Applied Sports Science newsletter – August 6, 2016

The dark times are almost over. The barren month or so after Euro 2016 is coming to an end. We will no longer have to rely on the scraps of preseason friendlies to be sated. Rejoice, breathe sighs of relief, for the Premier League season is almost upon us.

It’s become something of a cliche now to say that the Premier League can’t be won but can be lost in the early weeks and months of the season. And this season that is even more true: Such are the number of teams both aiming for, and capable of, a title challenge, every game counts, and a poor start to the campaign could be fatal.

This season has the added complication of being one straight after an international tournament, something of course teams have to deal with every other year, more so if they have a strong South American contingent, and there’s also the Olympics to take into consideration. So which teams will be hit the hardest by the summer’s exertions?

As the Dallas Cowboys prepare to open training camp on Saturday in Oxnard, California, two of their most important voices will belong to head athletic trainer Jim Maurer and associate athletic trainer Britt Brown.

Brown also carries the title of director of rehabilitation. He oversees the work put in by all of the team’s injured players. When you see Dez Bryant working the bands in resistance training, Brown is on the other end, pushing and pulling, trying to make sure Bryant’s recovery from January foot surgery is complete.

With Bryant, Sean Lee (knee), Orlando Scandrick (knee), Gavin Escobar (Achilles tendon), Maliek Collins (foot) and Lance Dunbar (knee) coming back from surgeries major and minor, Brown’s recommendations are taken strongly.

There isn’t much left for Ashton Eaton to do in the decathlon. He’s won Olympic Gold and multiple world championships, and, since 2012, he hasn’t lost a major world title in the 10-event test of athleticism (that includes the decathlon’s indoor brethren, the heptathlon). Plus, he’s broken the world record … twice.

Now he’s heading to Rio for a shot at one more gold medal, and one more honor in the event. If he wins — and he’s expected to do so — he’d be the first back-to-back Olympic champ since Great Britain’s Daley Thompson won in 1980 and 1984. The U.S.’s Bob Mathias is the only other two-time winner (1948 and 1952). The 28-year-old Eaton knows how amazing joining that elite company would be.

… Rapinoe has not seen game action since late last year, when she tore the ACL in her right knee while training with the national team in December. She has not played a single minute of the Reign’s National Women’s Soccer League campaign.

And yet, when USWNT coach Jill Ellis announced her 18-player roster for the upcoming Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, there was Rapinoe’s name as perhaps the most surprising inclusion on the list.

So while Rapinoe is “more than ready” to get back on the field, it will be with a slight twinge of apprehension.

Joe Flacco was wearing a brace on his left knee. That, I can confirm. Otherwise, I saw nothing during a full-pads Baltimore Ravens training camp practice Sunday morning that told me Flacco is in any way limited just eight months removed from tearing his ACL and MCL.

You won’t find a medical degree on my office wall, but what I do know is that I saw none of the clues that can tip off observers about health concerns.

The Mets placed their star slugger on the 15-day disabled list Thursday, and GM Sandy Alderson admitted that the team had shanked its handling of the injury

… Lately, I’ve been hearing something that disturbs me. A lot of entrepreneurs onstage have been bragging about not sleeping, telling their audiences about their 16-hour days, and making it sound like hustle-at-all-costs is the way ahead. Rest be damned, they say?—?there’s an endless amount of work to do.

I think this message is one of the most harmful in all of business. Sustained exhaustion is not a rite of passage. It’s a mark of stupidity. Literally. Scientists have suggested that scores on IQ tests decline on each successive day you sleep less than you naturally would. It doesn’t take long before the difference is telling.

The aim of this study was to examine the effects of a 5-week training program, consisting of repeated 30-m sprints, on two repeated sprint ability (RSA) test formats: one with one change of direction (RSA) and the other with multiple changes of direction (RSM). Thirty-six young male and female basketball players (age 16.1 ± 0.9 years), divided into two experimental groups, were tested for RSA, RSM, squat jump, counter-movement jump, and the Yo-Yo Intermittent Recovery-Level-1 (Yo-Yo IR1) test, before and after a 4-week training program and 1 week of tapering. One group performed 30-m sprints with one change of direction (RSA group, RSAG), whereas the other group performed multidirectional 30-m sprints (RSM group, RSMG). Both groups improved in all scores in the post-intervention measurements (P < 0.05), except for the fatigue index in the RSM test. However, when comparing the two groups, similar effects were found for almost all parameters of the tests applied, except for RPE in the RSA test, which had a greater decrease in the RSAG (from 8.7 to 5.9) than in the RSMG (from 8.5 to 6.6, P = 0.021). We can conclude that repeated 30-m sprints, either with one change of direction or multidirectional, induce similar physiological and performance responses in young basketball players, but have a different psycho-physiological impact. [full text]

“Get out strong. Commit”’ were the words that runner Lynsey Sharp had written on the back of her hand in bold black marker pen just before she ran the final of the 800m Commonwealth Games in 2014. Prior to the race, she hadn’t slept for 12 hours, having spent the night throwing up, with a drip in her arm. And yet, she went on to bag silver for Britain.

Meanwhile, cycling super-hero Chris Froome, who just last week brought home the Tour De France for the third time, attributes his wins as much to mental attitude – his by-words are ‘hunger’ and ‘determination’ – as physique. “It’s about the body only up to a certain point,” he has said. “There comes a point that you’re so far into the red and so far over your limit that it turns mental. It’s a mental game.”

But is such mental grit something only an elite few of us are born with, or can it be learned? As Team GB gears up for Rio, we asked the athletes – and their psychologists – how to think yourself to victory.

Accelerated running is characterised by a continuous change of kinematics from one step to the next. It has been argued that breakpoints in the step-to-step transitions may occur, and that these breakpoints are an essential characteristic of dynamics during accelerated running. We examined this notion by comparing a continuous exponential curve fit (indicating continuity, i.e., smooth transitions) with linear piecewise fitting (indicating breakpoint). We recorded the kinematics of 24 well trained sprinters during a 25 m sprint run with start from competition starting blocks. Kinematic data were collected for 24 anatomical landmarks in 3D, and the location of centre of mass (CoM) was calculated from this data set. The step-to-step development of seven variables (four related to CoM position, and ground contact time, aerial time and step length) were analysed by curve fitting. In most individual sprints (in total, 41 sprints were successfully recorded) no breakpoints were identified for the variables investigated. However, for the mean results (i.e., the mean curve for all athletes) breakpoints were identified for the development of vertical CoM position, angle of acceleration and distance between support surface and CoM. It must be noted that for these variables the exponential fit showed high correlations (r2>0.99). No relationship was found between the occurrences of breakpoints for different variables as investigated using odds ratios (Mantel-Haenszel Chi-square statistic). It is concluded that although breakpoints regularly appear during accelerated running, these are not the rule and thereby unlikely a fundamental characteristic, but more likely an expression of imperfection of performance.

UCF basketball will pick up the tempo next season, and conditioning is first on the agenda.

Johnny Dawkins, the new men’s basketball head coach, has stepped in and brought a new philosophy. He said in a May interview that he intends to play a fast brand of basketball this upcoming season, and the players’ conditioning will have to be up-to-par for Dawkins’ vision to come into fruition.

“Everything we do is design for our kids to be put into a position where we’re thinking about pace,” Dawkins said. “No matter what they do, even when on their own, they’re thinking about pace.”

A balance of study and sport is proving to be a medal-winning combination, with more than half of Australia’s Olympic team for Rio 2016 also committed to tertiary education.

The AIS has been working closely with Australian University Sport (AUS) and 40 of Australia’s universities as part of the Elite Athlete Friendly University (EAFU) program, which supports student athletes to achieve their academic goals while pursuing an elite sporting career.

The EAFU program is an initiative within the Personal Excellence Strategy, which focuses on the holistic development of athletes and their wellbeing and is accessible to more than 2000 of Australia’s elite and emerging athletes.

While reminiscing about the good ol’ days when he was a football player at Penn High School, almost four decades ago, Kingsmen coach Cory Yeoman couldn’t help but laugh.

Heck, he was tickled into a deep belly chortle.

Monday’s first day of football practice had him in a good mood anyway. Add to it the memories of how players used to deal with the August heat, and he feels like a true survivor.

Remember the salt tablets that were supposed to guard against dehydration? Infrequent water breaks? Heavy uniforms?

Seattle Sounders FC, a member of Major League Soccer (MLS), and Quest Diagnostics (NYSE: DGX), the world’s leading provider of diagnostic information services, today announced that Sounders FC are integrating biomarker testing with Blueprint for Athletes™ into the team’s training to help provide a competitive edge.
The Seattle Sounders FC

Earlier this season, Sounders FC began a pilot with select players of Quest’s Blueprint for Athletes service, customized test panels that evaluate blood-based markers and provide personalized insights athletes can use to help improve their performance. With today’s announcement, Seattle Sounders FC is the first MLS team to formally integrate Blueprint for Athletes into their training program with a broad group of players.

… come mid-October Eugene might be known by another name: HackTown USA. From October 14-16, the University of Oregon will be hosting the first Sports/Tech hackathon called “QuackCon.” It is anticipated that there will be roughly 200-300+ college students from around the U.S. who will attend and participate in the hackathon which will promote different types of sport innovations.

“Basically what a hackathon is is an event where students come together and they have an allotted amount of time, usually between 24-48 hours,” said Joseph Livni, a Sophomore computer and information science major at the University of Oregon. “In that period of time they [the hackers] have to basically create something tech oriented.”

University of California, Berkeley engineers have built the first dust-sized, wireless sensors that can be implanted in the body, bringing closer the day when a Fitbit-like device could monitor internal nerves, muscles or organs in real time.

Our understanding of in vivo Achilles tendon (AT) conditioning is limited to two-dimensional ultrasound measures of longitudinal deformation of the whole tendon. This study investigated the regional three-dimensional (3D) deformation of the AT during conditioning. Eighteen ATs were scanned using 3D freehand ultrasound during 10 successive 25 s submaximal (50%) voluntary isometric plantarflexion contractions. Longitudinal strain was assessed for the whole AT, aponeurosis, and free AT and transverse strain was assessed for the proximal-, mid-, and distal-portions of the free AT. Longitudinal conditioning of the whole AT was primarily driven by creep response of the free AT and transverse conditioning was greatest for the mid-portion of the free AT. Whole and free AT longitudinal strain increased up to the third contraction and were accompanied by a corresponding reduction in free AT cross-sectional area (CSA) strain in proximal-, mid-, and distal-portions. No significant changes in aponeurosis strain or tendon volume were detected between contractions. These findings suggest that conditioning alters free AT shape, with increased tendon length attained at the expense of reduction in free AT CSA. Although AT experiences different amounts of strain in different regions, the number of contractions required to reach steady-state strain during conditioning is uniform throughout the tendon.

Recent advances in materials, mechanics, and electronic device design are rapidly establishing the foundations for health monitoring technologies that have “skin-like” properties, with options in chronic (weeks) integration with the epidermis. The resulting capabilities in physiological sensing greatly exceed those possible with conventional hard electronic systems, such as those found in wrist-mounted wearables, because of the intimate skin interface. However, most examples of such emerging classes of devices require batteries and/or hard-wired connections to enable operation. The work reported here introduces active optoelectronic systems that function without batteries and in an entirely wireless mode, with examples in thin, stretchable platforms designed for multiwavelength optical characterization of the skin. Magnetic inductive coupling and near-field communication (NFC) schemes deliver power to multicolored light-emitting diodes and extract digital data from integrated photodetectors in ways that are compatible with standard NFC-enabled platforms, such as smartphones and tablet computers. Examples in the monitoring of heart rate and temporal dynamics of arterial blood flow, in quantifying tissue oxygenation and ultraviolet dosimetry, and in performing four-color spectroscopic evaluation of the skin demonstrate the versatility of these concepts. The results have potential relevance in both hospital care and at-home diagnostics. [full text]

A team of researchers from The Australian National University (ANU) has made a breakthrough in efforts to power sensors using energy harvested from signals emitted by television and cellular transmissions, such as those from mobile base stations.

The team, led by Salman Durrani from the ANU Research School of Engineering, has accurately modeled how much energy it takes to sense and transfer information by wireless sensors.

While the work is not a technological breakthrough in terms of devices that harvest energy, it does show that it’s feasible to have energy-harvesting-powered sensors with communication delays typically limited to less than a few hundred milliseconds.

For the first time ever, Ireland will have a field hockey team participating in the Summer Olympics. To make sure its athletes are performing at the highest level, the national team is getting some help from an Ireland-based startup that develops biometric measurement technology to identify players at risk for injury.

Kitman Labs, based in Dublin with offices in Silicon Valley, is working with both the Irish national field hockey team and the South African rugby team as they compete in this month’s Summer Olympics.

The company’s “Athlete Optimization System” analyzes athlete data collected from multiple systems including wearable trackers that show workload information and other data related to sleep, hydration, diet, mood, stress, and perceived muscle soreness. Coaches can look at the analytics to help drive decision-making related to the amount of training an athlete should be doing.

Illness or injury affected four out of every five athletes on the Great Britain Track and Field Team before, during or immediately after the 2012 Olympic Games.1 The return to play (RTP) decision is a case of risk management, and athletes may continue to train or compete, despite being ill or injured. This begs the question: ‘How is the return to play decision made in elite sport’?

RTP decisions are complex, specific to the athlete and type of sport, and often influenced by ‘decision modification’ factors (eg, pressure to return for a major event).2 In the case of a sprinter with a hamstring strain 2?weeks from the World Championships, the final RTP decision-maker might be the athlete. However, the healthcare professional should be the final RTP decision-maker when athlete decision-making capacity is compromised (eg, concussion). Decisions regarding the immediate medical management (including RTP) of an ill or injured player on the field of play should be made by a healthcare professional. The coach or manager should have no say in whether the medical team should attend the athlete, or in immediate player assessment.

The study objective was to describe the types, localizations and severity of injuries among first division Bundesliga football players, and to study the effect of playing position on match and training injury incidence and severity, based on information from the public media. Exposure and injuries data from 1?448 players over 6 consecutive seasons were collected from a media-based register. In total, 3?358 injuries were documented. The incidence rate for match and training injuries was 11.5 per 1?000 match-hours (95% confidence interval [CI]: 10.9–12.2), and 61.4 per 100 player-seasons (95% CI: 58.8–64.1), respectively. Strains (30.3%) and sprains (16.7%) were the major injury types, with the latter causing significantly longer lay-off times than the former. Significant differences between the playing positions were found regarding injury incidence and injury burden (lay-off time per incidence-rate), with wing-defenders sustaining significantly lower incidence-rates of groin injuries compared to forwards (rate ratio: 0.43, 95% CI: 0.17–0.96). Wing-midfielders had the highest incidence-rate and injury burden from match injuries, whereas central-defenders sustained the highest incidence-rate and injury burden from training injuries. There were also significant differences in match availability due to an injury across the playing positions, with midfielders sustaining the highest unavailability rates from a match and training injury. Injury-risk and patterns seem to vary substantially between different playing positions. Identifying positional differences in injury-risk may be of major importance to medical practitioners when considering preventive measures.

Background: The widespread use of anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury prevention interventions has not been effective in reducing the injury incidence among female athletes who participate in high-risk sports.

Purpose/Hypothesis: The purpose of this study was to determine if biomechanical and neuromuscular factors that contribute to the knee abduction moment (KAM), a predictor of future ACL injuries, could be used to characterize athletes by a distinct factor. Specifically, we hypothesized that a priori selected biomechanical and neuromuscular factors would characterize participants into distinct at-risk profiles.

Study Design: Controlled laboratory study.

Methods: A total of 624 female athletes who participated in jumping, cutting, and pivoting sports underwent testing before their competitive season. During testing, athletes performed drop-jump tasks from which biomechanical measures were captured. Using data from these tasks, latent profile analysis (LPA) was conducted to identify distinct profiles based on preintervention biomechanical and neuromuscular measures. As a validation, we examined whether the profile membership was a significant predictor of the KAM.

Results: LPA using 6 preintervention biomechanical measures selected a priori resulted in 3 distinct profiles, including a low (profile 1), moderate (profile 2), and high (profile 3) risk for ACL injuries. Athletes with profiles 2 and 3 had a significantly higher KAM compared with those with profile 1 (P < .05).

Conclusion: This is the first study to use LPA of biomechanical landing data to create ACL injury risk profiles. Three distinct risk groups were identified based on differences in the peak KAM.

Clinical Relevance: These findings demonstrate the existence of discernable groups of athletes that may benefit from injury prevention interventions.

Players have depended on Toradol injections to keep them on the field for two decades. Now, the NFL could be facing its next health crisis because of it.

… I would teach myself about portion control and how to balance a healthy plate that includes healthy fat, while also emphasizing that I never have to give up foods I love. My mantra would be: “Food should be enjoyed, not feared.”

Perhaps becoming a nutritionist helped me get a lot wiser about eating habits – or at least, it didn’t hurt. Here’s what 10 of my dietitian friends would have told their younger selves about food.

Ketosis, the metabolic response to energy crisis, is a mechanism to sustain life by altering oxidative fuel selection. Often overlooked for its metabolic potential, ketosis is poorly understood outside of starvation or diabetic crisis. Thus, we studied the biochemical advantages of ketosis in humans using a ketone ester-based form of nutrition without the unwanted milieu of endogenous ketone body production by caloric or carbohydrate restriction. In five separate studies of 39 high-performance athletes, we show how this unique metabolic state improves physical endurance by altering fuel competition for oxidative respiration. Ketosis decreased muscle glycolysis and plasma lactate concentrations, while providing an alternative substrate for oxidative phosphorylation. Ketosis increased intramuscular triacylglycerol oxidation during exercise, even in the presence of normal muscle glycogen, co-ingested carbohydrate and elevated insulin. These findings may hold clues to greater human potential and a better understanding of fuel metabolism in health and disease.

Here’s what four Olympic athletes eat to fuel their training.

The training table experiment at Fresno State did not work out, in part because a large number of student-athletes did not participate in the program even though they had paid for those meals through deductions in their scholarship checks.

It might not make sense, but it happens. New Mexico coach Bob Davie said he saw a similar thing happen when he was at, of all places, Notre Dame.

“When you get to that third meal and you can just go eat on campus … it was the same thing at Notre Dame. At Notre Dame, our kids could eat on campus. They don’t go,” said Davie, who coached the Fighting Irish from 1997 through 2001. “It’s crazy. They will not eat if they have to eat on campus. Maybe it’s the presentation of it; maybe it’s the same food all the time. Whatever it is, to try to get those kids to eat, unless you’re bringing it to them, you’re going to have a hard time.

“They don’t take advantage of it like you’d think, and that’s what’s frustrating.”

Eating for exercise shouldn’t be complicated: A typical diet will provide all the calories needed to power a workout. In fact, one of the biggest pitfalls for those hoping to get fit is eating to replace the calories burnt during a workout, experts said.

All the calories in food come from these three macronutrients: carbohydrates, protein and fat. The National Institutes of Health recommends that, for most Americans, 45 to 65 percent of daily calories should come from carbohydrates, 25 to 35 percent from fat and 10 to 35 percent from protein. The recommended total calorie intake depends on a person’s weight and sex, with a 154-lb. (70 kilograms) person needing to eat about 2,000 calories daily, according to the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.

Those numbers also hold for the vast majority of people who are exercising, said Dr. Michael Joyner, an exercise physiologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.

“If people are training at 30 or 40 or 50 minutes a day, they don’t need [extra] carbohydrates, they don’t need sports drinks, they don’t need any of that stuff. People have way overcomplicated this,” Joyner said.

Richard Hunwicks, Head of Human Performance at the Rugby Football League details how an innovative approach to analytics has helped revolutionise the RFL’s approach to player recovery.

Using the example of England’s three test victory over New Zealand he explores how QlickiT’s data analytics solution helps him effectively support the England players and coaching staff.

Football in general, and English football in particular, is in thrall to the cult of the individual. It is uniquely susceptible to guru thinking. The erroneous belief that problems are always best solved by signing more players, or sacking the manager, applies both on and off the field.

[Steve] W, alsh is not the first person to be hailed as the man who has cracked the transfer market. Among others, there was Graham Carr, for example, the chief scout at Newcastle who brought Yohan Cabaye and Papiss Cisse to the club. Tottenham believed Franco Baldini’s extensive contacts across Europe would enable them to reach players other clubs couldn’t. Liverpool believed Comolli’s scientific approach would reduce risk from new signings. Chelsea and Tottenham both found themselves in thrall to Frank Arnesen.

July has been a stellar month for British player Johanna Konta. After defeating one of her idols, Venus Williams, to win a Premier title at Stanford, Konta will play today for a spot in the semifinal of the Rogers Cup.

This month, Konta just can’t seem to lose. When players hit a streak like Konta has, it can sometime seem like winning becomes inevitable, as if with each win added to their record the next win becomes even more likely.

This kind of “rich get richer” effect goes by various names in sport: hot hand, streakiness, momentum, etc. The name Klaassen and Magnus like to use to refer to this effect is a winning mood.

… it’s the quantitative dynamics of football that remains the biggest so-far unexplored area of the game. We have very little understanding of how the ball and the players cross time and space in the course of a game, and how their trajectories and actions coalesce into team dynamics and, eventually, produce team outputs including goals. This gap in knowledge casts real doubts on the entirety of quantitative player analysis: since we do not know how individual player actions fit in the team dynamics, how can we claim to be rating the players robustly? And before the obvious objection is raised: these dynamic processes remain unexplored not for the lack of tracking data. The event data that is widely available nowadays contains plenty of dynamic information, but as long as our vocabulary forces us to consider every event in isolation, we cannot but glimpse it.

Luckily, a newer concept is emerging into view and taking a central place: the possession chain (possession for short). A possession is a sequence of consecutive on-the-ball events when the ball is under the effective control of a single team. A football game can then be seen as an (ordered) collection of sequences. It is a very positive development since possessions make much more sense as the fundamental building blocks of the game than events. This is because they are inherently dynamic — they span time and space. I believe that they should be studied for their own sake, and if you only compute them to figure out who should get partial credit for the shot at the end of it, then in my opinion, you are doing analytics wrong – or at least not as well as you could be.

… The U.S. was a sports science trailblazer in the late ’70s and ’80s, but understanding its importance is no longer enough to stay ahead of the game.

The globalization of sports science has begun to level the playing field.

The latest battles between national teams are dominated not just by scientific advances, but the ability to develop comprehensive development systems to apply them. Young people with natural potential to win Olympic medals must be identified early and have all the wisdom of sports science—from nutrition to medicine, psychology and training—funneled directly into their development.

Grab a pen and write down, in order, your predicted end-of-season table. Do it again next week, after one round of results, and again the following week, and so on until May.

August is the obvious time to be setting targets, but it needn’t stop on day one. Take the example of Watford last season.

Before a ball had been kicked, betting markets predicted the Hornets to finish on 35 points; the lowest total in the league. After six games, however, that prediction had shifted to 43 points and 13th place; mid-table was within reach.