Applied Sports Science newsletter – November 21, 2016

… “So much is dependent upon using your upper body,” Love said. “Even just being able to lift, ride a bike, and do extra stuff off the floor that I wasn’t able to do last year.”

But now he’s healthy and comfortable. Lue says he “looks stronger when he’s posting up and rebounding.” His offensive rejuvenation give the Cavaliers the NBA’s only trio of players averaging at least 20 points per game.

… “Do you think Jonathan Quick’s playing style has led to his current injury and do you think it will lead to more injuries in the future?” – Eugene Ngo (email)

HIRSCH: One thing about being as flexible as he is: If you’re too flexible, it can make your tendons and your muscles weaker, and more susceptible to injury. Dominik Hasek had the same thing.

But the other part of it is that goalies are overtraining. They go out 30 minutes before, practice, and then go out 30 minutes after. It’s too much.

No matter how many times we tell you sleep is as important to your fitness as nutrition and your training regimen, we know those late nights you spend working or out with your buddies are still happening. So how about a different tactic? The Sleep Matters Club, a sleep publication in the UK, has created an infographic that illustrates exactly what’s going on as you snooze away (hopefully for the recommended eight hours!). It even delves into how the body of an athlete goes into overdrive to repair the microtrauma of a WOD or long run at night. Check it out. And if you struggle to fall asleep at night, try these before-bed exercises, read these tips on getting better shuteye while traveling, and eat more of these foods.

… Why use ECC training?

There are lots of pros and cons to be considered as ECC training has the potential to strongly influence other training units; it needs to be used judiciously to create a positive impact on performance. The text to follow is largely based around the direct performance implications with respect to ECC training and the potential to develop a contractile system that is both stronger and faster. Perhaps the Holy Grail is using ECC training to move the force/velocity curve upwards and to the right with particular gains at high speed (see Figure 1). We may not quite be there yet in terms of complete understanding – but options are discussed in the text to follow.

… Can you start by talking about how shockingly unimportant or even disincentivizing it is to pay people money? I was particularly fascinated by your finding that as bonus size increases, performance decreases, because of the stress and fear of not getting the bonus.

Some time ago, I was asked to consult with a foreign government about a program where the ministry of finance wanted to improve the education in their schools. Their idea was to take the top 10 percent of teachers in each school and give them a bonus, and they asked me what I thought.

The first thing I asked them was, “What is your theory of what’s holding teachers now?” They said, “What do you mean?” I explained that every particular solution is an antidote to some specific problem. If you think that the solution is to give the top 10 percent of teachers a bonus, it means that you think that teachers know what to do, and the only thing keeping them from doing it is that they are lazy, and they need another motivation. Not only that, but this particular solution requires that every teacher thinks they could be in the top 10 percent. Right? Because if only the top 10 percent think they could be in the top 10 percent, it will not motivate the bottom people. So people need to be over-optimistic in this scenario. And what was clear in that example, to me, was that they had this very naive notion: “Let’s just pay people and somehow things will magically become better.”

So then I said, “How true are these assumptions that this is really what is going on?” I told them about one of my all-time favorite studies, where they gave the top teachers time to teach the not-so-good teachers. Now think about that model. That’s about knowledge, right? People don’t become teachers because they want to be lazy. They become teachers because they are motivated to help. But teaching is a very tough profession. So you want to take the people who have figured it out and give them time to teach the people who haven’t figured it out yet by themselves. Now if this ministry of finance got their way, the only thing they would guarantee is that none of the good teachers would want to help the bad teachers because then their bonuses would be at stake, right?

… Sport science is regarded as one of the fastest changing domains in education, with technology impacting on the day-to-day work of applied practitioners.

The industry is not standing still, so education within the industry must also keep moving. A common theme nowadays to keep pace with best practice is to provide continuing professional development events for those practitioners and students alike that are keen to stay up with the curve of change that shapes their industry.

Such CPD events live and die by the quality of the speaker that is brought to impart their knowledge and expertise on the audience and Australian Dr Tim Gabbett was the first guest to take part in what is to become a regular sport science CPD programme through the department at CIT.

Major League Baseball is now in the Statcast era, where Trackman radar is fully operational across all MLB parks and tracking both pitches and batted balls. This offers several advantages to the previously-existing PITCHf/x and HITf/x systems developed by Sportvision, though the transition is not without a few drawbacks. Still, Trackman is here to stay and pitch tracking is a brand new frontier for front office analysts and academy owners everywhere.

The major drawback behind Trackman is the prohibitively expensive cost (around $30,000 MSRP per public reports; we are not at liberty to disclose the price our radar cost) and the somewhat black-box nature of the device. Rapsodo is a new pitch tracking technology that has been in closed beta testing for over a year, and Driveline Baseball was one of their main partners in helping to develop the blended radar + optical unit along.

Smart technology continues to streamline and transform nearly all aspects of our lives — monitoring our sleep patterns, allowing us to work from anywhere at any time and even helping to find cures for diseases like Zika.

But more than optimizing tedious workflows or gamifying daily activities, smart technology has helped to increase our baselines and has made us better innovators and enactors of change. Besides providing the opportunity to go beyond old performance barriers, it’s opened up an entirely new way to experience the world around us.

Patient engagement leads us to better, safer, less expensive, and more flexible ways for managing healthcare’s complex tasks. It’s common sense, right? If you’re engaged in your own care and personally accountable to yourself and others, you’re more likely to invest the time and energy to achieve health and well-being in your life.

It’s tempting to believe this simple truth is the only truth to the matter. But as we know, healthcare is more complicated that. The New England Journal of Medicine in May announced survey results which show that only 9% of healthcare executives report high levels of engagement across more than 3/4 of their patient population. The authors suggest that we haven’t yet discovered optimal ways of achieving high rates of sustained patient engagement – which is itself startling, considering how much interest there is in this area.

Using the Microsoft Kinect 2.0 camera, a 3-dimensional gait analysis has never been easier or more accurate. See how easy it is to set up.

I’m always amazed at how focused triathletes are with MOUNTAINS of data, yet ignore the one piece of information that could truly change their performance, and their life. With blood testing, athletes can open a window to the inside of their body to track, analyze and understand their biochemical status.

A full panel blood test will provide a massive amount of information, including how you can optimize your body using simple training, nutrition, and even lifestyle changes. Everyone’s blood contains biomarkers, measurable substances that have biological effects on the body’s function. Science has shown that biomarkers can reveal your body’s true health status.

By measuring biomarkers in the blood, scientists can study what’s going on inside your body accurately and objectively. The more details you know about your biomarker results, the more useful the data is. In triathlete terms- no one uses a watch anymore that just records time- we want multiple data points (biomarkers) like pace, heart rate, power, cadence, watts and so on. InsideTracker is like the Garmin 920 of watches – the most advanced, feature rich, training tool on the market.

… Though vitamins can degrade in fresh fruits and vegetables over time, many nutrients in foods are much hardier than most people assume, Dr. Bouzari said. “Minerals like iron are almost bulletproof, and the fiber doesn’t care at all whether it’s heated or frozen,” he said. And in general, the differences in nutrient levels between fresh and frozen are so minor that they would be unlikely to have an impact on overall health, and dietitians generally encourage people to eat as many fruits and vegetables as they can, in whatever form they enjoy.

Jürgen Klopp is doing more than oversee a football transformation at Liverpool as he leads this season’s Premier League challenge. The club are in the midst of a food revolution.

Last summer the club appointed their first full-time nutritionist, Mona Nemmer, who was lured from Bayern Munich – much to the despair of the German champions.

If you know that Leicester City won the English Premier League last season, you also know that the club beat 5,000-to-1 odds to complete the fairy tale. The odds around them this season set up a different story. Bookmakers thought the Foxes were more likely to get demoted from the league than to retain their title.

It wasn’t because Leicester forgot how to win soccer matches in the off-season—although they occasionally play that way. Instead, the bookmakers correctly predicted something else. This was the year for English soccer’s empire to strike back.

Little is known about how team sport athletes individually and collectively experience sources of stress during competitive sport encounters. This study aimed to examine the nature of the stressors team sport athletes appraised during games at individual and team levels, as well as their degree of synchronization during an unfolding game. Through individual self-confrontation interviews, the activities of nine basketball players of the same team were examined in detail. The results revealed that 12 categories of stressors were reported, and categorized into two larger units reflecting stressors perceived as affecting (a) “the team functioning as a whole” and (b) “a player’s own functioning”. Thus, the nature and degree of similarity of the game-specific stressors experienced by basketball players within a single team were identified during a game. In addition, the findings showed six different patterns of synchronizations of team members’ stressors, as well as their changes over the course of the game. They provided support for the synchronized appraisal and experience of stressors within a team during a game. By adopting an interpersonal perspective and examining the temporal interplay in team members’ activities, this study shed light on stress within teams.