Applied Sports Science newsletter – July 21, 2016

… “No British woman has ever retained an Olympic title in track and field. This is an historical opportunity. She could create history.”

If anyone is qualified to give the perspective on Ennis-Hill’s journey from teenager to Olympic and world champion – and a mum – it is Sheffield-born Minichiello. He has guided her all the way through her athletics career.

Minichiello has seen Ennis-Hill become one of the best-known and most successful athletes the UK has ever produced. A fierce competitor, her will to win secured her place in the hearts of the British people as she secured heptathlon gold at the 2012 London Olympics.

The first thing Daniel Agger remembers is that he was unable to control his body. He did not feel any pain but he was just lying there shaking. Earlier that day, 8 March 2015, he had led out Brondby to face their rivals FC Copenhagen in a Danish league game. He lasted 29 minutes before being taken off. He then collapsed and was taken to the physiotherapist’s room at Parken.

He should never have played. He was carrying a knock from the week before and, like so many times in his career, he took a lot of anti-inflammatories – far more than the recommended dosage – and his body had had enough.

He stopped taking anti-inflammatories that day and this summer, having quit football in May, at the age of 31, the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten published a series of interviews with the player, conducted over a two-year period, in which he opened up about his career and what he put his body through in order to play.

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.

Many of us know that physical exercise is good not only for our bodies, but also for our ‘soul’. It can give us a unique psychological buzz, especially when we do it with others – just ask your nearest SoulCycle devotee or Tough Mudder initiate.

This buzz has long intrigued observers of human sociality. For more than a century, anthropologists have written about social bonding and community cohesion arising through what Émile Durkheim in 1912 called ‘collective effervescence’ – a euphoric unity generated when humans come together and move together, be it in religious ritual, music, dance or sport.

This same buzz appears to be a natural performance-enhancer. Tough workouts can seem that little bit easier with the support of a good friend. In competitive sports, teams that ‘click’ perform beyond the sum of their individual parts, often punching well above their weight.

Many athletes often have a difficult time telling soreness and pain apart. Are you just sore from a hard workout or are you now having pain because of a workout? It is normal to have soreness, especially when trying a new workout or after a hard week of practice, but how do you tell the difference?

… I reached out to Brandon Webb, an innovative SEAL trainer/educator, and CEO of Force12 Media for real-world perspective on what industry could learn from a special operations sensibility. Webb, who served in the Navy from 1993 to 2006 and radically redesigned the SEAL training course curriculum, graciously shared his insight about what works – and what fails – when effecting a training transformation.

A member of Seal Team 3, Webb became the Naval Special Warfare Command Sniper Course Manager in 2003. This was a precarious time. The SEALs leadership recognized that technical excellence—better shooting and better shots—didn’t go nearly far enough in addressing the complex environments and demands that would be made upon sniper teams in wartime deployments in multiple theaters. The wartime challenge demanded better collaboration, greater situational awareness and more strategic application of cutting edge technology for the war-fighter. The post-9/11 environment demanded it. In response, some of the radical changes that Webb designed are the following: He broke the class into pairs, assigning mentors to boost support and accountability; he created classes that explore and explain technologies giving participants greater insight into the physics and underlying mechanics of their equipment; and he adopted the “mental management” techniques of Olympic world-champion marksmen, which we were at first reluctantly but then enthusiastically embraced.

Imagine two aspiring entrepreneurs: Meg and Jen. They are equally capable and well-connected, and they are working on equally promising startup ideas. In fact, imagine that Meg and Jen differ in just one respect: Meg is thinking about what a good fallback job would be and how she plans to pursue it if her current startup fails while Jen is not.

Who do you think will work harder and in turn, have a better chance of success: Meg or Jen? Might merely thinking through a backup plan be enough to undermine Meg’s motivation and likelihood of success?

This was the question that we wanted to answer with our research. And yes, we find in a paper published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes that merely contemplating a backup plan can reduce the effort you put forth to achieve a goal, thus hurting your chances of achieving it.

Real Madrid appear to have successfully secured the appointment of fitness coach Antonio Pintus from Lyon as the Italian oversaw Los Blancos’ first preseason training session in Montreal on Monday.

Pintus signed a three-year contract with Lyon in early June but Madrid then made their move to secure his services this summer.

Lyon president Jean-Michel Aulas then said he had spoken to Madrid counterpart Florentino Perez about Pintus, who had already begun preparing the Ligue 1 club for their 2016-17 season, and added: “He [Perez] didn’t know that he had just signed for three years with Lyon. He told me that if Antonio wanted to stay at Lyon there was no problem.”

The National Institutes of Health recently awarded $120 million to the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif. to create mobile apps, web platforms, biosensors, and other tools to collect and analyze data on those volunteers. Scripps will also directly enroll 350,000 of them.

Leading the effort is Dr. Eric Topol, 62, a cardiologist and geneticist known for his prolific tweeting, rapid adoption of technology, and vociferous criticism of traditional medicine as antiquated and inefficient. STAT spoke to Topol as he was recovering from a knee replacement surgery — and complaining that the crutches he’s using haven’t changed since the Civil War.

The ONC issued a report to Congress today laying out the gaps that exist in health data protection. The report opines at length about non-covered entities (NCEs), the large swath of consumer-facing companies that aren’t subject to HIPAA.

“The wearable fitness trackers, social media sites where individuals share health information through specific social networks, and other technologies that are common today did not exist when Congress enacted the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA),” ONC writes. “While HIPAA serves traditional health care well and continues to support national priorities for interoperable health information with its media-neutral Privacy Rule, its scope is limited.”

Deep learning and artificial intelligence are the next big things for intelligent video applications, making it easier to process and analyse vast streams of footage

Objectives

This study aimed to investigate temperature-related changes in different neuro-muscular parameters, to elucidate the reasons for the increased likeliness of injuries of the anterior cruciate ligament under cold environmental conditions.
Design

Repeated measures study design.
Methods

To induce peripheral cooling of the knee joint and thigh muscles, ten healthy, female subjects underwent 30 min of exposure to a cold environment. Both knee extensor and flexor muscles were examined for electromyographic activity, maximum voluntary contraction strength, rate of force development and force sense. Measures of knee laxity were obtained by computerized arthrometry.
Results

Following cold exposure, rate of force development of the knee flexor muscles was significantly reduced (p = 0.016). Left-shifts of electromyography power spectra indicated changes in neural drive to the medial and lateral head of the vastus muscle. Maximum strength, force sense and knee laxity were not affected by the intervention.
Conclusion

The reduced capacity of cold knee flexor muscles to explosively generate force may limit the hamstrings’ capability to counter strong and fast contractions of the knee extensor muscles that cause anterior shear force on the tibia and, thus, strain the anterior cruciate ligament.

The NFL intends to hire a chief medical officer to work full time in the league office, Commissioner Roger Goodell told teams Wednesday. Goodell also informed the teams that longtime NFL medical adviser Elliot Pellman will retire.

“In recognition of this priority [on player health and safety] and the increasing complexity of our work, we intend to hire a highly-credentialed physician to serve as Chief Medical Officer and work in the league office on a full-time basis,” Goodell wrote in a memo to team presidents and chief executives, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post.

… The U.S. national teams appear to have only gotten serious about analytics recently and, while there will be 22 MLS clubs by next season, only nine employ data analysts, 14 have sports science staff, and 15 have performance analysts.

Why? Well, interest may be strong, but the budget is weak.

“There are two countervailing forces,” Dan Altman, the proprietor of soccer consulting company North Yard Analytics, said. “The force that you suggest is real—there are more American owners who are interested in using analytics at their clubs, as a share of owners, than in Europe, but there’s less money in MLS. So they may hire one analyst, or maybe one or two. But there are still some clubs that don’t have the three basic pillars working for them.”

… Guardiola could be something of a revolutionary figure for the sport in England. He is seen as the vanguard of football’s current coaching elite, with his practices and methods setting a precedent for the best part of a generation. Now the Premier League hopes to draw on that in order to improve and raise itself.

German football is now more technically adept and tactically aware as a result of Guardiola’s tenure at Bayern Munich over the past three years, with the Bundesliga improving due to the Spaniard’s ideologies. It’s not just the Bavarian club who benefited, but those hanging on to their coat-tails as well.