Applied Sports Science newsletter – August 12, 2016

Few football players embody the modern game quite like Tennessee Titans quarterback Marcus Mariota. He can pass, he can move, and he ran a college offense that’s helping to shape the future of football. His highlight reels should be beamed into space to show aliens what humans can do.

But ability doesn’t always translate into results. And so as the Titans embark on a crucial stretch for the former no. 2 overall draft pick on the eve of his second professional season, coach Mike Mularkey has forged a bold plan: In an age when seemingly everyone wants to be cutting edge, the Titans and their modern-age quarterback aren’t going to be particularly innovative offensively. And that’s by design.

“I’m going to do the things that I’ve had success with since 2001, and I will continue to do that until someone stops us,” said Mularkey, who served as the Titans’ interim head coach for part of the 2015 season and is now their full-time boss. Statistics show that NFL teams are passing more than ever, with teams throwing an average of 20 percent more yards in 2015 than they did in 2005. But Mularkey has no intention of adjusting his offense to fit that new reality, or indeed even accepting that there is a new reality: “I know people say this is a passing league,” Mularkey said. “I’ll argue with that.”

For fans of the stopwatch, the first week of the Olympics is all about swimming and the second week is about track. Like millions of others, I’ve been watching the Katie Ledecky and Michael Phelps shows with awe over the past few days.

On Tuesday night, Phelps won his 21st Olympic gold medal, his 25th medal overall. On Wednesday, Ledecky anchored the 4×200 freestyle relay for her third gold and fourth medal of these Games, with her best event, the 800-meter freestyle, still to come.

Meanwhile, my colleague Amby Burfoot pointed out in an email that Haile Gebrselassie—perhaps the distance runner with the broadest range of greatness in history—has a grand total of two Olympic medals. So what gives?

… Patty Mills was supposed to be in Hawaii over All-Star weekend with Spurs teammate Boris Diaw. He canceled it when “something came up” with the national team. He had to go to San Diego. “It was really cool,” Mills told me in April. “We have seven Aussies in the NBA. We grew up playing together. So to be able to go and just hang out, nothing to do with basketball, it’s pretty sweet.”

This anecdote is a reminder that Australians have a full-on NBA fraternity at this point. Beyond Bogut and Mills, the trip also featured Dante Exum, Cameron Bairstow, Dellavedova, Aaron Baynes and Joe Ingles. There are as many NBA championship rings on the Australian national team (four) as there are on Team USA.

“A lot of us play in the NBA,” Baynes says. “So you know, we’re up against it night in and night out. We have guys who are in high levels in Europe. We’re not intimidated at all.”

… What is the biggest mistake coaches make in the youth soccer world?

Searching for ways to improve player development is like chasing the Holy Grail and clearly citing what is wrong with youth soccer is unusual, yet Strudwick’s clear voice of experienced reason replied quickly,

“If you look at the heart of player development, we are still not getting it right,” said Strudwick. The numbers for participation are up, but we are still losing a lot of talent.”

Every four years, a small group of elite athletes captures the attention of the world at the Olympic Games. For two weeks, we marvel at their skill and wonder how they push past the boundaries of what ordinary human bodies can do.

For Stanford researcher Euan Ashley, MRCP, DPhil, superathletes are more than an ephemeral interest, they’re part of his life’s work. “We learn a lot of things by looking at extremes,” Ashley said in a recent interview with Maria Konnikova for the California Sunday Magazine. He’s researching “the fittest and the most failing in the world,” (as he puts it) because understanding what makes superathletes so healthy may help researchers identify what’s awry in people who are ill.

Clinging to a lead in the ninth inning of College World Series Game Three, Coastal Carolina’s Alex Cunningham faced Arizona’s Ryan Haug. There were two outs and runners on second and third, so a hit would have given Arizona the walk-off 5-4 victory and its second national championship in the past five years. Instead, Cunningham struck Haug out to give Coastal its first College World Series title. The whiff officially ended the NCAA Division I season, allowing all college pitchers to finally recover.

This game featured a bevy of heavily used pitchers. Coastal starter Andrew Beckwith had thrown 138 pitches in his previous start. Bobby Holmes, the first man out of Coastal’s bullpen, had thrown 47 pitches two days prior and 39 pitches five days before. On the Arizona side, starter Bobby Dalbec had worked deep playoff outings, all after hastily leaving bullpen work midway through the year. And reliever Cameron Ming worked constantly in tournament play; he made back-to-back appearances in the final two championship games to follow a 79-pitch outing just four days earlier.

If a major league manager ran his young pitchers this hard, he’d get hell from the fans and pundits who don’t want to see star prospects abused. Given that pitching through fatigue is a chief injury risk, it would be warranted.

… Not everyone can take home a gold medal, but we can all develop the mind-set of a champion. Here are six habits you can adopt to succeed.

1. Picture Yourself Winning

… a new study published in Perspectives on Psychological Science shows—as others have—that deliberate practice is just one factor that makes world sports champions. “More or less across the board, practice will improve one’s performance,” says Brooke Macnamara, a psychologist at Case Western University and lead author of the study. At a certain level of success, however, other factors determine who is the absolute best, she says.

Macnamara and her colleagues analyzed 34 studies that—put together—had tracked the number of hours 2,765 athletes had practiced. Those studies also recorded the athletes’ achievements, as determined by either objective measure such as a race time, expert rating of performance or membership in elite groups. For sports at all levels, including athletes performing at a state level or in clubs, deliberate practice could explain 18 percent of the differences in achievement between athletes. But when the researchers looked only at the very best competitors—those who had competed in the Olympics or other world competitions—differences in the number of hours they had practiced explained just 1 percent of the difference in their performance at sporting events.

… Humans are born to run, but technique can be coached, trained and improved. When we are young we naturally progress from crawling to walking to running, most likely driven by the desire to explore and get to places more quickly. As we grow, we improve how we run, developing from a fast toddle to a more efficient pace. This changing style not only improves efficiency but is also essential to reduce risk of injury.

My highest mileage week ever was 158 miles and at the time I actually felt fresh, strong and up for more! Earlier this year, after returning from injury, I was struggling to run 40 miles in a week without feeling absolutely shattered and in need of an extra 20 hours sleep in the week. So, assuming I haven’t suddenly lost the ability to train hard, what’s the difference between the two weeks?

The answer is consistency, progression and my body’s current understanding of what is ‘normal’. I always say to runners on relatively low mileage that they’d be surprised what their bodies can actually handle. With some sensible small weekly increases, you can teach yourself to adapt to a new higher level of mileage that will soon become your new norm.

There’s plenty of banter surrounding the importance of carbohydrates in an athlete’s diet. The banter comes out of four different camps. You have the Paleo enthusiast, Ketogenic dieters, Carb Back Loading believers, and finally the Traditionalist. Each camp holds its set of beliefs to how an athlete should manage their carb intake. Some believe that athletes require a limited amount, or should strictly consider carbohydrates from specific sources, while others believe carbohydrates should make up the bulk of caloric intake. I’m on the side of limiting carbohydrate intake for offensive line athletes for many different reasons. This post isn’t about persuading you to join either side of the debate. It’s to help you make the best food choices that allow you to be your best during training camp.

Before the 2016 Olympics had even begun last Friday, they were beset by doping controversies: virtually every Russian athlete appeared to be on some sort of performance enhancing drug and the World Anti-Doping Agency was revealed to be nearly as corrupt as FIFA. Not even a week into the Games, two athletes have already been 86’d over failed drug tests. Some Olympics athletes, it seems, will take just about anything that will afford them a small advantage. While they aren’t banned, here’s a handful of benign, bizarre, and sinister performance enhancing remedies that have been used by everyone from Olympic tennis players to sprinters to skeleton racers.

When it comes to fruit, I have a pet peeve. When people talk about fruit at cocktail parties, my only quibble is something semantic: how people use the word “the”—as in, when the strawberry arrived in North America, or how the avocado is paralyzing Central American farmers. There is no single version of each fruit any more than there is a single shade of red. To say that there is washes over the richness of fruit’s diversity. (Usually by this point, I find myself standing alone watching the ice melt in my drink.)

And yet, there is one fruit that deserves the “the” moniker, because it’s a fruit like none other. It’s the world’s most consumed fruit and spans generations as food for both toothless babies and the toothless geriatric. It’s soft, sweet, and easy to digest. It crosses historical eras, has been responsible for entire governments rising and falling, and has propped up beleaguered economies. If fruits were countries, the banana would be the world’s superpower. If fruits were pop stars, the banana would be Beyoncé.

It used to be the most valuable guy on a soccer team wore a uniform and played in the games. Not anymore.

At least not in the English Premier League, which kicks off a new season on Aug. 13. Big-money deals have become so prolific, the key person in many EPL organizations may now be the accountant who keeps track of it all.

If Manchester United’s $146-million transfer for French midfielder Paul Pogba gets done, the team, which already had the most expensive player in the EPL in Wayne Rooney, will have spent nearly $240 million on four others in the last two months. Chelsea spent $85 million on forward Michy Batshuayi and midfielder N’Golo Kante. Arsenal spent $46 million on midfielder Granit Xhaka.

Analysis by statistical experts from the Centre for Sports Business at the University of Salford has revealed the impact just two star signings could make to Manchester United’s season.

Ibrahimovic and Pogba will be joining Jose Mourinho’s squad for next season, after protracted negotiations in Pogba’s case. Now SAM, the Sport Analytics Machine, which has been developed by statisticians using a series of algorithms, and is able to forecast the results of a variety of sporting fixtures, has given its verdict on the signings.

Between them striker Ibrahimovic and midfielder Pogba can be expected to add a huge 10 points to United’s total at the end of the season, despite neither impressing at the Euro 16 tournament. That means it could be money well spent as ten extra points last season would have left United in the lucrative Champion’s League places. And together they increase United’s chances of winning the league from 2% to 6%.