Applied Sports Science newsletter – May 28, 2018

Applied Sports Science news articles, blog posts and research papers for May 28, 2018

 

Bojan Krkic: ‘I had anxiety attacks but no one wants to talk about that. Football’s not interested’

The Guardian, Sid Lowe from

The forward, who scored 900 goals for Barcelona’s youth teams and was labelled the ‘new Messi’, opens up on how the huge expectations affected him

 

Tom Brady working out at TB12 instead of Patriots OTAs sends message

Business Insider, Scott Davis from

Tom Brady appears to be sending a resounding message to the New England Patriots during organized team activities (OTAs) — from across the street.

According to reports, Brady had been working out at his TB12 Sports Therapy Center with his trainer and health guru Alex Guerrero, all while skipping the team’s voluntary OTAs.

The controversial part is that TB12 Sports Therapy Center is located a walk away from Gillette Stadium, where the Patriots are practicing.

 

The Quest to Run a Sub-Four-Minute Mile at Age 40

Outside Online, Martin Fritz Huber from

… Anthony Famiglietti has loftier ambitions. After the two-time Olympic steeplechaser turns 40 this November, he wants to become the fourth man in history to run a sub four-minute mile after hitting the big 4-0. (If he can secure the funding, he intends to make a documentary about it called Age Defiant, which will also feature other athletes who maintained elite-level performances well into their 40s and beyond.) Famiglietti’s moonshot mile is perhaps an unusual way to confront the beast of senescence, but it makes a crazy kind of sense. When you’ve spent more than half your life constructing your identity around the fact that you can run faster than 99.99 percent of the world’s population, it’s not easy to let go.

 

How Nighttime Tablet and Phone Use Disturbs Sleep

The New York Times, Well blog, Nicholas Bakalar from

When a person used an iPad instead of reading print before bedtime, he or she had a later sleep onset and suppressed levels of melatonin.

 

Science of football: Recovery with insight from FC Barcelona

Goal.com, Dr. K Bahdur and Dr R Pruna from

In previous columns I discussed fatigue in detail.

These covered the effects of training and how heavy training loads, constant travel, congested fixtures cause fatigue and the “they get paid to do a job so shouldn’t complain about fatigue” does not really fit in from either a physiological, psychosocial or cognitive perspective.

Fatigue decreases performance, increases injury risk and this can have both physical and mental consequences that can extend beyond the short term. Dr Ricard Pruna who is part of the medical team of FC Barcelona joined me for this column in trying to summarise the different recovery methods.

 

“Jumping into the injury danger zone: The Aspetar experience within elite volleyball”

YouTube, Aspetar from

Load monitoring and injury risk factors – as it relates to ankle, knee, and shoulder complaints in elite volleyball players

 

The FA’s New Dual-Career Program

Our Game Magazine (UK), Richard Laverty from

The Football Association (FA) has decided to end covering the costs of England players at university traveling to and from the United States for international training camps and tournaments starting in September 2019.

It’s a move which The FA hopes will persuade more of the young talent across the country to pursue their careers in England rather than across the pond, but it has left hundreds of players and parents in a difficult situation.

Players already in the U.S., such as Alessia Russo, Lotte Wubben-Moy, Anna Patten, and so on, will now have to subsidize their own costs when they return to England for international duty, while players going to the U.S. this summer will be at even larger disadvantage.

 

Resilience is the new happiness

Quartz, Ephrat Livni from

Happiness is a serious business. Inspired by the positive psychology movement, corporations hold positions for “chief fun officers” and esteemed institutions like Stanford and Yale offer classes on happiness. But this infatuation with good times is only creating confusion about what it means to succeed, and what skills we need to thrive.

Psychologist Anna Rowley—who counsels executives at Microsoft and other corporations—shirks the word “happiness” altogether. She believes resilience is the most important skill to cultivate, given the rapid rate of economic and technological change. Feeling good is all fine and good, but it’s fleeting. Learning to deal with difficulty, by contrast, improves your chances of feeling good again. That’s much more useful than clinging to an illusion.

We can’t always be happy. Pleasure is a relative state, contrasted by discomfort and pain. In between fleeting, pleasing moments are many challenging ones that make happiness a relief. So, to be happy, you have to first learn how to be strong; to pick yourself up after a fall, detach from sadness when you don’t succeed, and find the will to persist instead of getting depressed when things go awry, which they often will.

 

Silicon breakthrough could make key microwave technology much cheaper and better

University of Waterloo, Waterloo News from

Researchers using powerful supercomputers have found a way to generate microwaves with inexpensive silicon, a breakthrough that could dramatically cut costs and improve devices such as sensors in self-driving vehicles.

“Until now, this was considered impossible,” said C.R. Selvakumar, an engineering professor at the University of Waterloo who proposed the concept several years ago.

High-frequency microwaves carry signals in a wide range of devices, including the radar units police use to catch speeders and collision-avoidance systems in cars.

 

3D Sensors Provide Security, Better Games

Communications of the ACM, Keith Kirkpatrick from

… Not surprisingly, as the technology has improved, so has the demand for devices with embedded 3D sensing technology, according to Anand Joshi, a principal analyst with technology research firm Tractica LLC.

“Cameras have become really cheap and are being integrated into a wide range of devices,” Joshi says, noting that the growth and availability of computer vision technology and the software to extract depth information has enabled a large application development ecosystem to thrive, thereby supporting even more innovations.

Another 3D imaging technique that may support more advanced functionality is called stereopsis, or stereovision. This technology uses a sensor that takes the feeds from two cameras, and then compares the delta between the horizontal placement of each object to determine how far the object is from the sensor. This technique is deployed by LinX, another technology company acquired by Apple, possibly because the technology is not subject to interference, portending greater potential for use in outdoor applications and over greater distances.

 

An elastic fiber set to revolutionize smart clothes

EPFL, News from

It’s a whole new way of thinking about sensors. The tiny fibers developed at EPFL are made of elastomer and can incorporate materials like electrodes and nanocomposite polymers. The fibers can detect even the slightest pressure and strain and can withstand deformation of close to 500% before recovering their initial shape. All that makes them perfect for applications in smart clothing and prostheses, and for creating artificial nerves for robots.

The fibers were developed at EPFL’s Laboratory of Photonic Materials and Fiber Devices (FIMAP), headed by Fabien Sorin at the School of Engineering. The scientists came up with a fast and easy method for embedding different kinds of microstructures in super-elastic fibers. For instance, by adding electrodes at strategic locations, they turned the fibers into ultra-sensitive sensors. What’s more, their method can be used to produce hundreds of meters of fiber in a short amount of time. Their research has just been published in Advanced Materials.

 

Better Data Equals Better Training With TrinityVR

Baseball America, Tim Newcomb from

Virtual reality isn’t just a game. It isn’t just entertainment. The minds behind TrinityVR’s DiamondFX system have given virtual reality real heft in data collecting, data generation and training.

The VR platform uses proprietary physics-based calculations to turn multiple-source pitching data into realistic hitting scenarios. It is currently in beta use by three big league teams and ready for a full June commercial roll-out that the owners hope will see it expand across Major League Baseball and eventually into colleges and youth leagues.

Teams can employ those simulations to help train batters in pitch recognition, collect virtual data on young hitters facing big league arms or even have top-level batters prep for the evening’s game, as the Mariners’ Dee Gordon does. These are all aspects of a system that has evolved throughout the beta testing process since its debut at the 2016 Winter Meetings.

“We are unlocking the value to figure out how to better train and test players across some key sports science dimensions,” co-founder Julian Volyn said. Whether cognitive, vision, perception or motor, the crux of the platform takes a sports science tool that simply happens to be in VR to deliver tests and exercises.

 

Intraoperative monitoring of neuromuscular function with soft, skin-mounted wireless devices

npj Digital Medicine from

Peripheral nerves are often vulnerable to damage during surgeries, with risks of significant pain, loss of motor function, and reduced quality of life for the patient. Intraoperative methods for monitoring nerve activity are effective, but conventional systems rely on bench-top data acquisition tools with hard–wired connections to electrode leads that must be placed percutaneously inside target muscle tissue. These approaches are time and skill intensive and therefore costly to an extent that precludes their use in many important scenarios. Here we report a soft, skin-mounted monitoring system that measures, stores, and wirelessly transmits electrical signals and physical movement associated with muscle activity, continuously and in real-time during neurosurgical procedures on the peripheral, spinal, and cranial nerves. Surface electromyography and motion measurements can be performed non-invasively in this manner on nearly any muscle location, thereby offering many important advantages in usability and cost, with signal fidelity that matches that of the current clinical standard of care for decision making. These results could significantly improve accessibility of intraoperative monitoring across a broad range of neurosurgical procedures, with associated enhancements in patient outcomes. [full text]

 

Injury risk-workload associations in NCAA American college football

Journal of Science & Medicine in Sport from

Objectives

To determine injury risk-workload associations in collegiate American Football.
Design

Retrospective analysis.
Methods

Workload and injury data was recorded from 52 players during a full NCAA football season. Acute, chronic, and a range of acute:chronic workload ratios (ACWR: 7:14, 7:21 and 7:28 day) calculated using rolling and exponentially weighted moving averages (EWMA) were plotted against non-contact injuries (regardless of time lost or not) sustained within 3- and 7-days. Injury risks were also determined relative to position and experience.
Results

105 non-contact injuries (18 game- and 87 training-related) were observed with almost 40% sustained during the pre-season. 7–21 day EWMA ACWR’s with a 3-day injury lag were most closely associated with injury (R2 = 0.54). Relative injury risks were >3× greater with high compared to moderate and low ratios and magnified when combined with low 21-day chronic workloads (injury probability = 92.1%). Injury risks were similar across positions. ‘Juniors’ presented likely and possibly increased overall injury risk compared to ‘Freshman’ (RR: 1.94, CI 1.07–3.52) and ‘Seniors’ (RR: 1.7, CI 0.92–3.14), yet no specific ACWR – experience or – position interactions were identified.
Conclusions

High injury rates during college football pre-season training may be associated with high acute loads. In-season injury risks were greatest with high ACWR and evident even when including (more common and less serious) non-time loss injuries. Substantially increased injury risks when low 21-day chronic workloads and concurrently high EWMA ACWR highlights the importance of load management for individuals with chronic game- (non-involved on game day) and or training (following injury) absences

 

Michigan football offers scholarship to middle school athlete Tyler Martin

Land of 10 blog, William Kosileski from

When it comes to recruiting in college football, making a good first impression can go a long way. With that idea in mind, it appears that Michigan football is looking to make the ultimate first impression on a Class of 2022 prospect.

Michigan has offered a scholarship to Tyler Martin, a 6-foot-3, 227-pound eighth grader who played both linebacker and tight end for Buckingham Browne & Nichols School in Cambridge, Mass.

 

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