Applied Sports Science newsletter – June 13, 2016

Roy Hodgson has taken a “massive risk” by selecting Jack Wilshere and Daniel Sturridge in his England squad for Euro 2016, according to a sports science expert.

The duo were controversial choices for the final squad due to their lack of playing time this season and injury record.

Wilshere started just one match for Arsenal all season and Press Association Sport’s Euro 2016 Burnout Study shows that he managed only 253 minutes for club and country between July 1, 2015 and May 31, 2016, the third fewest of any player at the tournament. Sturridge played 1,757 minutes.

“There’s a massive risk in selecting those two,” Professor Greg Whyte, director of performance at the Centre for Health and Human Performance in London, told Press Association Sport.

Colin Kaepernick had issues with general manager Trent Baalke and the 49ers’ medical staff’s handling of his injuries, according to sources.

Although Kaepernick attempted to sidestep questions on those topics, he did shed some light on why he and his agents, Scott Smith and Jason Bernstein, might have been compelled to seek a trade in the offseason.

Kaepernick was asked if he has spoken with Baalke since he reported to the 49ers’ offseason program on April 4.

“No, I haven’t had any discussions with him,” Kaepernick said. “But, once again, I don’t want to get into specifics. I want to focus on football and making sure I’m prepared for this upcoming season.”

Graham Zusi won’t talk about it, but he quietly struggled with injuries in 2015. Paul Tenorio finds out how Zusi got healthy and back in form.

The aims of this study were (i) to characterise the acceleration demands of two different formats of small-sided game (SSG), i.e., 4v4 + goalkeepers (4v4 + GK) and 8v8 + goalkeepers (8v8 + GK); (ii) to analyse the correlation between performance in power-based tests and acceleration-based physical loading during the two different SSG formats and (iii) to analyse the neuromuscular-induced fatigue. Eighteen adult male footballers participated in the study (20.7 ± 1.0 years, 178 ± 5 cm and 71.4 ± 2.1 kg). Baseline measurements were obtained from countermovement jumps, 15 s repeated jumps and 5 and 15 m sprints. A total of 36 min was analysed for each SSG (4v4 + GK: two sets of 3 × 6 min, and 8v8 + GK: 2 × 18 min). Heart rate, blood lactate, perceived exertion and movement pattern (GPS) were analysed. Distances covered by very-high-intensity activities and very-high-speed running were lower in 4v4 + GK than in 8v8 + GK (effect sizes (ES) = ?0.69 ± 0.67 and ?1.04 ± 0.67, respectively; very likely), while accelerations and decelerations were higher in 4v4 + GK than in 8v8 + GK (ES = 1.13–1.52; almost certainly). Blood lactate concentrations were higher (ES = 1.40 ± 0.58; almost certainly) and players perceived themselves to be more tired (ES = 0.80–2.31; almost certainly) after 4v4 + GK than after 8v8 + GK. Sprint ability in 5 and 15 m tests decreased (ES = 0.87 ± 0.58 and 0.89 ± 0.58, respectively; almost certainly) only after 4v4 + GK. This SSG format appeared more demanding in relation to repetitions and fatigue development of muscle power-based actions than 8v8 + GK. It may therefore be logical to use the former type of SSG to target development of power-related football actions.

… “For some reason, this recruiting thing is blowing up. ‘I have to go to this 7-on-7, do this, do this.’ I’ve got a better idea. Go become a great high school football player on your team. When (we) walk in that high school, guess what that high school coach says? ‘Take him.’ You know what we do at Ohio State when he says that? We usually take him. I don’t care what you do at those other camps. I want to hear your high school coach say, ‘Take him.’ If I have relationship with that high school coach like I do with these NFL coaches, guess what happens? We take him.

“Don’t worry about (all the camps). That’s all fun stuff, that’s great. But that’s not why Ohio State recruits you. I can speak for the majority of my friends that coach football. That means nothing. What means something is the recommendation of the high school football coach. Go become a captain. If you’re a captain of your high school team and you’re talented enough, you’ve got a great chance of being here. If you’re very talented and you’re not a captain, I’m going to find out why, because something’s not right.”

FORGET smart uniforms and small classes. The secret to stellar grades and thriving students is teachers. One American study found that in a single year’s teaching the top 10% of teachers impart three times as much learning to their pupils as the worst 10% do. Another suggests that, if black pupils were taught by the best quarter of teachers, the gap between their achievement and that of white pupils would disappear.

But efforts to ensure that every teacher can teach are hobbled by the tenacious myth that good teachers are born, not made. Classroom heroes like Robin Williams in “Dead Poets Society” or Michelle Pfeiffer in “Dangerous Minds” are endowed with exceptional, innate inspirational powers. Government policies, which often start from the same assumption, seek to raise teaching standards by attracting high-flying graduates to join the profession and prodding bad teachers to leave. Teachers’ unions, meanwhile, insist that if only their members were set free from central diktat, excellence would follow.

The Cavaliers practiced first yesterday (as home team) at Quickens Arena, showing up at 11 a.m. after a game that ended just before midnight. After five days in Oakland, it may have felt like 8 a.m. We presume that’s why Tristan Thompson answered “take a nap” when asked what he intended to do to prepare for the Warriors at the end of his presser.

It could be a mildly amusing anecdote, but in fact it’s a burgeoning field of sports science, much like sports nutrition was almost two decades ago. W. Chris Winter is one of the country’s foremost researchers at the medical director of Charlottesville Neurology and Sleep Medicine, and a consultant with a slew of sports teams, that won’t allow him to share their identity. (Teams are super secretive about sports medicine for fear of revealing methods amplified by medical privacy laws.)

“Athletes get so taken care of from the time they arrive at the training center to the time they go home at night, but there’s always been an idea you’re on your own at that point,” says Winter. “People are sort of addressing the idea that we can probably do better than that.”

“Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out. Do you feel the energy that flows through your body?”

Phrases to that effect are sure to have been heard a great deal over the last few days at the headquarters of the Germany national team in Evian, where they are based for the European Championship. The reason? Optional daily yoga sessions have been offered to Bastian Schweinsteiger, Thomas Muller, Mario Gotze and Co for more than ten years now, and will continue to be on the agenda in France, where Germany face Ukraine in their opening UEFA EURO 2016 encounter on Sunday evening.

“Football and yoga go wonderfully together,” said yoga instructor Patrick Broome, who has been in all of Germany’s European Championship and FIFA World Cup™ camps for the last decade, in an exclusive interview with FIFA.com.

USA Cycling and the world’s leading thermal imaging manufacturer, FLIR Systems, recently partnered at the 2016 Volkswagen Professional Road National Championships in Winston-Salem, N.C., to monitor bicycles for illegal motors and components.

“Like all cheating, we take mechanical doping very seriously,” said Chuck Hodge, USA Cycling Technical Director. “To ensure a level playing field in this crucial event, we teamed with FLIR Systems to use thermal cameras to monitor bikes in the U.S. Professional road races.”

We propose a method for hand pose estimation based on a deep regressor trained on two different kinds of input. Raw depth data is fused with an intermediate representation in the form of a segmentation of the hand into parts. This intermediate representation contains important topological information and provides useful cues for reasoning about joint locations. The mapping from raw depth to segmentation maps is learned in a semi/weakly-supervised way from two different datasets: (i) a synthetic dataset created through a rendering pipeline including densely labeled ground truth (pixelwise segmentations); and (ii) a dataset with real images for which ground truth joint positions are available, but not dense segmentations. Loss for training on real images is generated from a patch-wise restoration process, which aligns tentative segmentation maps with a large dictionary of synthetic poses. The underlying premise is that the domain shift between synthetic and real data is smaller in the intermediate representation, where labels carry geometric and topological meaning, than in the raw input domain. Experiments on the NYU dataset show that the proposed training method decreases error on joints over direct regression of joints from depth data by 15.7%.

Background Hamstring strain injuries (HSIs) are common within the Australian Football League (AFL) with most occurring during high-speed running (HSR). Therefore, this study investigated possible relationships between mean session running distances, session ratings of perceived exertion (s-RPE) and HSIs within AFL footballers.

Methods Global positioning system (GPS)-derived running distances and s-RPE for all matches and training sessions over two AFL seasons were obtained from one AFL team. All HSIs were documented and each player’s running distances and s-RPE were standardised to their 2-yearly session average, then compared between injured and uninjured players in the 4?weeks (weeks ?1, ?2, ?3 and ?4) preceding each injury.

Results Higher than ‘typical’ (ie, z=0) HSR session means were associated with a greater likelihood of HSI (week ?1: OR=6.44, 95% CI=2.99 to 14.41, p<0.001; summed weeks ?1 and ?2: OR=3.06, 95% CI=2.03 to 4.75, p<0.001; summed weeks ?1, ?2 and ?3: OR=2.22, 95% CI=1.66 to 3.04, p<0.001; and summed weeks ?1, ?2, ?3 and ?4: OR=1.96, 95% CI=1.54 to 2.51, p<0.001). However, trivial differences were observed between injured and uninjured groups for standardised s-RPE, total distance travelled and distances covered whilst accelerating and decelerating. Increasing AFL experience was associated with a decreased HSI risk (OR=0.77, 95% CI 0.57 to 0.97, p=0.02). Furthermore, HSR data modelling indicated that reducing mean distances in week ?1 may decrease the probability of HSI.

Conclusions Exposing players to large and rapid increases in HSR distances above their 2-yearly session average increased the odds of HSI. However, reducing HSR in week ?1 may offset HSI risk.

Kevin Love fervently believes you are what you eat. In fact, he literally counts on it.

“Not 10 almonds, not 18 almonds — 14 almonds,” trainer Rob McClanaghan says when discussing Love, his most dedicated client. “Kevin is exactly on point. If he’s supposed to eat every two hours, then on the days when he wants to sleep in, he’ll wake up, eat and go back to sleep.”

Love has so drastically altered his eating habits that his teammates heckle him on social media. He switched to a plant-based diet in 2012, with salmon and grilled chicken as his preferred entrees. He eats five to six small meals a day, and when he was traded to Cleveland in 2014, Love hired a full-time chef who prepares menus that feature organic egg whites, beet juice, shredded wheat with almond butter and protein shakes.

When it comes to diets, Americans are fickle, fanatical, and not always well informed. And athletes are no exception—we have a tendency to view diets as a magic bullet, the missing link between us and a podium spot. Curious to see the evolution of popular diets, we ran a Google Trends search on four of the most prevalent ones among athletes—Paleo, gluten-free, raw, and ketogenic. Then, to make sense of it all, we talked to sports dietitian Christine Rosenbloom, who taught nutrition at Georgia State University for 30 years and authored a 2014 paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Nutrition Today on popular diets and athletes.

The following was delivered as the commencement address at the California Institute of Technology, on Friday, June 10th.

If this place has done its job—and I suspect it has—you’re all scientists now. Sorry, English and history graduates, even you are, too. Science is not a major or a career. It is a commitment to a systematic way of thinking, an allegiance to a way of building knowledge and explaining the universe through testing and factual observation. The thing is, that isn’t a normal way of thinking. It is unnatural and counterintuitive. It has to be learned. Scientific explanation stands in contrast to the wisdom of divinity and experience and common sense. Common sense once told us that the sun moves across the sky and that being out in the cold produced colds. But a scientific mind recognized that these intuitions were only hypotheses. They had to be tested.

The sense that Georgia Tech’s teams can be winning more — athletic director Mike Bobinski thinks it, too.

“On an across-the-board performance level, I don’t know that we’re where we would like to be in anything at this point in time, or where I think we’re capable of,” he said.

He didn’t name teams, but finding examples isn’t difficult. Of the school’s two most prominent teams, one experienced its worst season since 1994 (football) and Bobinski replaced the coach in the other (men’s basketball). To address that and other challenges, Bobinski has led a project that was presented to the athletic-department staff Tuesday.