Applied Sports Science newsletter – October 17, 2016

… At 16, he joined Valencia but soon returned, not ready to be alone and unprepared for a professionalised game; at 19 he signed for Atlético Sanluqueño, but that was in the amateur fourth tier; and at 20, he got the better of Beckham, Ronaldo and Robinho but got battered in the Bernabéu second leg; back to life, back to reality.

Barcelona came next, where Guardiola said he deserved an opportunity, but while he shone for Barça B, the “youth” team on their way to promotion, Leo Messi, Pedro and David Villa were there and he played only 14 minutes. Barça B’s coach Luis Enrique got the best from him but, approaching 25, he could not wait. Nolito joined Benfica where he scored in his first five games, got 15 that season and played in the Champions League, but he did not start, score or assist in the competition proper; and the following January he was loaned to Granada.

Then, in 2013, a decade after first playing for Sanluqueño, he went to Celta Vigo, where a familiar face had become manager. “Luis Enrique appeared at a moment in my career where it was either take a step forward or a step back,” he says. “I was at Barcelona B with him, then Celta. He bet very, very heavily on me and supported me. He made me see football differently, convincing me I could really make it.”

The 21st century strength coach operates in the world of big data. On a daily basis we are exposed to countless data collection, data analysis and intervention opportunities.

Take even simplest of training load monitoring systems – the session RPE system. With this method we log training time (minutes) and training intensity (1-10 scale) yet from this ever so basic tool we generate multiple metrics: daily and weekly training loads, training monotony and strain, training stress balance and percentage breakdown of training load per activity. We have big data before we even consider more highly involved and detailed datasets from neuromuscular fatigue tests, heart rate variability and GPS monitoring systems.

While each of these monitoring systems can have merit, this exponential increase in data creates problems for coaches to filter signal from noise. Information overload can blind us to the more obvious issues right in front of us.

… The greater the fitness, the higher the training impulse an athlete is able to sustain. Fatigue is the physiological response to a training impulse. Thus, a performance response to training is the difference between fitness and fatigue. Both fitness and fatigue increase with increased training but at different rates. Both fitness and fatigue decay exponentially after training but fatigue has a shorter half-life and decays faster. Fitness and fatigue are additive over time and performance is effected by manipulating volume, speed, intensity and the rest interval. Therefore, the rest interval is an integral component of fitness and performance improvement. The rest interval allows for adaptation and recovery. Adaptation produces improved fitness while recovery minimizes fatigue. A proper balance of training and rest will produce the greatest training benefit. Whereas, too long of a rest interval produces minimal adaptation and subsequently too short of a rest interval results in excessive fatigue and breakdown.

Ligue 1 club FC Metz are famous for developing talent like Robert Pires, Miralem Pjanic, Emmanuel Adebayor and more. FIFA Football goes inside.

… This year’s captains consist of an unproven quarterback, a semi-proven safety and a linebacker who’s missed all three losses due to injury. And many of the players they’re leading are big-time young talents who don’t yet have a clue what it’s like to stop Braxton Miller on fourth-and-2 with everything you’ve dreamed of on the line.

“We’ve got to try to keep explaining, showing these younger guys, ‘You have to put in so much work,’” MSU senior tight end Josiah Price said. “I mean I put in hours and hours and hours of watching my opponent before each and every game, on my own, without the coaches around me, to know the guy I’m lined up across from. And it’s hard to try to teach a guy who’s a five-star All-American, a four-star All-American, they just come in and think sometimes they’re going to do all this stuff.”

That has been one of the strengths of MSU’s program over the last half-decade — how quickly heralded young players are humbled, learning their recruiting stars are as prestigious and meaningful as used toilet paper once they arrive on campus, that everyone begins at zero in Ken Mannie’s weight room. Perhaps there is a gap in that understanding.

The Golden State Warriors started last season with a record 24 consecutive victories on their way to a historic 73-win campaign. But expect a little more trial and error and a little less intensity this time around, Warriors coach Steve Kerr said.

“I don’t think we’ll have that this year,” Kerr said. “We’ve kind of been through that. We’d rather win a championship than set a record, that’s for sure.

“Last year we felt like we could do both — and we were pretty close — but we couldn’t pull it off. This year’s more about just growing and getting better and experimenting the first couple months of the season.”

This approach is also framed by Kerr’s experience as a player on the Chicago Bulls teams that won three consecutive championships from 1996 to 1998.

The trouble with these extreme emotional reactions to grades is that students’ knowledge of a subject is tied to their experience of the grade, says Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, associate professor of education, psychology and neuroscience at the University of Southern California. Powerful emotions attached to grades drown children’s inherent interest in any given subject.

“Whether the grade is good or bad, you’re taking the student away from focusing on intrinsic interest and tying their experience to grades,” Immordino-Yang explained. Under such circumstances, genuine interest in learning for its own sake wilts. “Grades can be an impetus to work, and can be really satisfying,” she said. “But when emotions about the grade swamp students’ emotions about a subject, that’s a problem.”

Once considered obstacles to thinking, emotions are now understood to be interdependent with various cognitive processes. A better way to think about emotion’s centrality to learning, Immordino-Yang writes in Emotions, Learning, and the Brain, is this: “We only think about things we care about.” When kids care mainly about grades, they’re devoting more mental resources to the assessment than to the actual subject matter.

… Freelap USA: Clinical mental health has focused mainly on symptoms stemming from concussions in sport, but depression and other challenges of the human condition affect athletes just as much as the rest of the population. Can you go into the reason that the profession of psychology should move towards a compass model instead of being typically on the bottom of many organizational totem poles? The brain is the top organ, yet it is often left until the end of any investigation into complex problems.

John Sullivan: What I think you are asking is what the barriers are for sport psychology to be optimally and fully integrated into sport. First, I would say that this question certainly has cultural context for each sport organization, so there is not just one model for all organizations. That being said, sport psychology and the brain sciences continue to take a one-down position in sport which is—in part—due to a lack of education about the brain and a few lingering myths in sport.

In general, we tend not to learn much about the brain in our education systems. In fact, unless someone has specialized in the study of the brain, there would be very little working knowledge about its impact on our daily lives.

Maybe you’re lazy, maybe you’re not lazy. But one thing is for certain: Your brain is.

Research shows that even in our free time we often don’t do what we enjoy most — we do what is easy. Your brain doesn’t want to waste energy. So it’s always a bit lazy.

Problem is, the world is not lazy. These days it’s constantly shouting at you.

Bittium (Oulu, Finland) is demonstrating a wearable platform for health monitoring, which is targeted for preventive healthcare, and configured to aid the development of customized products and services quickly and cost-efficiently.

The wearable platform for health monitoring is a wearable device platform integrated with four sensors: 3-axis accelerometer, Optical Heart Rate (OHR), skin temperature and EmoGraphy skin conductance sensor. These sensors allow the measurement of person’s stress level, fatigue and sleeping quality.

In 2004, I was in a French prison cell, arrested by a Paris drug squad on the order of an examining magistrate, a powerful official in the French criminal justice system. It was right that I should have been there: I had broken the law — as it turned out, not French law, but sporting law. I had taken performance-enhancing drugs and I had won some of the biggest races in the sport of cycling, including a World Championship title. I had cheated.

In those days, those of us who were doping considered ourselves above the law. It was the reign of Lance Armstrong, and not only was he treated like a king, but he also acted like one.

Looking back, I see that the downfall of that era — one that had existed, to some degree, in professional cycling for nearly a century — was long overdue. The yearslong struggle of the antidoping authorities to get control of the sport eventually enabled it to reboot. In the post-Armstrong era, cycling has made significant strides toward becoming a clean sport.

In recent weeks, however, we’ve been forced to ask ourselves if we are actually in the light. The leak of Olympic athletes’ World Anti-Doping Agency records by the anonymous hacker group known as Fancy Bears has opened the world’s eyes to a disturbingly gray area in sporting law: the therapeutic use exemption.

Chris Higgins has been on an NHL roster every season since 2004. At 33, his days as a 20-goal guy are long gone, but he’s a veteran player and a solid defensive forward who can pitch in with a bottom six role, having played the last six seasons with the Vancouver Canucks.

He didn’t sign anywhere as a free agent during the summer, and ended up in Calgary Flames camp on a professional tryout contract under former Canucks assistant Glen Gulutzan. “I have to perform, but I feel like I could play a role here and help this team be very successful,” Higgins said. “Training camp is tryouts. I’ve approached it, with or without a contract, the same way every year.”

He left camp without a contract. So did Tuomo Ruutu, 33, who had been on a PTO with the Vancouver Canucks. So did defenseman Mike Weber, 28, on a PTO with the St. Louis Blues. So did a few dozen other veterans who entered training camps after the phones didn’t ring during the summer, hoping to latch on and then seeing the jobs they competed for turned over to other players.

Frequently, younger ones.

… The logistics behind this operation is mind-boggling. In 2015, the Blue Jays played a staggering 173 games, with 86 road contests and 32 trips between cities, a total distance of 67,000 kilometres – almost twice around the world. With logistics like that, there’s no time to rest. Planning for the 2017 season is already well under way, with hotels and transportation providers being sourced, airline contracts being negotiated and contingency plans being made in case of disruptions. But with the American League Championship Series just getting under way, there is the small matter of finishing the 2016 playoffs.

Consider the challenge that comes from having many games take place in different cities on consecutive days. Travel and game disruptions due to weather are not uncommon, and security has become a much bigger hurdle than it used to be. The playoffs add a whole level of complexity, as opponents and travel plans are unclear until mere days in advance. If players are stressed out or fatigued because of the trip, or if they are worrying about whether the right equipment arrives in time for a key game, their performance could suffer. Given the amount of travel involved in Major League Baseball, that is a huge concern.

How does a team’s scouting department prepare for the most critical part of their year? We went behind the scenes with the Colts’ scouting staff as their talent evaluators got ready for a fall of finding future NFLers

Tim Murray is clasping a sizable take-out cup of coffee while speaking about the most precious jewel in the kingdom. There’s every chance the beverage came from a nearby Tim Hortons, where chair-backs feature the Buffalo Sabres logo and the team’s blue and yellow colours adorn donuts. It’s Wednesday morning and Murray is sitting in the last row of KeyBank Center’s lower bowl. On the ice in front of the Sabres GM, Jack Eichel and his teammates are skating through their last practice before hosting the Montreal Canadiens to start the regular season. Once routine sets in, training sessions may feature an element of drudgery. Right now, though, the Sabres look like kids gleefully executing their chores on Christmas Eve. Murray’s manner is more reserved, but his praise of Eichel is effusive. “He’s of the utmost importance,” Murray says in reference to Eichel’s role in Buffalo’s scorched-earth rebuild. “He’s a young, No. 1 centre. He’s a world-class talent.”

About 20 minutes later, Eichel lets out a scream that silences the rink. The high-ankle sprain he sustains—and the fluke nature in which it occurs, on an entirely standard power-play drill—make it easy to fall back on the belief that the Sabres are condemned to perpetually ride the long-ago-dubbed “train to nowhere” that creaks along an above-ground rail just outside their home rink. Murray’s travel plans for the franchise, however, are firm enough to withstand some turbulence. January will mark the third anniversary of his hiring in Buffalo and there’s an expectation within the team and around town that the club—which made a huge leap in the standings last year, but hasn’t made the playoffs since 2011—will very much be in the post-season chase at that point.

Murray’s ground-up approach works in conjunction with a top-down tone set by owner, Terry Pegula, who, since purchasing the Sabres in 2011, has provided the organization with means, clout and stability they’ve never previously known. Just as the downtown trains increasingly carry people around a modestly revitalized Buffalo, the local hockey crew is pushing forward despite a distinct lack of good fortune and at least one lingering question mark. And should things ever break right in Western New York, the emotional release will match anything ever witnessed in the league.