Applied Sports Science newsletter – June 29, 2016

When Tennessee’s whirlwind of a coach, Pat Summitt, hits you with her steely gaze, you get a dose of the intensity that has carried the Lady Vols to five NCAA titles.

… Beasley’s high school coach, Andrew Catlett recalled when Beasley first set foot on the basketball court at St. Francis High School in Alpharetta, Ga. He was an awkward 5-foot-10 freshman with long arms and a sparkling smile that lit up the gym. He didn’t have great skill, hadn’t developed his shot or refined his ball handling, but he was a good athlete and had instincts that Catlett couldn’t teach.

“As a freshman, if you’d have told me he would be an All-American type who declared for the draft after just one year (in college), I would’ve said it was a long shot,” Catlett said. “It just goes to show that if you put in hard work and are coachable, good things can happen.”

Lionel Messi’s evolution as a player has been remarkable to behold, but in this article, we ask how Messi’s career has evolved the game itself.

In the first half of the piece, you’ll hear from the world’s foremost tactical authority and the author of Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Soccer Tactics, Jonathan Wilson. In the second half you’ll read the thoughts of Graham Hunter, acclaimed Spanish football expert and author of Barca: The Making of the Greatest Team in the World.

… At CSI Pacific, Samantha Ebata leads a Performance Analysis department that includes three unique types of specialists: Biomechanists, Performance Analysts, and Technologists.

A Biomechanist is someone who uses their knowledge of physics and applies it to the human body. They look closely at technical movements, movement efficacy, and injury prevention. Performance Analysts, on the other hand, traditionally have a mathematics background. They track everything that happens in the daily training environment, athlete behavior, and competition statistics, before analyzing it, entering it into a database, and modeling it. Technologists, meanwhile, research up-and-coming technology and find ways it can be integrated into the daily training environment and competition.

“We don’t tend to go through things directly with the athletes; we tend to go through things with the coach,” explained Ebata when asked about the responsibilities her department has. “Our goal is to inform the coaches of what they’re doing and give them evidence-based feedback on what their coaching style is. Then they can use that to direct their coaching with the athletes.”

ELECTRIC lighting, television, the internet and caffeine all get blamed for reducing the amount of time people sleep compared with the days before such luxuries existed. Such alleged sleep deprivation is sometimes held responsible for a rise of obesity, mood disorders and other modern ailments. The trouble with this argument, though, is that no one really knows how long people slept before coffee and light bulbs existed.

A study just published in Current Biology by Jerome Siegel of the University of California, Los Angeles and Gandhi Yetish of the University of New Mexico tries to provide an answer. Dr Siegel and Mr Yetish looked at three groups who cleave to pre-industrial (indeed, pre-agricultural) ways of life, to see if their sleep patterns differ from those of wired, urban humanity. To some surprise, they have found that in many ways they do not.

The groups in question are the Hadza of northern Tanzania, the Ju/’hoansi San of the Kalahari Desert, in southern Africa, and the Tsimané in Bolivia. All live largely by hunting and gathering. Dr Siegel and Mr Yetish asked for volunteers, and 94 people agreed to collaborate with them by wearing devices that recorded their level of movement, and also when the blood vessels near their skin were constricting. (This happens when people who do not live in environments managed by thermostats wake up: it makes more blood available to the brain and other internal organs.) Dr Siegel and Mr Yetish also put humidity- and temperature-monitoring devices in the areas where their volunteers tended to rest at night, in order to find out if these variables helped determine when they went to sleep and woke up.

When Joe Gibbs came back to the NFL during the 2004 offseason, organized team activities at Redskins Park were ultracompetitive. Guys battled. Full-scale one-on-ones, 7-on-7s, team periods — you name it, we did it. Rookies started graduate coursework in football right there on the field in April, May and June. Speed, tempo, repetitions. That’s the only way you learn in this league.

Those days are gone, swept away by the new collective bargaining agreement rules on offseason workouts, and the reduced practice time doesn’t cater enough to rookie development.

These young cats are placed in an environment that is much softer than it used to be. With monitored one-on-ones between wide receivers and defensive backs (no bump and run — ridiculous) and limitations on contact, offseason practices put coaches in a tough spot. How do you develop talent in that environment? Where do you even start?

“It’s a shame,” one NFL coach told me. “You have to be creative. But you can’t simulate football with the physical contact taken away.”

… About 30,000 US patients were asked if their primary care provider had recommended using wearables, in a Nielsen study (pdf) commissioned by the Council for Accountable Physician Practices (CAPP). Only 4% said yes. The year before, Nielsen posed the same question to about 5,000 patients, and 3% said yes. A similarly low level of people reported their doctors prescribing mobile apps to track physical activity or monitor biometrics like heart rate in both years.

The physicians tell a different story. Compared to the patients, a much greater percentage of primary care providers surveyed by Nielsen said that they had recommended fitness-tracking wearables or mobile apps to their patients in the last 12 months.

Flexible organic memory devices are now storing more information using light and divulging those data with electronic current.

These aren’t the first organic devices to use different physics for writing and reading data, but earlier devices were slower, stored fewer data, and degraded more quickly, say Paolo Samorì and Emanuele Orgiu of the University of Strasbourg. Chemistry has now allowed Samorì, Orgiu, Stefan Hecht of Humboldt University of Berlin, and their colleagues to overcome these limitations to build devices that could enable flexible, data-storing optoelectronic sensors and wearable electronics.

Everybody wants to exercise more, but many of us get caught up in day-to-day demands and never get around to it.

A profusion of phone apps promise to get us moving, whether with cute badges, colorful feedback graphs, or mutual support from other would-be exercisers. But can phone apps actually change people’s behavior? And if so, which ones work best?

In thinking about such questions, a team of researchers at Stanford realized that most motivational apps poorly exploit what is known about behavioral sciences. So the team — led by Abby King, PhD, professor of medicine and of health research and policy — custom built three phone apps based on different spheres of behavioral science, each designed to motivate participants to exercise more.

In 2013, Susan Backhouse of Leeds Metropolitan University in Britain published an interesting anonymized study looking into attitudes toward doping among collegiate and international athletes, and how they related to the use of legal sports supplements.

The key finding was that the athletes who reported using nutritional supplements were also more than three-and-a-half times more likely to report doping (22.9 percent compared to 6.0 percent). They were also more likely to report positive attitudes toward doping, and greater belief in the effectiveness of doping. The results were seen as support for the “gateway hypothesis”: you start out looking for an edge with legal performance-boosting pills, and eventually graduate to the “hard” (i.e. banned) stuff.

At the American College of Sports Medicine annual meeting earlier this month, a pair of posters presented by 3:41 1500-meter runner Phil Hurst, of Canterbury Christ Church University in Britain, took an interesting approach to exploring this concept.

Objectives

To investigate ?-alanine supplementation use and level of knowledge amongst professional footballers.
Design

Cross-sectional survey of Australian professional football players.
Methods

Questionnaires assessing ?-alanine supplementation behaviours, level of knowledge and sources of information were completed by professional rugby union (RU) (n?=?87), rugby league (RL) (n?=?180) and Australian Rules Football (ARF) (n?=?303) players.
Results

Approximately 61% of athletes reported ?-alanine use, however use by ARF football players (44%) was lower than that of RU (80%) and RL players (80%). The majority of respondents were not using ?-alanine in accordance with recommendations. Only 35% of the participants were able to correctly identify the potential benefits of ?-alanine supplementation. The main information sources that influenced players’ decision to use ?-alanine were strength and conditioning coach (71%) and dietitian (52%). Forty-eight per cent of athletes never read labels prior to supplementing and only 11% completed their own research on ?-alanine. Compared to RL and ARF players, RU players had both a greater knowledge of ?-alanine supplementation and better supplementation practices.
Conclusions

Despite over half the surveyed professional footballers using ?-alanine, the majority of athletes used ?-alanine in a manner inconsistent with recommendations. A better understanding of the environment and culture within professional football codes is required before supplement use becomes consistent with evidence based supplement recommendations.

Recently, Jeff Miller, the NFL’s vice president for player health and safety, and league-aligned neurosurgeon Russell Lonser spoke with a group of marijuana researchers funded by Baltimore Ravens offensive tackle Eugene Monroe. Monroe has contributed $80,000 to the University of Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins to advance the studies of medical marijuana use for NFL players.

In the background of Euro 2016 and the Copa América Centenario, the summer transfer season is well underway. This is the time for sporting directors and other club executives to shine, filling in gaps in their sides and unloading unwanted baggage. In NYA’s work with clubs, a number of useful strategies have come to the fore. Below is an inevitably incomplete list focused on just one part of the sporting director’s job: recruitment. These strategies may be obvious to some, but hopefully a few will be worth remembering.

1. Do your biggest business early. Being the first mover in the market sends a signal to other potential signings that the club is ready to deal and the squad is getting stronger.

Digging right into the numbers, without LeBron, Curry and other superstars who can create their own shot and pile up buckets, the data points to different usage patterns of national team players than we’re used to seeing in international competition.

“In the past, pretty much everyone played at least 10 minutes a game,” said Matt Kamalsky, an analyst for Synergy. “That’s when the team had it easy, over the past five or six years. Now we’re revisiting some of the old issues, where every 10 years or so we put out a national team that isn’t quite as strong as we’re accustomed to.”

In USA Basketball’s four most recent losses in global-level competitions using NBA players (three in the 2004 Olympics, one in the 2006 FIBA World Cup), the Americans shot a combined 22 for 84 (26.2 percent) from 3-point range. That’s the kind of dangerous trend the U.S. needs to avoid if it wants to squash upstarts’ chances at an upset. It’s also why, with a thinner group of scorers at their disposal, Kamalsky said we could see Durant and Thompson in particular logging 30-plus minutes a game.

… A reverse-order draft has two purposes. First, the one they tell the fans, is to preserve competitive balance, by giving the weaker teams a shot at the best incoming players. The other purpose is to save money for the teams by preventing bidding wars for rookies.

In baseball, the reverse-order draft for free agent amateurs was established 100 percent to prevent bidding wars, although it has had some effect in helping competitive balance as well. In basketball, I don’t really know why the draft was implemented; that happened before I was born. Doesn’t matter.

Anyway, the draft is helping NBA teams avoid insane bidding wars. What would happen, if there was no NBA draft?