Applied Sports Science newsletter – September 27, 2016

Technology once so exclusively pricey it was largely available only to the United States military might play a critical role in the success of the 2016-17 Detroit Pistons.

And if you had any doubts about whether Stan Van Gundy was a hidebound basketball traditionalist or embracing of every new idea possible to advance the franchise’s progress, this story ought to settle the debate.

The avenue Van Gundy and Andre Drummond chose to remedy the free-throw woes that saw Drummond shoot 35 percent last season and limit Van Gundy’s ability to use him late in closely contested games – exactly the type the Pistons expect to be playing more often as they solidify themselves as an upper-echelon NBA team – is … drum roll … virtual reality.

“I’ve been doing it three times every week. I have a system (at the team’s Auburn Hills practice facility) and I have one at my house, too,” Drummond said. “So every day after practice, I’ll go home or watch it here.”

… among Schmid’s ultimate tactical shortfalls leading up to his ouster in late July, he continued trying to play on the ground through Morris. This presumed Morris wanted it played on the carpet, that his skill set was prepared to hold up possession while runners made contrails into the box. This is why Nelson Valdez remained such an enticing option for so long. Morris didn’t seem capable.

Former Schmid understudy Brian Schmetzer has pulled a lot of the correct strings since starting the arduous climb back to postseason solvency, but his job on Morris’s tactical positioning is perhaps his greatest. That’s why Morris’s goal against the Galaxy on Sunday to spring a 4-2 win was so instructive.

This is Morris in his natural habitat.

Whether you are an athlete seeking peak performance or an adult attempting to reconnect with the health of your youth, the mind matters. Michael Gervais, sports psychologist for the Seattle Seahawks and many Olympians, explains that there are really only ways to train: your craft, physical development, and mental training. If you aren’t training the mind, you are missing a full third of your potential training benefit. The good news is that you already have the first essential ingredient of any successful person: the desire to improve yourself.

Many of you have probably tried, in vain, to white-knuckle certain changes that were sure to bring success. The problem is that willpower is a finite resource. As the famed Stanford marshmallow test showed, when willpower is taxed, people are more likely to listen to their emotions and opt for guilty pleasures or less productive options. Eventually, you’ll have a rough day at work, then it’s back to the bowl of Ben and Jerry’s you swore you’d only have on Sundays. For true change to take place we must understand habits and the methods by which we create lasting, positive change. Furthermore, you must be able to pinpoint what actions will give you the greatest leverage and make the most difference. [video, 1:43]

How well does your team share insights to help you collectively solve problems? It could be the difference between good and great.

MIT define Collective intelligence as a property of groups that emerges from the coordination and collaboration of team members. This collective intelligence is a good indicator of potential team performance and a far better indicator of success than any individual’s performance. So what sets apart these smart teams and how do they build collective intelligence?

In their research MIT have found that group satisfaction, group cohesion, group motivation and individual intelligence of team members, things that you might expect to determine performance, were not correlated with collective intelligence. Nor does having star performers make the biggest impact. The research suggests there are five ways smart teams build collective intelligence.

… The first step of identifying those goals and principles occurs at a restaurant or ballroom in a hotel the night before training camp starts.

The team meeting before the first practice sets the tone for each team heading into camp while creating an identity for the regular season.

The Vertical talked with league executives and coaches about the first team meeting and the concepts discussed the night before the first practice.

… While it’s easy to neglect introspection, fancy science says that it’s rather important for leading a life. The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, whose findings about how emotion shapes decision-making skewered the centuries-old insistence that cold logic is the optimal mode of navigating life, has said that what we refer to as insight is really the accumulation of getting intimate with what you already know. “What we construct as wisdom over time is actually the result of cultivating that knowledge of how our emotions behaved and what we learn from them,” he explains.

Introspection, however, takes healthy and unhealthy forms.

Training for endurance sports can, at times, feel like a never-ending arms race. Though many (rightly) focus on achieving big performance gains by training harder and smarter, those improvements become smaller and more difficult to obtain after a while. Since your fellow competitors are likely running similar intervals and lifting similar weights, maximizing endurance performance can often come down to scrutinizing the details.

Regularly performed endurance training has many beneficial effects on health and skeletal muscle function, and can be used to prevent and treat common diseases e.g. cardiovascular disease, type II diabetes and obesity. The molecular adaptation mechanisms regulating these effects are incompletely understood. To date, global transcriptome changes in skeletal muscles have been studied at the gene level only. Therefore, global isoform expression changes following exercise training in humans are unknown. Also, the effects of repeated interventions on transcriptional memory or training response have not been studied before. In this study, 23 individuals trained one leg for three months. Nine months later, 12 of the same subjects trained both legs in a second training period. Skeletal muscle biopsies were obtained from both legs before and after both training periods. RNA sequencing analysis of all 119 skeletal muscle biopsies showed that training altered the expression of 3,404 gene isoforms, mainly associated with oxidative ATP production. Fifty-four genes had isoforms that changed in opposite directions. Training altered expression of 34 novel transcripts, all with protein-coding potential. After nine months of detraining, no training-induced transcriptome differences were detected between the previously trained and untrained legs. Although there were several differences in the physiological and transcriptional responses to repeated training, no coherent evidence of an endurance training induced transcriptional skeletal muscle memory was found. This human lifestyle intervention induced differential expression of thousands of isoforms and several transcripts from unannotated regions of the genome. It is likely that the observed isoform expression changes reflect adaptational mechanisms and processes that provide the functional and health benefits of regular physical activity.

The main objective of this study was to characterize the occurrence of single sprint and repeated-sprint sequences (RSS) during elite female soccer matches, using fixed (20 kmh) and individually based speed thresholds (>90% of the mean speed from a 20 m sprint test). Eleven elite female soccer players from the same team participated in the study. All players performed a 20 m linear sprint test, and were assessed in up to 10 official matches using Global Positioning System (GPS) technology. Magnitude-based inferences were used to test for meaningful differences. Results revealed that irrespective of adopting fixed or individual speed thresholds, female players produced only a few RSS during matches (2.3 ± 2.4 sequences using the fixed threshold and 3.3 ± 3.0 sequences using the individually based threshold), with most sequences composing of just two sprints. Additionally, central defenders performed fewer sprints (10.2 ± 4.1) than other positions (full backs: 28.1 ± 5.5; midfielders: 21.9 ± 10.5; forwards: 31.9 ± 11.1; with likely to almost certainly differences associated with effect sizes ranging from 1.65 to 2.72) and sprinting ability declined in the second half. The data do not support the notion that RSS occurs frequently during soccer matches in female players, irrespective of using fixed or individual speed thresholds to define sprint occurrence. However, repeated sprint ability development cannot be ruled out from soccer training programs due to its association with match-related performance.

Recently, several models based on deep neural networks have achieved great success in terms of both reconstruction accuracy and computational performance for single image super-resolution. In these methods, the low resolution (LR) input image is upscaled to the high resolution (HR) space using a single filter, commonly bicubic interpolation, before reconstruction. This means that the super-resolution (SR) operation is performed in HR space. We demonstrate that this is sub-optimal and adds computational complexity. In this paper, we present the first convolutional neural network (CNN) capable of real-time SR of 1080p videos on a single K2 GPU. To achieve this, we propose a novel CNN architecture where the feature maps are extracted in the LR space. In addition, we introduce an efficient sub-pixel convolution layer which learns an array of upscaling filters to upscale the final LR feature maps into the HR output. By doing so, we effectively replace the handcrafted bicubic filter in the SR pipeline with more complex upscaling filters specifically trained for each feature map, whilst also reducing the computational complexity of the overall SR operation. We evaluate the proposed approach using images and videos from publicly available datasets and show that it performs significantly better (+0.15dB on Images and +0.39dB on Videos) and is an order of magnitude faster than previous CNN-based methods.

The Sneaker should come alive. Tinker Hatfield was sitting at a drafting table in his office in Beaverton, Oregon. He and another young designer at Nike named Mark Parker had just returned from a brainstorming session in Hollywood with film director Robert Zemeckis, who was storyboarding the sequel to his sci-fi comedy hit of three years earlier, Back to the Future. It was 1988, and Zemeckis and his creative team were on the hunt for futuristic sight gags for the film, set in 2015. They had tasked Hatfield and Parker with dreaming up some seriously 21st-century sneakers. One idea that came up in the meeting involved magnetic levitation, but to Hatfield that seemed a little too Jetsons.

His time as a pole-vaulter and his degree in architecture from the University of Oregon had taught him to prize utility, and it didn’t seem plausible to him that any athlete, even decades in the future, would ever want or need to levitate. Hatfield and Parker decided to treat the assignment not as a sight gag but, as he recalls, “like someone had asked me to reinvent footwear for actual performance reasons, in the real world, only I had 30 years to figure the technology out.” And that’s when the idea came to him: “What about a shoe that would essentially come alive when you put it on? It would sense you. It would become the shape of your foot, and when it came alive it would light up. Wouldn’t it be great if shoes could do that?”

One of the frustrations of researchers who study chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the degenerative brain disease linked to repeated head hits, is that it can be detected only in autopsies, and not in the living.

Researchers, though, have been trying to solve this problem in two primary ways: by identifying biomarkers linked to the disease that show up on imaging tests in certain locations in the brain, and by trying to locate in the blood the protein that is the hallmark of the disease.

On Monday, two groups of researchers said they had made what they considered small steps in developing both methods.

… the advent of talent management as a stand-alone specialty has led to overly complicated talent processes that are difficult to understand, at best, and confusing to managers, at worst. Anytime a function becomes a “profession,” with an association, conferences, certification, and the like, it starts formalizing its own language, which only insiders really understand. Just last year, for example, the Association for Talent Development, a professional society for talent development people, published a research study that proposed 15 core functions for talent development and 24 secondary functions that might be important for some organizations. Even if talent management professionals themselves could remember and implement all of these functions, it’s almost certain that managers would find them more confusing than useful.

… it’s easy to misinterpret randomness. We don’t have an intuitive feel for it. Randomness is invisible from the tip-of-your-nose perspective. We can only see it if we step outside ourselves.

The psychologist Ellen Langer has shown how poorly we grasp randomness in a series of experiments. In one, she asked Yale students to watch someone flip a coin thirty times and predict whether it would come up heads or tails. The students could not see the actual flipping but they were told the results of each toss. The results, however, were rigged: all students got a total of fifteen right and fifteen wrong, but some students got a string of hits early while others started with a string of misses. Langer then asked the students how well they thought they would do if the experiment were repeated. Students who started off with a string of hits had a higher opinion of their skill and thought they would shine again. Langer called this the “illusion of control,” but it is also an “illusion of prediction.” And think about the context. These are students at an elite university who know their intelligence is being tested with an activity that is the very symbol of randomness. As Langer wrote, you would expect them to be “super-rational.” Yet the first pattern they encountered fooled them into sincerely believing that they could predict entirely random outcomes.

… “When you’re busy and have limited bandwidth, you start making decisions less well. It’s called the scarcity trap. As you are overwhelmed with doing more and more, you have less time to think carefully about how to do each task.”

In football, as we are constantly distracted by the weekly cycle of matches and associated short-term decisions, it can be extremely difficult to find the time for contemplation and big-picture strategic thinking.

[Eldar] Shafir has a remedy for this common problem called “meeting with self”, a solution that encourages people to set aside two 15 or 30 minute chunks of time each day. This time is to be used to take care of unexpected tasks or to ruminate over long-term strategic issues.