Applied Sports Science newsletter – January 7, 2019

DeMarcus Cousins has entered the anxious stage of his rehabilitation, which means he so badly wants it to end that he is scrimmaging as often as he can, for as long as he can, because he can sense his Warriors debut is near.

“We’re nearing the finish line,” general manager Bob Myers said on Monday.

Nothing changed on Wednesday, when the Warriors went through their first practice of 2019. Cousins, in the final stages of rehab from Achilles’ tendon surgery 11 months ago, did everything his teammates did.

“He’s starting to feel the finish line getting closer and closer,” teammate Quinn Cook said after the session.

The Washington Redskins enter the offseason the same way they did in 2018, with a major question surrounding their next quarterback. It could be a lot tougher to find an answer in 2019.

Last offseason the Redskins traded for Alex Smith, hoping he would fill that hole for several years. But when he suffered the compound spiral fracture of his right leg in November, it left his career in doubt and the Redskins needing to plan for life without him. The Redskins have made it clear that Smith’s health, regardless of football, is most important.

However, they also know they must figure out how to replace him, and for how long remains to be seen.

Youngsters who can kick a ball are better at sums, according to new research.

The study suggests hand and eye co-ordination, developed in the playground, may have a beneficial role in the classroom.

Co-authored by Aberdeen University’s Dr Justin Williams, the research reveals primary school pupils good at hitting an object are up to 15% better at maths.

Professor Grant Jarvie, founding director of Edinburgh University’s Academy of Sport, said a link between sport and academic achievement was inevitable.

Robert Greene is the author of The 48 Laws of Power and most recently, The Laws of Human Nature. His books, which are popular with many world leaders, celebrities, professional athletes and hip hop stars like Drake, have sold more than 5 million copies and have been translated into over 30 languages. Robert’s raw, “amoral” look at history and the dynamics of power, seduction, and warfare have always been controversial—indeed, his books are banned in many prisons across the United States. This interview about political correctness, the bloody cost of the denial of human nature, and the inner-work required for rational thought was conducted for Quillette by Ryan Holiday, his former apprentice, over the phone from Austin, Texas while Robert recovers in Los Angeles from a near-fatal stroke he suffered in August, 2018. The text has been lightly edited for clarity.

Parenthood in the United States has become much more demanding than it used to be.

Over just a couple of generations, parents have greatly increased the amount of time, attention and money they put into raising children. Mothers who juggle jobs outside the home spend just as much time tending their children as stay-at-home mothers did in the 1970s.

The amount of money parents spend on children, which used to peak when they were in high school, is now highest when they are under 6 and over 18 and into their mid-20s.

… There is a good chance that athletes will also be split on whether they want to receive more information or not. Some will want to have everything thrown at them; others just want to be pointed in the right direction.

The beauty of understanding what new technology and analytics can do is knowing that you can deploy it whenever necessary to fit the needs of your athletes and not simply to cater to those who work best with a more non-technical approach.

The point of the data and technology is to know more of the “why” and get a player to an improved state faster. Whether a coach explains all of the background knowledge on spin rate, or any other metric, depends on the topic and the athlete.

Introduction

Physical activity is positively associated with children’s classroom behaviour. However, less is known about how different types of physical activity contribute to these outcomes. This study examines associations between sport participation and classroom behaviour among primary school-aged children.
Methods

Parents of 568 children aged 9–11 years reported child sport participation and classroom behaviour outcomes (school functioning, inattention, classroom behaviour (fidgetiness), acting without thinking and poor concentration). Sport participation included: duration (hours/week) and type (individual; team; team and individual). Regression analyses assessed associations between sport participation and classroom behaviour outcomes. Analyses adjusted for maternal education, and objectively-measured overall physical activity, and accounted for clustering by recruitment centre. Sex differences in associations were explored as a secondary aim.
Results

In comparison to children who did not participate in sport, children who participated in sport displayed less inattention/hyperactivity (individual sport: B = -1.00;95%CI:-1.90, -0.00; team sport:-0.88;95%CI:-1.73, -0.03) and less acting without thinking (individual sport: OR = 0.35;95%CI:0.13,0.98), after adjusting for overall physical activity. There were no sex differences in associations.
Conclusions

Findings indicated sport participation, one form of physical activity, was associated with less inattention/hyperactivity and acting without thinking, over and above the influence of overall physical activity levels. Parents may consider sport as one way to contribute to their child’s overall physical activity levels, although the impact of organised sport on classroom behaviour is modest at best.

… Shane Parrish: Adam, you did a presentation once on how not to be stupid. Can you tell me about that? What is stupidity?

Adam Robinson: Right. It’s so funny you should ask that, because people think stupidity is the opposite of intelligence. In fact, stupidity is the cost of intelligence operating in a complex environment. It’s almost inevitable. And so I was asked by an organizer of an investment conference in the Bahamas of some elite global investors to do a talk on anything I wanted to do, except not about investing. It’s just, pick an interesting topic. So I thought for a second and I blurt out, “Okay. How about how not to be stupid?” He laughed and he said, “Okay. Great.” It took me a month of hard thinking, mind you, just to define stupidity. By the way, if you’re in any field and you want to find ways to innovate, focus on words that are commonly used and try to define them simply.

It took me about a month, and I defined stupidity as overlooking or dismissing conspicuously crucial information.

Tom Farrey, executive director at the Aspen Institute and Julie McCleery from the University of Washington Center for Leadership in Athletics talk about the big business of youth sports. We also examine what to watch for from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation in 2019 and hear about more ailing orcas. Plus: Do you want to be composted when you’re dead? [audio, 19:00]

Below are the results of a study we recently conducted of 2019 All-American Bowl and Under Armour All American game participants:

175 out of 222 (79%) players invited to these games have played multiple sports in high school.

I’m in a parking lot in Menlo Park, California, eyeballing a small canister that looks like an Amazon Echo with a fringe on top. It’s a location beacon, but it’s not plugged into a power source. In fact, it’s not powered by anything other than ambient temperature. Despite that fact, it’s showing up on the phone screen, actively pinging external devices.

This is a simulation of what a self-powered beacon would be like when dropped into the real world — imagine it living on a remote trailhead, in the middle of a dense forest where even solar panels wouldn’t be an option. And, if companies like Matrix can make it happen, these self-powered sensors could be the way toward making giant smart grids a reality in a super-connected future.

The fast-growing field of bioelectronic medicine aims to develop engineered systems that can relieve clinical conditions by stimulating the peripheral nervous system1,2,3,4,5. This type of technology relies largely on electrical stimulation to provide neuromodulation of organ function or pain. One example is sacral nerve stimulation to treat overactive bladder, urinary incontinence and interstitial cystitis (also known as bladder pain syndrome)4,6,7. Conventional, continuous stimulation protocols, however, can cause discomfort and pain, particularly when treating symptoms that can be intermittent (for example, sudden urinary urgency)8. Direct physical coupling of electrodes to the nerve can lead to injury and inflammation9,10,11. Furthermore, typical therapeutic stimulators target large nerve bundles that innervate multiple structures, resulting in a lack of organ specificity. Here we introduce a miniaturized bio-optoelectronic implant that avoids these limitations by using (1) an optical stimulation interface that exploits microscale inorganic light-emitting diodes to activate opsins; (2) a soft, high-precision biophysical sensor system that allows continuous measurements of organ function; and (3) a control module and data analytics approach that enables coordinated, closed-loop operation of the system to eliminate pathological behaviours as they occur in real-time. In the example reported here, a soft strain gauge yields real-time information on bladder function in a rat model. Data algorithms identify pathological behaviour, and automated, closed-loop optogenetic neuromodulation of bladder sensory afferents normalizes bladder function. This all-optical scheme for neuromodulation offers chronic stability and the potential to stimulate specific cell types.

How Virginia’s Kyle Guy learned to live with anxiety in the wake of the greatest college basketball upset of all time.

Mental Health is all around us, the trouble is you just can’t see it. As the football world becomes more demanding albeit more rewarding, we took time out with ex Manchester United and Exeter City player Alan Tonge, now part of Mental Health FA, to discuss his views on mental health in football.

The man who could be called the savior of Alabama’s season as much as any player or coach has spent this weekend buried in snow. Thomas Clanton does not describe himself that way, of course, but depending on your perspective, he has contributed to the Crimson Tide’s national title push as significantly as Nick Saban or Tua Tagovailoa or Quinnen Williams or Jerry Jeudy. Clanton is a foot and ankle surgeon living 1,300 miles from Tuscaloosa in Vail, Colo., where on Saturday evening he had two feet of powder in his yard. “We’ve had a good snow year this year,” Clanton says. “I’ve been skiing 12 times.”

Clanton politely scoffs at the notion that he deserves credit for where Alabama is this weekend. “I don’t need any publicity,” he says softly. “I’m 68 years old. I’ve done all the things I wanted to do in my career.” You probably don’t know much about Clanton, or Alabama team surgeons Norman Waldrop and Lyle Cain, and you probably don’t know about a company called Arthrex and a product named the Knotless Syndesmosis TightRope (hereafter referred to simply as the tightrope). But the contributions of all of the above will come to a head in Santa Clara on Monday night, when the Crimson Tide meet the Tigers in a title bout where so much hangs on an ankle held together by a surgical procedure now getting national attention. “It’s amazing,” says Alabama quarterbacks coach Dan Enos. “I don’t understand anything about it. I know this, though, it’s amazing.”

Improving the reproducibility of neuroscience research is of great concern, especially to early-career researchers (ECRs). Here I outline the potential costs for ECRs in adopting practices to improve reproducibility. I highlight the ways in which ECRs can achieve their career goals while doing better science and the need for established researchers to support them in these efforts.