Applied Sports Science newsletter – September 2, 2016

Sometimes I send a Saturday newsletter to clear out a backlog of material sitting in the newsletter production queue. There are about double the number of items in this queue-clearing newsletter compared to the regular weekday email newsletter.

The events of this past MLS weekend bring to mind a line from the 1999 Guy Ritchie film, Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. Several of the movie’s bad guys are being peppered with BB gun fire when the leader of the gang exasperatedly demands “Could everyone stop getting shot?”

For MLS, let’s just change that last word. Could everyone stop getting injured?

A number of high profile players will miss crucial portions of the season’s final two months with injuries. Last weekend spared just a few playoff contending clubs from the bad luck.

The final week of the preseason is the edgiest of times for NFL players on the bubble. We tracked three young linebackers as they battled to make it for 2016

Daniel Lieberman has spent much of his professional career exploring how natural selection shaped humans into one of the best endurance athletes on the planet. Now he is investigating how evolution simultaneously honed a propensity to laziness. “It is natural and normal to be physically lazy,” he writes in a recent paper, “Is Exercise Really Medicine? An Evolutionary Perspective.” Lieberman reconciles the apparent juxtaposition of evolutionary forces, showing how competing mandates to run or to rest affect human behavior, physiology, and health. He explains the deep origins of the obesity epidemic—40 percent of women, 35 percent of men, and 17 percent of children in the United States are obese—and by pinpointing the causes, points to a solution. In an interview, Lieberman even suggests how Harvard could make changes to support student well-being.

Anaerobic power is a significant predictor of acceleration and top speed in team sport athletes. Historically, these findings have been applied to ice hockey although recent research has brought their validity for this sport into question. As ice hockey emphasizes the ability to repeatedly produce power, single bout anaerobic power tests should be examined to determine their ability to predict on-ice performance. We tested whether conventional off-ice anaerobic power tests could predict on-ice acceleration, top speed, and repeated shift performance. Forty-five hockey players, aged 18–24 years, completed anthropometric, off-ice, and on-ice tests. Anthropometric and off-ice testing included height, weight, body composition, vertical jump, and Wingate tests. On-ice testing consisted of acceleration, top speed, and repeated shift fatigue tests. Vertical jump (VJ) (r = ?0.42; r = ?0.58), Wingate relative peak power (WRPP) (r = ?0.32; r = ?0.43), and relative mean power (WRMP) (r = ?0.34; r = ?0.48) were significantly correlated (p ? 0.05) to on-ice acceleration and top speed, respectively. Conversely, none of the off-ice tests correlated with on-ice repeated shift performance, as measured by first gate, second gate, or total course fatigue; VJ (r = 0.06; r = 0.13; r = 0.09), WRPP (r = 0.06; r = 0.14; r = 0.10), or WRMP (r = ?0.10; r = ?0.01; r = ?0.01). Although conventional off-ice anaerobic power tests predict single bout on-ice acceleration and top speed, they neither predict the repeated shift ability of the player, nor are good markers for performance in ice hockey.

… RSL officially broke ground on its 42-acre, $50 million soccer complex in Herriman, a scant few miles from the stadium across town. The event was drowned out to an extent by LAFC’s stadium groundbreaking on the same day, which was attended by, among others, glitzy part-owners Will Ferrell and Magic Johnson. But make no mistake, this was every bit as impressive on an operational level.

With Kobe Bryant retired after two decades in purple and gold, the Los Angeles Lakers are entering a new and somewhat uncertain era featuring a first-year head coach and a roster built around several promising young players.

And as the illustrious franchise seeks to reclaim its place among the NBA’s elite after three straight seasons of missing the playoffs, and after posting their worst record ever last season, the Lakers looked ahead Wednesday to one of the most exciting, and certain, elements of their future: their state-of-the-art $80 million training complex.

Standing before the imposing shell of a two-story, 120,000-square-foot structure that is expected to open by summer 2017, Lakers officials offered a glimpse Wednesday into the new facility while also announcing a “long-term” partnership with UCLA Health, whose name will grace the not-yet-finished building. Lakers officials said the UCLA Health Training Center will be triple the size of the team’s current training facility, the Toyota Sports Center, which sits less than a half mile away.

The landmark façade of Cole Field House stands steady and familiar as ever, but inside is a tornado of activity. The sun shines onto backhoes and bulldozers rolling across the open bowl—now stripped of its seats and floor—that in a few years will be a unique complex at the epicenter of sports science.

When completed in late 2018, the reinvented and expanded building will unite programs in academics and entrepreneurship, research in sports medicine and public health, and football operations and athletic training.

“The state-of-the-art facility we envision will define a new era for Maryland—in athletics, in research, in entrepreneurship,” says Kevin Plank ’96, founder and CEO of Under Armour, who pledged $25 million to launch the project.

Objectives

Injury management is critical in the National Basketball Association (NBA), as players experience a wide variety of injuries. Recently, it has been suggested that game schedules, such as back-to-back games and four games in five days, increase the risk of injuries in the NBA. The aim of this study was to examine the association between game schedules and player injuries in the NBA.
Design

Descriptive epidemiology study.
Methods

The present study analysed game injuries and game schedules in the 2012-13 through 2014-15 regular seasons. Game injuries by game schedules and players’ profiles were examined using an exact binomial test, the Fisher’s exact test and the Mann-Whitney-Wilcoxon test. A Poisson regression analysis was performed to predict the number of game injuries sustained by each player from game schedules and injured players’ profiles.
Results

There were a total of 681 cases of game injuries sustained by 280 different players during the three years (total N?=?1,443 players). Playing back-to-back games or playing four games in five days alone was not associated with an increased rate of game injuries, whereas a significant positive association was found between game injuries and playing away from home (p < 0.05). Playing back-to-back games and away games were significant predictors of frequent game injuries (p < 0.05).
Conclusions

Game schedules could be one factor that impacts the risk of game injuries in the NBA. The findings could be useful for designing optimal game schedules in the NBA as well as helping NBA teams make adjustments to minimise game injuries.

When establishing the effectiveness of any injury prevention intervention, knowledge about which percentage of the studied population complied with the prescribed protocol is required. Especially in an intention-to-treat (ITT) approach, insights into the compliance to the intervention provides valuable and, arguably, necessary information to judge the efficacy and effectiveness of an intervention. However, to date, it is unclear to what extent RCTs on sport injury prevention have addressed compliance measures. Therefore, the objective of this systematic review was to assess the extent to which sport injury prevention trials defined, measured and adjusted results for compliance with an injury prevention intervention.

Entering the 2016-17 NBA campaign, a number of notable players are returning to the court after suffering a significant injury last season. This includes big-name stars such as Anthony Davis (left knee), Blake Griffin (left quad), Chris Paul (right hand), John Wall (both knees) and Marc Gasol (right foot).

Every step of an injury is difficult on a player, and their eventual return is no exception. While it’s the culmination of a ton of hard work and they’re thrilled to return to the game that they love, there’s always the possibility that the individual will be limited (physically and/or mentally) at least initially.

When a player goes through an intense rehab regimen, it can drastically change their body. This forces them to make adjustments once they’re healthy enough to play again. Dan Barto, who has trained over 100 NBA players as the Head Skills Trainer at the famed IMG Academy in Florida, has seen this happen many times as a player makes a comeback.

“Any time an athlete misses an extended period of time, they typically come back and work extremely hard, but they’re working with a new body and an old mind,” Barto explained to Basketball Insiders.

… Both pain and neuroscience research show us that, when you have pain, it has less to do with the actual state of your tissue, and more to do with your brain and nervous system (2).
Pain has more to do with your brain and nervous system than with your muscles, tendons, and joints.

Quite frankly, pain is not as simple as most people, and even some health professionals, think. Pain is a multifaceted experience that is produced by multiple influences and factors (1). Pain is not simply a sensation caused by an injury, inflammation in the body, or tissue pathology (1).

Injuries often hurt because they activate specific receptors in the body called nociceptors. Nociceptors are specialized neurons that alert us to potentially damaging stimuli; they detect extremes in temperature, pressure, and compounds produced by an injury. A non-technical name for them is danger receptors.

Recent research has shown us that you actually can have pain in the body without anything being wrong in the area of that pain. You can also have “damage” and so called degenerative changes in the body without any pain.

This paper investigates the time series properties of fighting and scoring in the National Hockey League from 1957-2013. The empirical analysis focuses on identifying structural breaks in the various time series and correlating these breaks with rule changes in the NHL, especially those that focus on fighting. We find that player behavior in the areas of fighting and scoring changed structurally before rule changes in the NHL that reduced the benefits and increased the costs of fighting. The data and empirical results suggest that the rise and fall of the enforcer was a function of changes in social norms within the NHL rather than legal changes by the league itself. The example suggests that other sports might also experience changes in social norms that lead to reduced violence and increased offense before formal rule changes are made by league officials.

… New research conducted by CEB, a Washington-based best-practice insight and technology company, looks not just at why workers quit but also at when. “We’ve learned that what really affects people is their sense of how they’re doing compared with other people in their peer group, or with where they thought they would be at a certain point in life,” says Brian Kropp, who heads CEB’s HR practice. “We’ve learned to focus on moments that allow people to make these comparisons.”

Some of the discoveries are unsurprising. Work anniversaries (whether of joining the company or of moving into one’s current role) are natural times for reflection, and job-hunting activity jumps by 6% and 9%, respectively, at those points. But other data reveals factors that have nothing directly to do with work. For instance, birthdays—particularly midlife milestones such as turning 40 or 50—can prompt employees to assess their careers and take action if they’re unhappy with the results. (Job hunting jumps 12% just before birthdays.) Large social gatherings of peers, such as class reunions, can also be catalysts—they’re natural occasions for people to measure their progress relative to others’. (Job hunting jumps 16% after reunions.) Kropp says, “The big realization is that it’s not just what happens at work—it’s what happens in someone’s personal life that determines when he or she decides to look for a new job.”

Pep Guardiola, Arsene Wenger, Jose Mourinho and Carlo Ancelotti are four of the game’s most successful managers. They are fiercely motivated men, but their motivations could not be more different.

In this piece, acclaimed author and former professional cricketer Ed Smith contrasts what drives these four men and concludes they make for identifiable personality types by which other managers can be classified.

A frenetic day looms in what is already a record-breaking transfer window but, amid all the scrutiny that will be aimed in the familiar direction of the managers, an increasingly pivotal role is being played by staff who work out of the spotlight.

Forget the range of titles. It might be director of football, head of recruitment, sporting director, technical director or a good old-fashioned chief scout, but every Premier League club now has someone heading up a department dedicated to recruitment. The role may also extend to wider structures throughout the club but, as football gets more global and the financial stakes rise, the quality of their work is increasingly pivotal to a club’s success.