Applied Sports Science newsletter – September 14, 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.

You are also invited to check out 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. The blog is to be a staging area for reports that should go on sale in early-2017. If your organization needs custom research into an applied sports science issue, please get in touch.

Thanks.
-Brad Stenger

… More than halfway through his first NFL preseason, many were already claiming him a bust. It appeared as though the spotlight and burdens of being a second-round kicker were too much for him.

Instead of crumbling under the weight of that narrative however, Aguayo reached out to a mental coach and then called Longwell, the former kicker who spent the majority of his 15 years in the league with the Packers and Vikings, now serving as a kicking coach and mentor at IMG Academy in Florida. The two had worked together there since last January to prepare for the NFL Combine and the draft, but now Aguayo needed some psychological guidance. Longwell was happy to encourage his student.

“You’re so blessed because you need to galvanize yourself in this league,” Longwell told him. “And some people go well into their first season, second year before having to go through a situation like this. You are so lucky that you get to go through it in your third game before the regular season even starts.”

“The players are not machines,” said Luis Enrique, of Lionel Messi, Neymar and Luis Suarez, in a press conference after Real Madrid beat his Barcelona team in April in the Camp Nou Clasico. “They are players of a high level, the highest in the world, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be beaten.”

It was a phrase he used about his entire squad on various occasions last season, even as they racked up a machine-like run of 39 games unbeaten, until they came into this Clasico.

Defeat by Los Blancos in that game was the start of a negative spiral for the team, which saw them knocked out of the Champions League at the quarter-final stage by Atletico Madrid.

Barcelona’s star striking trident did not take on this period in the best condition, having made long-haul trips to South America before the Clasico to take part in international fixtures.

… Real Madrid didn’t play well, but they don’t need to play well to actually win games. They have so much power up front… Cristiano Ronaldo scored on his return, and he played 65 minutes. This is something new that we’re going to see more often this season, where he will be rested or won’t be allowed to play the full 90 minutes.

The reason being, of course, is that in the last three years he’s finished the season really badly. Last season was the most successful of his career, and it will probably take him to the Ballon d’Or, but he was physically not at his best and [Zinedine] Zidane wants to avoid that again.

In my eyes, it’s two superheroes talking to each other, and only superheroes have got the same language and understand each other. I don’t think anybody else would have been able to tell him what to do.

We’re seeing a new era in the Cristiano Ronaldo story, one where he listen to the coaches and realises the limits imposed by his body. As usual, he will come stronger from it, I am sure.

The morning alarm is more than a signal that it’s time to get up – for many people it means it’s time to hit the gym. But if exercise is not a habit, that cue from the alarm may trigger a debate over whether to exercise or go back to sleep.

New research by Alison Phillips, an assistant professor of psychology at Iowa State University, finds that it takes more than a conditioned cue to stick with an exercise routine. Instead, it’s the combination of a cue, such as a morning alarm or the end of the workday, and an intrinsic reward that helps develop and maintain exercise as a habit. Phillips says if exercise is intrinsically rewarding – it’s enjoyable or reduces stress – people will respond automatically to their cue and not have to convince themselves to work out. Instead of feeling like a chore, they’ll want to exercise.

“If someone doesn’t like to exercise it’s always going to take convincing,” Phillips said. “People are more likely to stick with exercise if they don’t have to deliberate about whether or not to do it.”

… The odd thing about sleep is that we know what happens when we don’t get enough but we really don’t know the biological basis. Now, a new study from researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Groningen in the Netherlands found that in mice, sleep deprivation screws up connections in the hippocampus. The hippocampus is a C-shaped organ deep in the brain associated with memory and spacial relations. So a gridlock in the way messages is likely to distort memory. That deprivation could be why when I’m really tired, I put down my house keys and then for the life of me, can’t remember where they are. Or maybe this scientific evidence is just the proof I need to convince my kids to get a good night sleep before they have an exam. And for the record, no matter how much sleep I get, I have really lousy spacial-relation issue which makes parallel parking nearly impossible.

But while the potentially alarming news from the study published in the journal eLife–that lacking sleep shrinks a portion of the hippocampus–there was a bright side. A few good nights of sleep restore function and pumps up the hippocampus to its original size.

The grueling nature of the NFL season is a true test of a player’s conditioning and toughness. An NFL team must persevere through a nine-month stretch of team workouts, training camp, and both regular-season and post-season play in order to accomplish its ultimate goal of a Super Bowl victory. Recovery between workouts is essential in order for each player to perform at his best during the most important games of the season. With this in mind, the Ravens’ new Director of Performance and Recovery, Steve Saunders, facilitated the construction of a NormaTec Recovery Room for his players this offseason.

… A recent study by the French Institute of Health and Research sought to explore how cognitive thinking is impacted when our brain has been sufficiently taxed. Put simply, it wanted to explain why we do stupid things when we’re tired. The method used was by studying the impulse control of two sets of volunteers — those put through a series of difficult memory tasks over the course of six hours, and those who took it relatively easy over the same period. Ultimately, researchers found the less-taxed group exhibited greater control at day’s end.

When Apple Inc. Chief Executive Tim Cook introduced the Apple Watch two years ago, he touted its many abilities, including to display email, a calendar, the weather and to make phone calls.

Mr. Cook also described the watch’s health features. But when Apple unveiled an updated model last week, however, the focus was clearly on sports and fitness. “We think Apple Watch is the ultimate device for a healthy life,” said Jeff Williams, Apple’s chief operating officer.

The evolving presentations underscore a shift in Apple’s marketing focus for the watch, from a stylish jack-of-all-trades fashion accessory to a personal trainer.

MC10, Inc., the healthcare technology company specialising in stretchable body-worn computing systems, and PCH, which designs custom product solutions for startups and Fortune 500 companies, have entered into an exclusive partnership to commercialise MC10’s Wearable Interactive Stamp Platform (WiSP™). The partnership will allow brands to develop a variety of consumer applications for the platform, which is a skin-worn, ultra-thin, stretchable and disposable stamp.

… I partnered with two fellow Harvard students, John Capodilupo and Aurelian Nicolae, who eventually became my co-founders. We’ve spent the last 4 years building WHOOP, the first scientifically-grounded system to optimize performance for athletes. Today, we are proud to work alongside 50 brilliant engineers, designers, and data scientists. By creating proprietary hardware, software, and analytics, we help athletes train and recover more effectively.

WHOOP is different in that it provides actionable data. We collect over 100mb of data on an athlete per day, which is the largest of any wearable device. We then analyze that data to explain your body’s strain, recovery, and sleep performance. Strain includes the intensity of workouts or your overall day. Recovery is how prepared your body is for Strain. Sleep performance includes the quantity and quality of your sleep. If an athlete has a low recovery, we recommend that the athlete takes on a lower strain that day. (Yes, we actually tell athletes to do less!) If an athlete has a higher recovery, we encourage a higher strain. Matching your body’s strain to your recovery allows for optimal training. An athlete who wants to improve his recovery will also improve lifestyle decisions (like more sleep and less drinking alcohol).

… I have been studying and championing risk-based data de-identification for years. I believe that efforts to re-identify personal health information offer two key lessons about personal health information. 1) There is never zero risk in sharing data, just as there is never zero risk in taking a walk down the street. 2) Data sharing is inherently a risk-management exercise. Once you understand how to manage the risks, it’s possible to ensure that only a very small level of risk remains.

Simply removing information such as names and addresses from a dataset doesn’t render the data anonymous and ensure that an individual can’t be identified. Conferring real privacy protection means carefully assessing the re-identification risk, setting acceptable risk thresholds, and transforming the data using de-identification standards.

Several such guidelines and standards exist for doing this. The Health Information Trust Alliance (HITRUST), for example, recently released a de-identification framework that organizations can use when creating, accessing, storing, or exchanging personal information. Other organizations, like the Institute of Medicine and the Council of Canadian Academies have adopted similar standards that permit sharing sensitive data while managing the risks of re-identification. Current evidence shows that the risk of re-identification using these approaches is very small.

Consuming protein is an important part of any athlete’s diet; current recommendations state around 1.2-1.8g/kg bodyweight (BW)/day protein for endurance sports. For a 60kg athlete, this is in the region of 72-108g a day dependent on your training. More recently it’s been suggested that the body utilises this protein more efficiently if it’s spread out through the day.

I recommend 0.3-0.4g/kg BW protein at meals, which is in the region of 20-25g for most individuals, with 10-15g portions as snacks 1-3 times a day, based on their training and body composition goals. Protein is also useful to aid recovery as it enhances the re-synthesis of glycogen in preparation for your next training session.

Episode 143: Muscle physiology researcher Dr. Keith Baar from the University of California at Davis is on the show to discuss his teams work looking at nutrional and training strategies that can increase tendon stiffness, hence playing a role in injury prevention and the recovery process from tendon/ligament ruptures and bone/cartilage damage. [audio, 47:04]

… A double-overtime road win against a ranked opponent will produce that. And we’ll get to more about Arkansas’ 41-38 win Saturday at then-No. 12 TCU, and its possible meaning, in a moment. First, let’s talk about the guy carrying the notebook, and how he might be changing how Bielema makes decisions.

He is Rob Ash, the former Montana State head coach who’s now an offensive analyst at Arkansas. He works with the Hogs’ coaches during the week. But he was hired to help Bielema use analytics to find an edge, which is how he came to roam the sidelines with something that looks like a small-town phonebook.

“It’s the ‘Moneyball’ approach to football,” Bielema says.

… One of the things that made this men’s final particularly interesting was how different each finalist’s journey was to get to the title match on Arthur Ashe. Wawrinka had the more typical course of the two, having 3 matches of more than 3 hours in length with an especially tough quarterfinal against a resurgent Juan Martin Del Potro and semifinal against 6th seed Kei Nishikori. In total, it took Wawrinka 247 service games, 18 hours and 15 minutes of matchplay to reach the final.

Djokovic, on the other hand, had a much more irregular path. With one walkover and 2 retirements up to the final, the 128 draw looked much more like a draw of 16 for Djokovic. Having played only 118 service games to get to the final, he had to spend just 9 hours and 3 minutes on court, less than half the match age of Wawrinka. Add to that the fact that Djokovic was never really tested, as neither of his most able opponents, Jo Wilfried Tsonga and Gael Monfils, brought there full game— Tsonga having an injury that forced a retirement and Monfils employing a bizarre tanking strategy that made him absent for most of the first two sets of their semifinal match.

The polar opposite experiences made for an interesting natural experiment as to what best prepares a player for a top final performance: a slog over two weeks that wears on the body but builds confidence in one’s game? Or, a series of easy matches that never push the competitor’s skill or body to their brink?