. Notable accomplishments include the development of a commercial criterion, FDA-certified wearable research tool, useful in acquiring data from Soldiers and Marines in training and operational environments performing their normal activities under stressful conditions. This has advanced development of algorithms and concepts of operation for various applications. Current implementation of RT-PSM for thermal-work strain monitoring includes technology transitions through the National Guard Bureau and the Program Executive Office Soldier Integrated Soldier Sensor System program.

… I grew up in a kung fu house. It wasn’t until I got older that I discovered that most families didn’t talk about the Shaolin Temple or Jackie Chan at the dinner table.

The best part of watching kung fu movies with my dad was the conversations they sparked. We never watched them just for fun.

“Do you see how good his balance is?” My dad would always zero in on really specific stuff like that. Everything had a potential lesson.

How did you sleep last night? If you’re so tired you’re having to read that question again, you’re not alone. Two-thirds of British adults say they are sleep deprived, getting seven hours or less every night – something that, cumulatively, can have a dramatic effect on concentration levels and productivity.

But sleep is about quality, not just quantity. A ‘good night’s sleep’ that leaves you feeling refreshed, alert and energised involves not only getting the right number of hours, but the right type of sleep, says Nick Littlehales, a sleep coach who works with elite sports stars such as Manchester United football club and Team Sky to improve the standard of their slumber.

It is said that running is 95 percent mental. While we tend to get hung up on the physiological aspects of performance, hard training sessions more importantly fortify the brain to withstand the sensation of being uncomfortable for prolonged periods of time. Here’s a glimpse into what the sports psychology literature says on the subject:

1. An Australian study demonstrated that aerobic training can actually increase a person’s pain tolerance.

Experience-dependent structural changes are widely evident in gray matter. Using diffusion weighted imaging (DWI), the neuroplastic effect of motor training on white matter in the brain has been demonstrated. However, in humans it is not known whether specific features of white matter relate to motor skill acquisition or if these structural changes are associated to functional network connectivity. Myelin can be objectively quantified in vivo and used to index specific experience-dependent change. In the current study, seventeen healthy young adults completed ten sessions of visuomotor skill training (10,000 total movements) using the right arm. Multicomponent relaxation imaging was performed before and after training. Significant increases in myelin water fraction, a quantitative measure of myelin, were observed in task dependent brain regions (left intraparietal sulcus [IPS] and left parieto-occipital sulcus). In addition, the rate of motor skill acquisition and overall change in myelin water fraction in the left IPS were negatively related, suggesting that a slower rate of learning resulted in greater neuroplastic change. This study provides the first evidence for experience-dependent changes in myelin that are associated with changes in skilled movements in healthy young adults.

… “About 10 years ago, a video went viral on YouTube showing a toddler holding a paper magazine and trying to use it like an iPad, swiping and pinching to zoom, and it didn’t work so she just looked at it thinking, ‘It must be broken,’” says [Monica] Rogati. “It was obvious evidence of a new generation of digital natives. Today we’re witnessing a new revolution of data natives who expect their world to be ‘smart’ and seamlessly adapt to what they want.”

There’s incredible appetite for products that will anticipate every need and want. In this exclusive article, Rogati shares how companies can harbor their resources and take a new approach to rise to this occasion.

Flexible electronics seem to be a continually expanding area of electronics. However, a half-century of focus on silicon-based electronics has left the shelf set aside for materials that can be used for these new flexible electronics a bit bare.

Of late, there has been a big research push aimed at developing self-repairing, electrically conductive materials that can withstand the damage caused by the twisting and deformation of the materials. But thus far, most of that research has focused on self-repairing electrical conductors.

Now researchers at Penn State University have looked at developing a self-healing dielectric material. Dielectrics are just as important as conductors in that they provide electronic insulation and packaging.

… Officially jettisoned from the team, [Adam] Kern felt like his very identity had been taken away from him. His insomnia got worse. He took to taking extreme methods to sleep—what, doesn’t everyone move their mattress to the floor, use their desk and chair and sheet to build a sensory deprivation tent to block out the noise and the static, just to get some fucking sleep?—but nothing seemed to help. Finally, Kern sought out the therapist he had first gone to as a child.

It took a combination of therapy, SSRIs, and time, but Kern got better. He surmounted the depression, graduated with a bachelor’s in psychology, and even started running again; these days, he is training for a triathlon, each step he takes now for himself.

And he began to help others.

… “I just couldn’t even get up. I just struggled. I lost where I was for a moment,” the 29-year-old recalled, adding: “I just didn’t feel like myself at all.”

Monroe’s physicians had prescribed him oxycodone, and although his body needed relief from severe pain, the side effects of the painkiller were horrible. He felt like a “zombie” – sluggish, lethargic and always in a fog. He avoided developing a dangerous opioid addiction, but many other athletes, particularly professional football players, are not so lucky.

That’s why Monroe has become an unlikely advocate for medical marijuana, an alternative painkiller that the National Football League continues to ban despite growing evidence that cannabis is significantly safer than opioids, could reduce opioid dependence and could even diminish the long-term effects of brain injuries.

Of the 107 underclassmen who forfeited their final year of college football eligibility to enter last month’s NFL Draft, 30 were not selected.

That number will be even greater following next month’s NBA Draft. The league received 117 letters from players wishing to enter the draft before their college eligibility expired.

Yet, the draft consists of two rounds — 60 selections — of which many will be seniors and international players.

“The system right now is flawed and it doesn’t work well for anybody,” Miami basketball coach Jim Larranaga said. “It doesn’t work well for colleges. It doesn’t work well for the NBA.”

… The four minute and 12 second gain from last year to this year is actually larger than any of the per-season gains made during the 2011-2014 stretch when MLB games lengthened quickly; that kind of rise in game length is clearly frustrating to Manfred, especially after the gains they made last year. As the commissioner notes to Stark in the piece, MLB believes there are a variety of factors contributing to the longer games, with players not taking the pace-of-play initiatives as seriously this year, cold weather, and simply the structural change in results all contributing. Stark points out that walks and strikeouts are both up again, so overall pitches are up, and more pitches equals more time. But let’s try to go beyond that and look and see if we can quantify the differences in game length this year.

At the risk of oversimplifying things, there are essentially three buckets of variables that affect game length: the number of batters per game, the length of each at-bat, and then the dead-time elements; pitching changes, managerial arguments, replays, second baseman punching the lights out of bat-flippers, etc… The dead-time bucket is the hardest one to control; you can’t really legislate number of pitching changes easily, and while the league can work on speeding up replay, as Stark notes, there just aren’t enough of them to really be driving a big increase in game length.

So let’s focus mostly on the first two factors; the quantity of batters and the length of each at-bat.