Applied Sports Science newsletter – July 8, 2016

… Until Payet came under the management of Marcelo Bielsa at Marseille two years ago, his career was going nowhere. He had a reputation for not listening to coaches, for being a troublemaker in the dressing-room and for lacking commitment in training.

Bielsa found a player, who was ready to mature on and off the pitch. The Argentinian coach worked the 27-year-old hard on the training ground and Payet began to blossom. West Ham United took a chance and brought him to the Premier League for £10.7 million last summer. The gamble paid off.

We spoke to Manchester United’s former power development coach to find out how the Portugal star became football’s greatest athlete

Here is a picture, and its thousand words.

Nate Kaeding, Chargers placekicker, stands on the sidelines after missing his third of three errant field goal attempts during a playoff game. His helmet is on, his eyes are glazed, his mouth is half-agape. CBS flashes a graphic beneath Kaeding’s catatonic stare, because misery needs context. Missed field goals, regular season: 3. Today: 3. A yellow highlighter denotes today’s three as a “career-high.”

The specter that has always tormented him is now too real. It leeched into him when he pulled his Toyota Camry into the players’ lot that afternoon, just as it did before every game: The only way I’m going to be happy today is if I don’t miss a kick. It’s a thought that haunts no other player, he is sure, save the opposing kicker.

Roger Federer refuses to go gentle into that good night. Thirty-three days shy of his 35th birthday, Wimbledon’s ageless aristocrat produced a performance as stirring as any in his monumental canon, rebounding from two sets down and saving three match points en route to a stunning vanquishing of Marin Cilic. For a father-of-four supposed to be in the decrescendo of his career, whose year has been largely a story of back pain, it was a wonderfully unexpected reminder of his cussedness and will.

Calvin Johnson, who retired from the NFL early because his body was starting to break down, said many players are choosing to do whatever it takes to stay on the field.

That includes taking painkillers.

“I guess my first half of my career before they really, you know, before they were like started looking over the whole industry, or the whole NFL, the doctors, the team doctors and trainers they were giving them out like candy, you know?” Johnson said in an interview with ESPN’s Michael Smith.

Sprint runners achieve much higher gait velocities and accelerations than average humans, due in part to large forces generated by their lower limb muscles. Various factors have been explored in the past to understand sprint biomechanics, but the distribution of muscle volumes in the lower limb has not been investigated in elite sprinters. In this study, we used non-Cartesian MRI to determine muscle sizes in vivo in a group of 15 NCAA Division I sprinters. Normalizing muscle sizes by body size, we compared sprinter muscles to non-sprinter muscles, calculated Z-scores to determine non-uniformly large muscles in sprinters, assessed bilateral symmetry, and assessed gender differences in sprinters’ muscles. While limb musculature per height-mass was 22% greater in sprinters than in non-sprinters, individual muscles were not all uniformly larger. Hip- and knee-crossing muscles were significantly larger among sprinters (mean difference: 30%, range: 19–54%) but only one ankle-crossing muscle was significantly larger (tibialis posterior, 28%). Population-wide asymmetry was not significant in the sprint population but individual muscle asymmetries exceeded 15%. Gender differences in normalized muscle sizes were not significant. The results of this study suggest that non-uniform hypertrophy patterns, particularly large hip and knee flexors and extensors, are advantageous for fast sprinting.

… if you want to actually demonstrate that overstriding leads to negative effects, you first have to define what you mean by overstriding.

That question lurks in the background of a poster presented at the American College of Sports Medicine meeting in Boston by Chris Napier, a physiotherapist, biomechanics researcher, and runner at the University of British Columbia.

As part of an ongoing study, Napier analyzed the running strides of 18 women runners on a force-sensing treadmill. The goal was to look for patterns in the relationship between degree of overstriding and how heavily the runners’ feet struck the ground, using various force measures including the “average vertical loading rate,” which has been linked to the risk of certain running injuries such as stress fractures.

Pep Guardiola takes his first training session as Manchester City manager and CityTV take you behind the scenes!

The hopes of Irish hands lifting the Henri Delaunay Trophy live on and while Ronan Kavanagh isn’t performing between the white lines, his role with Wales underpins their revolution.

Sports science has evolved enormously and the Kilkenny native plays a key part in Chris Coleman’s squad working alongside experienced hands like Ryland Morgans (formerly of Liverpool) and Adam Owen (previously with Rangers).

Quarter-finals of major championships don’t come easily and Kavanagh rises early. Players are regularly supplemented with vitamins and fish oil, so pill pods are filled for each individual by half seven every morning.

… Team Sky’s fabled marginal gains have become shorthand for ‘racing fast, racing legal’. Cycling is hamstrung by its past; until Team Sky came along, it was all about racking up the miles, eating pasta and, all too frequently, seeing the team’s doctor for an artificial boost.

Sir Dave Brailsford and his team recognised these manacles and set about unlocking them by doing things differently. Where once teams would have spent a million pounds on a rider and their illegal performance enhancers, Sky would spend £900,000, paying the remaining £100,000 to a sports scientist and coach. Experts in exercise physiology and aerodynamics trawled the world’s sport-science conferences, universities and journals, looking for cutting-edge technology to give them the edge. That’s where my book, The Science of the Tour de France, comes in.

I spent 12 months at the Tour de France teams’ training camps and races – and hours on Skype! – to uncover what goes into creating the Chris Froomes and Alberto Contadors of this world. I interviewed the likes of sprinters Marcel Kittel and Peter Sagan, but also the coaches, sports scientists, nutritionists, aerodynamicists and chefs who help to create these champions. I discovered that science plays an increasingly important role in peak performance, and not just at Team Sky but across all teams.

Objectives

To investigate the application of differential ratings of perceived exertion (dRPE) to team-sport training.
Design

Single cohort, observational study.
Methods

Twenty-nine professional rugby union players were monitored over a six-week intensified training period. Training sessions were classified as: High-Intensity Intervals (HIT), Repeated High-Intensity Efforts (RHIE), Speed, Skill-based Conditioning (SkCond), Skills, Whole-Body Resistance (RT), or Upper-Body Resistance (URT). After each session, players recorded a session rating of perceived exertion (sRPE; CR100®), along with differential session ratings for breathlessness (sRPE-B), leg muscle exertion (sRPE-L), upper-body muscle exertion (sRPE-U), and cognitive/technical demands (sRPE-T). Each score was multiplied by the session duration to calculate session training loads. Data were analysed using mixed linear modelling and multiple linear regression, with magnitude-based inferences subsequently applied.
Results

Between-session differences in dRPE scores ranged from very likely trivial to most likely extremely large and within-session differences amongst dRPE scores ranged from unclear to most likely very large. Differential RPE training loads combined to explain 66–91% of the variance in sRPE training loads, and the strongest associations with sRPE training load were with sRPE-L for HIT (r = 0.67; 90% confidence limits ±0.22), sRPE-B for RHIE (0.89; ±0.08) and SkCond (0.67; ±0.19), sRPE-T for Speed (0.63; ±0.17) and Skills (0.51; ±0.28), and sRPE-U for resistance training (RT: 0.61; ±0.21, URT: 0.92; ±0.07).
Conclusions

Differential RPE can provide a detailed quantification of internal load during training activities commonplace in team sports. Knowledge of the relationships between dRPE and sRPE can isolate the specific perceptual demands of different training modes.

… Coach Karch Kiraly decided the national team would help pay for the young family to travel together to some tournaments in the run-up to Rio. Easy’s mother came along on occasion, too. The idea is one that Kiraly borrowed from U.S. Soccer’s longtime practice for moms on the women’s team, and he has fundraised specifically for the motherhood program because it goes beyond his regular budget.

As the career-life balance takes a spotlight in workplaces, some coaches and programs are looking at how they can better accommodate their athletes — and many have been doing so since long before the debate intensified. For now, Easy is the only mom on the volleyball team. Kiraly expects that will change soon enough, perhaps after these Olympics.

… Klinsmann believes Americans must play more soccer at all levels to close the gap to the world’s best teams.
The best of enemies

“The more you play, the better you’ll get. If you kick a ball against a house wall or against the garage for hours on end, you’ll get better. It’s as simple as that,” he said.

“At the end of the day, the big question is: What is it that gets kids outside to play soccer for so many hours every day? What gives them that drive to do what’s needed to make themselves better, every day, all year round?”

Danny Karbassiyoon turned every young player’s dream into reality, rising from youth-soccer obscurity in little Roanoke, Virginia to earn a professional contract with Arsenal FC as a teenager. Karbassiyoon signed during the English powerhouse’s iconic “Invincibles” era, no less.

Injury brought his own playing days to a premature end. Karbassiyoon continues to forge new ground as an Arsenal scout, where he’s spotted US youth international Gedion Zelalem and Costa Rican talent Joel Campbell and brought them into the Gunners camp. Now Karbassiyoon has shared his remarkable story in a book called The Arsenal Yankee, and this spring he returned to his native Virginia to visit with youth soccer players contemplating their own ambitions in the game.

During that trip, he graciously joined USSoccerPlayers.com for a detailed, honest conversation about player development, US soccer and why more of his countrymen haven’t followed his path into one of the biggest clubs in the world.

The fallout from nuclear bomb testing decades ago is now helping researchers better understand knee joints. By tracking radioactive carbon absorbed in knees, a team of Danish researchers has found that the structure of cartilage is determined by early adolescence and doesn’t change later in life. They published their findings Wednesday in Science Translational Medicine.