Applied Sports Science newsletter – February 21, 2018

Applied Sports Science news articles, blog posts and research papers for February 21, 2018

 

Major League Baseball is really, really difficult – the Ryan Flaherty story

BaltimoreBaseball.com, Dan Connolly from

This is a rather odd column topic, I’ll admit. It’s one that probably can be easily criticized. I’ll accept that, too.

It’s something I’ve thought about for years and have discussed from time to time when people who aren’t associated with Major League Baseball ask what strikes me most about the sport.

In those instances, I often bring up the name of Ryan Flaherty, who spent six years as the Orioles’ utility infielder before signing a minor league deal with the Philadelphia Phillies this week. Because watching Flaherty over the years always drives home a point for me: Baseball at the major league level is ludicrously difficult.

 

Can sleep hygiene alleviate quality/quantity in athletes? Some considerations below

Twitter, Hugh Fullagar from

 

Where’s the best place on your body to track heart rate? We asked the experts

Wareable (UK), Hugh Langley from

… When we head out running or cycling with these devices, heart rate accuracy is always a consideration, and more often than not it falls down when put up against more established and reliable methods. Part of the problem is location; we hear time and time again that while the wrist is a good place to put a screen, it’s also one of the worst spots for keeping a continuous and accurate HR reading.

This presents a tough challenge for companies. And in fairness, more are matching up to the chest strap, which is still the gold standard for BPM.

So where is the best place to track heart rate? We pulled in the expert advice from Valencell – maker of heart rate sensors – and Firstbseat – which analyzes heart rate data and provides its secret sauce to copious sports watches – to break it dow

 

Were Team GB’s skeleton suits responsible for fantastic three medal haul?

The Conversation, Nicholas Martin from

Team GB skeleton rider Lizzie Yarnold won a stunning Winter Olympic gold on February 17, backed up by bronzes for Laura Deas and Dom Parsons. Thanks to drag-resistant ridges, 3D laser scanning and topnotch material, Team GB’s skeleton suits are said to have provided up to a one-second advantage per run over the rest of the field and have been a hot topic of controversy.

What makes these revolutionary suits so speedy – and just how important were these technological innovations in Team GB’s riders’ success? The Conversation put these questions to Nick Martin, senior lecturer in Aerodynamics at Northumbria University.

 

Rivals Expand Image Sensor Scope

EE Times, Junko Yoshida from

The International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) showcased a few new developments on the image sensor front, outgrowing the past beauty-contest trend in favor of a race to add more context to images as their sensors capture them.

Technical papers on image sensors presented at this year’s ISSCC included event-driven sensors, different ways for global shutters to solve problems with the distortion of moving subjects, and ToF image sensors.

 

Working on the next generation of wearables at University of Cincinnati

HealthCareBusiness, Lauren Dubinsky from

… “For wearables, it is about continuously accessing a tiny yet high-quality sample of biofluid (interstitial fluid, sweat, tears, saliva, etc.),” Heikenfeld, told HCB News. “This is a challenge in itself that can be plagued by contamination and other issues.”

He added that wearables collect biofluid in the form of microliters or nanoliters. Because of that, reliable sensors are needed that can continuously work with small sample volumes and not be degraded by the other chemicals in the biofluid.

The Novel Devices Lab team is working on devices the size of a Band-Aid that generate sweat on a tiny patch of skin and wick it away, to sensors that measure substances like glucose. The subject can remain in a resting state while that is happening.

“For sweat, it’s simple in theory but tough in practice. You need to get the sample immediately off the skin surface and quickly transport it to a sensor before the sample itself degrades,” said Heikenfeld. “In some cases, you need a sensor surface that can recognize the chemical analytes of interest over the huge number of other chemical analytes that are present.”

 

New microfluidic devices help athletes and enhance physical rehab

Northwestern University, Northwestern Now from

Northwestern University professor John A. Rogers is collaborating with a broad collection of partners including Gatorade, the Seattle Mariners, the U.S. Air Force and Shirley Ryan AbilityLab to bring his wearable microfluidic sweat analytics system into widespread distribution.

The device measures sweat and sweat biomarkers accurately and in real time, allowing athletes, military personnel, fitness pros and others to monitor sweat rate and electrolyte loss, so they can keep hydrated, replenish their electrolytes and stay on top of their game.

The partnerships are aimed at further developing, testing and validating Rogers’ device, which monitors sweat loss and analyzes sweat chemistry with a simple, real-time visual readout.

Previously developed in Rogers’ Northwestern Engineering laboratory, the soft, flexible device sits on the skin and measures sweat to determine how the body responds to exercise. Launched from Rogers’ group through Northwestern’s Innovation and New Ventures Office (INVO), startup Epicore Biosystems has established large volume manufacturing capabilities for these microfluidic devices. It also has plans to co-package them with nutritional, skin health, cosmetics and sports hydration products, with additional possibilities for use in clinical medicine and rehabilitation.

 

Injured Alpine ski racers miss years, not days, at a time

Associated Press, Howard Fendrich and Pat Graham from

Just the thought of being at the Olympics on Tuesday made Swiss ski racer Lara Gut smile broadly, and that had nothing to do with it being the last opportunity to train for the downhill, an event in which she earned a bronze at the 2014 Sochi Games.

No, the reason for Gut’s excitement was much simpler, as she demonstrated with a two-word exclamation of “I’m here!” while kicking up her left leg. Turns out Tuesday is the one-year anniversary of the operation she had to repair tears to the anterior cruciate ligament and meniscus in that knee, a season-ending injury incurred during practice at the 2017 world championships.

“Everything that was natural, like walking — you have to get used to that again,” Gut said. “One day, you’re like, ‘Oh, it’s natural. I can walk. I can run. I can ski.'”

 

Athletes need coaches in the kitchen too

The Conversation, Ellen W. Evans and Ginnie Winter from

Athletes’ training regimes extend far beyond the pitch, track or ski run. They have a unique relationship with food, too. This is not just a matter of loading up on pasta and protein shakes. For those at the top of their game, every morsel is carefully balanced to optimise performance.

But while you may think that athletes are among the healthiest of humans, certain factors actually make them more susceptible to foodborne illnesses.

We know that regular moderate exercise is associated with a reduced risk of catching infections, including the common cold. But continuous, prolonged, and high intensity training, or strenuous exercise, can cause a temporary post-exercise immune dysfunction. This “open window” can last for up to 24 hours after exercise, and makes athletes susceptible to all kinds of infections.

 

Fuel for the Work Required: A Theoretical Framework for Carbohydrate Periodization and the Glycogen Threshold Hypothesis

Sports Medicine journal from

Deliberately training with reduced carbohydrate (CHO) availability to enhance endurance-training-induced metabolic adaptations of skeletal muscle (i.e. the ‘train low, compete high’ paradigm) is a hot topic within sport nutrition. Train-low studies involve periodically training (e.g., 30–50% of training sessions) with reduced CHO availability, where train-low models include twice per day training, fasted training, post-exercise CHO restriction and ‘sleep low, train low’. When compared with high CHO availability, data suggest that augmented cell signalling (73% of 11 studies), gene expression (75% of 12 studies) and training-induced increases in oxidative enzyme activity/protein content (78% of 9 studies) associated with ‘train low’ are especially apparent when training sessions are commenced within a specific range of muscle glycogen concentrations. Nonetheless, such muscle adaptations do not always translate to improved exercise performance (e.g. 37 and 63% of 11 studies show improvements or no change, respectively). Herein, we present our rationale for the glycogen threshold hypothesis, a window of muscle glycogen concentrations that simultaneously permits completion of required training workloads and activation of the molecular machinery regulating training adaptations. We also present the ‘fuel for the work required’ paradigm (representative of an amalgamation of train-low models) whereby CHO availability is adjusted in accordance with the demands of the upcoming training session(s). In order to strategically implement train-low sessions, our challenge now is to quantify the glycogen cost of habitual training sessions (so as to inform the attainment of any potential threshold) and ensure absolute training intensity is not compromised, while also creating a metabolic milieu conducive to facilitating the endurance phenotype.

 

German Olympians Drink a Lot of (Nonalcoholic) Beer, and Win a Lot of Gold Medals

The New York Times, Ben Crair and Andrew Keh from

When Simon Schempp, a biathlete on the German Olympic team, was training for the Pyeongchang Games, he often capped a hard day on the trail with a bottle of nonalcoholic beer. He enjoys the taste of beer like most Germans, who drink more of it per capita than the people of almost any other nation. But he drank the nonalcoholic variety for more than just the flavor.

“It’s a really good drink directly after training or after competition,” said Schempp, who won a silver medal in the 15-kilometer mass start event on Sunday.

Schempp’s sober assessment is popular in Germany. While most people see nonalcoholic beer as a responsible replacement for regular beer, Germans often drink it in place of sports drinks after exercise. Beer or Gatorade? No contest.

 

Did You Get Enough to Eat?

8020 Endurance, Matt Fitzgerald from

… little thought is given to the possibility of undereating, which is very real for endurance athletes given the high energy demands of their training and their interest in being lean not just for reasons of aesthetics and health but also for reasons of performance. And rare indeed is the endurance athlete who considers the fact that habitual undereating is more detrimental to performance than is its opposite.

Think about it. Athletes who eat slightly more food than they need every day will tend to feel good and perform well in workouts because they have plenty of fuel available for them, and they will also tend to recover from and adapt well to training because the raw materials that these processes depend on also come from food. The only negative (aside from long-term health issues, which are themselves mitigated by high activity levels) is that they will show up to the start line a few pounds over their ideal racing weight.

In contrast, athletes who habitually eat too little are unlikely to even make it to the start line.

 

An updated formula for marathon-running success

The Guardian, Ian Williams from

It was a real pleasure to see my marathon time predictor featured in the Guardian a few months back. My algorithm uses data from more than a thousand runners of varying abilities who have logged their training here on Fetcheveryone, to come up with a better prediction of marathon time. You can try it here.

It’s based on my view that the usefulness of the popular formula devised by Peter Riegel in 1977 starts to break down at marathon distance. This may well be because runners are often under-prepared for the rigours of the marathon, but it’s arguably better for morale to smash a realistic goal than to burn out chasing an elusive one.

 

2018 Research Paper Finalists & Posters

MIT Sloan Analytics Conference from

We are proud to announce our 8 Research Paper Finalists & 12 Research Paper Posters for the 2018 Sloan Sports Analytics Conference.

 

The Dutch Own A Single Sport Like No Other Country In The Winter Olympics

FiveThirtyEight, Tom Perrotta from

… The Dutch dominance is so complete that it inspires wacky theories. NBC’s Katie Couric was mocked for her recent statement that the Dutch are so good because they have a longstanding tradition of skating from place to place on frozen canals. The problem: Those canals freeze only a few times a year, if at all, and when people skate on them, it’s for recreation. Dutch skeedskaters are also rumored to have an ideal body type for the sport, but while the country’s racers are often tall, so are many of their opponents from other countries. Nor do the Dutch use a proprietary method to glide past other competitors: While many members of the team have spectacular form, which includes bending low and skating with force and precision, the technique isn’t a secret.

The real cause, more than anything else, is dedication. Starting in childhood, Dutch skaters train with excellent instructors. The Dutch team’s skating equipment is the best in the world, too. For the Olympics in 2014, officials from the host city of Sochi went to the Netherlands to learn how to build a top-of-the-line racing rink. By the time they are ready to compete, Dutch stars have been skating in ideal conditions and learning how to peak in time for the biggest races.

 

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published.