Applied Sports Science newsletter – July 26, 2018

Injuries have taken a heavy toll on Ross Barkley’s career. Once hailed as one of England’s best young talents when he surged to stardom at Everton, the 24-year-old has battled several major injuries already in his career, including back-to-back hamstring problems that limited him to just 4 appearances last season.

Switching to Chelsea halfway through the season did not alleviate the issues at the time, but he’s now back healthy and raring to go. In fact, he says he’s feeling fitter than ever.

When Angelique Kerber hired Wim Fissette at the end of 2017, she was “curious” as to what they could achieve together.

Seven months later and any questions she had have been answered. Kerber is a Wimbledon champion. The German, who won two Grand Slam titles in 2016, dropped out of the top 20 last year. But she was not content to led the slide linger. Kerber and coach Fissette sat down to discuss her goals.

“Last year when I started with Angie, I looked at all her stats from the year before, and I saw she was serving 75 percent to the backhand,” the Fissette told ESPN.com at Wimbledon.

“So I told her, that is something that needs to change, the percentage going to the forehand needs to be much higher. After the first month, she played in Australia, we saw the stats and we saw immediately how much she improved.”

… Over there on the west wall? That massive whiteboard that measures 10 feet high by 16 feet wide? That may be the most important thing in here.

That’s Nagy’s erasable canvas, an X’s-and-O’s spitball target that has become the Bears’ hub of offensive ideas.

It looks like a playbook piñata exploded with red, blue, green and black lines zigging, zagging, intersecting, curving.

This, Nagy admits, was among his first requests when he became Bears coach. Thus general manager Ryan Pace wasted little time getting a work order processed, understanding the “Beautiful Mind” board represented three of the biggest qualities he quickly admired in Nagy.

His creativity. His collaborative spirit. His attention to detail.

“His mind,” Pace says, “is always going.”

… was Croatia really “too tired” in the World Cup Final? Was fatigue, or lack of fitness, really the reason they lost the match?

I decided to take a closer look at the numbers from Croatia’s performance in the Final, as well as in their three knockout round matches, in the hopes of providing some insight into what role – if any – physical fitness and fatigue played in the outcome of the matches and the overall performance of the Croatian team.

Below are the three ways that fitness helped the Croatian team at the 2018 FIFA World Cup, and the lessons that can be learned from their memorable and historic performance.

Croatia covered the same distance as France in the World Cup Final.

Iowa’s Chris Doyle likely will retain his standing as the highest-paid college football strength coach at a public school this season with a base salary of $725,000.

Doyle’s salary, which became effective July 1, was released Tuesday by the university in response to an open-records request from USA TODAY Sports.

Doyle had $675,000 in basic pay last season — a little over $100,000 more than Ohio State’s Mickey Marotti, who had the second-highest total. However, under a provision in Iowa head coach Kirk Ferentz’s contract, the university agrees to fund certain average pay increases for assistants and other staff based on the team’s on-field and academic performance each season.

The ability to produce creative solutions is a key part of expert performance. The aim of this study was to identify the visual search behaviors that underpin superior creative performance of skilled soccer players during simulated 11-a-side match play. Players (N = 44) were required to interact with a representative life-size video-based simulation of attacking situations whilst in possession of the ball. Clips were occluded at a key moment and they were required to play the ball in response to each situation presented. Moreover, they were required to name other additional actions they could execute for each situation. Creative performance on the task was measured using the three criteria of originality, flexibility, and fluency of decisions. Visual search behaviors were examined using a portable eye-movement registration system. Players were classified as most- (n = 11) or least-creative (n = 11) based on their performance on the representative task. The most-creative players produced more appropriate, original, flexible, and fluid decisions compared to least-creative players. The creativity-based differences in judgment were underpinned by differences in visual search strategy. Most-creative players employed a broader attentional focus including more fixations of shorter duration and towards more informative locations of the display compared with least-creative players. Moreover, most-creative players detected teammates in threatening positions earlier in the attacking play. Creative performance is underpinned by different underlying visual processes when compared to less-creative performance, which appears to be crucial in facilitating more creative solutions.

Breathing is a well-described, vital and surprisingly complex behaviour, with behavioural and physiological outputs that are easy to directly measure. Key neural elements for generating breathing pattern are distinct, compact and form a network amenable to detailed interrogation, promising the imminent discovery of molecular, cellular, synaptic and network mechanisms that give rise to the behaviour. Coupled oscillatory microcircuits make up the rhythmic core of the breathing network. Primary among these is the preBötzinger Complex (preBötC), which is composed of excitatory rhythmogenic interneurons and excitatory and inhibitory pattern-forming interneurons that together produce the essential periodic drive for inspiration. The preBötC coordinates all phases of the breathing cycle, coordinates breathing with orofacial behaviours and strongly influences, and is influenced by, emotion and cognition. Here, we review progress towards cracking the inner workings of this vital core.

Background

Squatting is a core exercise for many purposes. The tissue loading during squatting is crucial for positive adaptation and to avoid injury. This study aimed to evaluate the effect of narrow, hip and wide stance widths, foot position angles (0°, 21°, and 42°), strength exercise experience, and barbell load (0 and 50% body weight, experts only) during squatting.
Methods

Novice (N = 21) and experienced (N = 21) squatters performed 9 different variations of squats (3 stance widths, 3 foot placement angles). A 3D motion capture system (100 Hz) and two force plates (2000 Hz) were used to record mediolateral knee displacement (ΔD*), range of motion (RoM) at the hip and knee joints, and joint moments at the hip, knee, and lower back.
Results

Both stance width and foot placement angles affected the moments at the hip and knee joints in the frontal and sagittal planes. ΔD* varied with stance width, foot placement angles and between the subjects’ level of experience with the squat exercise as follows: increasing foot angle led to an increased foot angle led to an increased ΔD*, while an increased stance width resulted in a decreased ΔD*; novice squatters showed a higher ΔD*, while additional weight triggered a decreased ΔD*.
Conclusions

Suitable stance width and foot placement angles should be chosen according to the targeted joint moments. In order to avoid injury, special care should be taken in extreme positions (narrow stand-42° and wide stance-0°) where large knee and hips joint moments were observed. [full text]

In this work, we investigate the problem of producing structured graph representations of visual scenes. Similar to object detection, we must predict a box around each object. Here, we also need to predict an edge (with one of several labels, possibly background) between every ordered pair of boxes, producing a directed graph where the edges hopefully represent the semantics and interactions present in the scene.

You don’t train the same way every day. Here’s why you should periodize everything else, too.

… Lochte posted a picture of himself in May on Instagram, which has since been deleted, showing him receiving an intravenous injection of what he says were “vitamins.” The problem is that USADA doesn’t allow intravenous infusions of permitted substances at volumes greater than 100 milliliters in a 12-hour period without a special “Therapeutic Use Exemption.” So the regulator slapped Lochte with a suspension that will last until July 2019.

It’s the latest example of how athletes test limits and run afoul of rules intended to keep illegal performance enhancers out of sport. We also saw this play out earlier this year at the Winter Olympic Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea. Four athletes faced doping allegations. Two were sent home. One, Aleksandr Krushelnitckii, who won bronze in mixed-doubles curling, was stripped of the medal he shared with his wife and teammate Anastasia Bryzgalova after testing positive for the banned drug meldonium.

And more may have gone undetected. The German broadcaster ARD revealed that an analysis of tests from more than 2,000 winter athletes between 2001 and 2010 showed that 46 percent of medal winners in international cross-country ski competitions returned at least one abnormal drug test. More than 50 of these athletes qualified for the games in South Korea.

… There has long been an argument among those who believed much of the PED hysteria was lunacy — who claimed, as science advanced, someday we all would look back at Bonds and McGwire and mock then not for cheating, but for using such primitive performance enhancers like “the cream” and cattle steroids. But it’s not just the science that evolved: Our mind-sets on what classified as “cheating,” or how much this even matters at all anymore, are different than they were a decade ago. The writer Joe Sheehan, in particular, has raised the plausible possibility that there wasn’t even a “PED era,” whatever the talking heads would have you believe — that there was no anomalous boom in home runs in the 1990s at all. More to the point: Who gives a shit about this stuff now?

When you look back at the PED panic in the age of Trump, it looks more and more like one of those First World problems, the sort of national scandal you invent because there are no actual national scandals to deal with, or at least none that you want to.

Dave Ellis spent years building Nebraska’s nutrition program. Then he left to tackle new challenges. He worked with professional players from the NFL, MLB, NBA, NASCAR and more.

Now he’s back. Ellis is Nebraska’s director of performance nutrition, a move made with hopes it will restore the football glory from the 1990s.

And naturally, Scott Frost was a big reason he returned.

“He is wise beyond his years,” Ellis said Wednesday on “The Bottom Line.” “He’s had great experience. He’s proven his leadership ability. He had proven it to me as an athlete, and now he’s proven it to us all as coach. He’s just got a quiet wisdom about him that is very reminiscent of a guy I worked with named Tom Osborne. That does a lot for my soul.”

… We need a batted-ball value stat that captures additional variables to get us closer to measuring batting output with skills. To that end, this article introduces a new wOBA-on-contact metric, called Batted-Ball Run Value, or BBRV for short.

BBRV’s Set-Up

Rather than incorporating a manual binning process, BBRV is built with a statistical model that parses through exit velocities, launch angles, and other variables to identify the drivers of run creation. More specifically, outcomes are modeled with a generalized boosted regression model (GBM), an accessible R implementation of Jerome Friedman’s gradient boosting machine that utilizes decision trees.

… For most of football’s history, scouts relied on hearsay for foreign transfers. In 1996 Southampton, an English team, signed someone claiming to be the cousin of George Weah, Africa’s biggest star. After his dreadful debut, the club discovered he had barely played professionally. An international tournament at least offered a chance to see potential imports play.

Today’s scouts, however, have access to footage and statistics from every league in the world. Raffaele Poli, the head of CIES Football Observatory, says an influx of staff from financial firms has led to greater interest in big data. In 2012 Arsenal purchased StatDNA, an American analytics firm. Both Bayern Munich and Manchester City have worked with SAP, a software company that provided insights for Germany’s World Cup winners in 2014.

The result, says Mr Poli, is an increasingly rational market. A full 80% of the differences between transfer fees for players can be accounted for by variables that CIES uses in its model, with only a few prices raising eyebrows.