Applied Sports Science newsletter – July 14, 2016

Adrian Peterson emerges from the sand pit behind O Athletik in Houston after leading a group of NFL players in an agility drill that resembles a sadistic game of Dance Dance Revolution. He heads indoors for the next stanza of his 3½-hour workout — a light day by Peterson’s standards — when a familiar voice calls out from behind him.

“Get the sand off your feet,” trainer James Cooper says, before chirping, “Don’t be acting like you own the place.”

But in a very real sense, Peterson does; he and Cooper are two of the six partners who opened the gym in the spring after years of cobbling together grueling workouts at various sites around Houston.

… The team’s inside knowledge of Rosenberry, however, led to the Union rating him much higher than most other teams. Still, to be drafted third took Rosenberry by surprise.

Six months removed from the draft, the Union have proven to be right. Rosenberry has been a starter since opening day and has played every single minute this season. In being named an All-Star starter, Rosenberry became the first rookie to be given that honor since 2013 and only the second since 2005. He has performed so well that he should be the top contender to win the Rookie of the Year.

… Known for his blistering pace, Mkhitaryan once joked that had he not made it as a footballer, he would have been a sprinter instead .

This was a quality that struck Verheijen, who has also worked with Manchester City, the Netherlands, Barcelona and Russia, when he was involved with the Armenia national team in 2012.

“There is one characteristic of him that I have almost never seen with other players and that is the fact that he has an acceleration after an acceleration,” he said. [commercial videos autoplay]

Right around the two-week mark of our HockeySTRONG program, we expect to hear the same question – “when are we going to start lifting heavy?” It is inevitable; at fifteen years old, even our youngest program members are used to starting day one with a loaded barbell on their shoulders.

Despite the lack of sex appeal, our HockeySTRONG program involves a slower buildup to the strength, speed, and power drills that are a little more Instagram-worthy. In the first two to three weeks of our program each year we perform a base phase, a period of time during which we focus on a few key priorities.

… Before the tournament began UEFA chief refereeing officer Pierluigi Collina told the 18 referee teams that good performances are the primary route to success (Chaplin, 2016). To achieve this they needed to perform at a top level, not only in the decision making field but also in the physical domain. This is where Topsportslab founder Werner Helsen comes into play.

Prof. Dr. Werner Helsen and his team have meticulously prepared the match officials for duty at UEFA EURO 2016. Already in preparation of EURO 2012, UEFA tasked professor Werner Helsen to develop a structured plan to prepare the selected elite referees for the 2012 Championship and beyond. The excellence plan included physical preparation, injury prevention and concentration training. Helsen has been involved in 4 FIFA World Cups and 4 European Championships. Today referees are prepared as 6-man referee teams. They undergo an intensive, structured preparation plan.

With less than a month to go before the world descends on Rio for the 27th Summer Olympic Games, thousands of athletes, coaches and sports practitioners are gearing up for the flagship sporting event of the year. The largest contingent will be representing the red, white and blue of the United States of America and such a big team comes with a host of big challenges. Finbarr Kirwan is a High Performance Director at the United States Olympics Committee (USOC) heading up two of the largest teams at the Games: track and field and swimming. He walks us through some of the obstacles he faces and divulges how he and his team are plotting for gold.

PURPOSE:

The aim of this study was to compare the effects of cold-water immersion and whole-body cryotherapy on recovery kinetics following exercise induced muscle damage.
METHODS:

Ten physically active men performed single-leg hamstring eccentric exercise comprising 5 sets of 15 repetitions. Immediately post-exercise, subjects were exposed in a randomized cross-over design to cold-water immersion (10 minutes at 10°C) or whole-body cryotherapy (3 minutes at -110°C) recovery. Creatine kinase concentrations, knee flexor eccentric (60°.s-1) and posterior lower limb isometric (60°) strength, single-leg and two leg countermovement jump, muscle soreness and perception of recovery were measured. The tests were performed before, immediately, 24h, 48h and 72h after exercise.
RESULTS:

Results showed a very likely moderate effect in favour of cold-water immersion for single-leg [Effect Size (ES) = 0.63; 90% Confidence Interval (CI) = -0.13 to 1.38] and two-leg countermovement jump (ES = 0.68; 90% CI = -0.08 to 1.43) 72h after exercise. Soreness was moderately lower 48h after exercise following cold-water immersion (ES = -0.68; 90% CI = -1.44 to 0.07). Perception of recovery was moderately enhanced 24h after exercise for cold-water immersion (ES = -0.62; 90% CI = -1.38 to 0.13). Trivial and small effects of condition were found for the other outcomes.
CONCLUSION:

Cold-water immersion was more effective in accelerating recovery kinetics than whole-body cryotherapy for countermovement jump performance at 72h post-exercise. Cold-water immersion also demonstrated lower soreness and higher perceived recovery levels across 24-48h post-exercise.

Some days, when Meb Keflezighi hits the road, his legs just don’t want to move.

That is what happens to a marathoner when he reaches the comparatively ancient age of 41.

“You can’t run like you’re 25 anymore,” he says. “You’re going to have bad days.”

It could be rightly argued that you simply don’t need sophisticated physiological tests to achieve your athletic goals. Roger Bannister didn’t know how much salt he had in his sweat when he ran the world’s first sub-4-minute mile in 1954. California ultra-distance runner Zach Bitter, on the other hand, who in 2013 set the world record for the farthest distance ever run in 12 hours at 101.66 miles, knows exactly how many calories he’s burning at a 7-minute pace, and what percentage of that comes from fat.

Physiological tests are becoming more affordable, scientifically rigid and specialized for the citizen athlete. But what can a few tests tell you that you don’t already intuitively know? If you knew more precisely about how your body works, could you change up your training or alter your diet and run a better marathon? I got pricked, prodded and pushed in order to find out.

Online training really can help to improve performance, a study published in Frontiers in Psychology has found.

Over 44,000 people took part in an experiment to discover what motivational techniques really worked. In conjunction with BBC Lab UK, Professor Andrew Lane and his colleagues tested which physiological skills would help people improve their scores in an online game.

This complex study examined if one motivational method would be more effective for any specific aspect of a task. The methods tested were self-talk, imagery, and if-then planning. Each of these psychological skills was applied to one of four parts of a competitive task: process, outcome, arousal-control, and instruction.

People using self-talk, for example telling yourself “I can do better next time” – performed better than the control group in every portion of the task.

… according to those engaged in Britain’s sporting transformation, there was nothing surprising about Murray. It is part of a pattern. “It’s not a fluke,” said Chris Froome on Monday, as he reflected on the success of British riders on this year’s Tour. “You look how far British Cycling has come in the last few years and it is not just by chance. It has been planned, it has been structured, we’ve seen the rise of talent.”

Froome was talking about the two-wheeled revolution. But as the director of Team Sky, Sir Dave Brailsford, suggested, the methodologies that have produced three Tour victories since 2012 have now become standard practice everywhere.

“It is not just cycling, it is across sport,” Brailsford said. “That doesn’t happen overnight, that takes investment, and Britain has been brave enough to invest in sport.”

Employees at San Francisco startup Nootrobox don’t eat on Tuesdays.

The weekly fast isn’t an extreme money-saving move by a scrappy, bootstrapping company. Instead, Nootrobox team members swear withholding food for 36 hours — they stop eating Monday night — improves their workplace focus and concentration.

“We’re actually super productive on Tuesdays,” co-founder and CEO Geoffrey Woo said. “It’s hard at first, but we literally adopted it as part of the company culture.”

… The fact that the training facilities will be, it would seem, up to speed with the best of the rest of the world is a fine thing. And centering a playing “home” for the USSF in one place is not a bad idea. Most of the rest of the world’s national teams convene in a single, predetermined place for each major camp. If that ends up becoming the NTCDC (U.S. Soccer really needs to work on its acronym game) then all the better.

But the biggest news, to my eyes, is this tidbit.

The site will be home to the U.S. Soccer National Coaching Education Center – providing a permanent, national home for the education of coaches and referees…

Sports and technology have merged to the point where it is widely accepted that data and analytics can help a pro franchise or major university compete at the highest level. But one of the major challenges those teams and schools face is implementing technology without using up a major part of their budget.

When Sheikh Mansour sanctioned the purchase of Manchester City back in September 2008, many neutral supporters believed that the Arabian Deputy Prime Minister would leave the club soon after. That, however, was wide of the mark and his claim that “we are building a structure for the future, not just a team of all-stars” is now humbly enshrined upon the wall at the entrance of the recently-built academy.

This very ethos has been perpetuated in every single executive decision made by the club since. Eight years on and the Blues continue to build towards a sustainable future in which they hope to compete on multiple fronts.

City’s new state of the art facilities constitute a Grade 1 Academy, the highest tier available. Containing 16 full-sized training pitches and a half-pitch specifically designed for goalkeepers, the complex offers a fertile base for further growth.