Applied Sports Science newsletter – September 8, 2016

I recently joined an applied research group at Georgia Tech, the Wearable Computing Center (WCC).

WCC is interdisciplinary and skilled in both technology development and communication. The group works with industry through contract services or on an ongoing basis. So if you are a sports team that isn’t getting desired results from athlete performance technology, the Center can create an educational workshop that gets your organization on the same page technically. WCC can also develop custom technology to help achieve unmet objectives. If you are a sports technology vendor, WCC can help with content, service designs, user interfaces and business models. Please get in touch if I can tell you more or if you have questions I can answer.

And I have gotten serious about adding content to the blog at http://sports.bradstenger.com where I am writing essays that work on making sense of the rapid and often technical advances in sports science. There is also a searchable archive of past Applied Sports Science newsletters dating back to April 2015. Last week there was a disruption in some newsletter mailings and if you missed any emails, those newsletters are available via the archive.

Thanks.
-Brad Stenger

You will not find many footballers called Mandela. Nor will you find many like Mandela Egbo.

The 19-year-old from Hackney is a lot more independent than most, as the former England youth international proved last summer. Moving abroad is a step few English players take but last July the Crystal Palace academy player joined Borussia Monchengladbach.

Just over a year on, Egbo explains to Standard Sport that he comes from a family where moving is nothing unusual. His mother, for instance, was born in London and then went to university in Nigeria.

Although it may seem counterintuitive, you don’t get faster, bigger, or stronger during a workout. The main function of hard physical training is to break your body down so it can grow back stronger. Fitness gains come later, during recovery, and recent research is revealing that simply being sedentary post-workout isn’t enough: in order to maximize recovery, you must also relax your mind.

“More and more evidence suggests that stress is stress,” says John Kiely, senior lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire’s Institute for Coaching and Performance. “If you finish a workout and throw yourself into something that is mentally or emotionally taxing, even if you are seated with your feet up, odds are that you’ll still obstruct the recovery and adaptation process.”

Following a stressful workout, your body releases a cascade of biochemicals, including the hormone cortisol, which heightens physical and psychological arousal. Collectively referred to as the “stress response,” these biochemicals, along with an array of other systemic changes in the body, act as signals for positive physical adaptation, says Kiely. “You definitely want to trigger a stress response,” he says. “It’s the key to growth.”

Maximum- and reactive-strength qualities both have important roles in athletic movements and sporting performance. Very little research has investigated the relationship between maximum-strength and reactive-strength. The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between maximum-strength (isometric mid-thigh pull peak force; IMTP PF) and reactive-strength (drop-jump reactive-strength index; DJ-RSI) variables at 0.3 m, 0.4 m, 0.5 m and 0.6 m box heights. A secondary aim investigated the between- and within-group differences in reactive-strength characteristics between relatively ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ athletes. Forty-five collegiate athletes across various sports were recruited to participate in the study (age: 23.7 ± 4.0 years; mass: 87.5 ± 16.1 kg; height: 1.80 ± 0.08 m). Pearson’s correlation results showed that there was a moderate association (r = 0.302 – 0.431) between maximum-strength variables (absolute, relative & allometric scaled PF) and RSI at 0.3, 0.4, 0.5 and 0.6 m (p ? 0.05). In addition, two-tailed independent samples t tests showed that relatively stronger athletes (n = 11; 49.59 ± 2.57 N•kg-1) had significantly larger RSI than weaker athletes (n = 11; 33.06 ± 2.76 N•kg-1) at 0.4 m (Cohen’s d = 1.02), 0.5 m (d = 1.21) and 0.6 m (d = 1.39) (p ? 0.05). Weaker athletes also demonstrated significant decrements in RSI as eccentric stretch loads increased from 0.3 to 0.6 m box heights, whereas strong athletes were able to maintain their reactive-strength ability. This research highlights that in specific sporting scenarios, where there are high eccentric stretch-loads and fast stretch-shortening cycle (SSC) demands, an athlete’s reactive-strength ability may be dictated by their relative maximal-strength, specifically their eccentric strength.

Inhibiting the firing of nerve cells in a brain area long known to guide goal-directed behavior makes mice build nests and fall asleep, a new study shows. Stimulating the circuit roused the mice and kept them awake.

The Sportscode Building Blocks blog series is intended to put tools in the hands of Sportscode users to increase the effectiveness of their Sportscode workflows and analysis. The examples used will be basic, with the intention of providing a foundation for the skills described in the examples. We’ll use sport-specific examples to demonstrate the techniques, but keep in mind: These examples can be applied to any sport or activity analyzed with Sportscode.

The National Football League’s Competition Committee is reviewing the results of a pilot that involved embedding ultra-wideband (UWB) RFID tags in its footballs. The goal is to analyze how well the league gained visibility into the pigskins’ locations and movements throughout this year’s preseason games.

The project is the next step in the NFL’s Next Gen Stats initiative, by which the football league aims to use technology to provide more game and player performance information to broadcasters and fans, according to Matt Swensson, the NFL’s emerging products and technology VP.

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and other deep learning techniques are one of the hottest topics in computer vision today, as you can tell by the number of columns I’ve devoted to the subject. Most recently, I discussed three talks from May’s Embedded Vision Summit, all of which covered processors for deep learning, each delving into a different co-processor type: GPUs, FPGAs, and DSPs. Today, I’d like to delve into more detail, showcasing videos and an article that provide in-depth implementation tips once you’ve made your processor architecture selection.

The next great sports technology innovation might just be invented in Seattle this weekend.

The Seattle Sports Tech Meetup is hosting the first-annual Seattle Sports Tech Hackathon Sept. 10-11 at Galvanize.

Context: A sports injury has both physical and psychological consequences for the athlete. A common postinjury psychological response is elevated fear of reinjury.

Objective: To provide an overview of the implications of fear of reinjury on the rehabilitation of athletes, including clinical methods to measure fear of reinjury; the impact of fear of reinjury on rehabilitation outcomes, including physical impairments, function, and return to sports rate; and potential interventions to address fear of reinjury during rehabilitation.

Evidence Acquisition: PubMed was searched for articles published in the past 16 years (1990-2016) relating to fear of reinjury in athletes. The reference lists of the retrieved articles were searched for additionally relevant articles.

Study Design: Clinical review.

Level of Evidence: Level 3.

Results: Fear of reinjury after a sports injury can negatively affect the recovery of physical impairments, reduce self-report function, and prevent a successful return to sport. Athletes with high fear of reinjury might benefit from a psychologically informed practice approach to improve rehabilitation outcomes. The application of psychologically informed practice would be to measure fear of reinjury in the injured athletes and provide interventions to reduce fear of reinjury to optimize rehabilitation outcomes.

Conclusion: Fear of reinjury after a sports injury can lead to poor rehabilitation outcomes. Incorporating principles of psychologically informed practice into sports injury rehabilitation could improve rehabilitation outcomes for athletes with high fear of reinjury.

Cardiovascular (CV) screening in young athletes is widely recommended and routinely performed before participation in competitive sports. While there is general agreement that early detection of cardiac conditions at risk for sudden cardiac arrest and death (SCA/D) is an important objective, the optimal strategy for CV screening in athletes remains an issue of considerable debate. At the center of the controversy is the addition of a resting electrocardiogram (ECG) to the standard preparticipation evaluation using history and physical examination. The American Medical Society for Sports Medicine (AMSSM) formed a task force to address the current evidence and knowledge gaps regarding preparticipation CV screening in athletes from the perspective of a primary care sports medicine physician. The absence of definitive outcomes-based evidence at this time precludes AMSSM from endorsing any single or universal CV screening strategy for all athletes including legislative mandates. This statement presents a new paradigm to assist the individual physician in assessing the most appropriate CV screening strategy unique to their athlete population, community needs, and resources. The decision to implement a CV screening program, with or without the addition of ECG, necessitates careful consideration of the risk of SCA/D in the targeted population and the availability of cardiology resources and infrastructure. Importantly, it is the individual physician’s assessment in the context of an emerging evidence base that the chosen model for early detection of cardiac disorders in the specific population provides greater benefit than harm. American Medical Society for Sports Medicine is committed to advancing evidenced-based research and educational initiatives that will validate and promote the most efficacious strategies to foster safe sport participation and reduce SCA/D in athletes. [full text]

Thomas Albini met his first patient blinded by a stem-cell ‘treatment’ last year. The elderly woman, who had macular degeneration, thought she was paying to participate in a clinical trial that would save her sight by injecting stem cells into both eyes. Instead, it left her legally blind.

By the time Albini, an ophthalmologist at the University of Miami in Florida, had treated two more women who had been blinded by the same procedure, he knew that there was a systemic problem. Two of the women had been lured by a posting in a clinical-trial registry — even though there was no real trial to speak of — and none of the injections had been administered by a physician. The clinic offering the injections claimed that its procedure did not require approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), in part because it used the patient’s own cells. Altogether, Albini found the cases shocking. “Any sort of review would have been helpful.”

The debate over whether the FDA should review such treatments is growing more intense as purported stem-cell clinics proliferate across the United States. Current FDA regulations are poorly enforced and leave room for various interpretations.

First comprehensive injury database that compares return-to-play rate and performance-based outcomes in NFL players who had orthopaedic surgery
Nearly 80 percent of the 559 players included in the database returned to play after surgery

Surgery for tendon injuries results in worse career trajectory than with other surgeries

Understanding performance outcomes may lead to alterations in training regimens and help guide postoperative expectations for an athlete’s career

If you’re worried about the level of play in the NFL, you have an unlikely ally: coaches and executives. “Everything from defensive linemen not knowing where their eyes should be looking, not knowing where blocks are coming from,” said Baltimore Ravens head coach John Harbaugh. “Defensive backs not recognizing routes, not knowing how to burst, stop, start, and change direction so they don’t tear their ACLs. Offensive linemen not knowing where blitzers are coming from. Just not a lot of technique anywhere.”

It’s rare for NFL coaches and executives to agree en masse on anything, but these days, nearly all of them seem to be fretting about a new and game-changing trend: The NFL is getting dangerously young due to changes at both ends of the age spectrum, with record numbers of less experienced rookies entering the league and veterans getting the boot.

“This is a real serious concern,” Harbaugh said. “Not just for the quality of the game, but for the well-being of these young guys coming into the NFL.”

It was not a good day for 49ers general manager Trent Baalke, who has spent seven draft picks over the past four years on players rehabbing from recent ACL injuries.

The 49ers on Monday morning announced cornerback Will Redmond was headed to injured reserve. The team also reached an injury settlement with wide receiver DeAndre Smelter, who has been bothered by a hamstring injury and never played during the exhibition season.

Here’s a look at the seven players general manager Trent Baalke selected since 2013 who sustained torn ACLs during their final seasons of college…

Is it better to fit in or stand out? That question has vexed all of us at one time or another, from teenagers to aspiring executives to sociologists. The answer, says Stanford Graduate School of Business professor Amir Goldberg: It depends. If you’re the kind of person who stands out culturally — you wear sweater vests and bowties to the office — then to succeed you will need to fit into your organization structurally, by being part of a tight-knit group of colleagues. And if you stand out structurally — you aren’t a member of any one clique at work, but have friends across departments — then you better fit in culturally (so ditch the bowties).

Goldberg and his coauthor Sameer Srivastava at the University of California, Berkeley, explain the reasoning behind that answer in their new paper, “Fitting In or Standing Out? The Tradeoffs of Structural and Cultural Embeddedness,” soon to be published in the American Sociological Review. The paper, written in collaboration with Christopher Potts, an associate professor of linguistics at Stanford, and graduate researchers Govind Manian and Will Monroe, explores the relationship between fitting in, standing out, and success within an organization.