Applied Sports Science newsletter – September 15, 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

… One morning before training, Kelly and I slept through our alarm. Teenagers need their sleep, right? We just didn’t hear it so we skipped breakfast and completely missed the team meal. We got up, got ready and went to training and we thought we were in the clear. No one said anything, so we were pretty sure that no one had noticed we weren’t at breakfast.

Right before training was going to start, Julie Foudy, who was the captain of the team at the time, brings us all into a huddle – the entire team – and starts talking in a very serious tone about how “a couple of rules have been broken recently with the team.”

Gulp.

I’m in the back thinking, “there’s no way she’s talking about Kelly and I missing breakfast!?” But she continues and says “there have been some people that have been late to team meals; skipping team meals… people that have done things that have broken the ethos of the team. Because of that, the team is going to get on the end line and run some full-field sprints.”

… Three years later, as a new NFL season begins, the paths of Clowney and Mack have diverged. Mack, a Raider, is an unquestioned superstar. Clowney, in Houston, is a question mark. Were those high school and college years, full of adulation, enabling and the shortcuts made possible by his rare physical gifts, a detriment to Clowney’s development? Conversely, did a five-year grind in anonymity make Mack the player he is today? What’s the difference between a college career that quietly crescendos and one that roars unceasingly? And for NFL teams, is there a lesson to be learned?

… “We need to coach better so our staff have been working very hard investigating other sports,” he said.

“With Great Britain doing so well at the Olympics, there are a number of sports to look at and learn from.”

Team GB won 67 medals at Rio 2016 to finish second in the table ahead of China.

Every year, new teams are crowned champions over a wide spectrum of sports, but there are only a handful that will forever echo throughout eternity as conquerors. The Brazilian footballers of the 1960s, the West Indian cricketers of the 1970s and ‘80s, the current New Zealand All Blacks who dominate rugby union; these reigns, as mighty as they appear, pale in comparison to an empire that stretches back to the very beginning. USA Swimming has exerted a stranglehold on their sport since the first Olympic Games and haven’t let go since. Thanks to a dominant mindset, they won’t be letting go any time soon.

“The success of our World Cup team gives a false illusion as to where we are in the youth game,” B.J. Snow, head coach of the United States’ U-17 girls national team says, alluding to the senior team’s triumph at the 2015 World Cup.

“We are behind the rest of the world in the youth game,” is his blunt assessment.

To the extent the U.S. is behind, it didn’t happen overnight. The process started long ago, with root causes in the way the women’s program was set up. Over time, as more countries began caring about women’s soccer, that structure had to be reassessed, then replaced, and, in what’s an ongoing process, put in a better position to define how the next generation of stars will develop.

Should that development happen, and if the youth ranks can produce more Mallory Pugh-type players, credit will have to go the vision of two people: April Heinrichs and Jill Ellis.

Seven football lessons from Julian Mann Nails, the youngest ever German coach

He just might be the harbinger of a new generation of German trainers. Nails Julian Mann is no ex-professional, very young (29), and yet he coaches Bundesliga club Hoffenheim. I talked to him and distilled therefrom seven football lessons. ‘One-touch football is a bad idea. ”

… New research shows that spikes in workloads are clearly factors in non-contact injuries. At the same time, the slow boil of low variability in training with moderate loads warns us that the stimulus is too conservative, and the rest is not deep enough to restore athletes.

Loading the body will never truly be represented by bar charts because our bodies are more complicated than one summary on a graph. These simple visualizations and scoring, however, provide a good start to estimate work. The combination of acute total daily loading, weekly, or microcycle training monotony, and the interaction in a strain score helps safeguard against overtraining and injury.

In this article, I’ll define training monotony and explain its value to coaches and how to improve it without compromising training goals.

Manchester United have brought in circus performers and parkour runners in an effort to help young academy stars improve their mobility and prevent injury.

Nicky Butt, head of coaching at United’s youth academy, believes players today are picking up more and more injuries because their bio-mechanics are lacking compared to those of, say, 20 years ago.

Butt told The Times: “I see players in our academy and they can’t move. Our lads don’t know how to fall, roll, and you should see the amount of injuries we get from popped shoulders or their arms.

The aim of the present study was to examine reliability and construct convergent validity of Player Load™ (PL) from trunk-mounted accelerometry, expressed as a cumulative measure and an intensity measure (PL · min–1). Fifteen male participants twice performed an overground football match simulation that included four different multidirectional football actions (jog, side cut, stride and sprint) whilst wearing a trunk-mounted accelerometer inbuilt in a global positioning system unit. Results showed a moderate-to-high reliability as indicated by the intra-class correlation coefficient (0.806–0.949) and limits of agreement. Convergent validity analysis showed considerable between-participant variation (coefficient of variation range 14.5–24.5%), which was not explained from participant demographics despite a negative association with body height for the stride task. Between-task variations generally showed a moderate correlation between ranking of participants for PL (0.593–0.764) and PL · min–1 (0.282–0.736). It was concluded that monitoring PL® in football multidirectional actions presents moderate-to-high reliability, that between-participant variability most likely relies on the individual’s locomotive skills and not their anthropometrics, and that the intensity of a task expressed by PL · min–1 is largely related to the running velocity of the task.

A Seattle television station recently ran a report under the banner “New Mouthguard Detects Athlete Concussions,” but it of course does no such thing.

The story is about the University of Washington football team trying out 10 of i1 Biometrics’ Vector MouthGuards, which uses a wireless signal in the player’s mouthguard to register the location and magnitude of head impact and transmits that data to the sideline.

“When that impact exceeds a certain threshold the training staff is going to get an alert on their mobile phones and it’s going to give them information to go ahead, take a look at that athlete, and make sure they’re ok,” Biometrics Andrew Golden told KING 5.

Researchers at NC State think that they have developed a new way to harvest body heat and turn it into electricity. The team has developed a patch that’s roughly a centimeter squared, that would attach to a person’s bicep. The device would then be able to generate anything up to 20 Microwatts, a significant increase on previous technologies. It’s not enough to power a smartwatch, but it’s possible that it may be enough to juice a medical sensor, reducing the number of bulky cables a patient has to trail around them.

The patch creates electricity by using the difference in temperature between your body and the air that surrounds it.

Overuse injuries commonly plague distance runners, as these athletes are exposed to high volume, intensity, and frequency of repetitive loading. The Achilles tendon experiences a significant amount of loading as it plays a critical role in energy storage and release during running. As a result, Achilles tendon injuries are one of the most common running-related musculoskeletal injuries.

Tendon pathology has been described to occur over a continuum, from early reactive stages (acute) to later stages of dysrepair and degeneration (chronic). Clinical treatments are most effective when they are tailored to match the stage of tendinopathy, as there is evidence that tendons at different stages of the pathology continuum may require different treatment approaches. Since external loading is a modifiable construct, understanding how tendon responds to cumulative loading, particularly in athletes at an elevated risk of developing overuse injuries, may improve tailored intervention delivery focused on load-based management.

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.

When I interviewed varsity rower Meredith Fischer for a recent Stanford Medicine magazine feature, I couldn’t wait to hear what had motivated her to radically change her diet. For years, eating meat was a huge part of Fischer’s identity. Her childhood nickname, “Meef,” stuck because it rhymed with beef, one of her favorite foods, and she was used to eating large servings of meat to help fuel her athletic performance. But since taking a Stanford class on “Food and Society” more than a year ago, she’s been a vegetarian.

… Speaking to the British Science Festival in Swansea last week, Dr Tom Markham, head of strategic business development at Sports Interactive – makers of Football Manager – said those numbers have exploded in the subsequent decades.

“The game now has a database with 319,726 current players. With former players, who may take other roles in football, it comes in at over 600,000.”

Compiling that database, Dr Markham said, is a big job.

“We have people on the ground in 51 different countries covering 140 leagues. There are 2,250 fully researched clubs, with 250 statistics on each player – aggregated to 47 in the user interface.

“With 1,300 scouts, all the main clubs have one researcher, and top clubs like Chelsea have multiple experts.”