Applied Sports Science newsletter – July 5, 2016

… For me, a good No.10 – a real no.10 – is an unselfish player. I’ve always said that I prefer to provide assists for the team than score goals. You must be selfless if you want to influence the game from this position. It’s all about helping to put your team-mates in the best possible situation to score a goal. Whether that means providing the assist for a goal or playing the penultimate pass in a move, the absolute priority is setting up the chance as best you can.”
Read more at http://www.fourfourtwo.com/performance/training/dimitri-payet-how-be-a-playmaker#U11LSu5LkoQ1BPVH.99

About 70 percent of kids in the United States stop playing organized sports by the age of 13 because “it’s just not fun anymore,” according to a poll from the National Alliance for Youth Sports. I have three kids, all of whom play sports, and my oldest is about to turn 13. I might not have understood why this was happening a few years ago, but sadly, knowing what I know now, the mass exodus of 13-year-olds from organized sports makes perfect sense to me.

“It’s not fun anymore” isn’t the problem; it’s a consequence of cultural, economic and systemic issues that result in our children turning away from organized sports at a time when they could benefit from them the most. Playing sports offers everything from physical activity, experiencing success and bouncing back from failure to taking calculated risks and dealing with the consequences to working as a team and getting away from the ubiquitous presence of screens. Our middle-schoolers need sports now more than ever.

Here are the reasons I think it’s become less fun for kids to play sports, and why they are taking an early retirement.

… Seven out of the 10 girls who quit sports during puberty said they didn’t feel like they belonged in sports, according to the survey of more than 1,000 girls ages 16 to 24. Nearly the same number (67%) said they felt that society doesn’t encourage girls to play sports.

Hoping to change those numbers and keep more girls in the game, Always has come out with the latest installment in its viral #LikeAGirl campaign (the first #LikeAGirl video has been viewed nearly 100 million times around the world.)

… Is the role of the sports psychologist more widely accepted than it was a decade ago, when you set up Sporting Edge?

Definitely. I think sport psychology is the final frontier in performance. From the mid-1990s there was a decade of fitness, then there has been a decade of data and analytics, and now the next decade will be about optimising the mindset of players, teams and coaches. It’s a natural progression driven by technology because it’s easier to measure physical attributes and also with the negative stigma around getting psychological help, people have been reluctant to reach out. Ironically, when people reach the very top we often hear that it was their mental game that led to their success. With so many world champions speaking positively about their mindset training now it has created a new drive for people to find out what they could achieve.

Despite a growing body of literature demonstrating a positive relationship between sleep and optimal performance, athletes often have low sleep quality and quantity. Insufficient sleep among athletes may be due to scheduling constraints and the low priority of sleep relative to other training demands, as well as a lack of awareness of the role of sleep in optimizing athletic performance. Domains of athletic performance (e.g., speed and endurance), neurocognitive function (e.g., attention and memory), and physical health (e.g., illness and injury risk, and weight maintenance) have all been shown to be negatively affected by insufficient sleep or experimentally modeled sleep restriction. However, healthy adults are notoriously poor at self-assessing the magnitude of the impact of sleep loss, underscoring the need for increased awareness of the importance of sleep among both elite athletes and practitioners managing their care. Strategies to optimize sleep quality and quantity in athletes include approaches for expanding total sleep duration, improving sleep environment, and identifying potential sleep disorders.

What sets top footballers apart from their peers? Strength and speed certainly matter, but evidence suggests the real difference is in the players’ minds

… Alright, you’re clarifying the problem and focused on getting the right info. Good. So now you need to be ultra-rational and logical, unswayed by emotion in order to make a good choice, right? Wrong again.

Feelings are your friends

Being calm definitely helps when trying to make good decisions — but ignoring emotions is silly.

As Stanford professor Baba Shiv explains, choices be made without feelings.

You might not think a basketball has changed much over the years. Kevin Krysiak, 37, Wilson Sporting Goods’ global director of innovation for team sports, would beg to differ.

Last year, the 102-year-old Chicago-based sports equipment maker introduced its first “smart” ball: the Wilson X basketball, with an embedded sensor that connects to a player’s smartphone to track shots, help analyze performance and run games where players must keep sinking baskets to beat the buzzer.

Football is a downright violent sport. If players aren’t injured in the games themselves, there’s a chance that they could be hurt in practice. It happens all the time.

While there’s no substitute for actual football practice, there is a technology enjoying rapid growth in the NFL and it involves taking contact-free virtual reps: virtual reality training.

STRIVR Labs CEO and founder, Derek Belch, says his company alone has seven NFL franchises that have invested in his immersive, 360-degree virtual reality training software and could have a few more by the time the 2016 season kicks off this September. So, essentially a majority of the league will be using VR to gain an edge soon enough.

Ahhh, wearable tech.

Is there a bigger buzzkill than that random person at the party telling you all about their Fitbit heart rate? We get it, you run!

As an anti-runner (come at me marathoners), I was a bit hesitant about how I’d fairly use and review the newly-launched Sensoria Fitness socks when I got my hands on them. The Sensoria socks aren’t your everyday cotton gym socks. When paired with their corresponding anklets, the socks—with the help of a mobile app—track your activity while virtually assisting you “improve speed, pace, cadence and foot landing.” So, you get to see your feet’s form glow up accordingly on your screen while a virtual trainer (I chose one called Mara) tells you what you’re doing wrong and what you’re doing right.

Designing wearable devices can be as much about dealing with packaging issues as it is about leveraging cutting-edge silicon, sensors, and developing “secret sauce” software. Such was the case with Thalmic Labs’ Myo gesture-control armband, which went through at least seven iterations before settling on the current version. Let’s go inside and find out why.

Objective: To determine the prevalence of abnormal structural findings using 3.0-T magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in the asymptomatic knees of male and female collegiate basketball players before and after a season of high-intensity basketball.

Design: Institutional review board-approved prospective case series.

Participants: Asymptomatic knees of 24 NCAA Division I collegiate basketball players (12 male, 12 female) were imaged using a 3.0-T MRI scanner before and after the end of the competitive season. Three subjects did not undergo scanning after the season.

Main Outcome Measures: Images were evaluated for prepatellar bursitis, fat pad edema, patellar and quadriceps tendinopathy, bone marrow edema, and articular cartilage and meniscal injury.

Results: Every knee imaged had at least 1 structural abnormality both preseason and postseason. A high preseason and postseason prevalence of fat pad edema (75% and 81%), patellar tendinopathy (83% and 90%), and quadriceps tendinopathy (75% and 90%) was seen. Intrameniscal signal change was observed in 50% preseason knees and 62% of postseason knees, but no discrete tears were found. Bone marrow edema was seen in 75% and 86% of knees in the preseason and postseason, respectively. Cartilage findings were observed in 71% and 81% of knees in the preseason and postseason, respectively. The cartilage injury score increased significantly in the postseason compared with the preseason (P = 0.0009).

Conclusions: A high prevalence of abnormal knee MRI findings was observed in a population of asymptomatic young elite athletes. These preliminary data suggest that high-intensity basketball may have potentially deleterious effects on articular cartilage.

Objective: Determine the percentage of skeletally immature athletes returning to sports after anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury and reconstruction.

Design: Retrospective case series.

Setting: Boston Children’s Hospital Division of Sports Medicine.

Patients: Eligible participants were identified by chart review. Males and females aged ?14 year old who were greater than 2 years after ACL reconstruction surgery seen between January 2001 and May 2009. A total of 250 patients completed the questionnaires.

Assessment of Risk Factors: Age, sex, mechanism, and sport played at time of ACL injury.

Main Outcome Measures: Response to the survey was 75% (250 of 333) which was analyzed using descriptive statistics to provide a summary of the study cohort. Kaplan–Meier survivorship analysis was applied to determine time to return to sports participation after ACL reconstruction with Greenwood formula used to calculate 95% confidence intervals around the estimated percentage returning at 6, 9, 12, 18, and 24-month follow-up.

Results: After undergoing ACL reconstruction, 96% of skeletally immature athletes are able to return to sports at the same skill level. Median time to return to sports was 9 months postoperative, with most athletes returning to sports (85%) by 12 months.

Conclusions: After undergoing ACL reconstruction, most child athletes are able to return to sports and 50% of these athletes return within 9 months after surgery.

Clinical Relevance: After undergoing ACL reconstruction, 96% of athletes ?14 year old are able to return to sports at the same skill level. Median time to return to sports was 9 months postoperative, with most athletes returning to sports (85%) by 12 months. In our study, patients cited physical limitation, loss of interest in sport, and fear of reinjury as reasons for not returning to previous level of sport. Return to sport may be improved by additional research into sports-specific training and rehabilitation in this cohort. [full text]

… Before our problem was one of scarcity. Now it is one of abundance. So much data coming in for every workout that needs to be summarized and run through our filters to distil the truly meaningful, the truly important.

Make no mistake, as a coach in modern times, if you try to attend to every metric for every workout for every athlete, you will either have a very limited athlete roster or you will lose your mind. These days, a large part of being an efficient and effective coach is about the efficient, selective handling of data.

… I will still describe Thinking, Fast and Slow as an excellent book – possibly the best behavioural science book available. But during that time a combination of my learning path and additional research in the behavioural sciences has led me to see Thinking, Fast and Slow as a book with many flaws.

First, there is the list of studies that simply haven’t held up through the “replication crisis” of the last few years. The first substantive chapter of Thinking, Fast and Slow is on priming, so many of these studies are right up the front. These include the Florida effect, money priming, the idea that making a test harder to read can increase test results, and ego depletion (I touch on each of these in my recent talk at the Sydney Behavioural Economics and Behavioural Science Meetup).

It’s understandable that Kahneman was somewhat caught out by the replication crisis that has enveloped this literature. But what does not sit so well was the confidence with which Kahneman made his claims.