Applied Sports Science newsletter – February 22, 2018

After spending 10 days before the All-Star break in New York consulting with a specialist to gather a second opinion on his right quad injury, All-NBA forward Kawhi Leonard bears the burden of determining when he’s prepared to play again, sources told ESPN.

Leonard has been medically cleared to return from the right quad tendinopathy injury, but since shutting down a nine-game return to the San Antonio Spurs that ended Jan. 13, he has elected against returning to the active roster, sources said. If Leonard returns, it will be because he has decided he can manage the pain of the injury, according to the sources.

Away from the Spurs to pursue second opinions in New York, Leonard recently utilized the gymnasium inside the National Basketball Players Association headquarters in Manhattan for workouts, league sources told ESPN. The Spurs had team personnel accompanying Leonard in New York, sources said.

… Yet, increasingly, it is only fair to also ask how much of Christie’s bad luck is down to her rather than her sport. Sure, one or two slices of misfortune is natural. But a run of six successive crashes or disqualifications at a Winter Olympics dating back to Sochi four years ago is harder to explain.

Was it the increased pressure of being at the biggest event in your sport, she was asked. “No,” she responded, before pointing out she felt more nervous before winning three titles in last year’s world championships in Rotterdam. “I just see it as three races that went rubbish in the last four years. Unfortunately all three of them were here. That’s short track and that’s the way it goes sometimes.”

There is some truth to that. In eight women’s 1000m heats at Gangneung Ice Arena on Tuesday, six skaters were disqualified for infringements while another five suffered a similar fate in the men’s 500m heats.

Was she too aggressive when she raced? This time GB’s short track leader, Stewart Laing, shook his head. “It’s harsh if people call Elise reckless,” he said. “It’s the nature of racing.”

… He tore the lat muscle in his last start, ending his faint hopes of at least being considered for a September call-up.

“It wasn’t anything (serious) like (Mets pitcher Noah) Syndergaard,” Blair said. “No surgery. I flew to see (Dr. James) Andrews and he said just rest, recover, don’t throw a baseball for three months, and you’ll be fine. He told me don’t golf, don’t go bowling. So I played a lot of video games.”

And he did a lot of workouts that were more advanced and effective than he had done before. The Las Vegas native stayed in Atlanta, where his wife works at Northside Hospital, and went to SunTrust Park to work out two hours each morning with fellow pitchers Mike Foltynewicz, Lucas Sims and Matt Wisler under the supervision of Braves trainers, including director of performance Andrew Hauser.

Young tennis players embarking on their professional careers in the late 1990s and early 2000s had little reason to think time was on their side. Advances in sports science now give the advantage to veterans like Robert Lindstedt, who is looking ahead to his third decade on the ATP Tour.

Strength coaches usually don’t get too much attention, but the Denver Broncos’ replacement for Luke Richesson is turning some heads.

The Broncos are planning on hiring local training guru Loren Landow, founder and director of Landow Performance in Centennial, to be the team’s new strength and conditioning coach, according to Mike Klis of 9News. Klis said the deal will likely be finalized once he’s done preparing NFL prospects for the draft in April.

Understand this: The NFL’s National Scouting Combine is a mammoth event. Over 300 NFL prospects fly into Indianapolis about two months before the NFL draft to undergo medical testing, sit down for interviews with all 32 teams and participate in on-field workouts. It’s also a symposium for sports tech companies; a networking event for NFL coaches, scouts and media; and the de facto kickoff to free agency, when the illegal negotiations for free agents, known as tampering when it happens before the official start to free agency, begin in earnest.

But before all that can start, Jeff Foster has to compile a list of invitees, a process he tweaked in 2017 as president of the National Football Scouting Inc. (NFS), which puts on the combine each year. Foster occasionally receives the ire of NFL agents, frustrated that their players did not make the cut, but more often than not, the job he does organizing the combine—and specifically, player selection—is applauded throughout the NFL. Here, he answers some questions about the process.

Many college students do not prioritize their sleep – work, school and social activities often take precedence to a good night’s rest – but professors at universities across the country are teaching students how to improve the amount and quality of their sleep. One of the latest schools to add such a class is Arizona State University.

Only 6.5 percent of students say they get enough sleep throughout the week, and about 73 percent say that at least once a week they stay up late to study instead of sleeping, according to a 2015 survey of ASU students conducted by the American College Health Association.

Brown University, University of Missouri, Stanford and New York University are just a handful of the colleges currently offering students classes on sleep. These classes cover everything from the science behind sleep to dream analysis and are meant to help students improve their overall health.

It is unknown if adult human skeletal muscle has an epigenetic memory of earlier encounters with growth. We report, for the first time in humans, genome-wide DNA methylation (850,000 CpGs) and gene expression analysis after muscle hypertrophy (loading), return of muscle mass to baseline (unloading), followed by later hypertrophy (reloading). We discovered increased frequency of hypomethylation across the genome after reloading (18,816 CpGs) versus earlier loading (9,153 CpG sites). We also identified AXIN1, GRIK2, CAMK4, TRAF1 as hypomethylated genes with enhanced expression after loading that maintained their hypomethylated status even during unloading where muscle mass returned to control levels, indicating a memory of these genes methylation signatures following earlier hypertrophy. Further, UBR5, RPL35a, HEG1, PLA2G16, SETD3 displayed hypomethylation and enhanced gene expression following loading, and demonstrated the largest increases in hypomethylation, gene expression and muscle mass after later reloading, indicating an epigenetic memory in these genes. Finally, genes; GRIK2, TRAF1, BICC1, STAG1 were epigenetically sensitive to acute exercise demonstrating hypomethylation after a single bout of resistance exercise that was maintained 22 weeks later with the largest increase in gene expression and muscle mass after reloading. Overall, we identify an important epigenetic role for a number of largely unstudied genes in muscle hypertrophy/memory. [full text]

Over the years, there have been several attempts to document the physical toll skating, and specifically the game of hockey, can take on the human body. But there has always been an obvious and prohibitive obstacle: how do you conduct delicate, scientific research in the cold on ice?

The Ice Hockey Research Group (IHRG) working out of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, found the answer to exactly that question when it turned to Vicon.

OBJECTIVE:

Musculoskeletal ultrasound imaging is increasingly being used for static and dynamic imaging of tendons, muscles, ligaments, and bones. New, hand-held, pocket-sized ultrasounds are more portable and affordable. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the feasibility of pocket-sized ultrasound to diagnose shoulder pathology.
DESIGN:

Prospective cohort study.
SETTING:

Tertiary Care Hospital.
METHODS:

Ten consecutive patients (mean age 54; range 42-68 years) referred for a shoulder ultrasound for evaluation of shoulder pain were recruited. A diagnostic ultrasound was performed first with a pocket-sized ultrasound machine (VScan; General Electric, Northville, MI) and cine images saved for later review. Next, standard diagnostic ultrasound by a radiology technician specialized in musculoskeletal ultrasound was performed using (LOGIQ; General Electric, Northville, MI) ultrasound. The radiology report from the standard diagnostic ultrasound was used as the gold standard for diagnoses. Two independent evaluators, a musculoskeletal-trained radiologist and a sports-medicine-trained physician with over 8 years of experience with musculoskeletal ultrasound, reviewed the images from the pocket-sized ultrasound.
RESULTS:

Nine of the studies were diagnosed with a pathologic entity during the standard diagnostic ultrasound and 1 was found to be normal. Diagnoses ranged from biceps tendinopathy, calcific tendonitis, and partial-articular-sided rotator cuff tear. Evaluator 1 correctly identified 7/10 diagnoses and evaluator 2 correctly identified 8/10 diagnoses. The evaluators also rated their confidence in diagnosis as 4.2/5 and the image quality as 3.7/4 from the pocket-sized ultrasound.
DISCUSSION:

The findings from this study demonstrate that pocket-sized, hand-held ultrasound machines may be used to identify shoulder pathology.

Heart attacks, strokes and other cardiovascular (CV) diseases continue to be among the top public health issues. Assessing this risk is critical first step toward reducing the likelihood that a patient suffers a CV event in the future. To do this assessment, doctors take into account a variety of risk factors — some genetic (like age and sex), some with lifestyle components (like smoking and blood pressure). While most of these factors can be obtained by simply asking the patient, others factors, like cholesterol, require a blood draw. Doctors also take into account whether or not a patient has another disease, such as diabetes, which is associated with significantly increased risk of CV events.


Nature Biomedical Engineering, we show that in addition to detecting eye disease, images of the eye can very accurately predict other indicators of CV health. This discovery is particularly exciting because it suggests we might discover even more ways to diagnose health issues from retinal images.

Using deep learning algorithms trained on data from 284,335 patients, we were able to predict CV risk factors from retinal images with surprisingly high accuracy for patients from two independent datasets of 12,026 and 999 patients.

… Even the staunch defenders who say athletes have sole ownership of their own wearable data acknowledge the thorny issues that arise with exterior tracking.

“That’s probably the hardest question that we’re going to be tackling going forward,” NFL Players Inc. president Ahmad Nassar said at the SportTechie State of the Industry event. “One of the dividing lines — but I don’t think it will be the dividing line — is what goes on outside our bodies, or the athlete’s body, versus what is happening inside their body, so heart rate and things that we can’t actually see.

“We can see that they run fast and have technology that measures that, so that’s not necessarily logically that much different than seeing a home run. You might need something from a tech standpoint to tell you how fast that is happening, but you can tell, whereas I cannot tell what Tom Brady’s heartbeat was on the final drive of the Super Bowl.”

A new study led by Irene Davis, Harvard Medical School professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation and the director of the Spaulding National Running Center plans to examine the role of fatigue on landing impacts and bone-stress injuries in basketball players.

The research team will be using small devices, called wearable sensors, that can be secured to the lower leg to measure these loads while players are on the court. The relationship between load and injury is affected by other factors such as sleep, nutrition, bony anatomy and the current state of bone health. To prevent bone-stress injury and help athletes recover from bone-stress injury, we must first have a better understanding of these mechanical and biological factors and how they relate to bone health, the researchers said.

… the key question for me is this: Has the commitment to analytics in football kept pace with the increase in information available? My answer would be No. Of course there has been an increasing acceptance of analytics by clubs over the past nine or ten years. But I’m not sure how deep that acceptance goes. Although some clubs are enthusiastic about the potentialities of data to inform decision-making, I have a suspicion that others are still rather uncertain, and while they may nominally claim to be “doing analytics” the real impact on their decision-making is rather limited.

A world first Tennis Hackathon, launched to coincide with Australian Open 2018, drew a record number of competitors from around the world in an attempt to find a way to automate the call of forced and unforced errors in professional tennis.

Tennis Australia’s Game Insight Group (GIG) teamed up with leading Silicon Valley-based crowd-sourcing platform CrowdANALYTIX to launch the single biggest release of tracking data in the history of tennis.

Tennis Australia Head of Innovation Dr Machar Reid said the results of the competition were an exciting step forward in the quest for the full automation of outcomes in tennis.