Applied Sports Science newsletter – June 17, 2016

… The professional life of an NBA player can be brief. There are not quite 500 roster spots in the league, and the same dumb luck, nepotism, chance, and other cosmic mitigators that shape careers in every field exist in the NBA, too. Two players that Stauskas gets compared to are Kyle Korver and J.J. Redick, and while neither fit is ideal, there really are some similarities. They are all shooters, active off the ball, and better passers and defenders than they generally get credit for being. Stauskas is not in the same universe with either in terms of accomplishments, but all three started their careers in a similar way. Neither Korver or Reddick peaked until their late 20s, after they found franchises that gave them the time to figure it out.

“When I hear stories like that, guys like J.J. and Kyle Korver, those are guys who are really good players in this league now,” says Stauskas, who turns 23 in October. “And when you hear about their struggles their first three, four, five years in the league it makes you realize it’s a process and it’s going to take some patience and take some time to get to where you want to be. ”

… As was discussed ad nauseam during Jordan Morris’ will-he-or-won’t-he trial with Werder Bremen, the most direct path toward stardom depends on the player. Player development is not a Robert Frost poem. It’s not cut-and-dry, nor is it linear.

Morris ultimately signed with his hometown Sounders, a decision lauded, for one, by Landon Donovan — the all-time leading scorer in USMNT and MLS history who spent most of his career firmly within the constraints of his comfort zone.

Yedlin, though, always considered a different path. He thrived on a challenge going all the way back to his youth soccer days with Crossfire Premier in Kirkland. He needed to be pushed.

“No matter what age group, whenever he played up, he always embraced it,” said Crossfire coach Bernie James.

… The toll on Curry has been immense. Since the season started in late October, Curry has logged 3,240 minutes of playing time — 54 hours of inviting and absorbing contact from defenders. The Warriors are on the cusp of more history, having already set an N.B.A. record by winning 73 games in the regular season, but Curry is feeling the weight of injury and fatigue.

As the playoffs have worn on, he has adopted the garb of a weekend warrior sweating it out at noontime hoops: protective sleeves on both knees, a gargantuan ice pack occasionally strapped to his right shoulder. Yet he has continued to dismiss questions about his health.

Chile’s Alexis Sánchez has played in 52 games for club and country in his 2015-16 season, which began last summer. His Arsenal teammate, Germany’s Mesut Özil, has taken part in 55. And the Argentine ironman Lionel Messi — despite missing a number of games this season to injury — racked up his 56th appearance this week.

A game a week might not seem like a lot to a casual fan. But soccer is one of the world’s toughest endurance sports, and clubs and national teams are testing the limits of what players can handle.

The very best players now appear in as many as four major club competitions in a season, tournaments that have expanded under pressure from television, and even more games as members of their national teams. In each game, a top player will run an average of seven and a half miles.

Make up for all that with a restful off-season? Good luck. Those have virtually disappeared from the modern game: If there is not a continental or world championship on the calendar, club teams travel to the United States, or the Middle East, or Asia, on marketing trips whenever they have a break.

… “Cristiano Ronaldo is so successful because he is really serious, really professional,” his former Real manager Carlo Ancelotti told CNN.

“Usually when we got back at 3 a.m. from away games, instead of going to bed he would take an ice bath.”

Ronaldo’s work rate and desire to improve is frequently mentioned by those who have worked with the player in the past. His undoubted ability and match-winning moments have gained him millions of fans across the world.

Sadly, most of the rapid cognitive enhancers currently being peddled are not very effective. Let’s start with brain training. None of the commercial brain-training software being marketed is backed up by strong scientific evidence. Lumosity started off claiming that its product was supported by scientific research, but a number of us in the cognitive neuroscience field were struck that the research section of the company’s website didn’t seem to have any peer-reviewed studies demonstrating this claim. Making such a claim without evidence is what got the company sued.

Lumosity, Posit Science and other brain-training companies differ in many of their particulars but share some common features. First, they ‘gamify’ training, so that it is more appealing. Second, they are adaptive, which means that, as you get better, the game gets harder. Both of these are solid principles of cognitive training. Third, many (but not all) of these systems focus on training an ability called working memory, which is the skill to keep multiple bits of information ready to hand, and juggle some of them while using others.

Working memory is an attractive target for cognitive training because measures of its capacity – how many bits of information you can juggle – correlate strongly with measures of problem-solving and reasoning, and because working-memory tasks are easy to program into games. Some systems also train attentional control, which is the ability to pick out task-relevant information from among distracting information. Like working memory, training attentional control makes theoretical sense and can be incorporated into interactive games. So, the thinking behind these interventions is totally reasonable.

The problem is that experiments to test the types of techniques used by commercial products to boost working memory and attention have not yielded significant results.

Professional footballers and their coaches often complain about the mental fatigue induced by the stress of frequent matches.

Now research from the University of Kent has demonstrated for the first time that mental fatigue can have a negative impact on football performance by reducing running, passing, and shooting ability.

Professor Samuele Marcora of Kent’s School of Sport and Exercise Sciences worked with researchers from the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia, and Ghent University in Belgium on the study published in the journal Medicine & Science in Sport & Exercise.

The purpose of the present study was to examine the acute effects of resting, aerobic exercise practised alone, and aerobic exercise with active video games (AVG), on complex reaction time (CRT) and the post-exercise acute rate of perceived exertion (RPE) in young healthy adults. The experimental group was composed of 92 healthy young adults, 78 males and 13 females (age M?=?21.9?±?2.7 years) who completed two sessions, A and B. In session A, participants rode 30?min on an ergometer, while in session B they exercised for 30?min on an ergometer while playing an AVG on a Wii. The control group was composed of 30 young adults, 26 males and 4 females (age M?=?21.4?±?2.9 years) who rested for 30?min. In each session, a CRT task was performed before and after exercising or resting, and post-exercise global RPE was noted. Repeated measures general linear model (GLM) and Wilcoxon tests were performed. (1) Both aerobic exercise alone and aerobic exercise combined with AVG improved CRT, while resting did not; (2) aerobic exercise combined with AVG did not improve CRT more than aerobic exercise only; and (3) RPE was lower after aerobic exercise combined with AVG compared with aerobic exercise only. In young adults, exercise produces acute benefits on CRT, and practising exercise with AVG helps to decrease RPE.

Over the past 15 years numerous studies have found that playing action video games such as “Call of Duty” helps cognitive functioning. In an article for Scientific American, brain and cognitive sciences professor Daphne Bavelier and alumnus C. Shawn Green, now an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, explain how shooting zombies and fending off enemy troops virtually can enhance brain skills such as visual acuity, reaction time, and multitasking.

The technical term is glossokinetic potential (GKP). As you move your tongue around your mouth, it changes electrical potentials all over your head. Making out with someone isn’t likely to result in a cerebral lightning storm, but the changes are nonetheless detectable via EEG. This detectability raises the interesting possibility of using tongue movements to control machines, like computers or wheelchairs.

Tongue input technology based on GKPs is something being actively pursued by computer scientist Yunjun Nam and colleagues at the Laboratory for Advanced Brain Signal Processing in Tokyo. In the current issue of IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Magazine they describe a successful tongue-machine interface immediately capable of directing an motorized wheelchair and that shows promise for being used in silent speech recognition technology, e.g. soundless talking.

… If you attend a basketball game at IU’s famed Assembly Hall, you may notice a series of 28 holes in the walls surrounding the court. What’s behind them is the idea that won Cuban over so quickly and may represent the next technological revolution in sports—affecting not only how we watch games but also how teams prepare for them and, most compellingly, how leagues officiate them.

… Dr. Robert Anderson, the Carolina Panthers team physician, is football’s foremost Lisfranc expert, and he’s a co-chair of the Foot and Ankle Committee. Anderson, who has operated on dozens of players with Lisfranc injuries, still terms the injuries “bizarre,” based on how much must go right—or wrong—for them to occur. … Anderson and the rest of the Foot and Ankle Committee have been studying Lisfrancs in-depth since 2012, and the NFL funds their research with grant money. Dr. Kirk McCullough, a member of the committee, discussed its findings at the American Orthopaedic Foot & Ankle Society conference in 2015. According to his presentation, of the 255 total Lisfranc injuries documented in ISS, 55 (22%) required surgery. Surgery rates nearly doubled from the 2000–05 period to the 2006–14 period, from an average of 2.4 per year to 4.6. (Surgery is necessary when bones shift and involves inserting hardware to stabilize the midfoot. Ligaments heal independently once the bones are aligned.) The study also observed 40 of Anderson’s surgical patients at a year or more after the operation. Among the 34 NFL players, 79% had returned to game play by an average of 314 days (about 10 months) post-surgery. All six of the college players observed returned to game play, by an average of 256 days (8.5 months) post-op.

… [Chris] Cosentino also knows a thing or two about pushing your body to the limit. In the late 90s, he raced as a pro ultra-endurance single speed mountain biker. While his compatriots were sucking down gels, Cosentino found that whole foods worked better for him. “I ate fried chicken during Montezuma’s Revenge and it was the most sustaining moment. Cold fried chicken at the base of a climb is pretty rad.”

It was actually fellow pro cyclist Jonathan Vaughters who, in 2009, told Lucas Euser to seek out offal. Vaughters was managing Euser’s team, Garmin-Slipstream. His advice to many of the men at the end of a tough season was to bulk up on Pâté and other dishes starring liver. But when Euser asked Cosentino about how to cook chicken livers, the chef thought he could offer one better: Beef heart. “Hearts have a high concentration of creatine in them. What supplement are weightlifters always taking? Creatine. So why not eat something natural that has it, and also has all of these minerals?” says Cosentino.

… MJ: The size range and diversity of the athletes you deal with is vast. How is the advice the same or different for a male shot putter vs. a tiny female distance runner?

LB: Nutrition advice for athletes needs to be personalized, practical and specific to the task. There are clear differences in the needs of a huge male shot putter and a tiny female distance runner—the absolute energy needed to support their body mass might be at opposite ends of the spectrum, as are the type and quantity of the fuel needs of their training programs. Competition nutrition will look very different for someone who needs to perform a highly explosive activity several times over a couple of hours (and perhaps repeated for heats and finals) and the athlete whose goals are to maintain the highest power output and economy of movement possible over 2.5 hours with opportunities to take on fuel and fluid while on the move to support these goals.

The types of performance supplements that could provide a small contribution to optimizing the outcomes of these efforts are also different. But what many people don’t realize about modern sports nutrition is the degree to which nutrition goals and requirements change for the same athlete—over their career, over their competition year and even within a week.

The Fukushima disaster shows why the line between high and low risk is individual. Can we learn to manage our own safety?