Applied Sports Science newsletter – April 29, 2019

They share a coach, have a combined total of more than two dozen national titles, and are the first- and second-fastest half marathoners in U.S. history. And on Sunday, for the first time, Molly Huddle and Emily Sisson will line up together at the London Marathon to race one of the fastest 26.2-mile courses in the world.

It is Huddle’s fourth crack at the distance and Sisson’s debut, but they plan to utilize some teamwork in a deep international field that’s likely to splinter early in the race. The duo is coached by Ray Treacy, women’s cross-country coach at Providence College.

“Obviously a lot can happen in the marathon, so we’re aiming for the ideal situation,” Huddle said during a phone interview on Monday. “But Ray does think we’ll be able to work together for a lot of the race and finish pretty close together, too. We both made it to the start line ready to roll, basically.”

Three years ago an endearing but seemingly aimless defensive lineman from East Mississippi Community College turned into an unexpected reality-show star. Now he’s trying to make an even bigger jump: from Netflix to the NFL.

… Hayward didn’t know for sure that a second surgery was on the horizon. He had half an eye on his team’s startling surge against Milwaukee and Philadelphia, but he was more focused on his recovery.

“You’re rooting for the team, but at the same time, I’m trying to focus on myself,” Hayward said. “Which is definitely selfish, but I was trying every day to get small increments.”

The Celtics probably don’t see Hayward’s progress as selfish, given how significantly he helps raise their ceiling this season. Much has been made of Hayward’s progress and how much better the Celtics are when he plays well and aggressively, but the numbers have been particularly noteworthy over the last few weeks.

Objective Insufficient sleep duration and quality has negative effects on athletic performance, injury susceptibility and athlete development. This study aimed to assess the sleep characteristics of professional Qatar Stars League (QSL) soccer players.

Methods In a cross-sectional study, QSL players (n=111; 23.7±4.8 years) completed three questionnaires to screen sleep disorders: (1) Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI), (2) Insomnia Severity Index (ISI) and (3) Epworth Sleepiness Scale (ESS). Poor sleep quality was defined as PSQI≥5, excessive daytime sleepiness was defined by ESS>8 and insomnia was defined as ISI≥11.

Results The prevalence of poor sleep quality (PSQI≥5) was 68.5%, with subthreshold insomnia (ISI≥11) 27.0% and daytime sleepiness 22.5% (ESS>8). Sleep quality was positively associated with insomnia (r=0.42, p<0.001) and daytime sleepiness (r=0.23, p=0.018). Age, anthropometry, body composition and ethnicity were not associated with any of the reported sleep quality parameters. Conclusion The prevalence of poor sleep quality (68.5%) reported should concern practitioners. Increasing awareness of the importance of sleep relative to athletic performance, recovery, injury and illness appears prudent. Further, regular qualitative/quantitative sleep monitoring may help target subsequent evidence-informed interventions to improve sleep in those demonstrating undesirable sleep traits. [full text]

… The first game is Friday at 7 p.m. at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. Written on the white board in the Canes’ locker room late Wednesday night was “Post Game Recovery” and the Canes must do that quickly for the second round of the playoffs.

“The biggest challenge for us is switching gears,” Brind’Amour said Thursday. “We’ve been going real hard here for a couple of weeks and obviously all that emotion, and then to kind of throw that away and focus on a whole different opponent, a different style, that’ll be the biggest challenge.”

The National Sports Agency (ANS) – which will govern French sport – has been launched in a bid to improve the country’s performance at the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games in Paris.

The ANS will be co-led by the French sports movement, the state and local authorities, as reported by Le Parisien.

This will give more autonomy to national governing bodies and take away decision-making power from the Ministry of Sport.

Working memory is an important concept that we’ve referred to in passing in several other Learning Scientist posts. This relatively simple concept influences how we think about learning and memory, so I wanted to give a brief overview of what working memory is, how it works, and why it’s important.

Should we be mindful of how popular “mindfulness” now is? Carl Erik Fisher says we should. Fisher is a professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University and a practicing psychotherapist who integrates meditation in his practice, and meditates himself. But he worries some popular meditation practices, which stress salvation through a clear mind, undermine the genuine benefits of meditation. Recent studies in psychology show mindful meditation has been detrimental to practitioners.

“The overselling of mindfulness can lead to this idea that we should always be rigidly focused on what’s in front of us and our minds should be totally clear of any sort of input or thought,” Fisher told Nautilus. “That’s a total misrepresentation. Mindfulness doesn’t mean the eradication of thoughts, in any tradition. In any sort of basic, secular, clinical application, it just means paying attention to the present moment…Maybe we need to clarify what we mean by mindfulness before we slap it on a bunch of posters in every school and every workplace.”

AMASS is a large database of human motion unifying different optical marker-based motion capture datasets by representing them within a common framework and parameterization. AMASS is readily useful for animation, visualization, and generating training data for deep learning.

… “In the business today, there are so many things that you’re competing with other franchises, it’s become a little bit of an arms race,” said former 76ers president of basketball operations Bryan Colangelo when he was on staff in 2016 when the facility opened. “We’re taking this to an entirely new level in terms of the health and performance and nutrition aspect of things. We’re really trying to drive excellence, create a culture of maximum performance, and trying to give them as many things that could help enhance that and get us there quicker.”

When it came time for the Buffalo Bills to make their free agency push this offseason, one of the cards the organization was able to play at the negotiating table was the fact that their commitment to improving their sports science and medicine department is almost unprecedented.

The Bills recently opened a newly-renovated 41,000-square-foot elite sports performance building, the ADPRO Sports Training Center which was designed by Populous, a worldwide architectural design company. The building’s ribbon cutting was April 12 as renovations reached their completion and the facility, which GM Brandon Beane claims is the best in the NFL, is now open to Bills players.

“I think it’s a game-changer for us,” General Manager Brandon Beane told The Buffalo News. “This is the one thing that we didn’t have that was top level, and we went from probably below average to the best — I think clearly the best.”

While 2019 is not a biennial rules change season for NCAA Soccer, the NCAA Playing Rules Oversight Panel (PROP) has approved a new rule allowing for hydration breaks for matches played in high humidity conditions. The PROP has also modified the rules regarding penalties enforced against a team who allows an ejected or suspended player to participate in a match. In this case, the team will no longer be required to forfeit the match where an ejected or suspended player participates.

There’s no doubt that Damian Lillard’s shot to end the Portland Trail Blazers’ first-round series against the Oklahoma City Thunder was one of the most incredible postseason shots we’ve ever seen. But was it a good shot?

A few weeks before Leicester City clinched its improbable, unforgettable Premier League title in the spring of 2016, an executive from one of English soccer’s dominant Big Six clubs was in a basement conference room at a four-star London hotel, explaining that it must not be allowed to happen again.

He was not immune to the romance of it all, he explained; he admired how Leicester had made the most of its comparatively scant resources to take its once-in-120-year shot. He even hoped that the international affection and attention the club had generated would benefit the league as a whole.

But a repeat, another uplifting underdog tale, he said, could not be sold as prima facie evidence of the Premier League’s strength, its innate competitiveness, its much-trumpeted unpredictability. It would, instead, be a sign of weakness, proof that the superpowers, for all their vast wealth, had fallen back to Earth.

Over the subsequent seasons, the Big Six — Manchester United and Manchester City, Liverpool and Tottenham, Arsenal and Chelsea — have done all they can to make sure that does not, and could not, happen. The gap between English soccer’s elite and the rest has been turned into a chasm.

… When a team is on the clock, it’s a heart-thumping, anxiety-escalating few moments, where penmanship counts and mistakes can be costly.