Applied Sports Science newsletter – October 20, 2016

… Part of the problem was simply down to inexperience — Boateng, born in 1988, was still learning his trade in those years — but the enforced break made him realise that his mentality had to change, too. He needed to be switched on much more, at all times.

“Keeping up your concentration is one of the hardest tasks when you’re a centre-back because a team like Bayern tend to dominate and can give you sense of false security,” he explains. “You mostly defend with your head, always reacting to the movement of opponents and teammates. I had to become more aware of that, play with much more consideration, the way you drive a car: you always need to look left, right and the rear mirror to see what’s going on around you.”

His journey to the top wasn’t an easy one, however. At the 2012 Champions League final against Chelsea in Bayern’s home town, his somewhat tepid challenge allowed Didier Drogba to score a late 1-1 equaliser from the Blues’ only corner of the game.

… The Pistons’ medical staff gave Johnson an MRI, then, after that showed nothing untoward, had him get a CAT scan. That showed nothing wrong, either.

“Yeah, he’s fine. Nothing came up in the CAT scan. He’s just got irritation down here. … Really, they think it’s coming from the shoes he’s wearing. But Stanley — not that he’s hard headed — wants to continue to wear those shoes, because they’re really comfortable. They’re comfortable? You’re in pain, because you’re playing. So, God bless him, at 20 years old, but it would seem to me that when the doctor tells you that the shoes are the problem, you would change shoes. We’ll see what happens,” Van Gundy said sarcastically after the game. “I don’t know how comfortable they are, if you can’t walk without pain. That’s not comfortable. … There’s always things that play into it, which is all well and good, as long as you can walk.”

Van Gundy was hoping — in addition to perhaps a shoe switch — the swelling would go down in Johnson’s foot enough to allow him to return to practice by Tuesday.

Ranell Hobson of the Academy of Sport Speed & Agility discusses the importance of players developing strength and mobility in their hips, a key attribute for physical performance in football.

… Nine months after landing Baker, his first marquee prep, Petersen dismissed Marcus Peters, his marquee holdover from Sarkisian. Peters was a long, athletic D-back who could shut down anyone. (The Kansas City Chiefs would go on to draft him in the first round in 2015.) But he also shut out Petersen’s brand of discipline. Peters clashed with the new staff, and in early November 2014, Petersen booted the three-year starter. He was the eighth player suspended or dismissed in Petersen’s first year in Seattle.

Nearly two years later, UW still feels the aftershock of Peters’ departure. Case in point: In Husky Stadium after a workout in the summer — 21 months later — several upperclassmen told me they cite Petersen’s dismissal of their star player as the moment the program began to mend itself after the chaotic, undisciplined end to the Sarkisian era.

Neuroscientist Sarah-Jayne Blakemore talks about social brain development in adolescence and the consequences for teenage learning and behavior

Ask any athlete or coach and they will readily acknowledge the mental side of training. The mind is an integral part of training the body. For instance, how an athlete perceives the training prescribed can be hugely influential in determining their experience of it. In turn this perception can affect how the athlete responds to the training performed. Despite their apparent importance, mental aspects of the training process are typically not accounted for in any structured or meaningful way. In this post we will elucidate what these critical elements or ‘mental resources’ are in relation to athletes’ training. We will then explore how each of these aspects can be accounted for and harnessed to best effect in the way athletes’ training plans are presented and delivered.

When you woke up this morning, what did you do first?

Did you hop in the shower, check your email or grab a doughnut? What did you say to your roommates on the way out the door? Salad or hamburger for lunch? When you got home, did you put on your sneakers and go for a run, or eat dinner in front of the television?

Most of the choices we make each day may feel like the products of well-considered decision making, but they’re not. They’re habits. And though each habit means relatively little on its own, over time, the meals we eat, how we spend our evenings, and how often we exercise have enormous impacts.

This is particularly true in our 20s, when so many of our habits are still up for grabs. The patterns you establish right now will impact your health, productivity, financial security and happiness for decades. How much money you make, how much time you spend with your friends and family, how well your body functions years from now — all of these, in many ways, are products of the habits you are building today.

Motivation is hard to come by. If you’re lucky, you have friends that will go to the gym with you to keep you in line. If you’re wealthy, you can hire a personal trainer. But if your friends have long sense given up and your bank account is screaming mercy, your options are few and far between.

The entire premise behind Moov is that wearables can be used to provide real-time feedback for fast paced workouts. When Meng Li, Nikola Hu, and Tony Yuan started Moov, the goal was always to create a virtual personal assistant that could step in at appropriate times with that feedback. To date, the group has succeeded at selling wearables to augment swimming, running, cycling, and even boxing boxing workouts with coaching, but today’s release brings heart rate into the conversation.

The new devices, conveniently named the Moov Sweat, embedded in a headband and Moov Swim, connected to a swim cap, are just one part of the company’s next steps. Moov is simultaneously announcing a Series B financing round of $12 million led by Mangrove Capital with participation from BOE Technology Group that will fuel additional R&D in addition to financing marketing for current products.

… In a bid to deal with their injury hoodoo, Arsenal installed an ‘AirFibr’ pitch at London Colney in April.

Paris-based firm Natural Grass make the pitch and they claim the all-weather resistant turf can reduce the risk of players picking up knocks by up to 40%. How they landed on that figure is anyone’s guess, but this claim has been verified by Prof. P. Rouch from the Arts & Metiers ParisTech biomechanics Laboratory.

For the last 6 years I’ve gone to the ANT+ Symposium held in the mountains outside of Calgary. This annual event caps off the busy sports tech conference season (following Interbike & Eurobike). Unlike those other two events though, this isn’t a trade show. Rather, it’s a conference for companies that are largely in the sports technology realm to discuss products and standards. And, it’s hardly limited to ANT+ these days. Just as much conversation is focused on the end-state product as the protocols used. … This year that keynote session went back to being more of my standard ‘State of the Sports Tech World’ presentation, where I discuss different trends in the sports tech industry. What was good, what was bad, what needs to happen next. But since I’d been doing this 6 years, I thought it’d also be fun to go and review slides from 2010/2012/2014 and see what previously bad things have been corrected.

… To me, failure has been the thing I’m most interested in over time. The intersection between failure and suffering. I remember reading an essay when I was doing philosophy on the nature of human fallibility by Samuel Gorovitz and Alasdair MacIntyre.

They point out that there are two key reasons people fail at whatever it is they set out to do. One reason is because of ignorance. We just don’t know all the laws that apply to the physical universe, and we don’t have a complete staid description of the universe that those laws apply to, and therefore we have research and discovery.

The second reason we fail is what they called ineptitude. Meaning, the knowledge exists but an individual or group of individuals fails to apply that knowledge correctly. What’s really interesting to me about living in our time and in our generation is that that is a remarkable change of living now: that ineptitude is as much or a bigger force in our lives than ignorance.

[For] most of human history, we were ignorant about the diseases that affected us — why do our bodies go wrong, and what can we do about it? What can we do about the world we live in and our environment? What can we do about many, many things?

PURPOSE:

Supplementation with dietary forms of vitamin D is commonplace in clinical medicine, elite athletic cohorts and the general population, yet the response of all major vitamin D metabolites to high doses of vitamin D is poorly characterized. We aimed to identify the responses of all major vitamin D metabolites to moderate and high dose supplemental vitamin D3.
METHODS:

A repeated measures design was implemented in which 46 elite professional European athletes were block randomized based on their basal 25[OH]D concentration into two treatment groups. Athletes received either 35,000 or 70,000 IU.week vitamin D3 for 12 weeks and 42 athletes completed the trial. Blood samples were collected over 18 weeks to monitor the response to supplementation and withdrawal from supplementation.
RESULTS:

Both doses led to significant increases in serum 25[OH]D and 1,25[OH]2D3. 70,000 IU.week also resulted in a significant increase of the metabolite 24,25[OH]2D at weeks 6 and 12 that persisted following supplementation withdrawal at week 18, despite a marked decrease in 1,25[OH]2D3. Intact PTH was decreased in both groups by week 6 and remained suppressed throughout the trial.
CONCLUSIONS:

High dose vitamin D3 supplementation (70,000 IU.week) may be detrimental for its intended purposes due to increased 24,25[OH]2D production. Rapid withdrawal from high dose supplementation may inhibit the bioactivity of 1,25[OH]2D3 as a consequence of sustained increases in 24,25[OH]2D that persist as 25[OH]D and 1,25[OH]2D concentrations decrease. These data imply that lower doses of vitamin D3 ingested frequently may be most appropriate and gradual withdrawal from supplementation as opposed to rapid withdrawal may be favorable.

It was as they were whiling away one of those long, sultry evenings cooped up in the comfortable surroundings of the Hotel Lucerna in Culiacán, Mexico, that Pep Guardiola outlined to Ángel Morales his vision of the perfect goal.

Over the course of their five months in northwest Mexico, Guardiola, who would become the greatest soccer coach of his generation, and Morales, a journeyman playmaker from Argentina, spent hours together, eating, relaxing, talking. A decade later, though, it is that one thought, that purest distillation of Guardiola’s philosophy, that has stayed with Morales.

“He said that his ideal goal was a move that involved every player on the pitch,” he said. “From the goalkeeper to the striker, everyone would touch the ball once, and then, at the end: goal. I told him it was impossible. I am an Argentinean: I liked to touch the ball three, four times, to dribble past someone. But that was what he said. And then, a few years later, when he was at Barcelona, I saw it come to fruition: football just as Pep had said.”

Everton FC have announced a partnership with Liverpool Hope University, as the club aims to optimise its fanbase growth and commercial development using new technology and advanced research methods. The five year partnership is the first of its kind between a top university and Premier League club.

The club will benefit from the university’s researchers and vast academic resources to drive corporate performance and expand the fanbase, as access to a dedicated research facility will allow for extensive testing of new strategies and initiatives.

… infusing data thinking throughout a company is orders of magnitude harder. This matters, because data thinking permeates your products and can make them feel “smart”?—?or not.

Here’s an example.