Applied Sports Science newsletter – August 5, 2016

One player expected to be back quickly, the other wondered whether his career was over. One watched helplessly as his squad struggled, the other looked on while his team thrived. The stories of Kevin White and Kelvin Benjamin connect and contrast: Two promising young receivers who spent the last year stuck on the sidelines; two different injuries; two divergent paths back to the field. The same feelings of helplessness, doubt, pain and elation; the ebbs and flows of a year removed.

In a league in which 474 players were placed on season-ending IR in 2015, these two receivers’ experiences are indicative of the tenuousness of life in the NFL. Injuries are such an everyday occurrence that fans simply adjust their fantasy lineups and assume, He’ll be back eventually. The how of it is immaterial. Yet for so many players, the how is their everyday reality.

It is repetition that defines Katie Ledecky. You see it when she stands on the starting block, waiting for the signals that begin a race, pushing and pulling on her swim cap several times, using her hands and elbows and the crook of her arm to fiddle with her goggles. It is why, for reasons she cannot remember, she claps her hands three times just before the beep to dive into the pool, a ritual that has always worked and therefore stands as its own reason.

There is comfort in doing things the same way. At critical moments, it removes the confusion of change. And yet, at the moment the world first saw the record-breaking swimming that would become the emblematic definition of Ledecky, it also saw a 15-year-old with the presence of mind to realize there was a time to let the ritual go.

Talent identification and development programs seek to recognise and promote athletes with long-term potential in a particular sport. Coaches involved in these programs are often required to make inclusion or exclusion decisions based on their perceptions of an athlete’s long-term potential. However, biological maturity can influence physical capabilities of adolescent athletes and may bias coaches’ perceptions of long-term potential. This study explored the relationship between coaches’ perceptions of long-term potential and variations in athlete’s biological maturity. Talented adolescent male Australian footballers (n?=?264) from nine different teams were recruited to provide basic anthropometric information for estimates of biological maturity. Coaches from each team were recruited to provide a rating of their own player’s long-term potential. Coaches perceived late maturing athletes to have a significantly lower long-term potential than their average and early maturing counterparts. Of the late maturing athletes, 72% were predicted to go no further than adolescent competition. No concurrent bias was evident between the average or early maturing athletes. The findings of this study demonstrate coaches’ perceptions of long-term potential can be biased by maturational variation in adolescent athletes. Such perceptual bias may impact on coaches selection decisions and result in talented but late maturing athletes missing selection into development pathways.

Sport science is a relatively recent domain of research born from the interactions of different disciplines related to sport. According to the European College of sport science (http://sport-science.org): “scientific excellence in sport science is based on disciplinary competence embedded in the understanding that its essence lies in its multi- and interdisciplinary character”. In this respect, the scientific domain of neuroscience has been developed within such a framework. Influenced by the apparent homogeneity of this scientific domain, the present paper reviews three important research topics in sport from a neuroscientific perspective. These topics concern the relationship between mind and motor action, the effects of cognition on motor performance, and the study of certain mental states (such as the “flow” effect, see below) and motor control issues to understand, for example, the neural substrates of the vertical squat jump. Based on the few extensive examples shown in this review, we argue that by adopting an interdisciplinary paradigm, sport science can emulate neuroscience in becoming a mono-discipline.

Steve’s parents John and Jean Nash also raised exceptional athletes in son Martin and daughter Joann. Martin played professional soccer for 15 years and represented Canada, and Joann captained the University of Victoria women’s soccer team.

What were John and Jean’s secrets in raising three kids for success in sport? Did they feed them raw slabs of meat from an early age to stimulate an aggressive edge? Did they yell at them and whip them with birch branches to provide “motivation”?

John Nash’s insights might surprise you.

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Participation in sports is a highly visible aspect of 21st-century life, with a normative dimension. Sport benefits health, encourages self-discipline, and develops character and teamwork. The positive physiological and psychological effects of sport and an active lifestyle are scientifically well-known: improved cardiorespiratory and muscular fitness, lower risk of osteoporosis and depression, and an increased life expectancy. Based on all this good news, one might wonder whether there is any downside.

‘Sports addiction’ sounds paradoxical, because we usually reserve the word ‘addiction’ for things that are recognisably bad for us, such as illicit-drug use or alcoholism, but there really is a sense in which you can become addicted to exercise. Even modest athletes can relate to the famous ‘high’ after exercising, triggered by the release of ‘happiness hormones’ such as dopamine and endorphins, which have mood-altering effects. These effects, like those produced by illicit drugs and alcohol, can be habit-forming. As in any addiction, ‘highs’ are important for getting hooked, but the development of an addiction depends on many external factors, too. Sports addiction is not taken seriously by everyone, however: ‘there are worse things to be addicted to’ mockers suggest, as if the term ‘addiction’ is only a metaphor. Sports addiction is, however, real, non-metaphorical, and harmful.

… You wouldn’t know it from browsing the self-help aisle of your local bookstore, but scientists are beginning to question whether focusing too much on goals runs counter to long-term performance and general well-being. In a Harvard Business School report titled “Goals Gone Wild: The Systematic Side Effects of Over-Prescribing Goal Setting,” a team of researchers from Harvard, Northwestern, and the University of Pennsylvania set out to explore the potential downfalls of goal-setting. They found that overemphasizing goals — and especially those that are based on measurable outcomes — often leads to reduced intrinsic motivation, irrational risk-taking, and unethical behavior.

We see this unfold in the real world all the time: Someone becomes overly fixated on achieving a goal and loses sight of his inner reasons for setting out to accomplish it in the first place. He becomes driven by the external rewards and recognition that he hopes accomplishing his goal will bring, and, in the worst cases, he’ll go to any extreme to achieve it.

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It is not hard to decipher Southampton’s thinking in their choice of Puel. The production of first-team players from the club’s famed academy has shown signs of slowing of late and, for all the brilliant work by Ronald Koeman, there was some frustration that players such as Harrison Reed, James Ward-Prowse and Matt Targett did not start more regularly last season.

Others, including Sam McQueen, Alfie Jones and Jake Hesketh are also now moving on to Puel’s radar. It will be a delicate balance, with Puel also navigating the sale of three key players in Sadio Mané, Victor Wanyama and Graziano Pellè amid a wider Premier League landscape with vast strength in depth.

Southampton’s recent recruitment record remains a cause for confidence but the choice of Puel, who has never worked outside France, is particularly bold. There is risk, too. He is analytical and relatively understated but, as Wenger once found out on the Monaco training ground, clearly also tough and steely.

The Steelers enjoyed their first off day of training camp on Tuesday, a chance for the players to catch up on one of the most valuable things they need this time of year, sleep.

And if they were having any problems sleeping, or understanding the importance of it, they got a lesson in just that during a recent seminar during camp.

Cheri Mah, a sleep research fellow at the University of California San Francisco Human Performance Center, spoke to the players at training camp about the importance of sleep and how it is directly related to performance.

As the world’s fiercest competitors gather this week in Rio de Janeiro for the Olympic Games, athletes and coaches will use every strategy they can to gain an edge. But according to many experts, the most important thing for boosting athletic performance — and shaving a second or two off a world record — isn’t a sleek uniform, the best shoes or a high-carbohydrate diet: It’s sleep.

“I think sleep gets the shorter end of the stick, when we all, athlete or otherwise, have competing priorities,” said Norah Simpson, a sports scientist at Stanford University who studies the role of sleep on athletic performance. And athletes at the Rio Olympics will have to fight to get enough of it, thanks to events at unusual times, international travel and, of course, the stress of competition.

As a population, athletes often have poor sleep quality and quantity, according to Simpson. Research also shows that when people are tired, they’re not very good at judging their own alertness or ability to compete. But sleep is one of the simplest enhancements an elite athlete can make to his or her performance. Simpson says some athletes still view tolerance for insufficient sleep as a badge of honor, but many are starting to realize that rest can mean the difference between winning and losing.

Ever wondered why players wear those black vests during training? As the 2016/17 season draws closer, Sky Sports investigate the cutting-edge technology being used by Premier League clubs…

Pre-season is a crucial period as clubs prepare for the new campaign, but how do they make sure their players are in peak physical condition for the gruelling months ahead?

Pep Guardiola has banned pizza and fruit juice at Manchester City while Antonio Conte is reportedly pushing his players to new extremes at Chelsea, but for many of the biggest sides at home and abroad, cutting-edge technology from STATSports is at the heart of preparations.

Applications such as autonomous vehicles and robotics heavily depend on lidar, and an expensive lidar module is a major obstacle to their use in commercial products. Our work at MIT’s Photonic Microsystems Group is trying to take these large, expensive, mechanical lidar systems and integrate them on a microchip that can be mass produced in commercial CMOS foundries.
Our lidar chips promise to be orders of magnitude smaller, lighter, and cheaper than lidar systems available on the market today. They also have the potential to be much more robust because of the lack of moving parts, with a non-mechanical beam steering 1,000 times faster than what is currently achieved in mechanical lidar systems.

Our lidar chips are produced on 300-millimeter wafers, making their potential production cost on the order of $10 each at production volumes of millions of units per year. These on-chip devices promise to be orders of magnitude smaller, lighter, and cheaper than lidar systems available on the market today.

This weekend saw the inaugural #HackMCFC football data hackathon take place in Manchester; a unique joint effort organised by City Football Group (owners of Manchester City, among others), Opta and ChyronHego, developers of the Tracab player tracking system.

Delivered by digital design specialists Play, more than 60 analysts, developers, designers and students were invited to City’s impressive Etihad Campus and given rare access to Opta’s match event data and ChyronHego’s player tracking data to develop new ideas focused on movement, passing, running and pressure.

There are now only 12 days before another Premier League season begins but is there a manager out there who truly feels ready?

Jose Mourinho believes that his new Manchester United team “lost a week in China” during last month’s ill-fated pre-season trip and will now try to make up for it with a series of double sessions ahead of the Community Shield against Leicester City on Sunday. Pep Guardiola has warned rather starkly that football’s demands would “kill our players” while Arsene Wenger’s refusal to compromise on minimum summer holidays for his squad means that he is already resigned to playing Liverpool on the opening day of the season without several key players.

How true is the assertion that money can buy success in football? Delve beneath the surface with this interactive and discover how financial health has compared to league position so far this decade [interactive graphic]