Applied Sports Science newsletter – December 2, 2016

Wilson Chandler is on the rise. The Denver Nuggets forward is off to a red-hot start this season, averaging 18.3 points and 7.7 rebounds, both career highs. In late November, Chandler scored at least 25 points in back-to-back games, a career first, and he hasn’t had this kind of streak since 2011, just before he was traded in the deal that sent Carmelo Anthony to the Knicks. That year also marked the start of more injury issues, as the nine-year veteran has missed all or part of several seasons due to surgeries on both hips.

In an effort to stay on the court—and out of the training room—Chandler’s injury struggles led him to look for solutions in an unusual spot: the kitchen. In an effort to improve his resilience, Chandler, 29, converted to a vegan diet six months ago, making him one the few vegans in the NBA.

… “I didn’t really think he was playing that bad,” Lue admits. “But I used to work for Doc Rivers in Boston, and he told me, ‘I never want to go into a Game 7 when the best player is on the other team.’ We had the best player. We needed him to be his best. I know he might have been tired, but f— that. We had to ride him. And he had to take us home.”

With 1:08 left in the game and the Cavaliers in another timeout, James sat motionless on the bench at Oracle Arena. He had cooled Green in the second half. He had swatted Andre Iguodala on the crucial breakaway. He had put up six straight points, and the score was tied. “I will never forget that timeout because he was so calm—and we were so calm because he was so calm,” remembers Cleveland power forward Kevin Love. “I could see Adam Silver in the stands over here. I could see Phil Knight over there. Everything was kind of moving in slow motion.”

… Almost all life on Earth has an endogenous circadian rhythmicity that is genetically determined, but that also responds to changes in light and dark. For human beings, reliable changes occur between day and night in hunger, body temperature, sleep propensity, hormone production, activity level, metabolic rate and more.

These findings on daily rhythmicity in microbiota have really piqued my interest because disruption of our circadian rhythmicity by electric light at night has been my research passion for several decades. As scientists investigate the links between our internal daily patterns, electric light and health, new information about the rhythmicity of our microbiome might hold clues about how this all works together.

The crucial question is whether the microbes simply respond to their host human’s circadian rhythm or whether they can actually alter our rhythm somehow. And does this really matter anyway?

… According to some evidence, the proportion of people sleeping less than the recommended hours of sleep is rising and associated with lifestyle factors related to a modern 24/7 society, such as psychosocial stress, alcohol consumption, smoking, lack of physical activity and excessive electronic media use, among others.

This is alarming as insufficient sleep has been found to be associated with a range of negative health and social outcomes, including success at school and in the labour market. Over the last few decades, for example, there has been growing evidence suggesting a strong association between short sleep duration and elevated mortality risks.

Given the potential adverse effects of insufficient sleep on health, well-being and productivity, the consequences of sleep-deprivation have far-reaching economic consequences. Hence, in order to raise awareness of the scale of insufficient sleep as a public-health issue, comparative quantitative figures need to be provided for policy- and decision-makers, as well as recommendations and potential solutions that can help tackling the problem.

Low levels of leg stiffness and reduced leg stiffness when fatigue is present compromise physical performance and increase injury risk. The purpose of this study was to (a) determine the reliability of leg stiffness measures obtained from contact mat data and (b) explore age-related differences in leg stiffness following exposure to a soccer-specific fatigue protocol in young female soccer players. 37 uninjured female youth soccer players divided into 3 sub-groups based on chronological age (U13, U15 and U17 year olds) volunteered to participate in the study. Following baseline data collection during which relative leg stiffness, contact time, flight time was collected, participants completed an age-appropriate soccer-specific fatigue protocol (SAFT). Upon completion of the fatigue protocol, subjects were immediately re-tested. Inter-session reliability was acceptable and could be considered capable of detecting worthwhile changes in performance. Results showed that leg stiffness decreased in the U13 year olds, was maintained in the U15 age group and increased in the U17 players. Contact times and flight times did not change in the U13 and U15 year olds, but significantly decreased and increased respectively in the U17 age group. The data suggests that age-related changes in the neuromuscular control of leg stiffness are present in youth female soccer players. Practitioners should be aware of these discrepancies in neuromuscular responses to soccer-specific fatigue, and should tailor training programs to meet the needs of individuals which may subsequently enhance performance and reduce injury risk.

After you finish a run, white blood cells rush biochemicals to your legs, where they rebuild your exhausted muscles. This process can last from a few hours to a few days, depending on the damage incurred. During this time, you may feel fatigued, achy and sore: that’s your nerves sending pain signals to your brain to let you know your muscles need a break. You may also notice slight swelling, because fluids carrying healing nutrients can expand tissue. All of this is a healthy physical response known as inflammation. Or, more precisely, acute inflammation, which is the immediate and short-lived reaction to a distinct event.

If you take it easy and fuel properly during this crucial period of repair, your body will return to normal. Better than normal, actually. Your muscles will adapt to the stress so they become stronger.

But if you disrupt this healing process on a regular basis – for example, you skip rest days and do back-to-back hard sessions – you could put your body in a state of chronic inflammation, says Dr Inigo San Millan, assistant professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, US. And that’s not where you want to be.

Researchers at the Center for Integrated Nanostructure Physics within the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) in Korea have used graphene to develop the thinnest photodetector to date that can produce even more electrical current than even larger devices.

The work bodes well for providing smaller and more powerful components for Internet of Things (IoT) devices and wearable electronics, as well as has implications for photovoltaic and other optical applications, researchers said.

A photodetector converts light into an electric currentand comes in many variations. The one developed by the team at the IBS is just 1.3 nanometers thick — 10 times smaller than current standard silicon diodes — and is comprised of molybdenum disulfide sandwiched in graphene.

The AIS has warned against using online direct-to-consumer genetic testing companies to predict athletic ability and says children under the age of 18 should not be subject to genetic testing for sporting purposes at all.

In a position statement published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, the AIS predicted genetic testing in sport and exercise medicine to become commonplace over the next decade because of reduced costs.

AIS Chief Medical Officer, Dr David Hughes, said it was important for the AIS to be proactive and lead an ethical approach to genetic testing and research in Australian sport.

We investigated the effects of supplement identification on exercise performance with caffeine supplementation. Forty-two trained cyclists (age 37 ± 8 years, body mass [BM] 74.3 ± 8.4 kg, height 1.76 ± 0.06 m, maximum oxygen uptake 50.0 ± 6.8 mL/kg/min) performed a ~30 min cycling time-trial 1 h following either 6 mg/kgBM caffeine (CAF) or placebo (PLA) supplementation and one control (CON) session without supplementation. Participants identified which supplement they believed they had ingested (“caffeine”, “placebo”, “don’t know”) pre- and post-exercise. Subsequently, participants were allocated to subgroups for analysis according to their identifications. Overall and subgroup analyses were performed using mixed-model and magnitude-based inference analyses. Caffeine improved performance vs PLA and CON (P ≤ 0.001). Correct pre- and post-exercise identification of caffeine in CAF improved exercise performance (+4.8 and +6.5%) vs CON, with slightly greater relative increases than the overall effect of caffeine (+4.1%). Performance was not different between PLA and CON within subgroups (all P > 0.05), although there was a tendency toward improved performance when participants believed they had ingested caffeine post-exercise (P = 0.06; 87% likely beneficial). Participants who correctly identified placebo in PLA showed possible harmful effects on performance compared to CON. Supplement identification appeared to influence exercise outcome and may be a source of bias in sports nutrition.

NBA season is underway and that means players need to be in tip top shape. But, it’s not only the athletes who have work to do; just like the game itself, keeping NBA players healthy is a team effort. Coaches, trainers, physicians and dietitians all work together to ensure that players are primed for performance throughout the season, and often use tools like InsideTracker to help them do so.

Just ask Tara Boening, a sports dietitian for the Houston Rockets who has tested a number of the team’s athletes with InsideTracker. She says she uses InsideTracker as a tool to offer rock solid proof to players whether what they’re consuming or doing is working for them…or not. “It’s a concrete way to provide information to us on how we can improve their diet, how we can improve their training plans, their sleep, their recovery on paper, because your blood doesn’t lie,” Tara says. “It’s a good tool for us to use… in order to help them perform better – which is our ultimate goal for them.”

A lot was made of the heavy workloads that elite relievers performed in the 2016 post season. Aroldis Chapman, Andrew Miller, and Roberto Osuna had extended appearances of 2+ innings, when they had only thrown an inning at a time in the regular season. With everything on the line, teams were willing to push these elite arms to their limits. For the most part (save for one scary moment in the AL Wild Card game with Osuna), they all emerged unscathed, and probably went a long way to raising reliever salaries for future seasons.

By now, you have probably learned that my Fatigue Unit metric heavily favours relief pitchers. A study by Whiteside and colleagues (2016)
, and my analysis of Driveline’s publically available data ,, have indicated that throwing on consecutive days, and throwing harder, are risk factors for Ulnar Collateral Ligament reconstruction. Relief pitchers are throwing more and more innings, and their rate of injury appears to be much greater than those of starting pitchers . These are the hard facts of relief pitching.

… I wanted to see which teams had improved their league position — season-on-season — while playing in the Europa League. English clubs qualified for the competition on 17 occasions between 2011-12 and 2015-16. Two of them — West Ham and Southampton last season — were knocked out in the preliminary rounds and so were ruled out, because the Europa League group stage had no bearing on whatever they did that year. That left 15 instances.

In that five-year period, Tottenham qualified for the Europa League in three straight seasons. I ruled out the final two, for the simple fact that the idea was to compare how they did in a Europa League-less season with one in which they spent plenty of Thursday nights on the pitch. That left me with 13 examples.

Birmingham City and Wigan Athletic both managed to qualify — via the FA Cup — while getting relegated in the same season. That made comparisons difficult, because the variable of being in the Championship is obviously far greater than playing Europa League football.

Based on what we saw with Lowry, our data scientists decided to take a deeper dive into what WHOOP can tell us about the performance of elite basketball players.

During the 2015-16 season, seven members of an NCAA Division 1 team wore WHOOP straps over a span of 24 games, a much more reliable sample size than the data from a single NBA player.

We looked specifically at two of the statistics mentioned by Lowry, field-goal percentage and free-throw percentage. Players’ shooting percentages in each game were compared to their respective Recovery numbers from the same day. We discovered a trend that supported exactly what Lowry said–simply put, better Recovery can lead to more accurate shooting.

A 50% difference in Recovery predicted roughly a 35% difference in field-goal percentage in relation to each player’s season average. The correlation was even greater for foul shooting, where a 50% difference in Recovery suggested a 50% difference in free-throw accuracy.

… [Harry] Pavlidis had a hunch that Judge “got it” based on the latter’s writing and their interaction at a site-sponsored ballpark event. Soon thereafter, the two talked over drinks. Pavlidis’ intuition was validated. Judge was a fit for the position — better yet, he was a willing fit. “I spoke to a lot of people,” Pavlidis said, “he was the only one brave enough to take it on.”

Judge was more than brave enough — he proved capable at the ensuing wonk work, allowing BP to unveil their revamped catching metrics in February 2015. Months later, Judge topped this accomplishment by revealing an unusual metric, Deserved Run Average (DRA), that could change life for the fan and hobbyist alike by fundamentally altering how baseball is analyzed.

Specifically, Judge has introduced to the community a framework that allows us to view baseball as more complicated than the usual one-on-one affair between a pitcher and a batter. The sport has always been more complex than that, even when evaluative tools suggested otherwise.

Not long ago Jason Gregor tweeted about the value of scoring first.

It may be a bit controversial and difficult to get right away, but the value of scoring first is not special. Long ago, Mr. Eric Tulsky, now of the Carolina Hurricanes, showed that the value of scoring first equals the value of any other goal.

Conditional probability can be difficult. Like actually. I’m not making fun of Jason Gregor because it can be a difficult concept to grasp. There is a very small percentage of people who will understand the Monty Hall problem intuitively.

Not everyone will get what Tulsky described in that article right away. I find probability trees helpful, so I will try to show what is going on here. Now as a fair warning: I’m not artistic, and I wrote this quickly, so the drawings won’t look very pretty.