Applied Sports Science newsletter – November 27, 2018

Michael Thomas repeats his mantra like it’s a verbal tic.

“I feel like I’ve been having to earn it my whole life,” he says. “That’s just how my story’s been. I found a way.”

That time in high school when he was just a raw, late-blooming junior who couldn’t crack the lineup? He found a way, in the spring that followed, to have the best offseason his high school coach says he has ever seen. That time when his monster offseason gave way to a monster senior year at Taft High — never once dipping below 100 yards receiving in a game — but still didn’t yield the big-time college offers he craved? He found a way, eventually, to lure Ohio State, after a brief interlude at a military prep academy to fine-tune his skill set. That time when he was redshirted as a sophomore in Columbus? He found a way, the very next season, to reinvent himself as a starter, culminating in a balletic, tiptoe-catch at the edge of the end zone in a playoff win over Alabama. That time when five receivers were taken off the 2016 draft board before his name was called in the second round? He found a way, in the three seasons since, to transcend them all.

…

If Mendez’s success on a national stage is relatively recent, the hard work that got him there is not. Nor are the challenges he had to overcome on that climb.

He was introduced to soccer by his uncle Armando, who took him to a neighborhood park to play when Mendez was still a toddler, then signed him up for his first organized team when he was 5. Mendez later joined the Chivas USA academy where he was part of a stellar group that included U20 teammate Ulysses Llanez and Mexican U17 player Efrain Alvarez.

“It was clear he was very talented from the start,” said Sacha van Der Most van Spijk, a former director of youth development for Chivas USA.

… Kovalchuk, who nearly signed with the Kings in 2010, was a positive force initially. He leads the team in multipoint games (four) and points (14). But that says more for the Kings’ offensive futility than his prowess; Kovalchuk has not recorded a point in his last nine games.

Before Kovalchuk’s slump began, Datsyuk said: “Since he left, hockey has changed now, and he needed to adapt a little bit. Now it looks like he’s adapted. I think the further they go, the more he can help the team.”

Kovalchuk played down the adjustment to the evolving N.H.L. after five seasons in Russia.

“Hockey is the same game wherever you play,” he said. “The rink here is smaller, so everything comes faster. All the best players play here. It’s a good challenge for me personally because you have to get out of your comfort zone sometimes to be even better. Even if you’re 35, it does not matter. You can be better and learn something every day.”

… One of the most pressing questions for people slotting mountain adventures into precious vacation is how much time they need to allot to acclimatization. Will arriving a day or two early make an appreciable difference to their performance and health? This is also, as it turns out, a crucial question for military personnel being deployed on mountain missions where they need to quite literally hit the ground running. Optimizing that calculation is the motivation for a new study from researchers led by Robert Kenefick at the U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine, in Natick, Massachusetts, published in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise.

… a small company in Tokyo called Crazy, an upmarket wedding-planning boutique, has taken an unexpectedly bold stand and decided to reward sleep. It will pay its staff a bonus if they prove they sleep longer each night. If they are able to keep up a steady pace of extended slumber and manage to get at least six hours on all weekday nights, workers can accumulate the equivalent of 64,000 yen ($562) a year.

The effect of maximal isolated muscle and cardiovascular fatigue on lower extremity biomechanics during running has been investigated extensively. However, the majority of runners do not run to exhaustion regularly. Consequently, research and industry are interested in biomechanical changes over the course of a typical prolonged run and how footwear technology may affect them. This study investigated the influence of neutral and stability footwear worn during a 42-minute prolonged treadmill run on lower extremity biomechanics. Fourteen male rearfoot runners completed two prolonged running sessions where they ran for 21 minutes on a force instrumented treadmill in a neutral shoe (baseline run). Participants then changed into another neutral shoe of the exact same construction but a different color or into a stability shoe and ran for a further 21 minutes (intervention run). Three-dimensional kinematics and kinetics were measured at the beginning and end of each 21-minute running period. Main effects for time were observed at the hip, knee, and ankle during both the baseline and intervention runs. Particularly, increased knee flexion and rearfoot eversion observed during mid-stance may exhibit a strategy to reduce the effective mass and minimize joint loads applied to the foot and knee. No main effects for footwear condition were found in lower extremity biomechanics. However, individual responses to the neutral and stability shoe conditions were observed. Running shoe design should: (1) focus on both acute and prolonged changes in lower extremity biomechanics at the individual level, and (2) further investigate the use of materials/architecture that allow runners to stay within their initial (baseline) preferred motion path and/or provide greater support when preferred motion path changes throughout a prolonged run.

Training and competition loads have emerged as valuable injury risk factors but very few studies have explored injury outcomes in adolescent athletes. The aims of this study were to describe injuries and to explore the relationship between training and match load volumes and injury in adolescent athletes participating in multiple contact team sports. One hundred and three male youth rugby athletes aged 14 to 16 years from 8 rugby union teams were prospectively monitored during a season for weekly training and match volumes and injuries. The relationship between volume and injury was explored by comparing the weekly volume in the week prior to an injury vs. weeks without injury. There were 83 time‐loss injuries in 58 athletes (62%). Overall injury incidence was 18.5 per 1000 player‐hours. Mean weekly injury prevalence was 27% (95% CI 25‐30). Average weekly volume was 5.4 (2.2) hours comprising 1.4 (1) match hours and 4 (2.6) training hours. Compared with weeks without injury, weeks prior to an injury had higher match volumes (110 [57] min vs 83 [59] min, p <0.001). Poisson regression demonstrated that match volume was a predictor of injury with an odds ratio of 1.41 (p=0.001). The contribution of match volumes to injury risk and the relatively high injury burden in these athletes may be profound. Very high match volumes are unlikely to be in the best interests of young athletes and could be avoided with a systematic approach to load management and athlete development.

… The vision is clearly to make the new facility a one-stop-shop. Iowa State would relocate its academic support center to the third floor of the new facility, add a nutrition and dining area to the fourth floor and Iowa State would have an Olympic sports center with softball batting cages, weight room and sports medicine facilities for soccer, softball, tennis and golf in the basement.

Clemson has opened the Clemson Applied Science Lab (CASL) at the Allen N. Reeves Football Complex. Director of Applied Science Alex Bina guided a tour (below) and answered questions about the new 2,400-square-foot area, which includes both a science lab and recovery center.

Jennifer Wethe knows the importance of getting treatment for a concussion as soon as possible. She also knows how often concussions can be overlooked in those critical first few moments.

“What we find instead is a lot of times people making excuses: ‘Oh well they’re just dehydrated,’ or ‘They got the wind knocked out of them,’ or ‘They had a headache,’” said Wethe, the co-director of the Mayo Clinic Arizona Sports Neurology and Concussion Program.

“Or any of these other things for why there might be some symptoms there instead of actually just checking them out objectively,” she said.

Wethe hopes to change that with a new protocol she had developed that can test athletes for concussions in under three minutes and that is simple enough to be conducted by a layperson.

As a busy undergraduate at MIT, Christina Bognet decided she wanted to start eating a healthier diet. She began checking the nutritional content of her food and considering portion sizes. She created grocery lists to minimize food waste and cost, sifting through hundreds of recipes to find ones that were both healthy and delicious. Then she had to figure out how to make the meals she selected.

Bognet pulled it off, losing nearly 50 pounds in her junior and senior year. But she realized that other people, including those with families, demanding jobs, or specific medical conditions, wouldn’t have time to research healthier eating choices and spend hours each week shopping and cooking.

That insight led Bognet to found PlateJoy, a meal-planning platform that tailors food recommendations to each user to help them adopt a healthy diet based on their unique lifestyle and health goals.

“I ultimately came to feel that the students would be best served by a book that follows very closely to my lectures, so I started writing down my lectures into a set of computational notebooks that would ultimately become this book. The outline of this book follows roughly that of Field’s book, since the lectures were originally based in large part on the flow of that book, but the content is substantially different (and also much less fun and clever).”

… Building the perfect NBA roster in a fictional universe, however, seems like a worthy endeavor, so we set out to do just that. But just saying “build the perfect NBA roster” is too broad, and if you take it literally, far too simple. What we needed was the concept of what a real roster would look like in a fantasy land where every single player in the league is up for grabs.

… We’re genuinely not a Barça gospel, [but] we think we’re preaching the gospel which is the one that Guardiola believes in, that Cruyff believes in, Xavi believes in, Iniesta believes in, Dani Alves believes in. At no point were we trying to stick out noses up their arses and tell them that it smells of roses. The purpose of telling this story wasn’t to say that everything is beautiful, and it’s a happy wonderland, 1968 Woodstock. None of that shit. I completely lived through it, occasionally being on a plane with the squad during that era. In those days, the Rijkaard days, the players spoke more. You knew the tensions. There’s a point in this film where we saw a clip of Pep as Barça B team coach, and it’s the only clip of him in that role. You can see him walking around the players and he takes Jeffren, who scored the fifth in the 5–0 win over Mourinho’s Madrid and he turns his shoulders. And you see Jeffren’s face going, “What the fuck? Don’t fucking touch me!” You’ve got this little fucking prick whose making his way—and he’s going “Who’s this fucker Guardiola, who I’ve never heard or seen play, and he’s turning my shoulders round?”

That happened in St. Andrews, in Scotland in 2008 when Pep moves up to the first team. And I know that although Piqué didn’t go and complain to the President, Piqué had to be told, “stand here. No, stand here! Exactly on that blade of grass. Turn your body fucking round.” Pep was an interventionist. And Abidal says in the film, “Either you respect me or I don’t respect you. I’m not a 16-year-old. You speak to me like that again I’m fucking off.” You hear reporters saying in that first week of training that Eto’o was pissed off with how Guardiola had spoken to him and about him. He didn’t speak to his face. Touré was unhappy with all the intervention and all the aggressive words. There were others that I’m not going to name. So when we also included Abidal saying that and Eto’o is saying “I’ll be a better coach than Pep and I’ll be better than him because I’ll tell people things to people’s faces,” we did it because it’s factually true. We didn’t want to paint a picture of any of the participants being perfect.

Barcelona have become the first sports team in history with average first-team pay in excess of £10m a year, according to the latest Global Sports Salary Survey, which also shows the extent to which wages are spiralling across all sports.

This season the Spanish champions will pay its 23-man squad an average of £10.45m, before bonuses, a figure that has risen by a third since 2017-18. Much of that is down to signing Lionel Messi to a new deal that pays him in excess of £50m a year, although signing Phillippe Coutinho, Arthur, Malcom and Arturo Vidal, and handing Gerard Piqué, Sergi Roberto, Samuel Umtiti and Sergio Busquets lucrative extensions has also significantly swollen the payroll.

Real Madrid are second in the GSS survey – which tracks pay in 349 teams across eight sports in 13 countries – with its first-team players earning an average of £8.1m a year. The next six spots are filled by NBA teams, with the Oklahoma Thunder in third (£7.85m) and the Golden State Warriors (£7.82m) in fourth.