Applied Sports Science newsletter – August 10, 2016

When American gymnastics superstar Simone Biles was born in 1997, Oksana Chusovitina had already won five world medals and an Olympic gold.

When Biles’ teammate Laurie Hernandez was born in 2000, Chusovitina was already the mother of a young son.

When Gabby Douglas made her Olympic debut in 2012, Chusovitina was competing in her sixth Games.

A list like this could go on all day, because there might be no other athlete in history who has defied the odds, and Father Time, like the 41-year-old Chusovitina. She is in Rio for her unprecedented seventh Olympics.

… “No one works harder than Kerri Walsh,” said Barbra Fontana, who spent 18 years on the pro beach circuit and who placed fourth at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. Fontana lives in Manhattan Beach, California, where Walsh trains, and sees her routinely.

“By that, I mean she gets up at 5:30, she meditates, she goes and trains volleyball, then she goes to the gym and weight trains, then she does brain training, then she does recovery, and she watches what she eats—with three children. Most athletes, to be honest with you, as they get older, they start cutting corners.”

Gareth Barry is just as excited to be playing in his 20th Premier League season as he was when he started out as a budding professional back in 1998.

Everton’s record-breaking midfielder says he still retains the same desire he did when he was handed his competitive debut for Aston Villa as a 17-year-old.

No player has made more Premier League starts than Barry who has been named in the first 11 for a top-flight fixture on 573 occasions.

Purpose

We investigated the effects of a 3-week dietary periodization on immunity and sleep in triathletes.
Methods

21 triathletes were divided into two groups with different nutritional guidelines during a 3-week endurance training program including nine twice a day sessions with lowered (SL group) or maintained (CON group) glycogen availability during the overnight recovery period. In addition to performance tests, sleep was monitored every night. Systemic and mucosal immune parameters as well as the incidence of URTI were monitored every week of the training/nutrition protocol. Two-ways ANOVA and effect sizes were used to examine differences in dependent variables between groups at each time point.
Results

The SL group significantly improved 10 km running performance (?1 min 13 s, P < 0.01, d = 0.38), whereas no improvement was recorded in the CON group (?2 s, NS). No significant changes in white blood cells counts, plasma cortisol and IL-6 were recorded over the protocol in both groups. The vitamin D status decreased in similar proportions between groups, whereas salivary IgA decreased in the SL group only (P < 0.05, d = 0.23). The incidence of URTI was not altered in both groups. All participants in both groups went to bed earlier during the training program (SL ?20 min, CON ?27 min, P < 0.05, d = 0.28). In the SL group, only sleep efficiency slightly decreased by 1.1 % (P < 0.05, d = 0.25) and the fragmentation index tended to increase at the end of the protocol (P = 0.06).
Conclusion

Sleeping and training the next morning regularly with reduced glycogen availability has minimal effects on selected markers of immunity, the incidence of URTI and sleeping patterns in trained athletes. [full text]

There’s nothing more demoralizing than trying to run at your goal race pace in training. Personally, I’ve seldom managed to run even half my race distance at goal pace; and on the rare occasions that I try something like that, I’m always left wondering: “How on earth am I going to run twice as far, but faster, in a race?”

Of course, experience teaches you that you can perform seemingly impossible feats once the starting gun fires. There are many different factors at work: you’re rested and tapered, your motivation is higher, you have competitors to measure yourself against, and so on. But how does all that actually translate into faster running?

A neat abstract presented at the European College of Sports Science’s annual congress in Vienna last month offers some insights. Marco Konings and his colleagues at the University of Essex investigated the effects of competition on the different types of fatigue that show up in your brain and muscles.

An age-old football axiom claims, “The eye in the sky don’t lie.”

It points to a coach’s ability to accurately judge a player’s technique and effort simply by watching the postgame or post-practice video. Like everything else these days, though, the technology of 20 or even 10 years ago seems like it’s from the Stone Age.

The new mantra in athletics might well be, “The Catapult catches all.” In the last decade, the Catapult system, an Australian technology that uses global positioning systems to measure more than 200 data points every step an athlete takes, has replaced the video camera as a coach’s favorite lie detector.

“It’s really a great tool for us,” first-year South Carolina coach Will Muschamp said. “It’s amazing. It shows exertion. How many times is the guy exerting? I can sit down with a player and say, ‘This guy plays the same position and his work capacity level is much higher than yours. Why?’ ”

For the first time, Major League Baseball approved two wearable devices for in-game use this season, adding to the vast suite of data-collection tools already in use. Many clubs enlist physiological tracking technologies for training purposes, but players are becoming concerned over the use and privacy of data collected from them, and how much their clubs might reach into their lives off the field. Call it data collection mission creep.

While players acknowledge and appreciate that the primary aim of the new devices is to improve performance and reduce injury, some are wary about ulterior uses. They fear clubs might insist on invasive tracking away from the ballpark, or that data hinting at future injury could lead to a lowball arbitration offer or reduced free-agent contract.

“It’s not really the technology itself—it’s all, in theory, great,” Colorado Rockies reliever and team union rep Adam Ottavino said. “I think we’re always a little bit scared of giving away too much of ourselves.”

The seeds for many of the 25, maybe 30, medals the U.S. track team hopes to win in Rio de Janeiro were planted at a training center in California with the help of technology originally designed for golf.

One of the many tools USA Track and Field makes available to its athletes is called “Track Man,” a computerized tracking device that sports fans might recognize from watching golf on TV. In addition to golf balls, “Track Man” can trace the trajectory of shot puts and hammers to allow the athletes who throw them keep track of how high and far they go.

“Immediate feedback,” says Phil Cheetham, senior sport technologist for the U.S. Olympic Committee, when asked about the greatest benefit of the technology. “Immediate knowledge of results is proven to help you improve technique much more quickly than if you don’t have the feedback.”

rizona-based company STYR Labs has launched a pair of fitness trackers and an accompanying mobile app that allows health enthusiasts to turn their lifestyle and fitness routine in highly customized nutrition plans.

Elite sport is a constant search for a competitive advantage. Even athletes who stay on the right side of the law take a cocktail of vitamins and supplements, and use cryotherapy chambers and oxygen tents. Now, coaches and teams on the hunt for the next edge are turning to the brain. “Neural doping” could be sport’s new revolution, or its next big scandal.

From brain-zapping headsets to subliminal messaging, neuroscientists are developing new tools and techniques that take advantage of what they’ve learnt about the athletic brain. Some are already being used, while others could potentially end up on the World Anti-Doping Agency’s banned list, alongside anabolic steroids and EPO.

Endurance is just one example of neuroscience breaking boundaries. Fatigue doesn’t come from the body, it comes from the brain.

… Oral Turinabol was the key ingredient in the last known state-sponsored Olympic doping program, which propelled East German athletes to gold medals in the 1970s and 1980s. Since then drug testing in sports has become much more widespread and much more precise, with tests for hundreds of specific compounds. In order to compete, athletes must give up their privacy, notifying officials of their whereabouts every single day of the year, so they can be located for on-the-spot, out-of-competition testing overseen by the World Anti-Doping Agency, or WADA. Something as potent and notorious as Oral Turinabol should have been wiped out long ago. Yet there it was, being swilled down like Red Bull by athletes who went on to win multiple medals at the Sochi Winter Olympics alone.

It seems reasonable to ask: Have we made any progress against doping in sports?

Its all about the fans, but what impact do you out there have on sports?

We want to know why athletes perform better in their home games and in doing so will introduce you to some top global talent

Gymnast Simone Biles’s signature move: Two backflips in the air, with straight legs, and a blind landing after an extra little half-twist.

Witnessing that gravity-defying feat, known as “the Biles,” you can’t help thinking that her level of talent is due to more than just thousands of hours of practice. Biles must have amazing genes. Clearly, there are some genetic markers for height—in Biles case, it helps to be small—but how about for factors like strength and precision?

For decades, scientists have been studying the role of nature and nurture in producing Olympic athletes like Biles. What they’ve learned is that while genes do play some role, they’re not a silver bullet. Environmental factors are extremely important: It makes a big difference if the athlete’s parents are interested in sports, and if they had access to both high-quality training and fresh food.

Every year during the NBA off-season, analysts debate how good or bad the players in that year’s draft will be. Every year we get cautioned that you really can’t evaluate a draft until 3 years later. However, aside from the occasional post about redrafting, I don’t see too many posts evaluating drafts multiple years later. Even for redrafts, the focus is on ‘what ifs’, which are interesting (and painful, I’m a Kings fan and we took Thomas Robinson and Jimmer Fredette instead of Kawhi Leonard and Damian Lillard, yikes), but don’t necessarily evaluate the draft as a whole.

Statistical data analysis is an important development factor that is essential to a team’s progression throughout the season. Here is a look inside Toronto FC’s partnership with Match Analysis and the benefits its Tango Online program has to improve player performance, knowledge and awareness.