Applied Sports Science newsletter – September 30, 2016

… The chunking of a task is a well-known management strategy — breaking huge projects down into small tasks that will be mentally less taxing and therefore more manageable. The use of analytics, though, particularly in the context of the Olympic marathon, is more novel.

Given [Jared] Ward’s rise, clearly he is not your typical runner. Dually inspired by his high school coaches and math teachers, Ward attended Brigham Young University to run cross country and study statistics. What Ward soon found out is that the BYU statistics department — led by Dr. Gilbert Fellingham and Dr. Shane Reese — has one of the top sports statistics groups in the country.

… what is he doing differently this season compared to years gone by?

Improved work rate

One of the main charges levelled against Walcott is that he does not work hard enough for the team. There was a moment away at Sunderland in April that was deemed as symptomatic of his lack of desire when he ducked out of a tackle with Younes Kaboul that would have left him with an open goal.

Although social and personal relationships are vital for productivity, health and wellbeing, conflict is inevitable and is likely to cause upset and hurt feelings as well as anxiety and distrust. Despite the potentially central role of interpersonal conflict in sport, researchers have yet to pay concerted attention to exploring the nature of conflict, its antecedents and consequences. Following a thorough literature search 80 research papers were identified, of which only a small number (6) studied interpersonal conflict directly, most captured dysfunctional interpersonal processes such as breakdown of communication. The current review aims to provide a critical summary of the existing literature around the psychological construct of interpersonal conflict, including its antecedents, management strategies and outcomes within the context of coach–athlete relationships as well as other relational contexts in sport. Based on the relevant literature, a framework of interpersonal conflict is proposed, which includes a specific focus on a key dyad within sport coaching – namely the coach–athlete dyad. Future research directions and potential practical implications for sport psychology consultants, coach educators, coaches and athletes as well as other stakeholders are discussed.

… Within the brain there are pathways that allow interaction and coordination of neural systems in the front and back portions of the brain, the left and the right hemispheres, and the higher and lower centers. With the recognition of the importance of this interaction, increasing efforts have been made to trace the functional and structural components of the brain. The power of the nervous system resides in the complex coordination of the activities of huge numbers of individual neurons. This idea was extensively reviewed in the special section of the November 2013 issue of the journal Science, entitled “The Heavily Connected Brain” (See Markov et al, 2013; Park & Friston, 2013; Stern, 2013; Turk-browne, 2013). It is now possible to trace the connectivity between neurons and to use new analytical techniques such as network theory to understand the underlying mechanisms of structure and function in large neural networks. These methods are helping to understand how it is possible that a fixed structure such as the brain can give rise to so much functional diversity. While the brain is a fixed structure, it can be in diverse states such as wakefulness and dreaming. This is because of the varied and complex ways in which underlying neural pathways interact.

… The solutions for change are more obvious than many think, and three suggested thoughts are below.

1. In order to think fast, players must first be taught how to think

… At its worst, anxiety can be a debilitating condition, but new research is showing that we can reverse these biases directly using various types of attention training. Furthermore, this training is now offered through easy-to-use software and even smartphone apps.

The most popular type of training is known as Attention Bias Modification Training (ABMT), also known more generally as Cognitive Bias Modification (CBM). Although the type of specific task used varies, the general idea is roughly the same. In a typical training session, every few seconds a display featuring both positive and negative images appears on the screen — usually happy and angry faces — which is repeated hundreds of times. Since anxiety is associated with a tendency to focus on negative stimuli, the goal of the task is to locate or respond to the positive images with a button response or a tap on the screen. By doing this over and over, and ideally, over the course of days or weeks, the brain is trained to habitually focus attention away from threat and negative information towards positive information.

… I asked [Anders] Ericsson if, given all the advances in genetics research and all the work on the science of expertise and élite performance that has taken place since his original formulation, he still believed in the preëminent importance of training. Do natural, heritable abilities really mean nothing? If, for instance, he himself could choose my trainer and design the perfect training plan, could I become a world-class pianist? (I chose this example since I played for many years in my youth and easily have ten thousand hours in hand.) At first, Ericsson demurred, refusing a straight yes-or-no answer in favor of asking questions about my past. Why hadn’t I been better as a child? Perhaps I wasn’t motivated? No, I assured him, I was. Perhaps my teacher wasn’t qualified? No, I responded. She was a former professor at a music conservatory in Russia. Maybe, I countered, I’m just not particularly talented at piano. He refused to accept that, and ultimately blamed my teacher. Clearly, she didn’t provide the right deliberate practice. I’d be in a different profession today if only she’d been better.

Alphabet’s health spin-off Verily is a little like Santa’s factory a month before Christmas. Its labs are full of promising ideas not quite ready for delivery. These include a glucose-sensing contact lens, a cancer-detecting wrist band, and a big study of what it means to be healthy.

However, during a visit to Mountain View-based Verily last week, I became the first journalist (that I know of) to see a prototype of the company’s health-tracking watch.

Not only is the watch real, but Verily has built “more than hundreds” of them, according to Brian Otis, who is the health company’s chief technical officer and an expert in low-power electronics from the University of Washington.

Since John Elway joined the Broncos’ front office in 2011, the team has been among the more forward-thinking NFL franchises, embracing iPad playbooks, revamping the team’s nutritional program and cafeteria, hiring a director of advanced analytics to assist Gary Kubiak with in-game trends, even turning to wearable technology to monitor players’ exertion in practice to reduce the chance of overuse injuries.

During the offseason, Kubiak said the use of virtual reality for training was considered, but the team opted to hold off on implementing the technology in practices.

For now.

Objectives

The extracellular matrix (ECM) of ligaments continuously undergoes remodelling in order to maintain tissue homeostasis. Several key mediators of ECM remodelling were chosen for investigation in the present study. It is thought that polymorphisms within genes encoding signalling molecules may contribute to inter-individual variation in the responses to mechanical loading, potentially altering risk of injury.
Methods

A genetic association study was conducted on 232 asymptomatic controls (CON) and 234 participants with surgically diagnosed anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) ruptures; of which 135 participants reported a non-contact mechanism of injury (NON subgroup). All participants were genotyped for ten variants in eight genes encoding ECM remodelling proteins. Haplotypes and allele combinations were also inferred.
Results

The CASP8 rs3834129 ins allele was significantly over-represented in the male CON group compared to the male NON subgroup (p?=?0.047, OR: 1.46, 95% CI: 1.01-2.12). In female participants, the IL1?B rs16944 TT genotype was significantly under-represented in the CON group compared to the NON subgroup (p?=?0.039, OR: 3.06, 95% CI: 1.09-8.64). Haplotype analysis revealed an under-representation of the CASP8 rs3834129-rs1045485 del-G haplotype in the CON group compared to both the ACL group (p?=?0.042; haplo.score:2.03) and the NON subgroup (p?=?0.037; haplo.score:2.09). Furthermore, following a pathway-based approach, genetic variants involved in the cell signalling cascade were associated with ACL injury risk.
Conclusions

The novel independent associations and allele combinations observed implicate the apoptosis and cell signalling cascades as potential contributors to ACL injury susceptibility. Furthermore, these genetic variants may potentially modulate ECM remodelling in response to loading and ultimately contribute to ligament capacity.

Regenerative medicine seeks to harness the potential of cell biology for tissue replacement therapies, which will restore lost tissue functionality. Controlling and enhancing tissue healing is not just a matter of cells, but also of molecules and mechanical forces. We first describe the main biological technologies to boost musculoskeletal healing, including bone marrow and subcutaneous fat-derived regenerative products, as well as platelet-rich plasma and conditioned media. We provide some information describing possible mechanisms of action. We performed a literature search up to January 2016 searching for clinical outcomes following the use of cell therapies for sports conditions, tendons, and joints. The safety and efficacy of cell therapies for tendon conditions was examined in nine studies involving undifferentiated and differentiated (skin fibroblasts, tenocytes) cells. A total of 54 studies investigated the effects of mesenchymal stem-cell (MSC) products for joint conditions including anterior cruciate ligament, meniscus, and chondral lesions as well as osteoarthritis. In 22 studies, cellular products were injected intra-articularly, whereas in 32 studies MSC products were implanted during surgical/arthroscopic procedures. The heterogeneity of clinical conditions, cellular products, and approaches for delivery/implantation make comparability difficult. MSC products appear safe in the short- and mid-term, but studies with a long follow-up are scarce. Although the current number of randomized clinical studies is low, stem-cell products may have therapeutic potential. However, these regenerative technologies still need to be optimized.

The NBA will allow teams to use hard-wired connections from the bench to review and cut video for immediate access, transfer video between bench personnel and the locker rooms and access data rather than have that info delivered from the video room to the bench.

The league informed teams of this measure in a memo sent on Thursday.

“This enhanced file sharing ability will enable coaches, players, athletic trainers and medical staff to make more informed decisions in real time,” NBA executive vice president of basketball operations Kiki VanDeWeghe wrote in the memo.

… MLB just told us that one of the best executives in the game is worth about the same as the decline years of a solid non-star, a guy who should be expected to be something like a league average player during the contract he just signed. I’m sure the Marlins and Cubs weren’t trying to create this kind of juxtaposition, but thanks to the timing of these two deals, we can say that the market is currently valuing coveted front office members in a similar way to an average player.

On the one hand, it’s very easy to think that this means that high level executives are still being wildly underpaid. A couple of years ago, Lewie Pollis — now working for the Phillies — put forth this very argument in his Honors Thesis at Brown University, building a model that claimed the best executives in baseball were worth something like seven or eight wins per year to their franchises, which would translate to something like $50 million per year in value. Previously, Benjamin Morris has argued that Billy Beane has been worth hundreds of millions of dollars to the A’s, and that the Red Sox screwed up by not luring him out of Oakland.

This past Saturday, the NBA held its first hackathon inside Terminal 23 in Manhattan. At just past eight in the morning, more than 200 participants comprised of undergraduates, Master’s and PhD student statisticians, engineers and developers from 50 universities in the United States and Canada were already all set up inside the venue, laptops fully charged, several cups of coffee already littered across the tables as everyone prepared to dig in for the all-day event.

Grant Fiddyment, 29, graduated from Boston University on Monday, finishing his PhD in computational neuroscience. This was his third hackathon. He participated in one at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference and was part of a two-week hackathon at the Allen Institute of Brain Science last summer.

“It’s a really fascinating space,” Grant said of the growing world of sports analytics, which he got into four years ago after he was asked in a statistics class to perform some data analysis related to the Boston Celtics. “Lots of hobbyists do it because they’re curious, interested in sports, and want to learn and share new things about the game. Meanwhile, some people do it professionally for similar reasons, but have to be more selective about what they share because the information represents competitive advantage.”

Major League Baseball players have become overwhelmingly overweight and obese during the last quarter century, say health researchers.

David E. Conroy, Penn State professor of kinesiology, and colleagues looked at 145 years of data on professional baseball players’ body mass. The researchers found that the athletes’ weight held steady for over 100 years, with the majority of them weighing in at what is considered “normal,” — i.e., with a body mass index (BMI) between 18.5 and 24.9.

However, around 1991 the average player’s BMI began to rise, and over the last 25 years nearly 80 percent of players fall into the overweight or obese category with a BMI above 25. Obesity in the general U.S. population began to rise in the mid-1970s, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.