Applied Sports Science newsletter – June 22, 2016

… I work hard on my body, man. I’m 34 now; it doesn’t come as easy as it did when I was 21, 22. I have to work at it now, where it used to be something that just came natural. Now I have to put in so many hours, but it makes me feel good to see the finished product. Like I said, being 34 but still being talked about — to me, that’s great, and it shows a lot about my hard work.

No one wants to do cardio — I hate stuff like that, but it’s got to be done. One thing we do is go outside and my trainer will make me chase him on a bike. When we work out in Miami, we just keep going around the block until he feels like I’ve had enough for that day. A lot of people saw me chasing him last summer. It’s funny. I get people honking their horns, like, “Go, D-Wade!” It’s kind of cool.

As elite athletes carrying the hopes of a nation at Euro 2016, the England team’s every calorie is counted and sinew monitored by a multi-million pound team of fitness analysts.

Yet the highly-tuned 24-hour health regime of the squad in France appears to have a rebel in its ranks – tobacco-sucking star striker Jamie Vardy.

The Leicester City favourite, already hailed as a sporting miracle man after his meteoric rise from non-league obscurity to Premier League champion, has a diet and gym-shunning schedule that would shock many amateur sportsmen and women.

It’s an origin story that makes little sense. An 18-year-old kid from Scottsdale, Ariz. – a place known for its cacti, golf courses and desert nightlife – is the best prospect in hockey and the projected saviour of the Toronto Maple Leafs.

But to fully understand how Auston Matthews got to where he is, you need to know that when he was a boy, he spent thousands of hours on tiny rinks – not much larger than an end zone – fighting off two or three other kids, stickhandling in and around masses of skates and sticks to score a half-dozen goals every game.

You need to learn about his skating coach, an eccentric Ukrainian named Boris who made players leap, pirouette and balance on their heels for so long they sometimes couldn’t walk the next day.

You have to recognize Matthews as one-of-a-kind.

The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the impact of four mood conditions (control, positive, negative, aroused) on movement expressivity during a fitness task. Motion capture data from twenty individuals were recorded as they performed a predefined motion sequence. Moods were elicited using task-specific scenarii to keep a valid context. Movement qualities inspired by Effort-Shape framework (Laban & Ullmann, 1971) were computed (i.e., Impulsiveness, Energy, Directness, Jerkiness and Expansiveness). A reduced number of computed features from each movement quality was selected via Principal Component Analyses. Analyses of variance and Generalized Linear Mixed Models were used to identify movement characteristics discriminating the four mood conditions. The aroused mood condition was strongly associated with increased mean Energy compared to the three other conditions. The positive and negative mood conditions showed more subtle differences interpreted as a result of their moderate activation level. Positive mood was associated with more impulsive movements and negative mood was associated with more tense movements (i.e., reduced variability and increased Jerkiness). Findings evidence the key role of movement qualities in capturing motion signatures of moods and highlight the importance of task context in their interpretations.

The author argues that being unaware of the differences between cooperation and collaboration impedes teachers from organizing group work as effectively as possible. True collaboration is simply too valuable not to take advantage of because it provides students with a significant opportunity to learn from one another, negotiate meaning, and improve their social skills. The purpose of this article is twofold: the author highlights the difference between cooperative work and collaborative work in general; she also suggests practical activities that serve as stepping stones to promote collaboration in English as a Second Language (ESL) classrooms.

Every day dating back to June 11th, Jimbo Fisher has been busy hosting a series of football camps at Florida State in his name where Seminole players acted as the coaches for those in attendance ranging in age from 8-years old to rising Seniors.

Attendees of the camp do many of the same things that Florida State players do during a practice, and Fisher noted that one of the goals of the camp is to show those attending “how to work.”

Go and Google “mental toughness quotes”. What you’ll find is scores of one liners from some of the greatest athletes, coaches and world leaders including Michael Jordan, Muhammad Ali, Vince Lombardi and even Donald Trump. What you’ll find is a host of history makers who believe that the abstract concept of mental toughness plays a major role in success. If you ask Dr John Sullivan, a psychologist with experience in many leading teams around the world, what you’ll find are history makers with no idea what they’re talking about. In his recently published book, Why the Brain Always Wins, Sullivan debunks mental myths and shows why coaches and athletes have it all wrong. CONQA Sport explores and challenges this theory.

… With a new report published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that research might be nearing a blistering rebuff of its own.

In a study designed to assess the experimental methods of earlier brain-training studies, researchers found that sampling bias and the placebo effect explained the positive results seen in the past. “Indeed, to our knowledge, the rigor of double-blind randomized clinical trials is nonexistent in this research area,” the authors report. They even suggest that the overblown claims from brain training companies may have created a positive feedback loop, convincing people that brain training works and biasing follow-up research on the topic.

“The specter of a placebo may arise in any intervention when the desired outcome is known to the participant—an intervention like cognitive training,” the authors note. Coupled with evidence that “people tend to hold strong implicit beliefs regarding whether or not intelligence is malleable” and that those beliefs may skew research findings, the authors conclude that past research is basically bunk

A new study found that chronic sleep restriction negatively affects athletic performance.

Results show that following sleep restriction, energy expenditure during submaximal exercise decreased 3.9 percent; maximal aerobic power decreased 2.9 percent and time to exhaustion decreased by 10.7 percent (37 seconds). Submaximal heart rate decreased after sleep restriction, as well as peak heart rate and Psychomotor Vigilance Test response speed.

“Our study is unique since we examined the relationship between sleep, physical performance, cognitive functioning, and physiology simultaneously,” said lead investigator, Cheri Mah, MS, Clinical and Translational Research Fellow with the University of California, San Francisco Human Performance Center.

Self-junctioned copper nanofiber transparent flexible films are produced using electrospinning and electroplating processes that provide high performances of T = 97% and Rs = 0.42 ? sq?1 by eliminating junction resistance at wire intersections. The film remains conductive after being stretched by up to 770% (films with T = 76%) and after 1000 cycles of bending to a 5 mm radius.

Ever since 2012, when Zhong Lin Wang and his colleagues at Georgia Tech developed the first triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG), Wang and his team have been making continual progress in updating the technology so it can better deliver power to small electronic devices. TENGs essentially harvest static electricity from friction.

OBJECTIVE:

To present data on the rate of anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury in 15 collegiate sports from 2004 to 2005 through 2012 to 2013 updating the 1988-1989 to 2003-2004 data.
DESIGN:

Prospectively designed descriptive epidemiology study.
SETTING:

National Collegiate Athletic Association Schools.
PARTICIPANTS:

National Collegiate Athletic Association School athletes.
MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE:

Injury rate by year and sport.
RESULTS:

Most ACL injuries to women occurred by a noncontact mechanism (60%) versus a contact mechanism for men (59%). The highest average annual rate of ACL injury for men was found in football (0.17 per 1000 athlete-exposure [A-E]). The highest average annual rate of ACL injury for women was found in lacrosse (0.23 per 1000 A-E). There were statistically significant increases in average annual injury rate for men’s (P = 0.04) and women’s soccer (P = 0.01) and a statistically significant decrease in women’s gymnastics over the 9 years (=0.009). Controlling for exposures, there were statistically significant increases in the average annual number of injuries for men’s and women’s basketball, ice hockey, field hockey, football, and volleyball and a decrease in the average annual number of injuries for baseball and women’s gymnastics. Women continue to sustain ACL injuries at higher rates than men in the comparable sports of soccer, basketball, and lacrosse.
CONCLUSIONS:

Anterior cruciate ligament injury rates continue to rise in men’s and women’s soccer. Some sports have shown absolute increases in ACL rates, which persist even after exposure rates are taken into account.
CLINICAL RELEVANCE:

Despite extensive research and development of prevention programs before and during the time of this study, very few sports showed a reduction in ACL injury rates in this data set.

In recent years more professional sportsmen have been open about their battles with depression. Despite the attention, mental illness in sport including depression still has many stigmas attached to it.

Credit has to be paid to the players unions, clubs and federations who are now trying to understand depression better and put in place support structures, coping mechanisms and create a safe place for players to open up about their struggles.

From the outside the life of a footballer seems perfect. They appear to be living the dream with adoring friends and invitations to A-line events and all the money in the world. However often players can feel alone and may find the stress and pressures put on them are too much. Often seeking help may be perceived as a sign of weakness or players expect that they have everything and thus should not feel sad or have doubts. They may choose to pretend they are fine, hiding the demons they are dealing with from even those closest to them. Faking feelings of elation when experiencing victory may hide the reality of a player feeling unfulfilled or empty and indifferent.

National team managers find years of careful planning often goes out the window once a major tournament kicks off

You hear it on podcasts. You read it in articles. Once a team gets to play on its home court, all the role players will step up and play better. It fits our idea of the superstar playing well, even though the crowd boos and sneers at him, but the team fails because the role players are not matching the fire and intensity that the star brings. Hence the hunger of playing Game 7’s at home.

Now this theory is all well and good. But here at The Nylon Calculus we exist also to check adages to see if they are actually observable in practice. And while It is true that role players play better at home and worse on the road, so too do the stars.

Examining the last 12 years’ worth of play, I have found little if any evidence showing much difference between role players and stars in terms of home/road play.