Applied Sports Science newsletter – June 16, 2016

Brazil coach Dunga has suggested that Kaka was unable to make his national team cut for Copa America because his training with Major League Soccer side Orlando City was not rigorous enough.

The 34-year-old Orlando City star had replaced injured Bayern Munich winger Douglas Costa in the team two weeks ago, but was himself ruled out of the competition just five days later with an injury.

When Harry Kane takes to the pitch for England’s Euro 2016 tie against Wales he will have already played 4,777 minutes of football for club and country this season – far more than any other striker in Roy Hodgson’s squad.

While there is no fear that Kane is suffering from any kind of physical burnout – the conditioning at Tottenham Hotspur and with England has dovetailed to ensure against that, with the unprecedented sharing of medical data — there is a concern over whether the forward has simply played too much football in the past two years.

A year has passed since Jan Van Winckel took up the role of Technical Director at the Saudi Arabian Football Federation (SAFF). This mild-mannered Belgian rarely gives interviews, but in an exclusive interview with Insideworldfootball, Van Winckel opens up about his new role as he strives to reform football in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Last August, Van Winckel set about perhaps his biggest football challenge career to date with the zeal and meticulousness that has been a hallmark of his career. He set about drafting a “Master Plan” for Saudi football that would ultimately decentralize the domestic game.

To live life is to make decisions, yet who actually makes the choices? Everyone makes their own, is the obvious response. And yet this is not quite right. In Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces that Shape Behavior, Jonah Berger traces the myriad ways that social queues guide us, often without our knowledge. Berger, a marketing professor at the Wharton School of Business, is the author of the 2013 bestseller Contagious: Why Things Catch On. His new book is a logical extension of that project, zeroing in on the individual decisions that, in the aggregate, make our society what it is. He answered questions from Mind Matters Editor Gareth Cook.

… Running shoes actually made those muscles work harder to keep the arch stable, the researchers report today in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. So the evidence is in: Wearing shoes does change the physiology of running. Just not in the way scientists expected.

PURPOSE: To compare the effects of three different high intensity training (HIT) models, balanced for total load but differing in training plan progression, on endurance adaptations.

METHODS: Sixty-three cyclists (peak oxygen uptake (V[spacing dot above]O2peak) 61.3+/-5.8 mL.kg-1.min-1) were randomized to three training groups and instructed to follow a 12-wk training program consisting of 24 interval sessions, a high volume of low intensity training (LIT), and laboratory testing. Increasing HIT (INC) group (n=23) performed interval training as 4×16-min in wk 1-4, 4×8-min in wk 5-8 and 4×4-min in wk 9-12. Decreasing HIT (DEC) group (n=20) performed interval sessions in the opposite mesocycle order as INC, and mixed HIT (MIX) group (n=20) performed the interval prescriptions in a mixed distribution in all mesocycles. Interval sessions were prescribed as maximal session efforts and executed at mean 4.7, 9.2 and 12.7 mMol.L-1 blood lactate in 4×16, 4×8 and 4×4-min sessions, respectively (P<0.001). Pre and post intervention, cyclists were tested for mean power during 40-min all-out (Power40min), peak power output during incremental testing to exhaustion (PPO), V[spacing dot above]O2peak and power at 4 mMol.L-1 lactate (Power4mM).

RESULTS: All groups improved 5-10% in Power40min, PPO and V[spacing dot above]O2peak post intervention (P0.05). Further, an individual response analysis indicated similar likelihood of either large, moderate or non-responses, respectively, in response to each training group (P>0.05).

CONCLUSIONS: This study suggests that organizing different interval sessions in a specific periodized mesocycle order or in a mixed distribution during a 12-wk training period has little or no effect on training adaptation when the overall training load is the same.

Earlier this week, more than 100 of hockey’s best prospects took part in the NHL Combine. Similar to the NFL, the NHL Combine features a battery of tests and assessments designed to give teams adequate information ahead of the NHL Draft on June 24th and 25th in Buffalo.

The Functional Movement Screen was formally added to the Combine in 2013.

“[Montreal Canadiens scouting director] Trevor Timmins suggested the NHL consider FMS testing to see if we could incorporate it into our Combine,” Director of NHL Scouting Dan Marr said. “It doesn’t necessarily pinpoint an injury; rather, it can indicate the potential or need for further examination and that’s just as, if not more, important.”

The Canadiens had been using the FMS as a part of their team combine for several years.

When Kanye West isn’t wearing his Yeezys (or Vans, as he describes in a song on The Life of Pablo), he’s often spotted in Adidas Ultra Boosts. Since being introduced last year, the Ultra Boost has quickly transcended its intended purpose as a running shoe, becoming an essential silhouette for sneakerheads everywhere. But despite Ultra Boost finding success in the streetwear community, Adidas continues to create products around a mantra from founder Adi Dassler: “It all starts with the athlete.” That idea, combined with the use of evolving technologies such as motion capture, is what drove the design behind AlphaBounce, the company’s latest running shoe.

Before becoming a reality, AlphaBounce had to be shaped by ARAMIS, a motion-capture system that helps determine the amount of strain and tension caused by different materials. ARAMIS, which NASA has used to inspect the outer hull of space shuttles, combines high-speed cameras with flexion sensors to gather information at up to 500 frames per second. Since the software maps skin, bone and muscle, it can give Adidas engineers insight into how they should go about designing a more comfortable running sneaker. ARAMIS can visualize the level of comfort on every area of an individual’s foot, from the heel to the toes, as well as indicate when the fabric may be getting in the way of performance.

… one might call Australia the birthplace of sports science. And it’s still the epicenter of the movement for a variety of reasons. The genesis of the industry was the proud sporting nation’s struggles at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, where Australia failed to win a gold medal — a result that spurred Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser to set up the Australian Institute of Sport.

“The establishment of the AIS implemented a sports-science approach to performance, which was unique globally at the time,” said Adir Shiffman, executive chairman of Catapult, a leading athlete tracker company headquartered in Melbourne. “Australia took to sports science as a profession long before any other country in the world.”

It’s fourth and goal. You’re down three. The clock is ticking. You’re on the road. And you have a decision to make: Take the field goal and tie it up, but give the opponent the ball with a two-minute drill and a chance to win. Or go for the win right now. You have to think fast. Make the call.

If you haven’t coached football, the closest you can come to reenacting this situation is in Madden. And any armchair quarterback is convinced they would make the right decision if given the opportunity. The problem being that sports radio callers and Twitter at large has never had a situation where they can prove it. Well, until now.

This is where the Salt Lake Screaming Eagles, a new expansion franchise in the Indoor Football League (IFL), come in. At first glance, it’s just another minor league team. But there’s a hook (and everything needs a hook or a meme these days or you run the risk of being meaningless and doubting your own self worth): this team is going to be run with a great deal of fan input. And not just what food to serve in club levels, or what songs to play during timeouts. This team is letting fans download an app and pick everything from team colors to plays during the game.

In the midst of two major ongoing soccer tournaments, the Copa America and the Euro 2016, there are surely a host of young players wondering what it will take for them to play on the same stage as many of these professional players.

Now, Nike has given a tangible exercise for anyone to do via their Nike Soccer app—brain training. Created with the help of digital agency AKQA, Nike added the “Pro Genius” aspect to their existing app. The Nike Soccer app already features an array of physical, tactical and technical drills for anybody looking to practice the beautiful game.

So far, the Pro Genius portion of the app has five different activities for the brain—counter attack, priming, visualization, self-talk and cross anticipation. Only the counter attack and priming modes are actual training exercises that require the app.

Back in March, James Michael McAdoo, the power forward for the Golden State Warriors, tweeted out a photo of himself in the training room, sporting a pair of slick over-the-ear headphones. Though you couldn’t tell from the picture, these particular headphones incorporated a miniature fakir’s bed of soft plastic spikes above each ear, pressing gently into the skull and delivering pulses of electric current to the brain. Made by a Silicon Valley startup called Halo Neuroscience, the headphones promise to “accelerate gains in strength, explosiveness, and dexterity” through a proprietary technique called neuropriming. “Thanks to @HaloNeuro for letting me and my teammates try these out!” McAdoo tweeted. “Looking forward to seeing the results!”

On Thursday night, McAdoo and his teammates will seek the eighty-ninth and final win of their record-breaking season, as they defend their National Basketball Association title in Game 6 of the final series against LeBron James’s Cleveland Cavaliers. The headphones’ apparent results, in other words, have been impressive. Although a Halo spokesperson declined my request for comment, a Warriors trainer confirmed that an unspecified number of players have been trying the device. This fits in with the team’s techno-utopian narrative. Since the bumbling Warriors franchise was purchased by a group of Silicon Valley venture capitalists, in 2010, it has acquired a reputation as “tech’s team,” playing with the wonky, numbers-driven approach of Sand Hill Road. The Warriors have also been enthusiastic early adopters of technology ranging from “intelligent sleep masks” for countering jet lag to body-worn sensors that detect pressure on the knees and ankles. Given the Warriors’ unprecedented dominance, this is an approach that other teams are likely to emulate. So it’s worth asking: do the brain-zapping headphones and other assorted gadgets really work?

A shift in the way sporting bodies tackle mental health has encouraged high-profile athletes to speak out about their individual battles.

… WADA doesn’t release estimates of the numbers of athletes currently taking drugs on its monitoring program list. For meldonium, the number was likely high. A study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine reported that 66 of the 762 urine samples from athletes at the 2015 European Games tested positive for meldonium.

Whether athletes use drugs on the current watch list to treat legitimate medical conditions or gain an unfair edge on the competition isn’t clear. An international team of scientists that make up WADA’s Prohibited List Expert Group ultimately makes that distinction. (Athletes who have a legitimate medical need for a banned substance can apply for a therapeutic use exemption.)

What gets a drug banned? We asked toxicologist Olivier Rabin, WADA’s science director since 2002, about the science behind the blackball.

Randy Carlyle said his methods as a coach are not outdated by any stretch. He doesn’t believe that his team needs to out-slug its opponent to win games. And he said he understands the fact that an NHL group needs to hold onto the puck and make plays with the puck in the offensive zone in order to win games.

“I don’t believe I’m a Neanderthal from a standpoint of wanting knuckles dragging and fighting,” the 60-year-old Carlyle said. “I don’t believe that. I’d like to have rough n’ tumble hockey. I like to play physical hockey. But the game has changed. You have to have skating ability. You have to be able to move the puck, you have to play a pace game.”