Applied Sports Science newsletter – November 4, 2016

… A new era has emerged in Major League Baseball, one that features young players with a lot of talent, and often, the competitive arrogance and cockiness that accompanies superstardom — Yasiel Puig, the late José Fernandez, Bryce Harper and Baez, to name a few.

Ross is the perfect counterpart to those players, a journeyman with limited talent but invaluable intangibles.

“Too many times you portray players as clubhouse leaders and that’s done way too loosely for me,” Cubs manager Joe Maddon told MLB.com before the season. “With him, it’s legitimate. He is a clubhouse leader. Despite not hitting .275 or better, he still maintains his stature in the clubhouse because of the respect people have for him for how he goes about his business. When he says something, it’s pertinent and right on.”

… “There are some elements that are different in the run game this year than last year at this time,” [Pete] Carroll said. “And part of it is we have not allowed Russell to take off and run very much, and he’s been very, very effective for us over the years, so we’ve had to take care of him, and that’s just part of the way this season has been.

“He’s getting better. And I’m really fired up about that. We’re going to keep progressing as he is able and do what we can do to get back to the kind of mix that we like. I know it’s coming, so I’m pretty optimistic about it. We just need to keep slugging it out here as we find our way, and we’re getting close.”

… Stress experienced early in life can be debilitating and potentially devastating if compounded throughout life. Where children experience prolonged periods of distress they need the proper help and support to enable them to cope and we clearly have some way to go in this area. But are the kinds of tasks that we are asking them to do in schools genuinely creating a state of distress? If stress is a often a question of perception as Selye claimed then to what extent is it helpful to portray testing and exams for example as a key contributor to a “mental health crisis spiralling out of control?”

Stress is a very difficult area because it is highly subjective and often results in emotional and sometimes irrational reactions to it. We all want to create a healthy, productive atmosphere for staff and students in which they feel they have agency over their future and in which they don’t feel overwhelmed by external stressors but by viewing all stress as distress without harnessing the hidden benefits of eustress, we might just be missing a trick.

Scientists have long known that there’s much more to our experience than the five senses (or ‘outward wits’) described by Aristotle – hearing, sight, smell, touch and taste. Yet the myth of five senses persists, perhaps because a clearer understanding of our sensory experience at the neurological level has only recently started to take shape. In this instalment of Aeon’s In Sight series, the British philosopher Barry C Smith argues that the multisensory view of human experience that’s currently emerging in neuroscience could make philosophising about our senses much more accurate, and richer, allowing philosophers to complement the work of scientists in important ways. But first, philosophy must catch up to the major advances being made in brain science.

… When we artificially decrease a stressor (i.e., “recovery”) as soon as a workout is complete—for instance, by hopping in an ice bath to thwart inflammation—it’s as if we are telling our bodies, “Hey! Wait a minute, the bad stuff is gone, we don’t need to worry about improving our defenses.” Research shows ice baths and anti-inflammatory pills may blunt adaptations from a workout. Similarly, taking anti-oxidants following hard training decreases adaptations because they mask the oxidative stress that accompanies working out, and this oxidative stress is the very signal we need to jump-start our body’s production of mitochondria, the energy-producing powerhouses of our muscles.

This paradox isn’t just at play in athletics. The same logic applies when astronauts lose bone density in space (stress of gravity is absent) or when the immune system weakens because it isn’t exposed to bacteria. The mind works in a similar fashion, too. We learn best and grow our mental muscle when we challenge it. Studies show that learning is enhanced when we are forced to struggle to solve a problem versus when answers are spoon fed to us.

This isn’t to say that “recovery” is always a bad thing. Context is key. Prior to a big event, doubling-down on recovery and eliminating stress makes sense.

A group of 15 AFL coaches will take part in a professional development camp at the AIS in Canberra next week culminating in them joining more than 250 other elite sports leaders attending the 4th World Class to World Best high performance conference on November 10-11.

The visit is a collaboration between the AIS Centre for Coaching and Performance Leaders (CCPL) and the AFL Coaches Association (AFLCA). Participants will include former AFL premiership players Michael Voss, Ryan O’Keefe, Amon Buchanan and Gary O’Donnell.

The coaches will take part in a customised program at the AIS designed to help them with decision-making and managing the hurdles they may face over an AFL season, before spending time at the Australian War Memorial and completing leadership development with the Australian Defence Force (ADF).

Today trainers and athletes have the ability to collect huge amounts of data variables via new wearable and fitness tracking technologies. At Sparta Science, their primary objective is to translate that data into something useable.

“We’re focused on depth, not width,” said Mike Hoffmann, a former strength coach who does business development at Sparta. “The whole goal of sports science is to help sports practitioners save time. Not collect more data points.”

Sparta is a two-piece program that pairs data collected from a force plate with a comprehensive software program, SpartaTrac, that allows trainers and coaches to turn that data into something actionable.

“Rather than saying here’s a hundred different data points you can get from the force plate, we’ve found what we think are the most reliable and valid and then started diving deeper,” Hoffmann said.

Psychologists say using willpower to achieve goals is overhyped. Here’s what actually works.

Scott Barry Kaufman is the scientific director of the Imagination Institute and a researcher at the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of two books on intelligence and creativity, Ungifted and Wired to Create, and his essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Scientific American, Psychology Today, and more. He recently joined David Epstein, an investigative reporter for ProPublica and the New York Times bestselling author of The Sports Gene, for a Heleo Conversation about the complex science of expertise. They argue for why we need to move beyond just “deliberate practice” when we talk about achievement, consider why certain theories reach peak popularity, and discuss why imagination matters immensely to achievement.

We compared running mechanics parameters determined from ground reaction force (GRF) measurements with estimated forces obtained from double differentiation of kinematic (K) data from motion analysis in a broad spectrum of running speeds (1.94-5.56 m·s−1). Data were collected through a force-instrumented treadmill and compared at different sampling frequencies (900 and 300 Hz for GRF, 300 and 100 Hz for K). Vertical force peak, shape, and impulse were similar between K methods and GRF. Contact time, flight time and vertical stiffness (kvert) obtained from K showed the same trend as GRF with differences <5%, whereas leg stiffness (kleg) was not correctly computed by kinematics. The results revealed that the main vertical GRF parameters can be computed by the double differentiation of the body centre of mass properly calculated by motion analysis. The present model provides an alternative accessible method for determining temporal and kinetic parameters of running without an instrumented treadmill.

… “This is just a different place,” John Baker, who played for the Cubs in 2014 and joined Epstein’s staff as a baseball-operations assistant last year, told Reuters.

“My first impression was wow, these guys won the World Series in Boston, they’ve been incredibly successful financially but they are ego-less people trying to provide the best possible environment for a team of baseball players to be successful. That’s the simple goal.”

The masterplan was built on a foundation of scouting and player development, supplemented by a series of brilliant trades and when the time was right, opening the cheque book for go-for-it free agency signings like Jon Lester and Aroldis Chapman.

Scientists in UK and Belgium find less experienced referees are more easily distracted and focus less on contact zones

Many matches in a short time is often given as a reason why football players injure themselves. Fifteen years of studies of European professional football now shows that the risk of suffering a muscle injury is high up to five days after a match.

The tight schedule and the lack of recovery time between matches is an issue that is constantly discussed in professional football. Recently, for example, targeted Malmo FF harsh criticism against the toughest schedule in the fall, after injuries to several key players.

The discussion conducted in Sweden and at the highest level in European football, and among trainers as well as among physiotherapists and doctors. Coaches often highlight that the team’s performance will suffer if you do not get enough recovery time, while the medically hold primarily discuss how it affects the player’s injury.

… One of the biggest issues Arsenal tend to face in November is a glut of injuries. Last year the Gunners began November with Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, Theo Walcott, Jack Wilshere, Aaron Ramsey, Danny Welbeck, Tomas Rosicky, Mikel Arteta and David Ospina all missing, and Per Mertesacker admitted after a 1-1 draw with Tottenham that the stretched squad were “a bit knackered”.

Injuries at Arsenal are of course not unique to November, but they become harder to absorb a few months into the season when overworked players begin to feel the effects of a busy start to the campaign.