Applied Sports Science newsletter – July 7, 2016

Toronto FC have a long list of walking wounded right now, but Jozy Altidore is no longer on it.

Altidore returned to training for Toronto FC on Tuesday for the first time since suffering a hamstring injury back in late May that forced him to miss six matches at the club level and the Copa America Centenario at the international level with the US national team.

The 26-year-old forward has had a history of hamstring problems throughout his career, including early this season, but is hoping that a new approach can put them all behind him.

“In a sense, [the hamstring] was kind of treated wrong,” Altidore told reporters on Tuesday. “We went to a couple of specialists and hopefully we’ve fixed the problem. Obviously with hamstrings, once you have them once or twice they can reoccur, but we hope that since we’ve corrected it, we can be better going forward now.”

… Looking back, all the traits we see now were there, although it was the concerns about his power that led to Lindor dropping. Gerrit Cole went first overall, your classic big, hard-throwing college right-hander. The Seattle Mariners drafted Danny Hultzen second, a polished lefty from Virginia who got injured. Trevor Bauer, a teammate of Cole’s at UCLA, went third to the Arizona Diamondbacks. After that came Dylan Bundy, Bubba Starling, Anthony Rendon and Archie Bradley, and it’s safe to say that at least six of the teams that drafted ahead of the Indians would like a do-over. Bundy and Bradley were high school pitchers, always risky choices. Rendon was injury prone in college and has been injury prone as a professional. Starling was the biggest risk of all, a star high school quarterback from Kansas; the Kansas City Royals bet on his athleticism and power over his lack of baseball experience.

There was an obvious reason to like Lindor over Starling: their birthdates. Starling was born Aug. 3, 1992; Lindor was born Nov. 14, 1993. Starling would turn 19 shortly after being drafted; Lindor wouldn’t turn 19 until after his third professional season. Studies have shown that draft-day age makes a big difference for expected future results for high school players. Younger is better. Older kids may look better simply because they’re older; they’ve had more experience and are often simply more physically mature. But give a younger player that extra year of practice and game time and sometimes that added physical growth, and the on-field results can change drastically.

Improved Fitness, NWSL Matches and Mental Fortitude Has Allie Long in the Running for a Spot on the Olympic Team

What looked to be a giant white egg in a corner of a room in Ohio State’s Woody Hayes Athletic Center cracked open the other morning, a soft-blue light shining forth before linebacker Craig Fada arose from within and stepped out.

He had just spent 30 minutes in the sensory-deprivation device, a tub whose shallow pool of water contains about 35 percent Epsom salt, allowing one to float effortlessly.

“It gives you the sense of relaxation that you can’t get anywhere besides here,” Fada said. “When you step out, you feel healed, rejuvenated and energized.”

PURPOSE:

The aim of this study was to investigate lactate recovery kinetics after high-intensity exercises.
METHODS:

Six competitive middle-distance runners performed 500-, 1000-, and 1500-m trials at 90 % of their current maximal speed over 1500 m. Each event was followed by a passive recovery to obtain blood lactate recovery curves (BLRC). BLRC were fitted by the bi-exponential time function: La(t) = La(0) + A 1(1-e -?1t ) + A 2(1-e -?2t ), where La(0) is the blood lactate concentration at exercise completion, and ? 1 and ? 2 enlighten the lactate exchange ability between the previously active muscles and the blood and the overall lactate removal ability, respectively. Applications of the model provided parameters related to lactate release, removal and accumulation rates at exercise completion, and net amount of lactate released during recovery.
RESULTS:

The increase of running distance was accompanied by (1) a continuous decrease in ? 1 (p < 0.05), (2) a primary decrease (p < 0.05) and then a stabilization of ? 2, and (3) a constant increase in blood concentrations (p < 0.05) and whole body accumulation of lactate (p < 0.05). Estimated net lactate release, removal and accumulation rates at exercise completion, as well as the net amount of lactate released during recovery were not significantly altered by distance.
CONCLUSION:

Alterations of lactate exchange and removal abilities have presumably been compensated by an increase in muscle-to-blood lactate gradient and blood lactate concentrations, respectively, so that estimated lactate release, removal and accumulation rates remained almost stable as distance increased.

… just because work stops, it doesn’t mean we are recovering. We “stop” work sometimes at 5PM, but then we spend the night wrestling with solutions to work problems, talking about our work over dinner, and falling asleep thinking about how much work we’ll do tomorrow. In a study released last month, researchers from Norway found that 7.8% of Norwegians have become workaholics. The scientists cite a definition of “workaholism” as “being overly concerned about work, driven by an uncontrollable work motivation, and investing so much time and effort to work that it impairs other important life areas.”

We believe that the number of people who fit that definition includes the majority of American workers, including those who read HBR, which prompted us to begin a study of workaholism in the U.S. Our study will use a large corporate dataset from a major medical company to examine how technology extends our working hours and thus interferes with necessary cognitive recovery, resulting in huge health care costs and turnover costs for employers.

Modern life rides roughshod over our internal clock. We want to believe we can do whatever we want at any hour of the day or night if we need to, be it having dinner at 11pm, or flying to New York at 4am, with no ill- effects.

However, millions of years of evolution have given our bodies a finely-tuned internal clock. Listening to these natural rhythms could be the key to a healthier and happier life.

… We reached out to Raj Dasgupta, MD. FACP. FCCP, FAASM, assistant professor of clinical medicine at Keck Medicine of USC, to get his top five tips for preparing for tomorrow:

1. Avoid late night drinks and meals

Around 2003 I came across Charlie Munger’s 1995 speech, The Psychology of Human Misjudgment, which introduced me to how behavioral economics can be applied in business and investing. More profoundly, though, it opened my mind to the power of seeking out and applying mental models across a wide array of disciplines.

A mental model is just a concept you can use to help try to explain things (e.g. Hanlon’s Razor?—?“never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by carelessness.”). There are tens of thousands of mental models, and every discipline has their own set that you can learn through coursework, mentorship, or first-hand experience.

There is a much smaller set of concepts, however, that come up repeatedly in day-to-day decision making, problem solving, and truth seeking. As Munger says, “80 or 90 important models will carry about 90% of the freight in making you a worldly?wise person.”

This post is my attempt to enumerate the mental models that are repeatedly useful to me.

After a race or hard workout, our bodies can be pretty out of whack. Cortisol, a hormone that’s released when we’re under duress, floods our systems. And our beat-up muscles, replete with micro-tears, trigger an inflammatory response that makes us feel stiff and sore.

Although it sounds awful, this stress response enables our bodies to adapt and become stronger. But if cortisol and inflammation linger, and broken-down muscles don’t regenerate quickly, trouble is on the way—in the form of decreased performance, injury, and illness.

To promote a swift return to normal, most runners turn to such traditional recovery techniques as icing, foam rolling, and massage. New science, however, is uncovering ways that we can use our minds to restore our bodies.

… While in Baltimore, ProSoccerTalk spoke with [Mo] Gimpel to see what makes Saints Academy so successful, and how the club’s growth into a global brand is helping their youth program grow as well.

When asked about the academy, the first thing Gimpel mentioned was their educational program. When competing to sign youth players with other clubs in the area, Gimpel believes Southampton’s commitment to education makes them a more attractive draw.

The wearable technology startups that get attention make products a Silicon Valley executive or journalist might use — fitness trackers, virtual-reality gaming headsets, jewelry that delivers text-message alerts. It’s lifestyle stuff. But wearable development in the near future depends on more workaday equipment.

Call them work-wearables: computers worn on the body that help get the job done. Think smart glasses displays for manufacturing workers following complex assembly directions; voice-activated clip-on computers that help store clerks check inventories; or caps with sensors that make sure long-distance truckers aren’t dozing off. Google’s Project Jacquard recently acknowledged the work-wearables market with a partnership to weave conductive yarn into uniforms made by Cintas. Judging from the companies’ talk about health care, hospital scrubs seem a likely first target.

Even as scientists discover more and more examples of the placebo effect, they have been stumped by one big mystery: How does it get out of the head and into, say, the immune system?

A study published on Monday takes a step toward answering that question, at least in lab mice.

It is a giant step from mice to people, but the idea is this: in people, the brain’s reward circuitry becomes active when we anticipate, for instance, recovering from depression or banishing pain, as brain imaging has shown. That circuitry then activates neurons that wend their way from the brain to organs, including those of the immune system.

Professional sports are emotional by nature, adrenaline pumping during high levels of physical exertion. Baseball, a sport that revolves around failure, is particularly emotive.

“You’re out there giving 100 percent, and when things don’t go your way, it gets frustrating,” Mets starter Jacob deGrom said.

… “Everyone’s got good team spirit on a shining day when you’re winning,” Coleman said. “All that team spirit you see, that’s real. It came from the darker days.”

Led by Real Madrid forward Gareth Bale, Wales’ progress is no accident. It won its group by beating Russia and Slovakia before eliminating Northern Ireland and tournament dark horse Belgium in the knockout rounds.

It’s tempting to look at Wales and see a one-man team. But while that’s true to a point, Bale’s teammates have a healthier take on the team dynamic.