Applied Sports Science newsletter – July 5, 2019

… The reality, for imports: Often it isn’t cultural shock that gets them, but basketball shock. “Yo, you’re in a different country,” Lawson says. “You’re not just coming over here and running s—.” Lesson One: Brace for bruises. “It’s definitely more physical,” says Brandon Bass, who played in the NBA for 12 years, left for China in 2017 and promptly led Liaoning to a CBA title. “You learn that real quick.”

The pace is also frantic—run-and-gun bordering on reckless. And because most imports are counted upon to shoulder the scoring load, they’re the focus of every opponent’s D. “I’d never been double- and triple-teamed the whole game,” says Beijing Fly Dragons guard (and 2016 Sixers second-rounder) Pierre Jackson, who nonetheless averaged nearly 40 points this season.

Looming over all of this is a patience that quickly wears thin. Each CBA team is allowed to switch its imports up to four times before the playoffs, then twice more in the postseason. “If you’re not performing at an incredible rate, you could easily be cut,” says Bass.

… “When Brittany caught up to me, I didn’t think about the 94 miles I’d just run. All I thought about was that this had just turned into a six-mile race,” Gallagher says. “I redlined harder than I’ve ever redlined in my entire life for six miles.”

As if her push to the finish line weren’t remarkable enough in and of itself, Gallagher had also just returned from a two-week trip to Alaska. In early June, Gallagher, who is as dedicated to her environmental activism as she is about running ludicrous distances over gnarly terrain, got a call from world-renowned climber Tommy Caldwell. Was she interested in coming on a Patagonia-sponsored expedition to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR)? It was too good an opportunity to pass up.

A Rutgers-led study sheds light on one of the most enduring mysteries of science: How did metabolism – the process by which life powers itself by converting energy from food into movement and growth – begin?

To answer that question, the researchers reverse-engineered a primordial protein and inserted it into a living bacterium, where it successfully powered the cell’s metabolism, growth and reproduction, according to the study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“We are closer to understanding the inner workings of the ancient cell that was the ancestor of all life on earth – and, therefore, to understanding how life arose in the first place, and the pathways life might have taken on other worlds,” said lead author Andrew Mutter, a post-doctoral associate at Rutgers University’s Department of Marine and Coastal Sciences.

Training load (TL) management is a key component for optimising performance. Understanding TL will allow us to evaluate fatigue and to anticipate overload and overtraining in order to minimise injury risk. As there is a relationship between TL and injury incidence (Drew & Finch, 2016), it is therefore important to measure this factor. The quantification of TL aims to analyse adaptations caused by training and reduce the risk of possible side effects from these adaptations, such as non-functional overload and injury (Halson, 2014).

In elite sports, and particularly in football, there is a very fine line between success and failure. A plethora of internal and external factors will determine performance. Monitoring and understanding these factors will help us to assess whether a player is adapting and responding well to a training programme. Monitorising to analyse trends in parameters related to fatigue, can help to make the right adjustments for the player’s condition. Although there are a variety of monitoring devices, such as GPS, pulsometers and lactate meters, we don’t always have access to these devices. However, wellness questionnaires have emerged in recent years as a reliable, economical and easy-to-use method for controlling load responses (Heidari et al., 2019; Saw et al., 2016). These questionnaires depict the player’s perception of his or her stress level and provides information on the TL both from a physiological and psychological standpoint.

Technologists have long dreamt of a day with a computer in every pocket. But now that this dream is a reality for many people, is it improving our lives as we had hoped?

In the past year or so, companies like Facebook, Apple, and Google introduced tools that help people limit their screen time, recognizing that many users express concerns about the way they spend their time with technology. As Google puts it, “We believe technology should improve life, not distract from it.”¹ A recent academic study found 367 apps and browser extensions that help people battle online distractions.

These are sometimes described as tools for “digital wellbeing.” But what exactly does this new term mean?

Worn sensors are popular for automatically tracking exercises. However, a wearable is usually attached to one part of the body, tracks only that location, and thus is inadequate for capturing a wide range of exercises, especially when other limbs are involved. Cameras, on the other hand, can fully track a user’s body, but suffer from noise and occlusion. We present GymCam, a camera-based system for automatically detecting, recognizing and tracking multiple people and exercises simultaneously in unconstrained environments without any user intervention. We collected data in a varsity gym, correctly segmenting exercises from other activities with an accuracy of 84.6%, recognizing the type of exercise at 93.6% accuracy, and counting the number of repetitions to within ± 1.7 on average. GymCam advances the field of real-time exercise tracking by filling some crucial gaps, such as tracking whole body motion, handling occlusion, and enabling single-point sensing for a multitude of users. [video, 2:21]

The conditions were miserable at the 2018 Boston Marathon: with heavy rain, temperatures in the low forties, and the occasional wind gust of 45 miles per hour, race organizers were mainly worried about hypothermia. But the weather was also a recipe for dehydration. “It was like running in a monsoon, which made it incredibly difficult to hydrate,” says Becca Pizzi, an experienced marathoner in the field that day. “The water was ice-cold, and we just weren’t thirsty.” Fortunately, Pizzi wasn’t waiting until she felt parched—she knew exactly when to take a drink midrace, thanks to a small patch on her left arm.

Pizzi was one of about 50 runners at Boston wearing a prototype of Nix, an inexpensive and disposable biosensor that analyzes sweat on the skin and gives real-time data on fluid loss and electrolyte levels. The product is one of the more promising developments in a wave of emerging technology that aims to answer the age-old hydration questions for athletes: How much should you drink during prolonged exercise? Should you drink when you’re thirsty or follow a hydration plan? And how much does dehydration affect performance?

Efforts to make artificial intelligence fairer now extend to Wimbledon’s courts.

The All England Club, which hosts the famed British tennis event, is adding technology enhancements at this year’s tournament aimed at eliminating bias from computer generated video highlights.

The club has already been using AI to go through hours of footage and automatically pick out the best shots from matches played on its 18 courts. The AI chooses the moments based on criteria including whether a player does a fist pump and how much the audience cheers after a point. Fans can then watch the assembled videos online and players can use them to review their performance.

Talks at Google is very excited to bring you a conversation with two all around pros: pro athletes, pro businessmen, and pro-mental health advocates, Antonio Davis and Dahntay Jones. [video, 55:34]

According to published findings, dynamic postural control and core muscle strength and endurance were found as risk factors for lower extremity overuse injuries. Examining core neuromuscular control and proprioception and functional movement as factors for these injuries might not be the best indicators for at-risk patients.

“I think an important take-home message toward clinicians, that was not mentioned in our conclusion, is that modifying these detected risk factors from our study with injury prevention in mind needs to be part of a more comprehensive, multifactorial injury prevention program that also focuses on other non-core stability-related aspects, such as balance training, warm-up/cooling down, flexibility training, functional strength training, etc.,” Cedric De Blaiser, PT, PhD, told Healio.com/Orthopedics.

Objectives: Athletes regularly suffer psychologically as a consequence of long-term injury. However, to date, there has been no investigation into the psychological protocols implemented to support long-term injured professional footballers.

Methods: An online questionnaire was developed to identify the current rehabilitation practices in English football. Seventy-five heads of medical departments responded to the survey from first teams and academies across the English Leagues.

Results: Medical staff recognised that there were clinical mental health problems, namely anxiety and depression affecting long-term injured players. It was acknowledged that there was a need for psychological support for long-term injured players. However, findings revealed most clubs had limited access to psychological practitioners and physiotherapy staff were almost entirely responsible for providing psychological support throughout rehabilitation.

Conclusion: Clubs responded overwhelmingly that they wanted to be able to access psychological support for long-term injured players.

… For decades, the term “burnout” has been deprioritized — wrongly accused of being some made-up, first-world crisis, most likely drummed up by millennials and Gen Zers who want more work-life balance. The truth is, the younger workforce has it right. And as they increase the demand for more meaningful work (even claiming they’ll take 32% less pay for the trade-off), burnout — specifically purpose-driven burnout — will continue to be a growing concern. In a Gallup survey of 7,500 full-time employees, 23% reported feeling burned out at work very often or always, while 63% said they experience it sometimes.

Recently, The World Health Organization (WHO) included burnout in its International Classification of Diseases, IDC-11, claiming that it “refers specifically to phenomena in the occupational context…a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed…” The WHO noted that the syndrome was characterized by three dimensions: 1) feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion; 2) increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; and 3) reduced professional efficacy.

Data analytics in sports is crucial to evaluate the performance of single players and the whole team. The literature proposes a number of tools for both offence and defence scenarios. Data coming from tracking location of players, in this respect, may be used to enrich the amount of useful information. In basketball, however, actions are interleaved with inactive periods. This paper describes a methodological approach to automatically identify active periods during a game and to classify them as offensive or defensive. The method is based on the application of thresholds to players kinematic parameters, whose values undergo a tuning strategy similar to Receiver Operating Characteristic curves, using a ground truth extracted from the video of the games.

Analysis of player tracking data for American football is in its infancy, since the National Football League (NFL) released its Next Gen Stats tracking data publicly for the first time in December 2018. While tracking datasets in other sports often contain detailed annotations of on-field events, annotations in the NFL’s tracking data are limited. Methods for creating these annotations typically require extensive human labeling, which is difficult and expensive. We begin tackling this class of problems by creating annotations for pass coverage types by defensive backs using unsupervised learning techniques, which require no manual labeling or human oversight. We define a set of features from the NFL’s tracking data that help distinguish between “zone” and “man” coverage. We use Gaussian mixture modeling and hierarchical clustering to create clusters corresponding to each group, and we assign the appropriate type of coverage to each cluster through qualitative analysis of the plays in each cluster. We find that the mixture model’s “soft” cluster assignments allow for more flexibility when identifying coverage types. Our work makes possible several potential avenues of future NFL research, and we provide a basic exploration of these in this paper.

… Over the last 30 years, globalization of the NHL has led to kids all over the world taking up hockey. Sweden and Finland, relative to their population, have produced numerous high quality NHL players and have experienced success in international competition. Finland has won the gold medal at three of the last six U-20 World Junior Championships, two of the last four U-18 World Junior Championships, and are the current IIHF World Championships defending champions. Not far behind, Sweden has won three of the last six IIHF World Championships.

Despite their recent success at the international level, Nordic players are picked later and less frequently than their North American counterparts.