Applied Sports Science newsletter – June 21, 2016

… During the grueling seven-game series, the Cavs relied on James much less than during last year’s Finals—allowing him to have more energy in the key late stages of games.

Though James played nearly 42 minutes a night, he was used in 33.1% of the Cavaliers’ possessions, down from 39.3% a year ago. He drove to the basket just over 14 times per game, down from 22 times a night in 2015. He ran 2.6 miles per contest, more than a third of a mile less than he did per game in last year’s Finals, according to SportVU player-tracking technology.

Land softly while running. It’s sound advice. And certainly not new.

But how do you put it into practice? To answer that question, three experts shared their approaches to helping runners improve their technique and touch down lightly.

Emily Schwartz, M.D., a sports medicine physician and avid runner in Los Angeles, treats runners with all types of running injuries. Her clinical observations bear out what the research shows—that when we strike the ground with less force, we reduce our risk of injury.

The purpose was to examine a round trip trans-American jet travel on performance, hormonal alterations, and recovery. Ten matched pairs of recreationally trained men were randomized to either a compression group (COMP) (n= 10, age: 23.1 ± 2.4 years, height: 174.8 ± 5.3cm, body mass: 84.96 ± 10.16 kg, body fat: 15.3 ± 6.0%) or control group (CONT) (n= 9, age: 23.2 ± 2.3 years, height: 177.5 ± 6.3cm, body mass: 84.35 ± 8.99 kg, body fat: 15.1 ± 6.4%). Subjects flew directly from Hartford, CT to Los Angeles, CA one day prior to a simulated sport competition (SSC) designed to create muscle damage and returned the next night on a overnight flight back home. Both groups demonstrated jet lag symptoms and associated decreases in sleep quality at all time points. Melatonin significantly (P < 0.05) increased over the first two days and then remained constant after the SSC. Epinephrine, testosterone, cortisol values significantly increased above resting values before and after the SSC with norepinephrine increases only after the SSC. Physical performances significantly decreased from control values on each day for the CONT group with COMP group exhaibiting no significant declines. Muscle damage markers were significantly elevated following the SSC with the COMP group having significantly lower values while maintaining neuromuscular performance measures that were not different from baseline testing. Trans-American jet travel significantly impacted parameters related to jet lag, sleep quality, hormonal responses, muscle tissue damage markers, and physical performance with an attenuation observed with extended wear compression garments.

… His players see Kiraly as modest, transparent and fair, someone who rarely raises his voice and always asks about family. Players said that when he meets with them, Kiraly always ends the conversation with a question: How can I be better for you?

“I told the team in the first meeting we had three years ago, ‘None of us is good enough.’ ” Pause. “ ‘Yet,’ ” Kiraly said. “And that starts with me. I was an assistant coach the previous four years. We wanted to stand at the top of the podium in London. We fell a hair short. So it started with me not being good enough, and this constant process of mastery and seeking improvement every day.

“So I have to be a model for them, too. I’ve got to push the limits of my ability. I’ve got to make mistakes. I will gladly fess up to them in the interest of being a role model as a learner. I have a ton to learn, because I haven’t been a coach very long.”

… So when will the U.S. finally be able to hail one of its own as a bona fide soccer phenom, a stratosphere currently reserved for Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi and perhaps his Barcelona teammates Luis Suarez and Neymar?

Maybe quicker than you think.

Instead of asking, “How does U.S. Soccer find and develop talent?” maybe we should first be asking, “What is talent?”

That was the message from Alexi Lalas, former U.S. Men’s National Teamer and current Fox Sports 1 soccer analyst, Monday on The Triple Threat on SportsRadio 610. When asked what he thinks we need to do to cultivate a roster that rivals the world’s elite, he said we first needs to come up with a clear rubric of what we’re looking for.

Chris Sgarzi – architect, Sasaki Associates, Watertown, Mass.

“We have seen a number of changes over the past 20 years in sport facility design, including a greater variety of approaches to strength and fitness, with more focus on complete personal wellness, accessibility and awareness. I expect this to continue, but with an increase in the integration of technology: this could include exercise in a virtual context, heart/health/nutrition monitoring and coaching, and customized training assistance.”

It started with a dinner.

Famed Atlanta steakhouse Bone’s was the location for a simple social introduction by a mutual friend of Steve Koonin and Dr. Scott Boden. The meeting between the Hawks CEO and the director of the Emory Orthopaedics and Spine Center last August led to a partnership that will result in a state-of-the-art practice facility and sports medicine center that will open in October 2017.

Rarely do deals like this come together so fast. The NBA Board of Governors approved the sale of the Hawks to an ownership group led by Tony Ressler on June 24, 2015. On Friday, exactly one year later, the Hawks and Emory will break ground on a $50 million complex in Brookhaven. Here is a behind-the-scenes story on how a unique partnership led to a facility unprecedented in the NBA in less than a year.

Baylor Scott & White Health — the largest not-for-profit health care system in Texas — together with the Dallas Cowboys, today broke ground on a game-changing sports medicine, research and performance facility that will be located at The Star in Frisco, home of the new Dallas Cowboys World Corporate Headquarters.

The 300,000 square-foot campus, to be named Baylor Scott & White Sports Therapy & Research at The Star, will focus on injury prevention, research and wellness for athletes of all levels, and is expected to become a nationally recognized model for the holistic treatment of physically active individuals upon its completion in early 2018. It is also a first-of-its kind collaboration between an NFL team, a health system and a school district — Frisco Independent School District.

Scientists have figured out how to make electronics as pliable as a temporary tattoo—meaning the next big tech platform may be your skin.

Background: The optimal treatment of acute Achilles tendon ruptures for active patients is under debate.

Purpose: To compare clinical outcomes and calf muscle strength recovery after the nonsurgical treatment and open surgical repair of acute Achilles tendon ruptures with identical accelerated rehabilitation programs.

Study Design: Randomized controlled trial; Level of evidence, 1.

Methods: From 2009 to 2013, a total of 60 patients with an acute Achilles tendon rupture were randomized to surgery or nonsurgical treatment. Nonsurgical treatment included first a week of cast immobilization, followed by a functional orthosis for 6 weeks, allowing full weightbearing after week 1 and active plantar flexion after week 5. Surgery was simple end-to-end open repair, and postoperative treatment was identical to nonsurgical treatment. Outcome measures included the Leppilahti Achilles tendon performance score, isokinetic calf muscle strength, and RAND 36-Item Health Survey at 18-month follow-up.

Results: At 18-month follow-up, the mean Leppilahti score was 79.5 and 75.7 for the surgically and nonsurgically treated groups, respectively (mean difference, 3.8; 95% CI, –1.9 to 9.5; P = .19). Angle-specific peak torque results of affected legs showed that surgery resulted in faster and better recovery of calf muscle strength over the entire range of motion of the ankle joint: at 6 months, the difference varied from 16% to 24% (P = .016), favoring the surgically treated group, whereas at 18 months, surgically treated patients had 10% to 18% greater strength results (P = .037). At 18 months, a 14% difference in the peak torque of the affected leg favored the surgical group versus the nonsurgical group (mean peak torque, 110.3 vs 96.5 N·m, respectively; mean difference, 13.6 N·m; 95% CI, 2.0-25.1 N·m; P = .022). The RAND 36-Item Health Survey indicated better results in the domains of physical functioning (P = .006) and bodily pain (P = .037) for surgically treated patients.

Conclusion: Surgical and nonsurgical treatments of acute Achilles tendon ruptures have similar results in terms of the Achilles tendon performance score, but surgery restores calf muscle strength earlier over the entire range of motion of the ankle joint, with a 10% to 18% strength difference favoring surgery at 18 months. Surgery may also result in better health-related quality of life in the domains of physical functioning and bodily pain compared with nonsurgical treatment.

David Sumpter joined us in London to talk shot statistics and the geometry of passing, using complex maths to reveal the inner workings of the beautiful game that is football*.

*Or soccer, depending on where you live.

Until September last year, I had never really gambled. I’d been to the dog tracks a few times when I lived in Manchester and once went to Aintree to watch the Grand National. Some of my friends would bet on the football, and I could see how it could add an extra dimension to watching the game. But I’d never got over the entry barrier posed by opening up an account and feeding in my credit card details.

That was all about to change. I had spent the summer working on Soccermatics, my book about maths and football, and decided to set myself one final challenge before I sent my draft to the publishers. I was going to take everything I had learnt about the mathematics of football and apply it to a real-life situation. I was determined to use maths to beat the bookies.

So, during the first half of the 2015-16 Premier League season I developed a set of models that tried to predict the outcome of games more accurately than the bookmakers’ odds did. I tested the models, refined them, and before too long I started to make money. From a starting capital of £400, I made £108.33 by the end of November: a return of 27% over two months.

We generalize a binary majority-vote model on adaptive networks to a plurality-vote counterpart. When opinions are uniformly distributed in the population of voters in the initial state, it is found that having more available opinions in the initial state actually accelerate the time to consensus. In particular, we investigate the three-state plurality-vote model. While time to consensus in two state model scales exponentially with population size N, for finite-size system, there is a non-zero probability that either the population reaches the consensus state in a time that is very short and independent of N (in the heterophily regime), or in a time that scales exponentially with N but is still much faster than two-state model.