Applied Sports Science newsletter – April 22, 2017

… Everything is kind of thrown at you at one time and you’re still in the figure-it-out stage. That’s the case still in year two, three, and four, regardless if you’re classified as a star, or a superstar. You go from trying to figure out the NBA to now trying to figure the NBA out as a star or superstar. So you’re trying to figure out how to carry that load while keeping your body intact, and now that goes back to nutrition because now you’re playing more minutes and there’s more of a workload. You’re not just sitting in the corner anymore. Now, you’re always in the pick and roll or iso’s. That’s more stress on your body and you have to learn how to utilize all this technology and information at your disposal to still perform at a high level. It’s a lot that goes into it that you might not necessarily think about, because the mindset is “lets go play.”

… In a year without the national team commitments of a World Cup or an Olympics, these American players spurned the resource-challenged NWSL for the appeal of playing for higher salaries — top players can pull down six figures for several months of playing abroad, mirroring the experience of some WNBA stars — and having access to the world-class facilities and professional environments adjacent to Champions League clubs.

“We have the privilege to have the men’s facilities for all our clubs,” said Arsenal Ladies manager Pedro Martínez Losa, who arrived in London in 2014 after two years coaching in the NWSL with the Western New York Flash. “We are fully professional, we come in the mornings, we train full-time. We have a lot of resources from the club … and we can give them a salary so they can have a life in London. It’s not a massive salary compared with the men, but they can live and have a comfortable and stable life.”

… More and more American men have found their way toward the top in recent years. Yet the last time six finished in the top 10? It was 1985.

This was the first time since 2009 both the American men and women finished on the podium as one of the top three finishers.

“I heard so many great things about this race,” Rupp said. “And it exceeded any expectations I had.

… Dempsey has played in all six of the Sounders’ games this season, scoring twice. He played arguably his best game of the campaign in last weekend’s 2-1 defeat to the Vancouver Whitecaps, but a combination of the crossbar and some stellar goalkeeping from the Whitecaps’ David Ousted kept him off the score sheet.

“This last month has been really, really encouraging, where you’ve seen the return of Clint both with the national team and with us, to be a really top, elite-level forward in our league,” said Lagerwey.

Getting there has taken some doing. The Sounders were beyond cautious with his rehab during the final months of 2016, and that continued into the preseason program. Seattle’s medical staff opted for an approach whereby Dempsey’s minutes were upped in 15-minute increments for preseason matches. After each game the club obsessively checked his condition to make sure there were no setbacks. There was the mental aspect of his comeback as well.

We went behind the scenes at Colney for a day in the life of our captain Russell Martin.

The NBA is afraid of what Chris Paul sees. Opponents show it in the way they react to his stare, selling out into passing lanes simply because Paul’s eyes suggest it. When Paul slows down to survey the floor, it can paralyze his defender with possibility. His attention is a weapon. The fear of it can lead a defense to do senseless things—the kind that leaves smart players baffled in the moment and shaking their heads in a film session. There are anxieties in guarding any great player, but with Paul, the greatest concern is the imbalance of information. Russell Westbrook kills with speed and Stephen Curry with space. Paul wins by seeing things that no one else could and exploiting a defense that knows it.

“There are point guards who see the action that can make the pass right now,” Clippers coach Doc Rivers said. “There’s very few of them that can anticipate if they keep the ball another second, what will happen.”

Our perception is shaped by our tools. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But if you have the moves to get anywhere on the court (like Paul does), your view of the game widens.

… As is expected this time of year, his college doctor went public with a positive assessment of Allen’s shoulders.

Personal physician reports mean very little as a medical professional is not allowed to release any information on a patient without consent. No player would allow his medical status being released unless it was positive in nature.

Reading between the lines, there is some concern despite the doctor’s glowing assessment. Allen reportedly has moderate arthritis in his left shoulder and mild arthritis is his right. There is no doubt he was a productive college player, but arthritis is not normal for a 22 year old and will only get worse. Currently his doctor already describes “beat-up shoulders” and Allen rarely working out with bench press in college to preserve his shoulders.

C-reactive protein (CRP) increases after strenuous exercise. It has been a concern that prolonged strenuous exercise may be harmful and induce a deleterious inflammatory response. The purpose of this study was to (a) assess and quantify the magnitude of CRP response following an endurance cycling competition in healthy middle-aged recreational cyclists. (b) Identify important determinants of this response. (c) Identify the relationship between CRP, myocardial damage (cardiac Troponin I (cTnI)), and myocardial strain (B-type natriuretic peptide [BNP]). (d) Identify the relationship between CRP and clinical events, defined as utilization of healthcare services or self-reported unusual discomfort. Race time was used as a measure of physical fitness. A total of 97 individuals (43±10 years of age, 74 [76%] males) were assessed prior to and 0, 3, and 24 hours following the 91-km mountain bike race “Nordsjørittet” (Sandnes, Norway, June 2013). There was a highly significant increase in CRP from baseline to 24 hours (0.9 (0.5-1.8) mg/L vs. 11.6 (6.0-17.5) mg/L (median[IQR]), P<.001), with no correlation of CRP to cTnI and BNP at any time-point. CRP was strongly correlated to race time at baseline (r=.38, P<.001) and at 24 hours following the race (r=.43, P<.001), In multivariate models, race time was an independent predictor of CRP both at baseline and at 24 hours (P<.01). There was no relationship between CRP levels and clinical events. In conclusion, high physical fitness was associated with reduction in both basal- and exercise-induced CRP. No adverse relationship was found between high intensity physical exercise, CRP levels, and outcomes.

Impact loading in athletes participating in various sports has been positively associated with increased bone mineral density (BMD), but this has not been investigated in elite Kenyan runners. Body composition and site-specific BMD measures quantified with dual x-ray absorptiometry were measured in 15 elite male Kenyan runners and 23 apparently healthy South African males of different ethnicities. Training load and biomechanical variables associated with impact loading, such as joint stiffness, were determined in the elite Kenyan runners. Greater proximal femur (PF) BMD (g · cm−2) was higher (P = 0.001, ES = 1.24) in the elite Kenyan runners compared with the controls. Six of the 15 (40%) Kenyan runners exhibited lumbar spine (LS) Z-Scores below −2.0 SD, whereas this was not found in the apparently healthy controls. PFBMD was associated with training load (r = 0.560, P = 0.003) and ankle (r = 0.710, P = 0.004) and knee (r = 0.546, P = 0.043) joint stiffness. Elite Kenyan runners exhibit greater PFBMD than healthy controls, which is associated with higher training load and higher joint stiffness. Our results reaffirm the benefits of impact loading on BMD at a weight-bearing site, while a high prevalence of low LSBMD in the elite Kenyan runners is hypothesised to be the result of a mismatch between energy intake and high training load. Future research investigating energy availability in Kenyan runners and the possible association with musculoskeletal injury should be investigated.

… The two studies involved two-week-long experiments where researchers deprived participants of varying hours of sleep. Before they did so, they first allowed subjects to receive eight hours of sleep, followed by a series of cognitive tests the next day—which measured things like someone’s speed of response, how well they could interpret a written passage, and the number of times they dozed off for a second or two (what science calls a microsleep). All of this gave them a baseline for each subject’s normal cognitive performance.

The researchers on Dinges’ team then assigned the participants to one of four groups: one group was allowed eight hours of sleep for the following two weeks, the next six, then four, and the last group received zero hours of sleep for up to three days straight.

That last group, says Matthew Walker, the director of the sleep and neuroimaging lab at the University of California, Berkeley, showed just how much your cognitive performance suffers after just one night of total sleep deprivation. What Dinges and colleagues found (and what subsequent studies have confirmed) is that to your brain, one sleepless night is the cognitive equivalent of being legally drunk, says Walker.

… consider the barnacle goose. Before setting off on a 3000-kilometre migration, it undertakes the training equivalent of sitting on the sofa guzzling fish and chips.

What about the months of gradually building up fitness, followed by a steady taper before the big day? That’s not really the barnacle goose’s style. Instead, says Lewis Halsey, an environmental physiologist at the University of Roehampton, London, “they just basically sit on the water and eat a lot”.

Scientists are only now beginning to investigate how this can be.

Catching more sleep could help student-athletes catch more touchdowns, but some still argue sports schedules are a reason against moving back the first bell.

With the U.S. national team’s World Cup qualifier in Mexico two months away, two subtexts have surfaced: altitude and politics.

Coach Bruce Arena addressed both during a conference call with reporters Thursday, outlining the approach to playing at 7,382 feet and playing down the impact of U.S.-Mexican relations and presidential policy on a soccer game.

Purpose:

The present study aimed to investigate the difference between straight-line (STL) and change of direction (COD) intermittent running exercises in soccer players.
Methods:

Seventeen male professional soccer players performed the agility T-test and 6 intermittent running exercises: 10s at 130% of maximal aerobic speed (MAS) alternated with 10s of rest (10-10), 15s at 120% of MAS alternated with 15s of rest (15-15) and 30s at 110% of MAS alternated with 30s of rest (30-30) both in STL and with COD. All exercises were monitored using a global positioning system. Heart rate was measured during exercises and the rate of perceived exertion (RPE) was collected post-exercise. Delta (Δ) between covered distance in STL and COD exercises at a similar load was calculated and relationships between T-test and Δ distance were analysed.
Results:

COD intermittent exercises showed a significantly decreased distance covered and an increased number of accelerations, heart rate peak and RPE value compared to STL intermittent exercises at a similar load. High relationships were observed between T-test performance and Δ distance in 10-10 (r = 0.72, P < 0.01) and 15-15 (r = 0.77, P < 0.01) whereas no significant relationships were observed between T-test performance and Δ distance in 30-30 (r = -0.37, P = 0.2). Conclusion:

Intermittent COD exercises were associated with higher acceleration, heart rate peak and RPE compared to STL during 10-10 and 15-15 exercises. The ability to rapidly change direction is a crucial quality to perform intense sport-specific running in professional soccer players.

Everyone needs a good night’s sleep, and many of us will experience some difficulty sleeping or staying awake. Dr. Kryger’s latest book The Mystery of Sleep is for a general audience, citing examples from those who have sleep problems/disorders, and for those just curious on how to improve their own sleep. Using his extensive experience in the field, Dr. Kyger provides an overview to the world of sleep and the mysterious disorders that affect it.

“One 60-minute run can add 7 hours to your life” claimed The Times last week. The story was based on a new review in Progress in Cardiovascular Diseases that concluded that runners live, on average, three years longer than non-runners and that running will do more for your longevity than any other form of exercise. But there’s more to running than its health-enhancing effects. Research published in recent years has shown that donning your trainers and pounding the hills or pavements changes your brain and mind in some intriguing ways, from increasing connectivity between key functional hubs, to helping you regulate your emotions. The precise effects sometimes vary according to whether you engage in intense sprints or long-distance running. Here, to coincide with a new feature article in The Psychologist – “Minds run free” – we provide a handy digest of the ways that running changes your mind and brain.

Becca Longo is making history as the reported first female athlete to receive a football scholarship to a NCAA Division II college. But it almost didn’t happen.

… The official two-a-days ban was going to happen sooner or later, as football on all levels has seen full-contact practices reduced. The NFL banned them in 2012. And in 2014, 15 organizations including the NCAA’s concussion task force recommended that if teams were to have two-a-days in preseason, they should only have contact in one of the sessions.

In January, 16 medical organizations came back to the organization with another proposal that included doing away with full-contact two-a-days completely and made it clear that if teams do have second sessions, they should be walk-throughs or meetings. There are no helmets, pads or conditioning activities allowed in walk-throughs. The key is reducing exertion and promoting recovery.

PURPOSE:

We investigated technical and physiological responses along with their relationships during an incremental field test to exhaustion specific to tennis (TEST) in elite players.
METHODS:

Twenty male elite tennis players completed TEST, which consisted of hitting alternatively forehand and backhand strokes at increasing ball frequency (ball machine) every minute. Ball accuracy (BA), ball velocity (BV) and tennis performance index (TP = BA x BV) were determined by radar and video analysis for each stroke, in addition to cardiorespiratory responses and blood lactate concentrations.
RESULTS:

At low intensities (below 80% of maximal oxygen uptake (V˙O2max)), technical performance was steady. From 80 to 100% of V˙O2max, significant and steady decreases in BV (-9.0% and -13.3%; P = 0.02 and P = 0.002), BA (-19.4% and -18.4%; both P < 0.001) and TP (-27.4% and -29.15%; both P = 0.002) occurred for forehands and backhands, respectively. Changes in TP and blood lactate concentration from 60 to 100% of V˙O2max were inversely correlated (r = -0.51; P = 0.008). BV was 5.2% higher (P = 0.042) for forehand vs. backhand, and there was no difference between strokes for both BA (P = 0.930) and TP (P = 0.536). CONCLUSION:

Technical alterations (i.e. decrease in BV, BA and TP) in elite players undergoing TEST only occurred at high intensity (>80% of V˙O2max), presumably due to the use of compensatory strategies to overcome fatigue. Above this intensity, all technical indices decreased steadily until exhaustion, independently of the stroke nature.

Purpose:

Competitive match-play is a dominant component of the physical load completed by soccer players within a training micro-cycle. Characterising the temporal disruption in homeostasis that follows exercise may provide some insight into the potential for match-play to elicit an adaptive response.
Methods:

Countermovement jump (CMJ) performance was characterised 3 days post-match for 15 outfield players from an English Premier League soccer team (age: 25.8 ± 4.1 yrs; stature: 1.78 ± 0.08 m; mass: 71.7 ± 9.1 kg) across a season. These players were classified as either starters (n=9), or non-starters (n=6), according to the average individual playing time (higher/lower than 60 min/match). Linear mixed models were used to investigate the influence of indicators of match-activity (total distance covered (TD), and high-intensity running distance (HI)) on CMJ height and peak power (PP) values.
Results:

Starting players covered largely greater TD (ES=1.5) and HI (ES=1.4) than non-starters. Furthermore, there was a possible positive effect of HI on CMJ height and PP. This relationship suggests that an additional 0.6 km high-intensity distance covered would increase CMJ height and PP by slightly more than the smallest worthwhile change values of 0.6 cm and 1.0 W/kg, respectively. This small yet practically relevant increase in performance may suggest that match-play, more specifically the intense activities that are associated with the match, provides a physiological stimulus for neuromuscular adaptation.
Conclusion:

This data may have implications for the management of preparation of soccer squads, especially the training requirements of starting and non-starting players.

… Harold Nash replaced Woicik from 2011-15, when the Patriots reached five straight AFC Championship Games and two Super Bowls. The Patriots ranked 30th, 19th, 29th, 12th (winning Super Bowl XLIX), and 29th over that span of time, and cumulatively ranked 30th out of the 32 teams. While the Patriots weren’t the healthiest squad under Woicik, ranking 30th in AGL was unacceptable for the Patriots.

As a result, the Patriots parted ways with Nash (who was named the S&C coach of the Detroit Lions, which ranked 14th in AGL) prior to the 2016 season. In his place, the Patriots promoted Moses Cabrera to the leading role in the weight room.

Under Cabrera, the Patriots ranked 8th in the league in AGL in 2016 and won their fifth Super Bowl title in franchise history. What changed?

… “The biggest thing is, whatever we do in the weight room, it has to translate to the football field,” Geib said. “If we’re spending all this time getting strong, getting fast, getting quicker, improving our reaction time, all those little things, they have to carry over to the game.”

He accomplishes that by training players in their respective position groups. Offensive and defensive linemen lift together. Running backs, linebackers, tight ends train together then wide receivers and defensive backs as well.

“Because we kind of specialize in those groups, it allows us to tweak the workouts and make adjustments so these guys get what they need to develop skills on the football field,” Geib said. “Not just to be bigger, stronger and faster, but as it works as a foundation for the game of football.”

Mayo Clinic will nearly double its presence in Mayo Clinic Square, the site formerly known as Block E that sits across the street from Target Center in downtown Minneapolis.

Later this month, construction will begin on a 16,000-square-foot addition to Mayo’s sports medicine facility.

A baby falling back to sleep at 2 am to a gentle lullaby may convince its parents that music can induce sleep, but new compositions designed to help listeners relax sound rather different to Rock-a-bye Baby.

Boston-based start-up Sync Project uses biometrics to tailor music to your mood. Its Unwind app measures your heart beat via your smartphone’s accelerometer and uses these readings to tweak a relaxing ambient track by UK band Marconi Union. After listening, you take a brief survey. How relaxed do you feel?

Santa Cruz, California-based Murj, developer of a digital data collection platform for implantable cardiac devices, has officially emerged from stealth mode. Backed by $4.5 million in venture funding, the company wants to streamline workflow for clinicians grappling with increasingly more data from heart-monitoring devices, both remotely and in the office.

Murj’s SaaS platform aims to replace fragmented, inefficient data management tools for implantable devices like pacemakers, loop recorders and cardioverter defibrillators. Built on what the company describes on its website as “the principle of two clicks,” Murj offers a cloud-based application that consolidates data from all implantable cardiac device types, enabling clinicians to quickly receive, analyze and report transmissions remotely from any secure web browser.

… Researchers from the King’s College London developed a wearable device that measures muscle fatigue while participants run outside the lab. The wearable device is a pair of leggings with surface EMG (sEMG) electrodes embroidered into the fabric to take measurements of the electrical stimulation of the quadricep muscles.

It is difficult to recover the motion field from a real-world footage given a mixture of camera shake and other photometric effects. In this paper we propose a hybrid framework by interleaving a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and a traditional optical flow energy. We first conduct a CNN architecture using a novel learnable directional filtering layer. Such layer encodes the angle and distance similarity matrix between blur and camera motion, which is able to enhance the blur features of the camera-shake footages. The proposed CNNs are then integrated into an iterative optical flow framework, which enable the capability of modelling and solving both the blind deconvolution and the optical flow estimation problems simultaneously. Our framework is trained end-to-end on a synthetic dataset and yields competitive precision and performance against the state-of-the-art approaches.

Co-founders Jordan Muraskin and Jason Sherwin’s business venture is a well documented brainchild — a neuroscientific blueprint to the cognition of hitting a baseball. Now the duo’s niche platform with a Ph.D. premise is growing up, but not quite dumbing down.

deCervo is becoming a product.

According to Muraskin, deCervo hails from Columbia University and was born out of his own Ph.D. Muraskin’s look into the brain function of individuals who had achieved mastery in their field grew into a platform that uses EEG technology to measure the reaction and recognition skills of hitters.

The budding autonomous-car industry is in something of a panic. Laser sensors are crucial to help most self-driving cars see, but there aren’t enough to go around. This is, of course, good news for companies that make those sensors, and now Velodyne, the most established manufacturer of the devices, has announced a much more affordable new sensor.

Consumer wearables, like smart watches and Fitbits, are becoming ever more popular. But wearable medical technology has remained somewhat absent from the scene, despite huge potential for improving patient care and potentially lowering healthcare costs.

Kirkland, Wash.-based Cardiac Insight is hoping to break into that market with Cardea Solo, a lightweight disposable electrocardiogram (ECG) test that monitors a patient’s heartbeat. The company has raised $4.5 million to develop and commercialize the device and announced today that it has been approved for use by the FDA and is now available to healthcare providers.

… P3 founder Dr. Marcus Elliott had resisted expansion until this opportunity.

“We saw Atlanta as an East Coast hub that would allow us to assess athletes up and down the coast,” Elliott said. “We have as many East Coast athletes as West Coast athletes. We have a lot of European athletes, too.

“Getting more data is important if you want to get insight into human systems. The more high-quality data we have coming in, the more insights we’re going to be able to glean.”

P3’s office in Atlanta will expose the company to more athletes, and relationship with Emory could help P3 publish findings in journals where “we can bring these insights to a larger audience,” Elliott said

Science is showing that how you feel isn’t just about what you eat, or do, or think. It’s about what you believe.

Using game features in non-game contexts, computers can learn to build personalized mental- and physical-therapy programs that enhance individual motivation, according to Penn State engineers.

“We want to understand the human and team behaviors that motivate learning to ultimately develop personalized methods of learning instead of the one-size-fits-all approach that is often taken,” said Conrad Tucker, assistant professor of engineering design and industrial engineering.

They seek to use machine learning to train computers to develop personalized mental or physical therapy regimens — for example, to overcome anxiety or recover from a shoulder injury — so many individuals can each use a tailor-made program.

… One of Alabama’s team doctors, Norman Waldrop, paused while describing [Jeff] Allen and his value to the Tide program.

“People may laugh at me saying this,” Waldrop said, “but I honestly think you can credit several wins and at least a large portion of credit towards a national title to Jeff and the training staff. I don’t think we would have won as many games over the Saban era without Jeff and the training staff being as good as they are. I feel very firmly about that.”

Allen is that good, an unsung hero and core member of the Alabama football program who is widely considered one of the best and most innovative athletic trainers in the country.

… “There is a period of vulnerability after the athlete’s cognition is recovered but before the brain is is recovered,” McCrae told the Journal. If so, it may explain why Kenny Bui, a 17-year-old high school football player, died three days after a collision and a month after receiving his first concussion that season. Terri McMahan, the athletic director for Bui’s Evergreen High School, said they “followed the standard protocol.”

McCrea initially found a difference between the diagnostic results of cognitive exams and the biological results available from an MRI while studying a small sample of athletes. Now, he’s studying a much larger group: he’s tracked the health of 28,000 college athletes over the past three years.

In the survey of workload practices of high level football clubs (Akenhead & Nassis), 41 sport scientists and fitness coaches responded to specific questions. There were two questions relevant to this post’s title; one asked the participants to rate their perceived expected and actual effectiveness of their strategy on injury prevention and performance enhancement. The other one asked them to name and rate the barriers to workload monitoring effectiveness on injury prevention and performance improvement. Their answers, as means and SD, appear in these 2 graphs.

Briefly, here is the summary of the answers:

Actual effectiveness of workload monitoring was rated as being lower that the expected effectiveness for injury prevention and performance improvement (Graph 1)

The main barriers to effective implementation of the workload practices were insufficient manpower and low coach buy-in.

Take Home Message: A clinician could use Star Excursion Balance Test anterior asymmetries to possibly differentiate collegiate athletes at greater risk for non-contact knee or ankle injury.

… Verily, in a couple incarnations1 has been working with teams at Stanford and Duke for three years to figure out what Baseline will measure. “The more we understand across populations, the more we can do for science,” Mega says.

Stanford and Duke will get the data first—and then after two years it’ll be open to other qualified medical researchers. (They’ll establish their own ethics rules and consent for their work). “It’s not a hypothesis-driven study,” says Sam Gambhir, a Stanford cancer researcher who helped design the project. “It’s a study to acquire a longitudinal dataset.” If it works, it’ll be some serious data: blood, genome, urine, tears, activity via wearable, heart, sleep, state of mind. “No one has done this deep a dive into each and every one of 10,000 individuals,” Gambhir says.

That size and depth explain why Alphabet1 is involved. Even if Gambhir had come up with the idea on his own and somehow gotten federal funding (to the tune of $100 million, some reports say), he says, “we’d still have to find someone like a Verily or Alphabet to work with because of the large data structure needs and interactivity between participants and the internet.”

… Aging is as much about the physical processes of repair and regeneration — and their slow-motion failure — as it is the passage of time. And scientists studying stem cell and regenerative biology are making progress understanding those processes, developing treatments for the many diseases whose risks increase as we get older, while at times seeming to draw close to a broader anti-aging breakthrough.

If stem cells offer potential solutions, they’re also part of the problem. Stem cells, which can differentiate into many cell types, are important parts of the body’s repair system, but lose regenerative potency as we age. In addition, their self-renewing ability allows the mutations that affect every cell to accumulate across cellular generations, and some of those mutations lead to disease.

“We do think that stem cells are a key player in at least some of the manifestations of age,” said Professor of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology David Scadden, co-director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. “The hypothesis is that stem cell function deteriorates with age, driving events we know occur with aging, like our limited ability to fully repair or regenerate healthy tissue following injury.”

Arsenal Football Club’s conference on injury screening of footballers and other elite sportspeople showed divided opinion, even among experts. Graham Clews reports.

A nutritious diet is essential for performance. Eating the right foods means you prepare and recover from intense training with relative ease, packing in essential nutrients in the process. What is surprising, though, is that the focus for athletes need not solely be on wholesome, nutrient-packed fare.

Despite being labelled unhealthy for the general population, sugar and refined carbs are often uppermost in the minds of sports scientists who plan elite performers’ diets. While this isn’t a green light to eat every meal in Burger King or Nandos, there are occasions when you can indulge an appetite for refined or sugar foods.

Anyone who’s ever walked into a grocery store has seen the various health claims on food items calling certain products “healthy.” But what exactly does “healthy” mean — and can you rely on it?

The Food and Drug Administration is trying to find out. The federal agency recently began a public process to redefine how the word “healthy” can be used on food products. It’s an issue that would change how companies can label foods and how consumers perceive them.

To help unravel the meaning of the term “healthy,” UCLA Health writer Ryan Hatoum spoke with Dana Hunnes, senior dietitian at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center and adjunct assistant professor at UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health, to get an expert’s take.

James Witts shares the latest sports science research, including new thoughts on nutrition, fluid therapy and stretching

FLUID STRATEGY

A tri hydration strategy is important for all athletes, and recent research suggests a regimented routine is far more effective than going freeflow. Ten elite cyclists rode a 30km criterium either drinking as much as they wished or drinking water every 1km to match predicted fluid losses. Performance improved significantly in the regimented group, thanks to favourable physiological measurements like lower body, skin and gastrointestinal temperature. The take-home message? A meticulous strategy will pay off, so set your HRM to remind you to drink at the races every 15mins or so.

Among the lesser-known skills that ex-track star Mike Woods has picked up in his five years as a professional cyclist is the ability to scarf down an arborio rice cake loaded with sugar, coconut oil and cream cheese in the middle of the peloton, ideally before a sudden breakaway makes it too hard to eat and breathe at the same time.

“Going from running to cycling, there was a big learning curve in all aspects of the sport, and diet was certainly one of them,” says Woods, a 30-year-old Ottawa native who turned to cycling in 2011 after a series of stress fractures derailed his running career.

We look at the differences between whey, soy and others on the market, and whether shakes or bars are best

… The opioid epidemic ravaging the United States has brought new impetus to understanding how addiction hijacks the brain. More and more, scientists are shifting their focus to what’s going on in the brain after people like Mooney go off drugs.

Their quest has unveiled a troubling picture: Repeated drug use leads to long-term changes to the brain. Some of those changes, new research suggests, might be hard to reverse and might even intensify right after withdrawal, explaining why it is so hard to stay off drugs.

There’s a war at the highest levels of Major League Baseball, and the sport doesn’t know what to do about it. All that’s at stake is the way the game is played.

What makes it so complicated is there aren’t clear sides. Trying to address pace of play can challenge even the staunchest baseball ideologue. Consider the phraseology itself. Does baseball have a pace-of-play problem? Or is it a pace-of-play issue? Or rather a pace-of-play question? The continuum isn’t blurry. It’s 20/1,000.

Regardless of the noun assigned to it, pace of play stood at the forefront of baseball’s near-term evolution before the season and finds itself squarely there still after the first 11 days of the season backslid into the slog MLB dreads.

… Welsh football is a difficult conundrum to figure out. For years, the national team failed to experience much joy in major tournaments, left to watch on as other similarly-sized nations appeared more regularly than them in important competitions.

It’s not as if the national side has been totally devoid of talent down through the years, either. In John Charles, Ryan Giggs, Ian Rush and Mark Hughes, Wales have seen four of the most talented British players ever produced go on to represent them across a number of generations, and yet neither one was able to prove the necessary catalyst in transforming them from a mediocre team into a silverware-capturing one during their playing days.

Today, however, they are one of the best teams around, regularly producing a marriage of the most effective and eye-catching football currently available to watch.

There are loud changes in baseball and quiet ones. While the topline news about this season has been the continuing march toward three true outcomes (walks, strikeouts and home runs), there are other ways 2017 has been different than 2016, 2015 and in some cases all seasons before. Are these changes real? Are they permanent?

… A few days earlier, in late August 2006, the Argentine stars Carlos Tevez and Javier Mascherano had themselves arrived at West Ham. Flanking Alan Pardew, the team’s manager, Tevez and Mascherano held up claret-and-blue shirts and smiled for the news media. How on earth had this struggling Premier League team managed to sign two of the world’s most sought-after players? The story has its roots in South America, but was also tied to the riches that accompanied the breakup of the Soviet Union and to an Israeli dealmaker called Pini Zahavi, who was never far away from soccer’s biggest transfers.

Scudamore was already aware of wealthy individuals buying the transfer rights of players as early as 2000, a year after he took the job at the Premier League. Zahavi had told him all about it.

Zahavi was suave and smooth-talking, and had parlayed a career as a soccer journalist in Israel into being a transfer broker. His first deal, while still working as a reporter, had been to take Avi Cohen to Liverpool from Maccabi Tel Aviv in 1979. After 20 years as an agent, he had turned his attention to acting as a dealmaker to help a small group of wealthy individuals, some of them from the former Soviet Union, to invest in the transfer market. He called the business Soccer Investments & Representations.

Player recruitment is a process that should ideally combine objectivity and subjectivity. Both aspects, however, should regularly come under suitable scrutiny and review: we should question whether we are looking at the right data, and we should question the predictions of our scouts.

While the former can require detailed statistical checks, the latter needn’t be an arduous process. As key decision makers, we should have a clear view on what constitutes success from new signings. Our scouts can then provide predictions as to whether a player is likely to meet these success criteria. In due course, the predictions can be assessed against the actual outcome to give an overall score.

​Batters will run up to 90 feet, in 3.5 to 5 seconds. Runners will run a bit less than 90 feet in around the same time. Outfielders will run 40 to 140 feet in 3 to 7 seconds.

In order to figure out “speed”, we’d like to be able to put the three of them along a common scale, meaning fitting the distance or the time as a constant. Football has the 40-yard dash, with the 4.4 seconds as the standard to beat. We could try to do distance in baseball, perhaps choosing a short distance like 30 feet or 50 feet, so that we’d be able to cover all kinds of runs. That’s when I turned over to my followers at Twitter and asked them how they would measure it, and I asked it in terms of “number of strides”. That is, how many strides do you need. And it came out to around 7 or so, which is around 30 feet, or, more interestingly, 1 second.

One second. That is perfect. Because if we’re going to have a unit as a “per” second, whether I say “feet per second” or I say “most feet covered in his fastest 1 second”, it’s going to be the same number. Billy Hamilton runs at 30 feet per second? Great. Bill Hamilton covered 30 feet in his fastest 1 second window? Great. In either case, all I have to do is get that 30 feet and that 1 or per second out there, and everything else can be tailored to the discussion.