Applied Sports Science newsletter – September 23, 2019

Applied Sports Science news articles, blog posts and research papers for September 23, 2019

 

Chargers’ Derek Watt creates own path, faces older brother J.J. Watt

ESPN NFL, Eric D. Williams from

… Derek says he and his brothers fantasized about making it to the NFL while playing football in their backyard. They pretended to play for their favorite team, the Green Bay Packers.

“We just continued to work and work, and finally we’ve all achieved the dream of getting to the NFL,” Derek said. “And now it’s just what our story is in the NFL, and how far it can go.”

 

Bo Bichette trying to ‘be smart’ in recovery from head injury

CBC Sports, The Canadian Press from

… “More tired than usual, a little bit nauseous at times but everyday I’ve been better so that’s all I can hope for,” Bichette said when asked about his symptoms.

“I never had any head injuries and it sucks. And obviously you’ve gotta be more careful, you’ve only got one brain, so I’m just trying to be as smart as I can with it.”

Bichette was hit by a pitch from Gabriel Ynoa in the top of the sixth inning but initially stayed in the game after being assessed on the field by trainers. He made a defensive play on a ground ball in the bottom of the sixth and batted again in the top of the seventh before being replaced by Richard Urena for the bottom of the inning.

 

FC Dallas’ Dominique Badji emphasizes stepping up for NYCFC clash despite short rest

Pro Soccer USA, Arman Kafai from

… Coming off a poor 4-0 loss against Chicago, Dallas came with a plan into CenturyLink Field, earning a point in a place the team has historically struggled. That point on Wednesday came with a cost, however, as many players walked into training Friday sore from the turf field. While playing on turf is something players have to deal with, recovery for a quick turnaround is key.

“Yeah, our bodies are so sore, speaking for myself and playing on turf” forward Dominique Badji said. “But we’re used to this with the way the league is set up and it’s not the first time we’ve had a couple games close back-to-back. We have a great training staff that’s going to get us ready for three points this weekend.”

 

Toronto Maple Leafs: Questioning the Focus of Load Management

Fansided, Editor in Leaf blog, Patrick Morrison from

Load Management, the new favorite word for Toronto Maple Leafs fans. Is it really all it’s cracked up to be or just another excuse for a problem we can’t currently quantify?

When assessing the focus of the upcoming season for the Toronto Maple Leafs there is one point that seems to be resounding among most fans, Freddy must play less.

This load management focus on Goaltenders has become a growing buzzword in the hockey community and a word synonymous with the Leafs management of Freddy Anderson.

 

Phoenix Suns announce nine members of new medical staff

Arizona Sports, Logan Newman from

… After parting with Nelson this offseason, the Suns took the final step away from his tenure and toward the future Friday, announcing the hire of a new medicine and performance team.

Brady Howe was announced as the Senior Director of Player Health and Performance. He is a former member of the Atlanta Hawks training staff and the director of athletic performance for the Utah Jazz’s G League affiliates.

 

Why does it matter what time of day you take an HRV reading?

Myithlete from

… This new study has shown day-night HRV variation to be substantial, with HRV almost twice as high around midnight than at mid-morning in younger people. Both the 24 hr average and the amount of variation decrease as we age, in parallel with our day to day recovery becoming less effective.

 

Non-Responders: What to Do If Your Body Doesn’t Respond to Training

Triathlete Magazine, Ian McMahan from

… if you’re not seeing any improvement with your training—even if it’s working for your training partner, teammate, or the triathlete swimming one lane over—change what you’re doing. It’s an opinion shared by Hirofumi Tanaka, director of the Cardiovascular Aging Research Laboratory at the University of Texas, Austin. “One of the things that triathletes get disappointed about is their relatively low VO2max or maximal oxygen consumption when we bring them into the lab and test them,” Tanaka says.

In order to accommodate three different modes of exercise, triathletes too often sacrifice training intensity—one of the most important drivers for aerobic capacity improvement. Gibala says interval protocols ranging from repeated 30-second “all out” sprint runs to 5-minute cycling bouts at 80 percent of peak power have been shown to boost performance in trained athletes, without an increase in volume. This also speaks to the effectiveness of a varied approach to intensity training, he says. Pickering also maintains there are completely legitimate reasons why you may experience only slight gains in performance. For instance, the longer you have been training, the less you can expect to improve. What’s more, for masters athletes, “non-response,” rather than a negative response, might mark a good training year.

 

Study finds hub linking movement and motivation in the brain

MIT News, Picower Institute for Learning and Memory from

Our everyday lives rely on planned movement through the environment to achieve goals. A new study by MIT neuroscientists at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT identifies a well-connected brain region as a crucial link between circuits guiding goal-directed movement and motivated behavior.

Published Sept. 19 in Current Biology, the research shows that the lateral septum (LS), a region considered integral to modulating behavior and implicated in many psychiatric disorders, directly encodes information about the speed and acceleration of an animal as it navigates and learns how to obtain a reward in an environment.

“Completing a simple task, such as acquiring food for dinner, requires the participation and coordination of a large number of regions of the brain, and the weighing of a number of factors: for example, how much effort is it to get food from the fridge versus a restaurant,” says Hannah Wirtshafter PhD ’19, the study’s lead author. “We have discovered that the LS may be aiding you in making some of those decisions. That the LS represents place, movement, and motivational information may enable the LS to help you integrate or optimize performance across considerations of place, speed, and other environmental signals.”

 

Changes in Locomotor Ratio During Basketball Game Quarters From Elite Under-18 Teams | Psychology

Frontiers in Psychology journal from

Quantifying game and training demands in basketball allows to determine player’s readiness and optimizes preparation to perform and reduce injury risks. Available research is using tracking technology to perform general descriptions of the game activities at professional levels, but somehow, is not exploring the possibilities of gathering data from new variables that can contribute with complementary information for the coaching staffs. The aim of this study was to identify changes in locomotor ratio, at higher and lower speeds, during the game quarters from elite under-18 basketball teams. Ninety-four male players participated in the study (age: 17.4 ± 0.74 years; height: 199.0 ± 0.1 cm; body mass: 87.1 ± 13.1 kg) from different playing positions, Guards (n = 35), Forwards (n = 42), and Centers (n = 17). Data were gathered from an international tournament and players’ movements were measured using a portable ultra-wide band position-tracking system (WIMU PRO®, Realtrack Systems, Almeria, Spain). The following variables were measured: (1) relative distance in different speed zones: walking (<6.0 km·h−1), jogging (6.0–12.0 km·h−1), running (12.1–18.0 km·h−1), high-intensity running (18.1–24.0 km·h−1), and sprinting (>24.1 km·h−1); and (2) player load, vector magnitude expressed as the square root of the sum of the squared instantaneous rates of change in acceleration in each of the three planes divided by 100. Afterward, these variables were used to calculate players’ locomotor ratio (player load per meter covered) at higher (running, high-intensity running, and sprinting) and lower speeds (walking and jogging). Results from the locomotor ratio at both lower and higher speeds presented a significant effect for the quarter (F = 7.3, p < 0.001 and F = 7.1, p < 0.001, respectively) and player position (F = 3.1, p = 0.04, F = 9.2, p < 0.001, respectively). There was an increase in the locomotor ratio from game quarter (Q) Q1 to Q4 at lower speeds, but contrary trends at higher speeds, i.e., the values have decreased from Q1 to Q4. Also, forwards and centers of the best teams presented lower values at higher speeds. Altogether, the findings may be used by coaching staffs as a first baseline to elaborate normative behavior models from the players’ performance and also to induce variability and adaptation in specific practice planning. [full text]

 

Meru Health launches wearable companion to track biofeedback

MobiHealthNews, Laura Lovett from

Digital mental health company Meru Health is launching a new wearable aimed at helping its users understand the mind-body connection through biofeedback.

Meru’s platform uses a multi-pronged approach to helping customers improve mental health including connections to licensed therapists, digital tools and peer support.

The new tool is meant to be clipped on a user’s ear when they are doing a specific biofeedback practice provided by the Meru platform. Users will then feedback about their heart rate variability during the session. The idea is to help participants see results train their breathing practices.

 

BoostMeUp: Improving Cognitive Performance in the Moment by Unobtrusively Regulating Emotions with a Smartwatch

ACM Digital Library, Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies from

A person’s emotional state can strongly influence their ability to achieve optimal task performance. Aiming to help individuals manage their feelings, different emotion regulation technologies have been proposed. However, despite the well-known influence that emotions have on task performance, no study to date has shown if an emotion regulation technology can also enhance user’s cognitive performance in the moment. In this paper, we present BoostMeUp, a smartwatch intervention designed to improve user’s cognitive performance by regulating their emotions unobtrusively. Based on studies that show that people tend to associate external signals that resemble heart rates as their own, the intervention provides personalized haptic feedback simulating a different heart rate. Users can focus on their tasks and the intervention acts upon them in parallel, without requiring any additional action. The intervention was evaluated in an experiment with 72 participants, in which they had to do math tests under high pressure. Participants who were exposed to slow haptic feedback during the tests decreased their anxiety, increased their heart rate variability and performed better in the math tests, while fast haptic feedback led to the opposite effects. These results indicate that the BoostMeUp intervention can lead to positive cognitive, physiological and behavioral changes.

 

6 Coffees that Are Supercharged for Athletes

Outside Online, Graham Averill from

You probably don’t need another reason to start your morning with a cup of joe, but here goes. Caffeine’s potential to improve athletic performance is well established: numerous studies have found that it has positive effects on strength, power output, and endurance. Now companies are targeting athletes by infusing their java with ingredients like mushrooms and algae that may carry other performance benefits. Here are six of them.

 

Sleep and Nutrition Interactions: Implications for Athletes

Nutrients journal from

This narrative review explores the relationship between sleep and nutrition. Various nutritional interventions have been shown to improve sleep including high carbohydrate, high glycaemic index evening meals, melatonin, tryptophan rich protein, tart cherry juice, kiwifruit and micronutrients. Sleep disturbances and short sleep duration are behavioural risk factors for inflammation, associated with increased risk of illness and disease, which can be modified to promote sleep health. For sleep to have a restorative effect on the body, it must be of adequate duration and quality; particularly for athletes whose physical and mental recovery needs may be greater due to the high physiological and psychological demands placed on them during training and competition. Sleep has been shown to have a restorative effect on the immune system, the endocrine system, facilitate the recovery of the nervous system and metabolic cost of the waking state and has an integral role in learning, memory and synaptic plasticity, all of which can impact both athletic recovery and performance. Functional food-based interventions designed to enhance sleep quality and quantity or promote general health, sleep health, training adaptations and/or recovery warrant further investigation.

 

The truth about eating eggs

BBC – Future, Jessica Brown from

… Eating eggs alongside other food can help our bodies absorb more vitamins, too. For example, one study found that adding an egg to salad can increase how much vitamin E we get from the salad.

But for decades, eating eggs has also been controversial due to their high cholesterol content – which some studies have linked to an increased risk of heart disease. One egg yolk contains around 185 milligrams of cholesterol, which is more than half of the 300mg daily amount of cholesterol that the US dietary guidelines recommended until recently.

Does that mean eggs, rather than an ideal food, might actually be doing us harm?

 

Fifa World Cup report shows women’s game has grown technically and tactically

The Guardian, Suzanne Wrack from

The manager of the US women’s national team, two time World Cup winner Jill Ellis, has talked about her legacy. Having announced at the end of July that she would be stepping down from the post she has held for six years, at Fifa’s conference in Milan to analyse the 2019 World Cup she added to the hype: “It was one of a kind, obviously the second World Cup for me personally, but a wonderful showcase. The numbers don’t lie; our sport is exciting and energising.”

Ellis was right in saying that the numbers don’t lie. A presentation on the highlights of a 105-page Technical Study Group report into the tournament shows that the game has grown technically and tactically.

With no difference in the number of goals scored in France and the 2015 World Cup in Canada, 146, you could be forgiven for tempering that claim. But it did feel like a more attacking tournament and, while fantastic goalkeeping can undoubtedly be considered a factor in holding that number down, there are other signs that point to a more exciting game.

Goalkeepers played 26% of their passes “short”, as opposed to 15% in 2011 and 16% in 2015 highlighting an inclination to play out from the back.

 

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published.