Applied Sports Science newsletter – August 4, 2016

… SportTechie: You’ve played 214 games the past 2 seasons, deep into June twice and now the Olympics. How do you keep in top competition mode and how does technology play a role? What technology did the Warriors and now USA Basketball use to keep everyone at top capacity?

Harrison Barnes: It’s all about how I prepare my body during the offseason. The training I’m doing now is focused on cardio workouts. I use the heart rate tracking feature on my Fitbit Blaze during workouts to monitor my heart rate zone and adjust my intensity up or down based on what I’m working on that day. For my workouts I try to keep my heart rate above 130. I’m also doing a lot more work in the weight room. Mostly I’m trying to maintain my cardio fitness because when you lose that, it’s harder to get back.

Start with this: in 2008, when Ryan Lochte competed in the Summer Games in Beijing, he took his meals at the McDonald’s in the Olympic Village. “Breakfast, lunch, and dinner,” he later told ESPN, explaining simply: “I knew what I was getting.” In so doing, he took a bad habit of American culture and made it a discipline, creating for himself a training table of the familiar. He super-sized. Sadly American. Then he won four medals—two of them gold—and set a pair of world records. Very American.

Now, on the cusp of the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janiero, Lochte is the most dominant American athlete in the Games, perhaps on the planet. Eleven career Olympic medals, at least one gold every four years since 2004. He’s favored to win four more this summer. Why? He persists. No matter the obstacle, he overcomes it. He wore speed-enhancing bodysuits until they were outlawed, and then he still won. He used a revolutionary kick turn that was named for him, then outlawed, and he won after that, too.

… On a recent afternoon in Las Vegas, Ingram sank into a hotel room couch and explained how he aims for six feedings every 24 hours: breakfast, then a snack, then lunch, then a snack, then dinner, then a midnight snack. “It gets sickening,” Ingram says, sounding tired, “but I just try to stick to it.”

Ingram says he gorges on steak, grilled chicken, mashed potatoes, creamed spinach and … well, it sounds like he’d rather stop there. Though Ingram’s favorite class at Duke was public speaking, he’s famously soft spoken; even sitting a few feet away, it’s hard to hear him above the whir of a nearby air conditioner. But he seems even more reserved about the subject of his weight — or lack thereof. And it’s understandable. He has faced such questions in almost every interview (and countless other settings) for years.

“I think it just gives me motivation to show these guys that the skinny part doesn’t matter,” Ingram said on a conference call shortly after the Lakers selected him No. 2 overall this summer. “It got me here today. Being skinny didn’t mean nothing when I was battling with each and every guy, each and every night.”

As a former athlete (softball), running was our punishment. Though a necessary evil of the sport, running was secondary to the actual game. If we missed a groundball or struck out looking, we ran laps. During those grueling laps, I remember how much I hated it and how I needed to be on the field, not out on this track watching someone else take my starting spot. The act of running for me has always been to get back on the field, or to hit a mile marker or to get a certain time.

For the past five years I’ve desperately tried to become a runner, sporadically even calling myself one, even though I feared the secret society of real runners would expose me as a fraud.

Now that my athlete days are over, at least in the sense I’d always known, it’s time to face my running demons. After some soul-searching, countless hours of various running groups and consulting a few professionals, I found my disdain for running isn’t uncommon.

The use of athletic recovery strategies is now commonplace across high performance sport, with strategies ranging from nutritional supplementation to ice baths and compression garments widely adopted by athletes. With approx. 40,000 people having recently completed the London Marathon and with the competition season having started for many athletes, so the importance of athletic recovery comes into focus.

Despite the popularity of recovery strategies, some fundamental questions remain to be elucidated. What is it we’re trying to recover from? What’s the evidence to support the use of various strategies? To what extent might the placebo effect be at play? And more recently, the question of whether the chronic use of recovery strategies might in fact attenuate training adaptation has been a topic of fierce debate and scientific enquiry.

Purpose

The purpose of this study was to examine the acute and chronic training responses to strength-, hypertrophy- and cluster-type resistance training.
Methods

Thirty-four trained males were assigned to a strength [STR: 4 × 6 repetitions, 85 % of one repetition maximum, (1RM), 900 s total rest], hypertrophy (HYP: 5 × 10 repetitions, 70 % 1RM, 360 s total rest), cluster 1 (CL-1: 4 × 6/1 repetitions, 85 % 1RM, 1400 s total rest), and cluster 2 (CL-2: 4 × 6/1 repetitions, 90 % 1RM, 1400 s total rest) regimens which were performed twice weekly for a 6-week period. Measurements were taken before, during and following the four workouts to investigate the acute training stimulus, whilst similar measurements were employed to examine the training effects before and after the intervention.
Results

The improvements in 1RM strength were significantly greater for the STR (12.09 ± 2.75 %; p < 0.05, d = 1.106) and CL-2 (13.20 ± 2.18 %; p < 0.001, d = 0.816) regimens than the HYP regimen (8.13 ± 2.54 %, d = 0.453). In terms of the acute responses, the STR and CL-2 workouts resulted in greater time under tension (TUT) and impulse generation in individual repetitions than the HYP workout (p < 0.05). Furthermore, the STR (+3.65 ± 2.54 mmol/L?1) and HYP (+6.02 ± 2.97 mmol/L?1) workouts resulted in significantly greater elevations in blood lactate concentration (p < 0.001) than the CL-1 and CL-2 workouts.
Conclusion

CL regimens produced similar strength improvements to STR regimens even when volume load was elevated (CL-2). The effectiveness of the STR and CL-2 regimens underlines the importance of high loads and impulse generation for strength development. [full text]

His title is strength and conditioning coach, and his job description, put simply, is to make the University of Memphis football team bigger, faster and stronger.

But that’s not exactly how Josh Storms characterizes his job.

“We’re the culture coach,” he says. “Whatever Coach (Mike Norvell)’s vision is for the program, I have the best vehicle to instill that culture in this team.”

Since Norvell formally took over the Tiger football program this winter, the culture at the Billy J. Murphy Athletic Complex has changed. So it only makes sense that there’s also a changing culture in the weight room — and a new man in charge.

If you were a stack of blocks would you stand? The human body is designed to be self-supported. Every bone is intended to stack on the bone below it, like a stack of well-positioned blocks, making standing effortless. Efficient posture results in efficient stability and movement, which can enhance performance and prevent injury. … Together, we can begin to re-write your body’s history and create new postural habits. The first step to restoring symmetry is to bring awareness to your body position and holding patterns.

Study findings regarding strengthening interventions in runners with patello­femoral pain syndrome have been inconsis­tent, perhaps because specific subgroups are more responsive than others. Preliminary research suggests high school runners may make up one such subgroup.

Human augmentation will force sport to confront questions that it has so far resisted. So what improvements to the human body are acceptable in sport?

… A variety of wearable technology is on the market to monitor life signs, but these mostly possess hard components that have to be strapped onto the body. Scientists have been developing stretchable electronics that can fit better onto people, but these were limited by the size and weight of their batteries. … The battery-free nature of this patch makes it five to 10 times thinner than comparable gadgets, says study leader John Rogers, a materials scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Members of the Virginia Tech football and women’s soccer team are now using customized insights from biological data to help team performance to peak levels through a new collaboration between Virginia Tech, competitive member of the elite Atlantic Coast Conference, and Blueprint for Athletes from Quest Diagnostics (NYSE: DGX), the world’s leading provider of diagnostic information services.

Under the collaboration announced today, participating members of the university’s men’s football and women’s soccer teams will be tested at regular intervals throughout the 2016-2017 competitive seasons using Blueprint for Athletes, a suite of laboratory blood tests that provides amateur and professional athletes customized insights to help improve their performance and help avoid vulnerability to injury. Players, coaches and athletic staff will use the ongoing assessments to better understand players’ biological changes that signify response to training, and will adjust nutrition, thermoregulation, recovery and other aspects of training on a personal basis for each player.

This work is part of Abe Davis’s PhD dissertation at MIT, and is based on the paper: “Image-Space Modal Bases for Plausible Manipulation of Objects in Video” ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH Asia 2015)
by Abe Davis, Justin Chen, Fredo Durand

Shortly after the recent massacre at an Orlando nightclub, the city’s mayor declared that the White House had agreed to waive federal privacy rules to allow doctors to update victims’ families. News of the waiver was widely reported, but as the Obama administration later clarified, both the mayor and the media were “simply mistaken.” No waiver was granted because none was needed. The confusion amid the tragedy in Orlando underscores widespread misconceptions about the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Privacy Rule. Here we shed light on a handful of myths that bedevil doctors and patients alike.

Myth No. 1

HIPAA prohibits communicating with patients’ loved ones.

When some of the Broncos wore Gatorade sweat patches last weekend at practice, the goal wasn’t to improve performance in July or August.

Instead, the team is searching for an edge down the stretch — in December, in January and in February. And so inside UCHealth Training Center, the Broncos are looking for innovative ways to keep the players at peak performance. A partnership with the Gatorade Sports Science Institute is simply the latest example of the Broncos’ emphasis on providing the latest and greatest technology to aid players.

Six scientists from the institute spent time at Broncos training camp on Friday and Saturday to determine specific hydration procedures for Broncos players who play the most reps. Through an intensive process that involves fluid measurement and sweat patches, the scientists tested 25 players over the course of two days to develop individualized plans that factor in volume, carbohydrates and electrolytes. During games, select players will receive personalized bottles that will replenish in a way that best serves each one.