Applied Sports Science newsletter – July 12, 2016

… To relieve pressure on his legs and knees, Duncan also changed up his diet as he approached his mid-30s.

“He lost a lot of weight,” former teammate Bruce Bowen said in 2012. “In fact, when we would go out to eat, Tim would split the bill and we had a big plethora of food out of us. But now, he’s starting to eat wheat bread and chicken only, no mayonnaise, no mustard, none of that.”

Duncan also cut down on sugar and bread consumption as he got older, and he stopped snacking late at night. We may not know Duncan’s exact diet, but it worked well enough that Al Jefferson, who just signed with the Indiana Pacers, credits Duncan for influencing him to lose weight to prolong his career down in the post.

… When I spoke to the Swedish Davis Cup captain, Thomas Enqvist, about how Murray might have fared in the 90s, when Enqvist was a regular top-10 player up against Pete Sampras, Andre Agassi and Jim Courier, he initially stressed the differences with then and now – balls, rackets, strings and, in Wimbledon’s case, the court. Enqvist would back Sampras against anyone if the grass was still like grease and the balls only reluctantly rose above the waist. Then came a big but. The top players are better and fitter than when I played, he added. And Murray is truly exceptional, a future hall-of-famer for sure.

Is it possible to compare across the eras? Dan Weston, a tennis analyst and professional gambler, suggests one way: looking at how successful a player has been at holding and breaking serve in each year he has played. For instance in 1991, when Becker won the Australian Open – his penultimate grand slam title – and was ranked No1 for 12 weeks, he held 84% of his service games and broke 27% of his opponent’s serves, a combined success total of 111%.

Murray, though, has bettered that figure in each year since 2009 – always winning 81-86% of his service games and breaking 31-36% of his opponent’s. According to Weston, Murray’s best rank over a season, 118%, is the same figure as Sampras and Edberg at their peak.

Many people cheat on taxes—no mystery there. But many people don’t, even if they wouldn’t be caught—now, that’s weird. Or is it? Psychologists are deeply perplexed by human moral behavior, because it often doesn’t seem to make any logical sense. You might think that we should just be grateful for it. But if we could understand these seemingly irrational acts, perhaps we could encourage more of them.

It’s not as though people haven’t been trying to fathom our moral instincts; it is one of the oldest concerns of philosophy and theology. But what distinguishes the project today is the sheer variety of academic disciplines it brings together: not just moral philosophy and psychology, but also biology, economics, mathematics, and computer science. They do not merely contemplate the rationale for moral beliefs, but study how morality operates in the real world, or fails to. David Rand of Yale University epitomizes the breadth of this science, ranging from abstract equations to large-scale societal interventions. “I’m a weird person,” he says, “who has a foot in each world, of model-making and of actual experiments and psychological theory building.”

Most of us are focused on training smarter, eating better and tweaking our equipment so we achieve our fitness and health goals, whether that means a finishing a marathon, losing weight or earning a personal best in a competition.

However, when it comes to getting stronger, it is important to think about failure. Specifically, momentary muscular failure—or working until complete fatigue, where no more reps can be performed—and how that is critical to making your muscles bigger and stronger. Over the years almost every imaginable combination of sets, reps and loads have been used by people who want to get stronger to either look better or improve performance in sports. However, recent research suggests that perhaps all of this is mostly a distraction and the key is going to volitional fatigue whatever the sets, reps and load.

As far back as the Greeks and Romans, humans have documented the belief that there is a strong link between exercise and intelligence. But in the last two decades, neuroscience has begun to catch up with Thales and Juvenal’s idea that a sound mind flourishes in a healthy body. While the studies unite in telling us that running will makes us smarter, it is only partly true. The process is more complicated and reveals more about the wonderful complexities of both the human body and its evolution. Although the science might be helping us to understand how the mechanisms work, an important question remains: why does running make us smarter?

Two studies, one published by Finnish researchers in February and the other in Cell Metabolism in June, have expanded our understanding of the mechanisms involved in running and the ways that it enhances memory and cognition. Before these, it was understood that exercise induced a process called neurogenesis (where new brain cells are created) in a part of the brain involved in memory formation and spatial navigation, known as the hippocampus.

While intense exercise will create brain cells, they are basically stem cells waiting to be put to use. Exercise doesn’t create new knowledge; rather, it gives you the mental equivalent of a sharpened pencil and clean sheet of paper.

For a long time we’ve suspected that psychological status and mood affects athletic performance. It makes sense that if you’re stressed or down you’re less likely to be at your best. New research is emerging that suggests this connection may be clearer than we realised and that stress can impair both running performance and recovery…

A recent study in the Netherlands found that a negative life event (e.g. Bereavement, being the victim of a crime) may increase stress, impair recovery and reduce running economy (a measure of how efficient you are as a runner). This latter aspect is a key finding as it suggests a connection between stress and running efficiency. In a nutshell it may well be that stress slows us down.

… Most biomechanical studies deal with how we negotiate smooth surfaces, perhaps with changes in inclination. Even that is tricky. We are unstable creatures: Both walking and running are a continuous state of imbalance in which one leg supports our body while the other goes through a swinging motion. Somehow our bodies and brains tame the instability and make it productive. Textbooks commonly describe the process using a simple spring-mass model in which our legs are, as physiologist Daniel Ferris from the University of Michigan calls it, “a strikingly consistent set of pogo sticks” (see Sidebar: Pogo Sticks, below). According to this model, running is essentially hopping on two legs. The rate is governed by just a couple of parameters, such as the speed and length of the leg.

The pogo-stick model captures the basic repetitive motion of walking and running, but it poses a puzzle. As the pioneering Russian neurophysiologist Nikolai Bernstein pointed out in the 1930s, the pogo stick moves in a very simple way because of its mechanical design, but the simplicity and fluidity of human movement cannot have such a straightforward explanation. Our muscles can act across our joints in a gargantuan number of ways: Their flexibility creates an enormous problem of control. Those seemingly infinite possibilities for motion, therefore, must be streamlined into a few routinized ones. How do our bodies and brains choose among all the possible courses of action, as if following an intricate trail map that offers multiple means of reaching a destination, and how do they do this in such a consistent way? And how are these choices made when the options expand greatly to include the myriad ways to sidestep a rock on a mountain trail? It seems like too much for the conscious brain to handle. As it turns out, it is.

All 24 nations in Euro 2016 face the same challenge: they need their players to take the field in the best shape possible. But achieving peak tournament fitness comes with many challenges, particularly perhaps for countries which have not qualified for a major tournament in recent years.

The challenges that support staff and coaches face can be broken down into two categories: how best to prepare the players and team and how to manage the logistics of training and playing on foreign soil.

The first aim is to ensure that the coach is able to select from a fully fit squad. That means limiting injuries and illness. When it comes to athletes, recent research from Australia has found that sudden changes in the duration and intensity of a player’s training load are precursors to injury.

Using a wearable neuromuscular device can reduce the risk of ACL injury in female soccer athletes, according to new research. The study showed functional improvements in athletes who used the devices in combination with a regular training program.

It’s been almost a year since my last post here. In the past ten months we made good progress with HRV4Training, finally publishing our work on the relation between physiological data such as heart rate and heart rate variability (HRV) and training on our user base?—?one of our early goals. … This post is about how I see the digital health space, and the approach I’ve taken in the past few years while moving towards that goal; from N=1 to epidemiological research. It’s about a personal journey and by no means it is a comprehensive analysis of what other companies in the space are doing. Yet, I hope these points can trigger some reflection and help channeling efforts in the right direction, so that eventually research & people can benefit.

… This power of information and machine support will have a striking effect on the patient-doctor relationship, along with how clinics and hospitals function. Since the patient is autonomously generating most of the data with validated algorithmic interpretation, the doctor’s role will shift to providing oversight, mapping out therapeutic and preventive strategies, and tapping into one’s knowledge base, experience and wisdom. Embracing the shift of much responsibility for data collection to patients, and its interpretation by artificial intelligence, the human factor of the doctor—establishing trust and support with extraordinary communicative skills and real intelligence—will be indispensable.

Priority themes at the 63rd annual meeting of the American College of Sports Medicine were athlete care and clinical medicine, sports nutrition, physiology of exercise, motor control and population physical activity. There were few presentations with a focus on high-level sports performance. Featured Presentations: celebrating the Boston Marathon, minimalist footwear, physical activity for future generations, Paralympic sports, mitochondrial biogenesis, fatigue, dehydration, energy balance, concussion, Bengt Saltin.

… Red Wings director of player development Jiri Fischer, who ran the camp, said he wanted each prospect, including all seven of the team’s 2016 draft picks, to leave with knowledge of two or three nuances about being a professional hockey player. Whether it was learning how to conduct themselves around reporters or use social media without making themselves look bad, the Wings piled on the information.

Second-round draft pick Givani Smith said learning about nutrition from team dietitian Lisa McDowell was an eye opener.

“I think it’s big, knowing what you put into your body and how it affects you,” Smith said Sunday. “It really affects how you play on the ice, and it’s good to hear that kind of stuff.

… Chris Coleman realized that while he has a world class player in Gareth Bale in his side, and a very impressive Aaron Ramsey working from midfield to support the attack, the squad of players he has as a whole are, as individuals, were ‘average’. Yet he made them, as a collective, a lot stronger than its parts. This is a proper team. It’s evident. The bond between the players and staff, the sense of commitment and desire, the energy and work rate all the players put in. Their adherence and discipline to the tactics and strategy and ultimately this has led to a belief in themselves. As Coleman says, “When it is time to defend we’ll do it for our lives. When it is time to attack we’ll do it with our lives.” Simple.

Yet it’s not always easy to motivate a group of players to do these things properly. Especially when it comes to defending.

On the manicured grass field set between the riverfront and the cracked asphalt of the surrounding Chester neighborhood, the heat rose in shimmering waves one day last week, and the soccer players swam steadily through, advancing toward the goal.

It was just the first of two daily practices for the Philadelphia Union, the only team in Major League Soccer with a training schedule as demanding. It is much tougher than a year ago, and the players either fall in line or fall away.

A lot is different with the Union compared with a year ago. The team, which has qualified for the MLS postseason just once in its six-year history and not since 2011, has been near the top of the Eastern Conference standings. Also new is the front-office presence of Earnie Stewart, a former U.S. national team player hired in the offseason as the Union’s sporting director, the soccer equivalent of a general manager.