Applied Sports Science newsletter – June 28, 2016

Pierre-Luc Dubois once relied on his brain and hockey sense when entering the hard areas of an ice surface.

Smarts and savvy, however, can carry a player only so far in the corners and in front of the nets, where games are often won and lost. At 16, Dubois realized he needed to pack muscle onto his 160-pound frame if he wanted to play professionally.

His rise from decent prospect to the No. 3 overall pick by the Blue Jackets is a testament to his sacrifice and dedication in the gym. Dubois might be the youngest participant at the Jackets’ development camp, which opened Sunday, but he is physically mature beyond his years.

Emmanuel Sanders’ first two seasons with the Broncos got him a Pro Bowl nod and a Super Bowl ring. Going into season three, he hopes that’s only a warmup for even greater things.

The highest level of NFL success hasn’t changed the 29-year-old wide receiver. It’s made him even more focused on football.

“I try to keep training harder,” Sanders said. “I know I’ve got a small window to be in the National Football League. it seems big, but it’s small compared to your life span. I’ve got the rest of my life to travel the world, do other things. I’m just locked and loaded into working out.”

Sounders forward Nelson Valdez isn’t injured, at least according to coach Sigi Schmid, having fully recovered from the nagging calf problem he’d struggled with earlier this season. … “He’s still working his way in terms of fitness,” Schmid said afterward. “They really didn’t train much with Paraguay. We wanted to keep (Jordan) Morris inside. I don’t think playing wide for him is the best, so when we put him in, we put him inside.”

Last night was huge for center Clayton Keller. The dazzling NTDP product went seventh overall to Arizona, giving the Coyotes a player with a Patrick Kane-like skill set. It was also a victory for smaller players, as Keller is one of the few top-10 picks in recent years to come in at 5-foot-10 or less.

But Keller can’t rest too much on his accomplishments in Buffalo; he’s got a big decision on his hands. Will he play for Boston University next season, or the OHL’s Windsor Spitfires? Is the AHL a possibility? There’s a lot of intrigue involved.

“Those are all options, including the American League,” said Arizona GM John Chayka. “But we want Clayton to be where he is comfortable. B.U. and Windsor are both great programs, I have no issue with either one of them. We’re going to have a discussion and see where it goes.”

A key treatment for heart disease is a procedure known as myocardial resection, wherein a section of diseased or damaged heart tissue is removed. Researchers have been trying to figure out the best way to fill the void where the tissue has been removed. There has been research into creating 3-D scaffolds made from the patient’s own skin cells—structures on which the heart muscle can be regenerated. However, this approach doesn’t provide for a way to continuously monitor and control the development of these tissue patches.

Now, researchers out of Harvard University, led by Charles Lieber, may have found a way to create tissue scaffolds that can be controlled and monitored. The Harvard researchers added this capability by mimicking 3-D nanoelectronic arrays; the results show a way towards real-time mapping and control of electrophysiology in tissues.

Dr. Kaigham Gabriel has a message for sensor makers — get modular, or continue to suffer in the shadows. During a keynote at Sensors Expo 2016, Gabriel, a former DARPA official, Google executive, and current president and CEO of the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, asked the audience to look at the market cap of sensor and chip makers compared to the so-called “system integrators,” companies like Apple and Microsoft. Just as an example, Intel, arguably the most well-known chipmaker, has a market cap of $153.6 billion, Qualcomm’s is $79.2 billion. Meanwhile, Apple and Microsoft have market caps of $528.99 billion and $411.70 billion, respectively. “There’s easily a factor of three to, in some cases, 50 times greater market cap,” Gabriel said. “And yet many of the capabilities [system integrators] deliver are based on the devices and systems that companies like Intel and Qualcomm produce.

How did this happen? Gabriel believes it is because the sensor companies aren’t close to the user, whereas companies like Apple are right in the consumer’s face.

A space-age device was tucked into a pocket hidden in his jersey, and Chris Van Zeyl, a six-foot-six offensive lineman, invited an interviewer to fish it out. Without specific directions, it would have been undetectable: “I’m 300 pounds, and this is a couple of ounces.”

It was the size of an old pager. Most of Van Zeyl’s teammates have been wearing the little gadgets since training camp, largely because the Toronto Argonauts believe they offer a significant promise — the potential reduction of soft tissue injuries.

The team is believed to be among the first in the CFL to adopt GPS technology, a satellite-assisted tool for tracking the workload coaches place on players at practice. It can track how fast and how far players run, relaying data 10 times a second to a program coaches can access in real time.

The NCAA’s committee responsible for student-athlete health and safety took steps at its summer meeting to better establish medical personnel as authoritative decision-makers in college sports.

During its meeting June 15-17 in Dallas, the Committee on Competitive Safeguards and Medical Aspects of Sports approved a series of recommendations that build on legislation passed by the NCAA’s five autonomy conferences earlier this year and would establish athletic trainers and team physicians as unchallengeable decision-makers for medical management and return-to-play decisions related to student-athletes. The recommendations would also create a new designated position on campuses – an athletics healthcare administrator – which would ensure campuses are following established best practices for medical care.

The University of Michigan Athletic Department announced Thursday (June 23) the hiring of David Granito as head football athletic trainer. Granito comes to Ann Arbor after serving as an athletic trainer with the New England Patriots since 2002. He began his appointment with the football program on Monday (June 20).

As players get bigger, stronger and faster, it’s inevitable the world’s top athletes will need support from athletic trainers, strength coaches and therapists as they try to accomplish great feats.

Yusuke Nakayama is one the people the Cleveland Cavaliers’ players have turned to the past few years. As a member of the training staff, the native of Susono, Shizuoka Prefecture, recently contributed to the Cavaliers’ emotional run to the NBA title as an athletic trainer/performance scientist.

A higher protein intake has been recommended for endurance athletes compared with healthy non-exercising individuals based primarily on nitrogen balance methodology. The aim of this study was to determine the estimated average protein requirement and recommended protein intake in endurance athletes during an acute 3-d controlled training period using the indicator amino acid oxidation method. After 2-d of controlled diet (1.4 g protein/kg/d) and training (10 and 5km/d, respectively), six male endurance-trained adults (28±4 y of age; Body weight, 64.5±10.0 kg; VO2peak, 60.3±6.7 ml·kg-1·min-1; means±SD) performed an acute bout of endurance exercise (20 km treadmill run) prior to consuming test diets providing variable amounts of protein (0.2–2.8 g·kg-1·d-1) and sufficient energy. Protein was provided as a crystalline amino acid mixture based on the composition of egg protein with [1-13C]phenylalanine provided to determine whole body phenylalanine flux, 13CO2 excretion, and phenylalanine oxidation. The estimated average protein requirement was determined as the breakpoint after biphasic linear regression analysis with a recommended protein intake defined as the upper 95% confidence interval. Phenylalanine flux (68.8±8.5 ?mol·kg-1·h-1) was not affected by protein intake. 13CO2 excretion displayed a robust bi-phase linear relationship (R2 = 0.86) that resulted in an estimated average requirement and a recommended protein intake of 1.65 and 1.83 g protein·kg-1·d-1, respectively, which was similar to values based on phenylalanine oxidation (1.53 and 1.70 g·kg-1·d-1, respectively). We report a recommended protein intake that is greater than the RDA (0.8 g·kg-1·d-1) and current recommendations for endurance athletes (1.2–1.4 g·kg-1·d-1). Our results suggest that the metabolic demand for protein in endurance-trained adults on a higher volume training day is greater than their sedentary peers and current recommendations for athletes based primarily on nitrogen balance methodology.

There has always been a big gap between the official recommendations for how much protein we “need” and how much strength athletes have consumed. Endurance athletes haven’t paid much attention to this debate; you don’t need big biceps to run a good marathon, after all.

But a new study from Daniel Moore and his colleagues at the University of Toronto and Japan’s Ajinomoto Co. offers a revised take on the question. The data was presented at the American College of Sports Medicine’s annual meeting earlier this month in Boston, and has now been published in the journal PLoS ONE.

The key development is that the study uses a relatively new technique called “indicator amino acid oxidation” to measure protein use, which involves tagging an amino acid with a carbon isotope tracer to allow its use in the body to be tracked. Previous studies have generally relied on a technique called “nitrogen balance,” which is more cumbersome and—according to the authors of the new study, at least—less reliable.

The way people make decisions in the real world is a topic of increasing interest among psychologists, social scientists, economists, and others. It determines how economies perform, how elections are run, and how conflicts break out and get resolved.

One idea has provided a focal point for decision-making research. This is the notion of bounded rationality—that people are limited by various constraints in the real world, and these play a crucial role in the decision-making process. People are limited by the difficulty of the decision they have to make, their own decision-making skill, and the time they can spend on the problem. Nevertheless, whatever the circumstances, a decision has to be made and the consequences accepted.

That raises an important set of questions. How do these factors influence the quality of the decision being made? Does time pressure have a bigger impact than, say, decision-making skill on the quality of a decision?

Many opportunities exist for applications of machine learning in professional sport. Large increases in the amount of data generated by sporting clubs are being reported, predominantly due to wearable technologies and increased athlete monitoring.

This presentation will discuss some of the current applications of machine learning to high-performance sport as well as prospects for further research. This includes in-competition decision-making, movement classification using accelerometer and injury prediction.

Manchester City’s #HackMCFC is the first football hackathon to be organised by a football club and will provide participants with access to world leading performance analysis systems, as well as detailed player and match data, to help them uncover new insights on player performance.

With the objective of generating new insights and innovation, City are inviting experts and students from the fields of tech, data and digital product design to take part in a free weekend hack event like no other. With the support of the Premier League, OptaPro and ChyronHego, City will be providing participants with exclusive data insights from ten of the Premier League fixtures they played during the 15/16 season.