Applied Sports Science newsletter – August 18, 2016

Applied Sports Science news articles, blog posts and research papers for August 18, 2016

 

Stanford Cardinal running back Christian McCaffrey is his own man

ESPN College Football, Andrew Corsello from August 17, 2016

… The intensity of this kid! There’s an immersion and stillness and deep rhythmic groove he achieves as he traces with his right index finger the motions plotted out for him and his teammates while also quietly incanting their mnemonic tethers. White. Sixty. Ox. Robin. One row over, one of McCaffrey’s teammates, smirking, unburdens himself. It’s silent but deadly — a weaponized, wet-velvet, all-but-visible wave of flatulence that warps the air of the cabin. I exclaim Save us from Satan while pulling my shirt collar over my nose and mouth. Others around me do the same (more or less). But not McCaffrey. No, McCaffrey is in his bubble, impervious, tracing, incanting, learning, maintaining his rhythm: After “finishing” a given play, he moves on, then returns exactly five minutes later to test his retention.

It’s not the intensity that I’m loath to disturb but the earnestness. It somehow seems of a piece with his regard for the flight attendant making the safety announcement, quietly touching in the same way. I table my voice recorder for the moment and open a notebook. Perhaps because McCaffrey happens to be a pretty good self-taught pop-song pianist (again, see YouTube), I scribble this mincing fancy: Like a conservatory piano student working his way through a Chopin étude. The instant I do, though, another, even less appetizing, phrase bubbles up to consciousness. That phrase.

 

Core Stability in Athletes: A Critical Analysis of Current Guidelines | SpringerLink

Sports Medicine from July 30, 2016

Over the last two decades, exercise of the core muscles has gained major interest in professional sports. Research has focused on injury prevention and increasing athletic performance. We analyzed the guidelines for so-called functional strength training for back pain prevention and found that programs were similar to those for back pain rehabilitation; even the arguments were identical. Surprisingly, most exercise specifications have neither been tested for their effectiveness nor compared with the load specifications normally used for strength training. Analysis of the scientific literature on core stability exercises shows that adaptations in the central nervous system (voluntary activation of trunk muscles) have been used to justify exercise guidelines. Adaptations of morphological structures, important for the stability of the trunk and therefore the athlete’s health, have not been adequately addressed in experimental studies or in reviews. In this article, we explain why the guidelines created for back pain rehabilitation are insufficient for strength training in professional athletes. We critically analyze common concepts such as ‘selective activation’ and training on unstable surfaces.

 

Science of suffering

Runner's World, UK from August 12, 2016

Each ragged breath feels like fire being torn from your lungs, your heart is thudding like a basketball on the court floor, your muscles throb, each footstep sends shock waves through your body. Every fibre of your being implores, ‘Stop!’

Running certainly hurts when you’re pushing hard. But according to researchers from California State University, who interviewed elite cyclists about pain and its relationship to performance, it is a type of pain that must be confronted by anyone who wants to succeed in endurance sports. It’s easy to assume the likes of Mo Farah have an innate ability to withstand the pain of extreme effort, but Dr Lex Mauger, who is studying the role of pain in exercise at the University of Kent, believes this is not the case. ‘Rather than saying athletes feel less pain, it’s more about their willingness to tolerate it,’ he says.

Mauger believes that pain is very much involved in limiting endurance performance. ‘It may contribute to task disengagement or reductions in work rate that are manifested in an athlete’s pacing strategy as a protective mechanism,’ he says. In one study, he found the use of a painkiller (paracetamol) could improve power output, reduce time to complete a set-distance time trial and prolong time to exhaustion, strongly supporting the idea that pain limits performance.

 

What does it take to break a world record at the Olympics?

SI.com, Michael J. Joyner from August 15, 2016

During the Olympic Games, I get a lot of questions about what it takes to medal and set a world record. When someone like Katie Ledecky breaks records by wide margins and dominates the competition, the inquiries come fast and furious.

There are five broad factors to think about when explain a record-setting athletic performance: physiology, technique, technology, sociology and psychology.

 

Are there critical fatigue thresholds? Aggregated vs. individual data.

Frontiers in Physiology from August 15, 2016

The mechanisms underlying task failure from fatiguing physical efforts have been the focus of many studies without reaching consensus. An attractive but debated model explains effort termination with a critical peripheral fatigue threshold. Upon reaching this threshold, feedback from sensory afferents would trigger task disengagement from open-ended tasks or a reduction of exercise intensity of closed-ended tasks. Alternatively, the extant literature also appears compatible with a more global critical threshold of loss of maximal voluntary contraction force. Indeed, maximal voluntary contraction force loss from fatiguing exercise realized at a given intensity appears rather consistent between different studies. However, when looking at individual data, the similar maximal force losses observed between different tasks performed at similar intensities might just be an “artifact” of data aggregation. It would then seem possible that such a difference observed between individual and aggregated data also applies to other models previously proposed to explain task failure from fatiguing physical efforts. We therefore suggest that one should be cautious when trying to infer models that try to explain individual behavior from aggregated data.

 

Visual Business Intelligence – The Myth of Expertise Transference

Stephen Few, Visual Business Intelligence blog from August 12, 2016

During the long course of my professional life, I’ve observed a disturbing trend. People sometimes claim expertise in one field based on experience in another. This is a fallacious and deceitful claim. I have extensive experience in visual design, but I cannot claim expertise in architecture. Any building that I designed would most certainly crumble around me. I’m a skilled teacher, but this does not qualify me as a psychotherapist. That hasn’t stopped me from occasionally giving advice to friends, but without charge, which probably matches its worth. Although these fields of endeavor overlap in some ways, expertise in one does not convey expertise in another. No concert violinist would claim the transfer of that virtuosity to the saxophone, but IT professionals sometimes make claims that are every bit as audacious.

The field of business intelligence (BI) provides striking examples of this trend. When BI initially emerged, data warehousing was the pre-existing field of endeavor that supplied BI with most of its initial workers and technologies. Years earlier, relational database theory and management supplied most of the initial workers and technologies of data warehousing. Today, the field of endeavor that goes by such names as analytics, data science, data visualization, and performance management, is the domain of workers and technologies that were previously associated with BI and in many cases still are. I know several individuals who began their careers as experts in relational databases, who then moved into data warehousing, and then into BI, and finally into analytics and its kin without actually developing expertise in any but their initial field of endeavor. Instead, they made names for themselves in relational databases or data warehousing, and then transferred that moniker to each subsequent field of endeavor with little study or experience, and thus little skill. Many of the people who give keynotes today at BI/Analytics/Big Data conferences and who write white papers on related topics fall into this category. This is one of the reasons why domains related to analytics are so confusing, hype-filled, and poorly realized.

 

How to raise a future Olympian

Today's Parent from August 10, 2016

Every day at noon, while the other kids fool around in the cafeteria, 13-year-old Ryan Oehrlein heads out the door. He does gymnastics by himself for four hours at a gym in Milton, Ont. There are no lineups at the apparatuses, no small talk, nothing to make him stop and catch his breath. It’s so quiet that he’s happy when the preschool program is going on. “That’s how lonely it gets. I look forward to little recreation kids coming,” says Ryan.

Ryan hopes to compete at the Olympics one day. This summer, as the London Summer Games take place, many kids will join Ryan in embracing that dream. Their parents might cheer them on, but do they know what it takes to raise an Olympian? It won’t be just the child who makes the sacrifice.

The glory at the end of the day may be worth it, but the life of a parent of an Olympic hopeful is a stretched thin one. It’s an existence defined by crammed in routines and hours driving or waiting on the bleachers. Vacations and friends outside the sport dwindle. Many parents can’t consider a job opportunity if it means moving away from the coach or messing up the training schedule. Some families with elite-level athletes pull up their roots entirely and move provinces to access better training for their kids.

“It’s a tough slog being a parent of an elite athlete,” says Nick Holt, professor at the University of Alberta’s Faculty of Physical Education and Recreation in Edmonton. “I try to encourage parents to go into it with their eyes wide open.”

 

Topsportslab directs the Red Lions in their physical development journey towards Rio 2016 Olympic success – Topsportslab

Topsportslab from August 06, 2016

In 2008 the Belgium’s National men’s hockey team (BNT) qualified for the first time in history for the Olympics in Beijing. They ended 9th but missed an Olympic Certificate. In 2010 TopSportsLab was introduced by the physical and medical staff to support them in a scientific way in terms of continuous monitoring and injury prevention.

 

Current knee cartilage repair algorithms

Aspetar Sports Medicine Journal, Tommy S. de Windt from August 10, 2016

… musculoskeletal injuries are common in sports and correspond to 80% of all sport-related injuries. Joint injuries, especially in the knee, have become more common due to the increase in physical activity of both young and old participants in sport at all levels. Activities that involve running, jumping, physical contact and fast changes in direction impose an additional burden on the knee, with forces that can reach up to 10 times body weight. The intensity and level at which sports are played have dramatically increased in the last century resulting in even more strain on the musculoskeletal system. Not surprisingly, a European emergency department found 8% of all injuries to be knee injuries related to sports and recreation.

The exact incidence and prevalence of cartilage defects remains unknown.

 

Time Trends in Incidence and Severity of Injury Among Collegiate Soccer Players in the United States

American Journal of Sports Medicine from August 15, 2016

Background: A number of sociocultural and environmental changes have occurred over the past several decades that may affect the risk of injury among young athletes playing soccer.

Purpose: To identify trends in injury incidence and severity between 2 time periods (1990-1996 and 2004-2009) in both male and female National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) soccer players in the United States.

Design: Descriptive epidemiology study.

Methods: Data were analyzed from the NCAA Injury Surveillance System. The rate ratio (RR), along with the 95% Wald CI, compared incidence density in 2004-2009 relative to that in 1990-1996.

Results: Overall sex-pooled injury rates were significantly lower in the 2004-2009 cohort compared with the 1990-1996 cohort (RR = 0.88; 95% CI = 0.86-0.91), and this was true for almost every category of injury studied. We observed only 1 significant sex difference between the time periods with regard to noncontact injuries, as men experienced a significant increase in rate of noncontact injuries between 1990-1996 and 2004-2009 (RR = 1.09; 95% CI = 1.02-1.17), whereas women experienced a significant decrease (RR = 0.70; 95% CI = 0.67-0.75).

Conclusion: These surveillance data show decreasing trends in collegiate soccer injuries. Whether these decreases are attributable to greater resources being allocated toward athlete health, injury management, or the safety of the playing environment cannot be determined. Given the prominence of soccer play in the United States, public health efforts should promote the use of this surveillance system to better inform and evaluate injury prevention practices and policies directed toward player safety.

 

Rutgers’ Revamped Focus on Nutrition

SB Nation, On the Banks blog from August 16, 2016

In both professional and collegiate sports, especially football, there has been a large trend of ‘Sports Science.’ Thanks to Chip Kelly, the concept of Sports Science has made its way into the NFL and now into most of collegiate football and its overall athletics.

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Rutgers, with pretty much an entirely new staff, has made it a large focus of training camp to make sure their players are getting rest and water and Gatorade and proper nutrition in their meals.

The Twitter account, @RUfueledup, has been on a Twitter rampage since the beginning of practices started by showing the public the necessary steps one should take for a successful camp and a healthy body throughout the rigorous grind.

 

Higher, faster, farther: doping at the Summer Olympics

STAT from August 16, 2016

Booze?! Seriously?

It’s true: The first banned substance an Olympian was caught using was ethanol. At the 1968 Mexico City Games, Sweden’s Hans-Gunnar Liljenwall helped power his country to third place in the pentathlon, only to see the bronze medal go to France when he failed a drug test and got his team disqualified.

The International Olympic Committee had adopted rules against performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) the year before, and while alcohol might not be one’s first choice of a PED, Liljenwall acknowledged that he’d downed a couple of beers before the pistol shooting part of the pentathlon. As countless suds fans across the centuries can attest, it does wonders to calm jittery nerves and provide fortitude for the challenge ahead.

 

How previous steroid use could give a boost for entire athletic career – The Globe and Mail

The Globe and Mail from August 15, 2016

… even when athletes quit cheating, the effects of doping can have long-lasting consequences that extend beyond the damage to their reputations. According to experts who study muscle physiology, the use of anabolic steroids may lead to changes in the body that last for the duration of one’s athletic career, and potentially even a lifetime.

The critical issue is how anabolic steroids (of which the most commonly used by athletes is a synthetic form of testosterone) affect what’s known as muscle memory. Muscle memory is believed to be the reason why people who work out seem to bounce back quickly in fitness, regaining muscle strength and size, even after taking a break. There are a few possible explanations for how it works.

 

Running Circles around Us: East African Olympians’ Advantage May Be More Than Physical

Scientific American, Frank Bures from August 05, 2016

… The reigning theory in the West is that runners from east Africa have some evolutionary advantage over runners from other backgrounds. Because so many of the elite runners come from the Oromo ethnic group in Ethiopia and the Kalenjin tribes in Kenya, it is assumed these groups must have adaptations or environments that make them faster. Perhaps it was their pastoralist fathers and grandfathers who spent generations running after cattle. Maybe their ancestors “persistence hunted,” chasing animals until they tired and could be easily killed. It could be their longer, thinner legs or their increased lung capacity from living at relatively high altitudes. In an attempt to find answers, researchers have collected DNA from across the region. Yannis Pitsiladis, a sports physiologist and geneticist from the University of Brighton in England, recently told The New York Times, “We know genes are important. We just don’t know which ones they are.”

Garrett Ash, an exercise physiologist at the Yale School of Nursing who studied Ethiopian runners with Pitsiladis, agrees. “Based on my work, and my reading of the literature,” he says, “you can’t say there’s any ancestral genetic advantage to being born in Ethiopia. It has a very heterogeneous ancestry. That being said, you do need to pick your parents and grandparents carefully. There are certain genetic variants that are required to compete at those elite levels. Oftentimes it’s a gene–environment interaction. But there’s a lot of work to be done to see what those genes actually are.”

 

ACTN3 R577X and ACE I/D gene variants influence performance in elite sprinters: a multi-cohort study

BMC Genomics from April 23, 2016

Background

To date, studies investigating the association between ACTN3 R577X and ACE I/D gene variants and elite sprint/power performance have been limited by small cohorts from mixed sport disciplines, without quantitative measures of performance. Aim: To examine the association between these variants and sprint time in elite athletes.
Methods

We collected a total of 555 best personal 100-, 200-, and 400-m times of 346 elite sprinters in a large cohort of elite Caucasian or African origin sprinters from 10 different countries. Sprinters were genotyped for ACTN3 R577X and ACE ID variants.
Results

On average, male Caucasian sprinters with the ACTN3 577RR or the ACE DD genotype had faster best 200-m sprint time than their 577XX (21.19?±?0.53 s vs. 21.86?±?0.54 s, p?=?0.016) and ACE II (21.33?±?0.56 vs. 21.93?±?0.67 sec, p?=?0.004) counterparts and only one case of ACE II, and no cases of ACTN3 577XX, had a faster 200-m time than the 2012 London Olympics qualifying (vs. 12 qualified sprinters with 577RR or 577RX genotype). Caucasian sprinters with the ACE DD genotype had faster best 400-m sprint time than their ACE II counterparts (46.94?±?1.19 s vs. 48.50?±?1.07 s, p?=?0.003). Using genetic models we found that the ACTN3 577R allele and ACE D allele dominant model account for 0.92 % and 1.48 % of sprint time variance, respectively.
Conclusions

Despite sprint performance relying on many gene variants and environment, the % sprint time variance explained by ACE and ACTN3 is substantial at the elite level and might be the difference between a world record and only making the final. [full text]

 

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