Applied Sports Science newsletter – September 1, 2016

Searchable archived newsletters are now available: http://sports.bradstenger.com/category/newsletters/applied-sports-science-newsletter/

Michael Phelps spent countless hours in the pool as he geared up for his fifth appearance in the Olympic Games this summer in Rio. But to help get back to his peak form, the swimming legend got some help from the suite of fitness technology by his sponsor Under Armour UA -4.64% .

Under Armour shared with Fortune some key data that it helped collect for Phelps as he geared up for Rio. One interesting finding: in the 373 nights leading up the Rio Olympics, Phelps averaged seven hours and 36 minutes of sleep. He aimed to get as close to that target as possible while in Rio as well.

… “I have been talking to a psychologist about football,” Huff said. “I have been too hard on myself when dropping balls. I also know that it will happen in this league. It’s a long season; you’re not going to catch every pass. That’s what I had to realize.

“I did it some last year (sports psychologist), and it didn’t help me too much. The one that I have now, he’s amazing. He is helping me elevate my game. I had a pregame routine that I got away from but after talking to him, I started doing it again.”

The ‘thing’ that Huff got back to doing was going out on the field before the game or before practice and collecting his thoughts. He envisions himself making plays.

Former Jacksonville Jaguars running back Fred Taylor says he was never told by doctors during his 13-year career that he had suffered a fractured collarbone and injuries in each shoulder.

Taylor said on his official Twitter account Wednesday morning that he underwent a full orthopedic exam in Chicago last week, and 11 MRIs and 12 X-rays revealed that he had partially torn labrums in each shoulder and at one point suffered a fractured clavicle.

Taylor tweeted that the doctors he was referred to by the NFL never informed him of those injuries.

Larry Sanders leaned on the kitchen island in his house in Sherman Oaks, California, on a Friday afternoon. He had just eaten spaghetti with red sauce and he was explaining to me how, and why, he did not need the NBA—unless, that is, he got the NBA on precisely his terms. If playing again meant things being like they were before, when he was miserable and far removed from being the person he wanted to be, then he would be out for good.

“I won’t put myself in that situation again,” he said. “Honestly, there will never be the urgency to do it. I don’t care if I’m dead broke on the beach somewhere, because I understand—I truly believe in my heart—there’s too many things to do in this world.”

This was June. A month later, reports that Sanders was contemplating un-retirement would send the basketball world into convulsions.

… What I learned, when I got to the NBA, was that my dreams of fraternity were naïve ones. I sat in locker rooms where players barely spoke to one another. I endured team plane rides where one guy stared daggers at the next because of a contract dispute.

Consequently, I barely batted an eye at the recent “revelation” that Bradley Beal and John Wall don’t much like one another.

Of course they don’t like each other, I thought. That’s just the way it is.

The question is: should it be?

Objectives

We examined a model, informed by self-regulation theories from the health psychology literature, which included goal adjustment capacities, appraisals of challenge and threat, coping, and well-being.
Design

Prospective.
Methods

Two-hundred and twelve athletes from the United Kingdom (n = 147) or Australia (n = 65), who played team (n = 135) or individual sports (n = 77), and competed at international (n = 7), national (n = 11), county (n = 67), club (n = 84), or beginner (n = 43) levels participated in this study. Participants completed measures of goal adjustment capacities and stress appraisals two days before competing. Athletes also completed coping and well-being questionnaires within 3 h of their competition ending.
Results

The way an athlete responded to an unattainable goal was associated with his or her well-being in the period leading up to and including the competition. Goal reengagement positively predicted well-being, whereas goal disengagement negatively predicted well-being. Further, goal reengagement was positively associated with challenge appraisals, which in turn was linked to task-oriented coping, and task-oriented coping positively associated with well-being.
Conclusion

When highly-valued goals become unattainable, consultants and coaches could encourage athletes to generate alternative approaches to achieve the same goal or help them develop a completely new goal in order to promote well-being among athletes.

Practitioners and coaches often use external training load variables such as distance run and the number of high-speed running (HSR) activities to quantify football training. However, an important component of the external load may be overlooked when acceleration activities are not considered. The aim of this study was to describe the within-microcycle distribution of external load, including acceleration, during in-season 1-game weeks in an elite football team. Global Positioning System technology was used to collect time-motion data from 12 representative 7-day microcycles across a competitive season (48 training days, 295 data sets). Training time, total distance (TD), high-speed running (HSR) distance (>5.8 m·s?1), sprint running distance (>6.7 m·s?1) and acceleration variables were recorded during each training session. Data were analysed for interday and interposition differences using mixed linear modeling. The distribution of external load was characterized by the second training day of the microcycle (5 days prematch) exhibiting the highest values for all variables of training load, with the fourth day (1 day prematch) exhibiting the lowest values. Central midfield players covered ?8–16% greater TD than other positions excluding wide midfielders (p ? 0.03, d = 0.2–0.4) and covered ?17% greater distance accelerating 1–2 m·s?2 than central defenders (p = 0.03, d = 0.7). When expressed relative to training duration and TD, the magnitude of interday and interposition differences were markedly reduced (p = 0.03, d = 0.2–0.3). When managing the distribution of training load, practitioners should be aware of the intensity of training sessions and consider the density of external load within sessions.

Focusing only on one sport, year-round, can increase kids’ risk of injury and burnout, according to a clinical report from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).

Authors of the guidance document, Dr. Joel S. Brenner and the AAP Council on Sports Medicine and Fitness, advise pediatricians and parents to keep in mind that the primary focus of sports for young athletes should be to have fun and learn lifelong physical activity skills. Playing multiple sports, at least until puberty, decreases the risk of injury, stress and burnout, they add.

Specializing at a later age, perhaps in the late teens, may be a better route to accomplishing athletic goals than specializing earlier in life, upping the odds of lifetime sports involvement, lifetime physical fitness and potentially elite participation, the report concludes.

Drue Tranquill has played two seasons at Notre Dame and has torn two ACLs, limiting the safety to 14 games. As if rehabbing both knees weren’t trouble enough, he was tasked this spring with a more tedious assignment.

He was told to track his hours of sleep. And quality of sleep. And meals. And energy level, along with any looming tests or assignments or anything else that may be weighing on him away from the football field.

This assignment wasn’t limited to Tranquill or his many teammates recovering from an injury-plagued 2015 Irish season. All players had wellness questionnaires they had to fill out, uploading the information to smartphone apps in an effort to track what correlation, if any, there was between one’s overall well-being and on-field performance.

“It was a burden at first because we had to run a few times because guys weren’t filling their wellness questionnaire out,” Tranquill said. “But I think it’s something that some players sometimes see at the beginning of, ‘Oh man, it’s just another thing they’re making us do.’ But I think the coaches understand the value in it. I think we understand the value in it now.”

The rigors of the long season were starting to get to the Golden State Warriors. Back-to-backs, cross-country flights in the middle of the night, the mental and emotional toll of staying sharp through a seemingly endless season — all of these factors were wearing down the winningest team in the league.

That’s when Steve Kerr and a couple other members of his staff got an idea: Let’s mock the hell out of Luke Walton. Walton was Kerr’s top assistant, a rising star in the coaching world who would go on to become the Lakers’ new head coach in April 2016. He’d won multiple championships as a player, and held additional status within the game as the son of one of the greatest players of all time.

On this day, nobody cared. Seeking to snap his team out of its malaise, Kerr ordered the team into the video room to watch some important film: Walton’s devastating acting performance on “The Young and The Restless.”

New technology has produced massive piles of data about everything that happens on a baseball diamond. For both players and MLB front offices, all kinds of answers are in there—finding an edge is all about asking the right questions.

Remember the summer of analytics?

NHL teams tripping over themselves to hire the best and the brightest and hockey-based data analysts were going to turn spreadsheets into knowledge and deliver that extra edge.

It felt as if was going to be revolution.

Two years later — outside of growing comfort with terms like “puck possession” and “zone entries” — the sport neither looks nor feels revolutionized.

The introduction of Statcast has marked the beginning of a new era in baseball, at least from a stathead’s perspective. The revolutionary new tracking system calculates metrics such as exit velocity and launch angle, which have already provided us with new insights on baseball’s inner workings. But while Statcast is so far surpassing the wildest dreams of sabermetricians, the tracking system remains a work in progress, with gaps in its powers of observation.

The system itself is a technical marvel. A Doppler radar (which tracks high-speed objects, like the ball) combined with a camera tracking array (which tracks low-speed objects, like the players), Statcast integrates these two sources of information to monitor the position and velocity of every object and person on the field. This setup generates a greater volume of data in a single game than was collected in all of MLB’s previous history combined.1

But that data isn’t always easy to analyze. Front office analysts I spoke with said that Statcast’s radars frequently lose track of batted balls on atypical trajectories — for example, with extremely high (popup) or low (chopper) angles.

In what may be a first-ever exhaustive health study of intercollegiate student-athletes, a team of CU Boulder researchers will gauge not only athletes’ fitness but also their general well-being.

“Certain athletic departments will carry out their own assessments during their respective seasons, or among different domains, such as studying concussions,” said Matt McQueen, director of CU Boulder’s Public Health Program.

“But I have not seen a study of this depth,” he said, noting that researchers aim to get a snapshot of a wide range of health data “to generate new hypotheses or perhaps new interventions.”

… Hitters somehow manage to succeed at this deeply complex task, generally getting a hit about a quarter of the time. But exactly how they do it remains a mystery. Being quick or strong is no guarantee of success: There are many examples of athletically gifted players who didn’t make it because they couldn’t hit well enough.

Now, two neuroscientists have focused on an understudied aspect of hitting: the brain. They have developed a way to measure brain activity just before and during the act of hitting, and they think their approach can help unravel the neural processes that underlie the skill — and perhaps help hitters improve.