Applied Sports Science newsletter – October 28, 2016

… despite winning 62 percent of his games and leading the franchise to three Western Conference appearances and the 2012 NBA Finals, Brooks was dumped after failing to make the playoffs after an injured-riddled 2014-15 season.

In response, he took the next year off. He didn’t work on his golf game. Instead, Brooks finally worked on himself.

“I felt like I needed to get better,” he says. “That’s just how I was raised. My mother taught me that.”

Javy Baez was barnstorming in Tennessee when Jason McLeod saw him for the first time. The day was hot and sunny, and the best player on the field was 18 years old, skinny, live-wired, and brilliant. The Apaches played a double-header under the May sun, and Baez homered twice. After the game, he stuck around and put on a wood-bat BP show for the assembled scouts. More home runs. That’s when McLeod, then with the Padres and now a senior executive with the Cubs, noticed something strange: Javier Baez, a right-handed hitter, was hitting home runs left-handed.

“The ball just sounded different off his bat,” said Jaron Madison, another Padres alum who saw Baez that year and who, like McLeod, is now part of Theo Epstein’s brain trust in Chicago. It was his initial report, in fact, that compelled his boss to come to see the kid play in Tennessee. That report: explosive bat speed, an ultra-aggressive swing, and extraordinary competitive fire. “What really clicked for me was his confidence,” McLeod recalled last week. “He wanted to show people how good he was.” And yes, he was that good, said Madison. “Just one of those special athletes that looked like he could play all over the field.” Five years later, that special athlete is still stuck somewhere between disaster and a big-league dream, waiting to erupt.

Notable English club Arsenal FC continues to search for the next promising talent — and with the help of PUMA, the highly respected English Premier League (EPL) club has affiliations with select American youth soccer organizations providing a whole new pool of prospects.

Now, the Gunners take a look at the latest talent within these organizations and helps American youths learn the Arsenal way — with a goal of identifying elite players who could put their skills to the test at Arsenal’s London Academy.

San Diego’s Albion SC is well known for developing world class players and it’s strong commitment to creating dynamic player development opportunities. Albion SC has several coaches and youth players in England right now training at Arsenal FC.

When Ed Orgeron took over as LSU’s interim coach, one of the first changes he made was adjusting the Tigers’ practice schedule.

Gone were the long, arduous practices Les Miles preferred. Orgeron replaced them with up-tempo workouts that required the team being on its feet for a fraction of the time in hopes of keeping players fresh for games and throughout the season.

Background: Extreme conditioning programs (ECPs) are fitness training regimens relying on aerobic, plyometric, and resistance training exercises, often with high levels of intensity for a short duration of time. These programs have grown rapidly in popularity in recent years, but science describing the safety profile of these programs is lacking.

Hypothesis: The rate of injury in the extreme conditioning program is greater than the injury rate of weightlifting and the majority of injuries occur to the shoulder and back.

Study Design: Cross-sectional study.

Level of Evidence: Level 4.

Methods: This is a retrospective survey of injuries reported by athletes participating in an ECP. An injury survey was sent to 1100 members of Iron Tribe Fitness, a gym franchise with 5 locations across Birmingham, Alabama, that employs exercises consistent with an ECP in this study. An injury was defined as a physical condition resulting from ECP participation that caused the athlete to either seek medical treatment, take time off from exercising, or make modifications to his or her technique to continue.

Results: A total of 247 athletes (22%) completed the survey. The majority (57%) of athletes were male (n = 139), and 94% of athletes were white (n = 227). The mean age of athletes was 38.9 years (±8.9 years). Athletes reported participation in the ECP for, on average, 3.6 hours per week (± 1.2 hours). Eighty-five athletes (34%) reported that they had sustained an injury while participating in the ECP. A total of 132 injuries were recorded, yielding an estimated incidence of 2.71 per 1000 hours. The shoulder or upper arm was the most commonly injured body site, accounting for 38 injuries (15% of athletes). Athletes with a previous shoulder injury were 8.1 times as likely to injure their shoulder in the ECP compared with athletes with healthy shoulders. The trunk, back, head, or neck (n = 29, 12%) and the leg or knee (n = 29, 12%) were the second most commonly injured sites. The injury incidence rate among athletes with < 6 months of experience in the ECP was 2.5 times greater than that of more experienced athletes (≥6 months of experience). Of the 132 injuries, 23 (17%) required surgical intervention. Squat cleans, ring dips, overhead squats, and push presses were more likely to cause injury. Athletes reported that 35% of injuries were due to overexertion and 20% were due to improper technique.

Conclusion: The estimated injury rate among athletes participating in this ECP was similar to the rate of injury in weightlifting and most other recreational activities. The shoulder or upper arm was the most commonly injured area, and previous shoulder injury predisposed to new shoulder injury. New athletes are at considerable risk of injury compared with more experienced athletes.

Clinical Relevance: Extreme conditioning programs are growing in popularity, and there is disagreement between science and anecdotal reports from athletes, coaches, and physicians about their relative safety. This study estimates the incidence of injury in extreme conditioning programs which appears to be similar to other weight-training programs.

When it comes to sleep, we’re so occupied with our dreams and checking out of consciousness for the day that we sometimes forget that our bodies never really power down — they are constantly working, even while we are in our deepest sleep.

When our bodies enter that stage during the night, our blood pressure drops, our breathing slows, our muscles relax and hormones, including those that help us grow and develop, are released, according to the National Sleep Foundation. The rapid eye movement stage is also when our muscles are “turned off,” which makes our bodies immobile.

… Carroll was asked how he knows when to limit practice and how he knows that guys are recovered and ready to go:

“We have been monitoring for a long time now — it’s three years of trying to figure out how to do this and make sense of the data. We feel pretty confident that we understand it. Now you can’t measure guys in games, you know, you can’t use the equipment during the games, but we do know enough and we have a good sense for it now, I think better than I’ve ever had as a coach.

“The support system allows us to really be able to evaluate each guy, based on the load that he’s undertaking and all that. It does help us. And we really are responding to that regularly, throughout the week, regardless of what happened the week before. It’s a common practice for us now to check it out, know how many plays a guy got, what kind of exertion, and we can estimate from the games what’s necessary for the next week. So there’s a big process involved there. I really appreciate it.

… In the 1960s, a series of interesting experiments was done on air traffic controllers. Researchers wanted to explore if they had a general enhanced ability to “keep track of a number of things at once” [2] and whether that skill could be applied to other situations. After observing their sophisticated abilities in air traffic control, they then gave them a set of generic memory based tasks with shapes and colours. The extraordinary thing was that when tested on these skills outside their own area of expertise the air traffic controllers did no better than anyone else.

These findings challenged contemporary thinking on generic skills. Surely they had developed a set of general cognitive capacities that could be used in other areas or ‘domains’? The evidence suggested the opposite. In order to be good in a specific domain you need to know a lot about that specific domain and moreover, “the more complex the domain, the more important is domain-specific knowledge.”[3] This phenomenon is now well established and has been replicated many times.

The aim of this study was to assess the prevalence of health problems and associated risk factors in former elite female football players. A cross-sectional research design was employed, using an online questionnaire on personal characteristics and health complaints during/after the career. One hundred fifty-two (response rate: 62.0%) former first German league players answered the survey. Around 70% described their current health as good or very good. Over half (57.9%) reported knee problems during the last 4 weeks while exercising and a third (33.6%) during normal daily activities. The second most common location for complaints was the head (53.3%). Almost one quarter (23.7%) of players suffered from osteoarthritis (OA). Regression analysis showed that OA in knee/ankle and physical complaints (PC) in knee/ankle/head were significantly predicted by number and severity of previous injuries (P < 0.05). Further, increases in age, training volume, and level of play were associated with an increased likelihood of presenting with OA (P < 0.05), but not PC. In conclusion, a football career may lead to specific long-term health problems in elite female players. Prevention strategies should focus on knee, ankle, and head injuries. Future studies are needed to clinically assess the prevalence rates of OA and possible neurocognitive changes.

Adidas might be getting out of the GPS running watch race, but the sports giant is not giving up on wearables altogether it seems. That’s because it’s working on Chameleon, a new lifestyle tracking wearable, and All Day, a new health, activity and wellbeing app to match.

Wareable has been told by a source that Chameleon and All Day are set to launch in 2017. It’s likely that Chameleon will be the final branding but bear in mind this could be a codename (though it has been used on Adidas Originals footwear before).

Why is iron important to our health and athletic performance? Iron is a necessary micronutrient and ingredient in hemoglobin and myoglobin working in the exchange cycle of oxygen from your blood to your muscles. If you have low iron levels you aren’t efficient in oxygenation of your body’s tissues and so can’t function optimally. The iron equation and how low iron can negatively impact on sport performance is unique to each individual. Once you understand your individual profile, you can address how low iron might impact you specifically. Since athletes are more likely to have iron deficiency than sedentary people, it’s a helpful topic to look into. If fatigue is cramping your performance read on.

In cooperation with the Sports Association of the Palatinate (SBP), a survey was conducted on substance use by recreational and amateur athletes. Distribution of the online questionnaire took place by means of chain-referral sampling, and questions on substance use were presented using the randomized response technique (RRT) to protect the anonymity of respondents and prevent socially desirable answers. The estimated lowest limit for the population share for use of prohibited substances during the last season (4%) and for lifetime use (3.6%) did not differ significantly. Approximately 21% of respondents had used substances for training or competitions that were taken for a purpose other than performance enhancement (e.g., to improve their mood or to help with recuperation from a minor injury or illness) in the last year. 49% had done so at some point in their life.

s anyone who’s watched Moneyball or listened to game commentators for five minutes knows, statistical analysis is a huge part of professional sports and AI driven analytics have become a major component of that in recent years. Nvidia is looking to take it to the next level though, with GPU driven analytics that can look at far more data in real time.

Professor of computer science at New York University, Claudio Silva, is a big name in the analytics game. He helped develop Major League Baseball’s Statcast, automated statistics engine which analyses live gameplay to make predictions about upcoming actions. By teaming up with Nvidia however, it’s thought that he could develop new tracking systems which can analyse just about everything a player does mid-game.

… Something I learned in talking to members of The Process Community is that you must not underestimate the depth and darkness of the lurch. There is no Process without the lurch, both in the teleological sense that there is no salvation without sin and in the practical sense that the Philadelphia 76ers would never have let Sam Hinkie burn the organization down if the alternative—an endless future of respectable hopelessness—were not somehow more unappealing. The secretive, gnomic, oatmeal-complected Hinkie, author of an 11-page resignation letter that reads like lorem ipsum filler text comprised entirely of management patois, seems like an odd fit for the role of redeemer/martyr, and strictly in terms of his own charmless and charisma-free pragmatism he absolutely is. But the devotion to Hinkie is not just a devotion to Hinkie, just as Hinkie’s role in Process cosmology is more apostle than messiah. The Process, the living faith that things could become better if only they first became significantly worse, is what matters most. Hinkie was simply that idea’s vessel on earth.

Or, in less grandiose terms: “the reason why there were so many people who were so gung-ho about supporting the process was that we’d already discussed this exact idea—or not this exact idea, maybe not this drastic—during all those mediocre seasons,” Neubeck says.

Relative age effects (RAEs) have been studied as a potential factor associated with player selection bias in numerous sports. However, little research has examined the role of RAEs among National Football League (NFL) draftees. The purpose of the current study was to determine the existence of RAEs in NFL draftees from the last 10 NFL drafts. Draftee birth dates were collected and divided into calendar and scholastic quarters (SQ1-SQ4). To determine the presence of RAEs in specific subsets, NFL draftees were grouped according to round drafted, position, level of conference play, and age at the time of the draft. Significant χ tests (p ≤ 0.05) comparing observed birth-date distributions vs. the expected birth-date distribution from the general population were followed up by calculating the standardized residual for each quarter (z > ±2.0 indicating significance). Overall, no RAEs were seen when birth-date distribution was assessed using calendar quarters (p = 0.47), but more draftees were born in SQ2 (December-February) than expected (p < 0.01; z = +2.2). Significantly more draftees were born in SQ2 than expected for middle-round draftees (p = 0.01; z = +2.4), skill positions (p = 0.03; z = +2.3), Power Five college draftees (p < 0.01; z = +2.6), and early draftees (p < 0.01; z = +3.1). However, reverse RAEs were seen among late draftees, with fewer draftees being born in SQ2 (z = -3.6) and more being born in SQ4 (June-August; z = +2.6) than expected. In contrast to previous research, the current study observed significant RAEs in NFL draftees from the last 10 years. This player selection bias should be considered when evaluating long-term athlete development models in American football.