Applied Sports Science newsletter – August 17, 2016

… The pressure is certainly being felt by the players. Their performances so far have surprised the local media, who were optimistic ahead of the games after being so impressed by new Olympic coach Rogerio Micale both on and off the training field.

The decision not to include a sports psychologist was the only point of contention. On the first day of press conferences in Teresopolis, site coordinator Erasmo Damiani was asked to explain the notable absence.

The way people make decisions in the real world is a topic of increasing interest among psychologists, social scientists, economists, and others. It determines how economies perform, how elections are run, and how conflicts break out and get resolved.

One idea has provided a focal point for decision-making research. This is the notion of bounded rationality—that people are limited by various constraints in the real world, and these play a crucial role in the decision-making process. People are limited by the difficulty of the decision they have to make, their own decision-making skill, and the time they can spend on the problem. Nevertheless, whatever the circumstances, a decision has to be made and the consequences accepted.

That raises an important set of questions. How do these factors influence the quality of the decision being made? Does time pressure have a bigger impact than, say, decision-making skill on the quality of a decision?

For many years I lived in Eugene, Oregon, also known as “track-town USA” for its long tradition in track and field. Each summer high-profile meets like the United States National Championships or Olympic Trials would bring world-class competitors to the University of Oregon’s Hayward Field. It was exciting to bump into great athletes at the local cafe or ice cream shop, or even find myself lifting weights or running on a track next to them. One morning I was shocked to be passed as if standing still by a woman running 400-meter repeats. Her training pace was as fast as I could run a flat out sprint over a much shorter distance.

The simple fact was that she was an extreme outlier, and I wasn’t. Athletic performance follows a normal distribution, like many other quantities in nature. That means that the number of people capable of exceptional performance falls off exponentially as performance levels increase. While an 11-second 100-meter can win a high school student the league or district championship, a good state champion runs sub-11, and among 100 state champions only a few have any hope of running near 10 seconds.

Keep going along this curve, and you get to the freaks among freaks—competitors who shatter records and push limits beyond imagination. When Carl Lewis dominated sprinting in the late 1980s, sub-10 second 100m times were rare, and anything in the 10-second flat range guaranteed a high finish, even at the Olympics. Lewis was a graceful 6 feet 2 inches, considered tall for a sprinter. Heights much greater than his were supposed to be a disadvantage for a sprinter, forcing a slower cadence and reduced speeds—at least that was the conventional wisdom.

So no one anticipated the coming of a Usain Bolt. At a muscular 6 feet 5 inches, and finishing almost half a second faster than the best of the previous generation, he seemed to come from another species entirely.

Specific football drills improve the development of technical/tactical and physical variables in players. Based on this principle, in recent years it has been possible to observe in daily training a growing volume of small-sided and conditioned games. These games are smaller and modified forms of formal games that augment players’ perception of specific tactics. Despite this approach, the assessment of players’ knowledge and tactical execution has not been well documented, due mainly to the difficulty in measuring tactical behavior. For that reason, this study aims to provide a narrative review about the tactical assessment of football training by using representative tasks to measure the tactical expertise of youth football players during small-sided and conditioned games. This study gives an overview of the ecological approach to training and the principles used for representative task design, providing relevant contribution and direction for future research into the assessment of tactical expertise in youth football. [full text]

Most of us are fascinated by the achievements and successes of elite athletes, who train for years to have the opportunity to reach their goals on the world stage.

These sportspeople show us what’s possible for the human body – how fast we can move, how far and high we can jump, how strong or graceful we can be. But what goes on in the mind of an elite athlete performing at their peak?

Athletes’ psychological states – the temporary, brief, subjective experiences that happen during exceptional performance – are often collectively described as “the zone”. A recent example was British Open winner Henrik Stenson, who was described as “not just in the zone … but on a crest of inspiration”.

But the latest research shows there are two psychological states underlying excellent performances in elite sport – two different zones. Professional golfers describe these as “letting it happen” and “making it happen”.

… Reading through the fairytale of Leicester City FC, one of the most interesting things I have found was that most of their backroom staff stayed as Claudio Ranieri took over the manager’s seat from Nigel Pearson just before last season started. In many cases where there is a change in the managerial position, the new manager brings his own staff with him. The backroom staff – management staff, scouts, match analysts, sport scientists, strength and conditioning coaches, physiotherapists, sport psychologists, nutritionists – have all been praised by the media for their ecstatic success (Singer – Dailymail, 2016), most of them (only two came over with Ranieri) carrying over the work that had been processed under Pearson, blending well into the new system from Ranieri. Thai owner, Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha, had huge trust in his staff. Pearson, who helped the club to get promoted to Premiership in 2014 and had a greatest escape from the relegations in 2014/15 season that created the momentum of the club’s success through the last season, implemented a crucial philosophy with this backroom staff that initiated high performance model of the club’s success. In a talk after the promotion to the Premier League in 2014, Pearson stated “If everyone improves by a couple of percent, it very quickly adds ups. That is really what it’s about” (Jackson & Aloia – BBC Sport, 2014). This type of training philosophy is mostly acquired in sports like track and field or any other performance based sport where the winning and losing is separated by a very marginal difference of time frame. In those sports, when athletes are at the highest level, the performance gains are very small at a time but it is important to have marginal gains progressively over time to add up. As the graph shows below, the performance increment is huge at the beginning but becomes marginal as it gets close to the maximal potential (highest level); the rate of adaptation is high at low performance, but drops as the performance improves.

… In 2015, [Tom] Vernon led a team of investors to buy top-tier Danish soccer club FC Nordsjælland and soon afterwards installed Keith Sharpe to be Group Head of Character Development, a newly created role Vernon believes is a world first. He told the Leaders Performance Institute why he’d done it.

It actually started at the academy in Africa. We wanted to do things differently – by embracing the power of football to create positive role models for Africa (with our group now having a European club, our vision simply extends to create global role models). We quickly realised that the European style academies – where players are often released at the end of a season if they haven’t performed – wasn’t working. These kids are going back to nothing and the fear of that was hindering performance, so we decided to make long-term commitments to our students. We have an extensive scouting network throughout West Africa, where we assess 20,000 boys and girls annually, on our core foundations. We then award scholarships between 10 and 18 years of age.

… Put simply, Guardiola loves talking about football. It’s a process that begins the first time he meets his players, continues throughout every training session (“He interjects all the time to correct and explain exactly what he wants from us,” recalled Dani Alves of Pep’s early days at Barcelona) and even extends to individual chats every day. Praise is effusive when merited.

Guardiola typically spends two hours per day discussing one-on-one the positional minutiae of what he demands from his players. Entirely self-taught as a player, Jerome Boateng has been the biggest beneficiary at Bayern Munich, adding brains to his prodigious centre-back brawn, while Philipp Lahm still spends 15 minutes after every training session talking in minute detail about midfield play, his hands a blur of explanatory signals. For more instinctive players such as Franck Ribery, less is more.

“Pep doesn’t just give you orders,” said Gerard Pique. “He also explains why.”

In 2001, a professional runner named Gregory Jimmerson headed up to Mammoth Lakes, California, to spend a couple of weeks running with his old friend and rival Meb Keflezighi. The two were born three months apart, and they’d been roughly as good when younger. Both had come in second at the national high-school cross-country championships as seniors—Jimmerson in 1992 and Meb in 1993. As a senior at Stanford, in 1996, Jimmerson had been the fastest American at the N.C.A.A. cross-country championships. Meb, who attended U.C.L.A, finished a few places behind. The next year, Meb, who is universally known in the running world by his first name, won the race.

When he went to Mammoth Lakes, Jimmerson was still training intensively and had Olympic aspirations. But he had studied engineering in college and had begun working forty-hour weeks at a company that produced lasers. Meb focussed only on running. They worked out together, but Meb’s routine after he took off his shoes startled Jimmerson. “He would finish the workout and immediately get a protein shake, and then he’d go sit in an ice bath or the creek,” Jimmerson told me. “Then he’d get massaged and stretched and do core workouts. Then he’d take a nap and do it again.” Meb even had a tiny pool where he could run in place, Jimmerson noted, allowing him to get in additional workouts without pounding his legs. The sport itself doesn’t take that much time: Meb was running only about twelve hours a week. But he had turned his preparation into a full-time job. Jimmerson realized he didn’t have that kind of commitment. “It was an all-consuming life style with a singular focus,” he said. “That’s where his strength was.”

When backup quarterback Scott Tolzien left Green Bay for Indianapolis this offseason, he decided to do something radical: He wrote down on paper everything he learned, and he got a binder in which to carry Indy’s plays. In the five years since teams started assigning tablets to players, the NFL, along with the rest of the world, has moved away from paper and toward screens. But not Tolzien, who started to realize “as I was getting older” that he wanted to write things down. (It’s worth noting that Tolzien is 28.)

Though tablet usage is now so pervasive in the league that players must informally request a different method if they don’t want to use a digital playbook, not everyone is comfortable with the increased reliance on the tech, or the ensuing shift in how coaches teach and players learn. Virtual reality training techniques continue to emerge, and there are seemingly endless ways to give players what they want on a tablet, but while football people are willing to admit that a tech-first life brings plenty of advantages, they’re still grappling with a core question: Is the tablet era actually making the bulk of players better or worse?

“We’re still a notebook-binder, three-ring profession,” said Bengals coach Marvin Lewis. “And a highlighter.”

Mike Perkins has spent countless hours filming Jacksonville Jaguars practices from a scissor lift about 50 feet in the air.

It was uncomfortable, even downright scary, at times. Strong wind, sideways rain, nearby lightning, Perkins has experienced all of it.

So when Perkins, the team’s director of football technology, had the opportunity to move away from the sometimes-dangerous lifts for good, he didn’t hesitate.

Now, the Jags are one of at least 10 NFL teams that have partially or completely eliminated scissor lifts and switched to mobile “mast cams,” which have high-definition cameras atop high-reaching poles and are controlled remotely from the ground.

Ever wondered what happens when a player arrives for a medical – and why it sometimes takes so long to announce the completion of the transfer?
Well here is a brief rundown of club-record signing Borja Baston’s transfer from Atletico Madrid to the Swans.

Feeling good? If so, that’s fantastic – and also very mysterious, as I’ve learned while editing the new issue of Stanford Medicine magazine. The issue leads off with an article on a new quest to understand well-being. In it, the project’s leader notes that despite its great importance to humanity, well-being is something medical scientists have hardly investigated.

“The vast majority of biomedical research has focused on treating diseases, while a much smaller part has focused on maintaining health and maybe some prevention efforts,” said John Ioannidis, MD, DSc, professor of medicine and director of the Stanford Prevention Research Center. “There’s very, very little research that has tried to look at the big picture — what makes people happy, resilient, creative, fully exploring their potential and living not only healthy, but more-than-healthy lives.”

The LA Galaxy were among four teams in Major League Soccer that heightened their sports science and performance analysis programs by partnering with California-based company Match Analysis.

The Galaxy, Chicago Fire, Portland Timbers and Seattle Sounders FC announced earlier this month that they will be expanding their usage of Match Analysis’ performance technology and data.

“At the LA Galaxy we rely on the Match Analysis fitness reports and player tracking data to monitor the intensity and work load of our players throughout the season,” Ivan Pierra, LA Galaxy Director of Sports Science Department said in a statement. “This data is crucial for customizing our team and individual fitness requirements.”

No, it’s not just you. From Michael Phelps to Kristin Armstrong, the 43-year-old American cyclist who just won her third gold in three consecutive Games, Olympic athletes really are getting older.

Take the rowing discipline of sculling: the average age of finalists in the Olympics has steadily risen from 24 in 1976 to 31 in the 2012 London Games. And the average age of retirement for all rowers who’ve won three or more gold medals increased by 15 years to 39 between the 1980 Moscow Games and London.

The U.S. is fielding 137 athletes 30 or older in Rio—25 percent of the entire team (and 15 more team members will celebrate that birthday this year). So what’s causing this gradual upward jog in age?