Applied Sports Science newsletter – July 11, 2016

… perhaps the best part of an intriguing semi-final is not Bale-Ronaldo but the fact that beyond the fawning headlines both Wales and Portugal have been carried here by a genuine collective effort. Not just in the obvious numbers: in their past six games combined Portugal and Wales have scored 12 goals, three of these from Bale and Ronaldo. But also in terms of how these teams work, what their real shared strengths have been. Never mind the stars. Let’s hear it for The Other Guys.

While in New Orleans, former Pelicans shooting guard Eric Gordon was unable to catch a break from injuries.

He missed 189 out of a possible 410 games and never played more than 64 games in a season.

But Gordon described his persistent injuries as flukes on Saturday when he was officially introduced by the Houston Rockets after signing a four-year, $53 million contract as an unrestricted free agent.

By mixing science and art, AIS staff are taking an innovative route to deliver The Stay Healthy Project messages to other AIS staff, athletes and coaches.

I went undrafted and ended up playing for the Minnesota Vikings from 2012-2014. I knew how to win and had the privilege of playing for the winningest college football program since 2000, Boise State University. My particular class, 2008-2011, holds the title of ‘winningest class in the history of college football’ after earning a 50 win, 3 loss record over a four-year period. We were considered a mid-major school, yet we defeated champions from the SEC, ACC, PAC-12, Mountain West, WAC, and MAC conferences without prejudice. Without getting in to too many stories, I wanted to display that we knew how to win!

I want to share what I learned from my time at Boise State and the things that I thought made us successful.

In the days before the Portland Thorns’ May 21 visit from the Washington Spirit, Mark Parsons had grown frustrated. The match was an important one for the 29-year-old head coach, who’d left the Spirit six months earlier, but during that week’s preparations, his new team was beginning to show some worrisome signs.

The principles the team had agreed on in the six months leading up to the season – attitude, effort, and focus – weren’t coming through in training. A team that had fought through four road games in five to open the season with a 2-0-3 record was starting to lose perspective.

“There were things building in the two days, three days before that Washington game that drove me nuts,” Parsons, reflecting this week, told FourFourTwo. “It was simple things. A player’s body language? Poor. A player making a comment to another player or staff, saying ‘hey, when can I get to do that?’ Basically, getting a bit selfish.”

This summer’s preseason is a crucial time for Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp. It will be his first in charge of the Reds and the German is set to put his players through a strenuous workout as he attempts to fully implement his unique style on the team.

According to an ESPN FC source close to his former club, Borussia Dortmund, Klopp’s gruelling training methods will be used to work out which players will be up for the fight, and which he will not be able to rely on.

Whether diving the ocean or falling from space, Red Bull’s high performance centre knows how to give competitors the edge

Athletes benefit tremendously from working hard in off-season training (OST) because it sets them up to avoid injuries and perform their best during the season. Ironically, many athletes struggle to stay motivated to participate regularly in this training. Research has highlighted the benefits for athletes perceiving a caring and task-involving climate, where they gauge their success based on their personal effort and improvement, and perceive each member of the team is treated with mutual kindness and respect. Athletes who perceive a caring and task-involving climate on their teams are more likely to report greater adaptive motivational responses. Research has not currently examined athletes’ perceptions of the climate in OST programs. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between athletes’ perceptions of the climate in an OST program to their motivational responses. High school athletes (N = 128; 90 males 35 females; mean age = 15.3 years) participating in summer OST programs completed a survey that included measures of intrinsic motivation, commitment, their valuing OST, feeling like it is their decision to participate in OST, their perceptions that their teammates take OST seriously, and attendance. A canonical correlation revealed that athletes who perceived a highly caring/task-involving climate reported higher intrinsic motivation, value of and commitment to OST; attendance; and perceived teammates take OST seriously. Results suggest that creating a caring and task-involving climate in OST programs may help athletes optimize their motivation to participate in important strength and conditioning programs.

… Teams often want to cut down on unnecessary meetings and group sessions, coaches often prefer working one-to-one or in small groups but that’s difficult when you don’t have access to players for a full day. Technology has played a massive role in being able to communicate away from the training ground, but fining the best tool and something that can do everything you need is hard. … Last year I set-up a Slack Channel for a course I was running and found it a brilliant way to communicate with the students. More on how to use this in a minute, but it meant I could put everything in one place and best of all because it works in a browser it’s available on desktop and mobile, PC and MAC.

Inside Lululemon Labs, the cultish activewear brand’s 11th New York City location that opened in March, there’s not a single $100 yoga pant in sight. Instead, slimming pencil skirts, crisp blazers, and creased trousers—all in a distinctly N.Y.C. palette of black, white, navy, and gray—line the walls. Catering to New Yorkers, the store sells clothing designed for professionals but constructed out of the brand’s high-performance materials. Behind the sales floor, the design team toils away in an office in the back. … Instead of putting together case studies, these companies are making their customers the lab rats—essentially, letting the market play a hand in the design of their products.

These days, many of us regularly feed pieces of ourselves into machines for convenience and security. Our fingerprints unlock our smartphones, and companies are experimenting with more novel biometric markers—voice, heartbeat, grip—as ID for banking and other transactions. But there are almost no laws in place to control how companies use such information. Nor is it clear what rights people have to protect scans of their retinas or the contours of their face from cataloging by the private sector.

There’s one place where people seeking privacy protections can turn: the courts. A series of plaintiffs are suing tech giants, including Facebook and Google, under a little-used Illinois law. The Biometric Information Privacy Act, passed in 2008, is one of the only statutes in the U.S. that sets limits on the ways companies can handle data such as fingerprints, voiceprints, and retinal scans. At least four of the suits filed under BIPA are moving forward. “These cases are important to scope out the existing law, perhaps point out places where the law could be improved, and set principles that other states might follow,” says Jeffrey Neuburger, a partner at law firm Proskauer Rose.

The focus on ‘marginal gains’ is synonymous with British Cycling’s massive success of recent years; it’s become a winning approach that general manager Dave Brailsford wields to great effect at Team Sky. So now that post-race cooldowns, luxurious team buses and individualised nutrition plans have become commonplace across pro cycling, what’s next? In this extract from new book The Science of the Tour de France, author James Witts looks at Marginal Gains 2.0.

We surveyed Americans and a panel of nutrition experts about which foods they thought were good or bad for you.

Peer effects, in which the behavior of an individual is affected by the behavior of their peers, are central to social science. Because peer effects are often confounded with homophily and common external causes, recent work has used randomized experiments to estimate effects of specific peer behaviors. These experiments have often relied on the experimenter being able to randomly modulate mechanisms by which peer behavior is transmitted to a focal individual. We describe experimental designs that instead randomly assign individuals’ peers to encouragements to behaviors that directly affect those individuals. We illustrate this method with a large peer encouragement design on Facebook for estimating the effects of receiving feedback from peers on posts shared by focal individuals. We find evidence for substantial effects of receiving marginal feedback on multiple behaviors, including giving feedback to others and continued posting. These findings provide experimental evidence for the role of behaviors directed at specific individuals in the adoption and continued use of communication technologies. In comparison, observational estimates differ substantially, both underestimating and overestimating effects, suggesting that researchers and policy makers should be cautious in relying on them.

INTRODUCTION:

Running with a forefoot strike (FFS) pattern has been suggested to reduce the risk of overuse running injuries, due to a reduced vertical loadrate compared with rearfoot strike (RFS) running. However, resultant loadrate has been reported to be similar between foot strikes when running in traditional shoes, leading to questions regarding the value of running with a FFS. The influence of minimal footwear on the resultant loadrate has not been considered. This study aimed to compare component and resultant instantaneous loadrate (ILR) between runners with different foot strike patterns in their habitual footwear conditions.
METHODS:

29 injury-free participants (22 males, 7 females) ran at 3.13m.s along a 30m runway, with their habitual foot strike and footwear condition. Ground reaction force data were collected. Peak ILR values were compared between three conditions; those who habitually run with a RFS in standard shoes, with a FFS in standard shoes, and with a FFS in minimal shoes.
RESULTS:

Peak resultant, vertical, lateral and medial ILR were lower (P < 0.001) when running in minimal shoes with a FFS than in standard shoes with either foot strike. When running with a FFS, peak posterior ILR were lower (P < 0.001) in minimal than standard shoes.
CONCLUSIONS:

When running in a standard shoe, peak resultant and component instantaneous loadrates were similar between footstrike patterns. However, loadrates were lower when running in minimal shoes with a FFS, compared with running in standard shoes with either foot strike. Therefore, it appears that footwear alters the loadrates during running, even with similar foot strike patterns.

The Tour de France pours out pages of standings every day. Not just the daily and overall rankings, but also a variety of secondary competitions for skills like climbing and sprinting.

For some cycling fans, however, that information is not enough. They instead turn to Strava, a social media site that started out catering to weekend warriors but has increasingly attracted professional riders who can engage with fans and participate in a bit of electronic espionage.

Strava started seven years ago as a place where amateur cyclists could boast and take part in virtual competitions that, say, ranked the best times for climbs up popular hills. Over the last two years, however, a growing number of professionals have joined, allowing the amateurs to see exactly how hard the pros race and train.