Applied Sports Science newsletter – June 30, 2016

Tim Lincecum used to obliterate the laws of physics. Now he’s fighting them as he attempts to revive his career.

Don’t expect training for tennis to prove easy, says Andy Murray.

“With tennis, the thing is you need a little bit of everything,” Murray says. “You need to understand your game and what your game needs.”

Training has evolved for Murray over his career, shifting from his days as a scrawny junior trying to hit with the big boys on tour to now knowing the limits of his 29-year-old body and the balance between on-court preparation, rest, intense workouts and the most recent addition to his regimen: flexibility.

… Kim is known for his work with pass rushers — Tamba Hali, Justin Houston, Jason Taylor, Justin Tuck — but the Browns have him helping at all positions besides quarterback and kicker/punter. He specializes in hand placement, footwork and hip movement, which are critical in taekwondo.

The Browns established a seven-person high performance staff led by director Adam Beard, who installed a strength and conditioning program for every position. Kim is part of the staff, but his everyday work with players is in addition to their regimens with the training and coaching staffs.

“I like to get my hands on every player,” he said. “I have a passion for doing what I’m doing. I don’t want to get locked in on one (position).

… Leif Inge Tjelta, a professor at the University of Stavanger, has compared the results from several studies that deal with training methods preferred by professional distance runners.

“It turns out that a large percentage of their training involves long runs, meaning easy workouts at a steady pace without breaks that last anywhere from 50 minutes to several hours,” Tjelta said.

The purpose of my research is to explore how women negotiate their identity and place in the occupational setting of the football industry. The information uncovered will be beneficial to governing bodies, both in football and other sports, organisations such as the Professional Footballers’ Association and football clubs in shaping policies and procedural guidelines for players. The research will provide insight into the subjective experiences of professional women footballers, uncovering potential commonalities between other professions focusing on organisational culture, career development and the expectations of women in the workplace. The research will examine whether women encounter negative stereotypes working in male dominated occupations. From an academic perspective, this work will contribute to the sociologically under-researched area of women’s football, enabling a greater understanding of professionalisation of sport and women’s place in it.

Several Troy football players entered a classroom in Veterans Memorial Stadium Wednesday to lunge, plank, stand on one foot and jump.

As odd as it sounds, those activities could eventually help the Trojans avoid injuries and even improve their athletic performances.

The Trojans football program is one of the first few U.S. college units to utilize DorsaVi, a “cutting edge” movement analysis system, said Trent Nessler, national director of sports medicine innovation for Select Medical. Select Medical is the parent company of Champion Sports Medicine, the Trojans’ long-time athletic training and sports medicine provider.

First-year Miami director of strength and conditioning Gus Felder had quite the shoes to fill when he joined Mark Richt in Miami. His predecessor, Andreu Swasey, spent over a decade and a half in the head strength role for the Hurricanes, so Felder had to get the current ‘Canes roster to buy into the new approach that he and Mark Richt had put together for the strength and conditioning program.

While Felder notes in a recent interview that they’ve made a lot of progress, he adds that the buy-in process starts with guys knowing that putting in serious work in the weight room goes beyond behind drenched in sweat and waking up sore; it’s also about training your mind.

“This game is 90% mental and 10% physical, and we understand that. Your body is going to follow your mind, and one thing that we don’t want to do, is we don’t want to quit anything that we start, in life. The stuff that we do in the weight room is not just for football, it will set you up in life.”

Background: Double-leg forward or drop-jump landing activities are typically used to screen for high-risk movement strategies and to determine the success of neuromuscular injury prevention programs. However, research suggests that these tasks that occur primarily in the sagittal plane may not adequately represent the lower extremity biomechanics that occur during unilateral foot contact or non–sagittal plane movements that are characteristic of many multidirectional sports.

Purpose: To examine the extent to which lower extremity biomechanics measured during a jump landing on a double leg (DL) after a sagittal plane (SAG) movement is representative of biomechanics measured during single-leg (SL) or frontal plane (FRONT) jump landing tasks.

Study Design: Controlled laboratory study.

Methods: Lower extremity biomechanics were measured in 15 recreationally active females (mean age [±SD], 19.4 ± 2.1 years; mean height, 163.3 ± 5.9 cm; mean weight, 61.1 ± 7.1 kg) while performing SAGDL, SAGSL, FRONTDL, and FRONTSL jump landing tasks. Repeated-measures analyses of variance examined differences in lower extremity biomechanics between the 4 tasks, and linear regressions examined the extent to which an individual’s biomechanics during SAGDL were representative of their biomechanics during SAGSL, FRONTDL, and FRONTSL.

Results: Lower extremity kinematics and kinetics differed by condition, with the SAGDL task generally eliciting greater hip and knee flexion angles and lower hip and knee forces than the other tasks (P < .05). Although biomechanics during the SAGDL task were strongly associated with those during the FRONTDL task (R 2, 0.41-0.82), weaker associations were observed between SAGDL and single-leg tasks for hip kinematics (R 2, 0.03-0.25) and kinetics (R 2, 0.05-0.20) and knee abduction moments (R 2, 0.06-0.18) (P < .05).

Conclusion: Standard double-leg sagittal plane jump landing tasks used to screen for ACL injury risk and the effectiveness of ACL injury prevention programs may not adequately represent the lower extremity biomechanics that occur during single-leg activities.

Clinical Relevance: These results support further investigation of single-leg multidirectional landings to identify high-risk movement strategies in female athletes playing multidirectional sports.

… Under Armour’s Head of Innovation, Kevin Haley, has some predictions. In an interview with Tech Insider, he told us what athletes may use in the next decade.

“In 10 years at Under Armour, we’ll be making things that no one has conceived of yet,” he says.

Here are his predictions.

This week is the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference in Las Vegas, and Google researchers have several accomplishments to present. They’ve taught computer vision systems to detect the most important person in a scene, pick out and track individual body parts and describe what they see in language that leaves nothing to the imagination.

First, let’s consider the ability to find “events and key actors” in video — a collaboration between Google and Stanford. Footage of scenes like basketball games contain dozens or even hundreds of people, but only a few are worth paying attention to. The CV system described in this paper uses a recurrent neural network to create an “attention mask” for every frame, then track relevance of each object as time proceeds.

The promise of innovation is this: Although when breakthroughs are made they are typically so expensive that only those with a lot of money get access to them, the technology will get cheaper over time and become available to the general populace. That holds for Bushwick’s Notch, which officially launched last week.

“After several years of R&D we are thrilled to announce the launch of Notch, [the] first and only smart motion capture system for mobile devices,” the company announced.

Notch created motion sensors that can be attached to the body and relay the range of movements to a mobile app. If you’re doing yoga or lifting weights or going through physical therapy, or whatever else you might be trying to perfect in getting your body to do, you’ll be able to replay your movements and analyze what you did.

Let’s introduce the cast. The narrative suppliers, predominantly journalists and mainstream media outlets, are tasked with the most day-to-day part of football coverage: match reports, press conferences, transfer news, and so on. They make up the bulk of the coverage, but their importance has waned.

The analysts are more niche content creators; their pieces are mainly on the internet, and are as much a product of this new habitat as a part of it. They diverge predominantly into two methodological camps – tactics, the study of football strategy, and statistics, the application of numerical methods to the sport.

There is little, if any, overlap between the three camps. This may be a product of the context. The demand for football coverage has never been as big as it is now, and it has never been as diverse in its preferences. While the internet chokeholds traditional outlets with its new clickbait revenue model on one hand, it opens the door to a host of new types with the other.

The UEFA Euro 2016 is taking place these days in France. The Belgian National team is one of the teams that surprised by the big quality of its players, today it’s a strong candidate to win the championship. For several years Belgium has been working with LongoMatch PRO to analyze their games. We recently had the pleasure to interview their video analyst: Herman de Landtsheer, a football professional with an extensive experience in his country.

… IT WOULD NOT have required much effort for Hinkie to dispel the notion that he didn’t know basketball. In Providence, it took five minutes.

As he settled into his seat, Hinkie reached into his bag. He didn’t pull out a laptop with Excel files listing players’ effective field goal percentages or turnover rates but rather a stack of booklets, each dedicated to a different player in one of the day’s four NCAA tournament games and filled with scouting reports and interviews.

During nearly nine hours of live hoops on this chilly Thursday in Dunkin’ Donuts Center, the conversation focused on basketball minutiae. From a few rows behind the scorer’s table, Hinkie demonstrated the way one player’s thumb disrupted the rotation on his shot. He noted how another cupped the ball in traffic and finished by spinning it from tough angles, an indicator that he could convert around the rim in the NBA. Bad body language, separation gained on dribble moves, the size of players’ hands — these were what got Hinkie excited on that day, not actuarial tables.

The rapid decisions elite athletes make suggests that their structural and functional neural connections may be different relative to the general population (Miura et al., 2010). Baseball hitters in particular exhibit extraordinary perception-action coupling in order to hit a 95mph fastball. Here we investigated differences in cortical networks between trained baseball players and age-matched controls using simultaneous EEG and fMRI during a baseball pitch discrimination task as well as a structural DTI scan. We developed a novel EEG-fMRI fusion technique that revealed expertise-related differences in spatiotemporal brain network dynamics, extending our previous EEG-only expertise effects (Muraskin, et al., 2015). We also employed connectometry (Yeh et al., 2015) to identify structural correlates differentiating baseball hitters from the control group. Combined, our multimodal results reveal a multi-faceted view of the brain network properties that contribute to a hitter’s expertise. … A unique fusion methodology based on single-trial analysis of the task-related data was used to identify structural and functional differences between baseball players and a control group for a Go/No-Go task. We found reliable differences that distinguished trained athletes from controls. Expertise effects in the spatio-temporal cascade of brain activity and structural connectometry are suggestive of networks that would facilitate enhanced perception-action coupling. In general, our approach illustrates how multimodal neuroimaging can provide specific macro-scale insights into what makes an athlete brain, or potentially the brain of any other type of expert, different.