Applied Sports Science newsletter – January 7, 2020

… As of Sunday, Williamson has been out 10 weeks and counting. In that time, the Pelicans, who were a popular dark-horse playoff pick before Williamson went down and a bevy of other injuries began to follow, have gotten off to a 12-24 start. Entering play on Sunday, they have the second-worst record in the Western Conference. They’ve won five of their last six, but a playoff berth still appears to be a long shot.

Which begs the question: Why bring Zion back at all? Per ESPN’s Andrew Lopez, the Pelicans are concerned enough with Zion’s future health that they are trying to “tweak” the way he walks and runs. There is a growing contingent of people who believe a red-shirt year is in the best interest of both Williamson and the Pelicans, who can more or less officially forfeit the season and acquire another lottery pick while protecting their most important long-term asset.

… on a Wednesday afternoon in South Philly, with the Eagles’ wild-card round showdown against the Seattle Seahawks four days away, he’s the center of attention. But once upon a time, he was a 5-foot-6 running back with no scholarship offers. A year later, he was an unused freshman walk-on at Louisiana Tech. Three months ago, he was a practice-squad player.

All of which helps explain why the locker room at the NovaCare Complex seems slightly unprepared for his sudden fame. Scott, the star of the Eagles’ playoff clincher, stands at his locker. And as the semicircle of humanity around him swells – two rows deep, then three – Marcus Green realizes he has a problem.

Green has been a practice-squad receiver here since September. He’s been assigned a temporary-looking locker on an island in the middle of the floorplan. On a normal day, he’d look directly across the aisle at Scott. Today, he can’t do much of anything. His personal space has been swallowed up by the growing crowd. So he decides to create some. He swings his mobile locker left. A team staffer walks by and asks what the heck he’s doing.

Last week, we wrote about Nick Senzel being the key to the rest of the Cincinnati Reds’ winter. Senzel, who had a disappointing rookie year, is now an object of speculation after the Reds filled his positions with the signings of Mike Moustakas and Shogo Akiyama. Some in the game even believe the Reds will dangle Senzel in an attempt to land Cleveland’s Francisco Lindor.

If a player like Senzel, a top-10 prospect entering 2019, can see his stock diminish within a year, then imagine what a shaky rookie season can do to the standing of players without his pedigree. With that in mind, we decided to profile five lesser-known players who had miserable rookie seasons, but who we believe showed enough to leave us optimistic about their futures.

… A load of 225 pounds was selected, not from rigorous scientific testing as some believe but as a compromise. While some wanted to do bodyweight, a set percentage of body weight, or a set load by position, the waters got too muddied. They felt that anyone who was going to play in the NFL should be able to bench press 225 pounds so they would just perform repetitions to failure at that to test strength.

While that is really a misnomer, as pointed out in this previous elitefts article and this journal article we did, it is a fair statement to say that someone who bench presses 500 pounds will be able to perform more repetitions than someone who bench presses 300 pounds. So, in those terms, it is a strength test. However, does it even matter? Benches are not on a football field. No one lies on their back and presses, as many people like to point out.

… The idea behind taking a deep breath when you are stressed is to get more oxygen. And herein lies the misconception—you do not actually need more oxygen, unless, of course, you are physically exerting yourself. If you are sitting in a chair, or standing in line, lying in bed, talking with someone, or engaging in most daily activities, you do not need more oxygen. There is about 21 percent oxygen in the air you breathe in and about 15 percent oxygen in the air you breathe out1; you get plenty of oxygen in every breath you take, and you do not need to make an effort to inhale more

You do, however, need to make sure that the oxygen you inhale gets used by your organs. And this is where the trick lies: Turns out, in order for your organs to get the oxygen they need, you don’t need more oxygen; you need to conserve your carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide—the one typically portrayed as public enemy number #1—is actually super important to maintain proper breathing chemistry.

Top athletes’ brains are not as noisy as yours and mine, according to a fascinating new study of elite competitors and how they process sound. The study finds that the brains of fit, young athletes dial down extraneous noise and attend to important sounds better than those of other young people, suggesting that playing sports may change brains in ways that alter how well people sense and respond to the world around them.

The last time I wrote a controversial column about stretching, I got a record number of readers questioning the rationale behind eliminating stretching before a workout. That was 20 years ago, when stretching was an integral part of almost all warmups. Nowadays, not only has stretching disappeared from most pre-workout routines, American exercise scientist James Nuzzo is recommending removing stretching as one of the foundational pillars of physical fitness.

Nuzzo doesn’t believe stretching is irrelevant. He just wonders why trainers still prescribe stretching exercises for healthy individuals who want to improve their overall fitness, and why evaluating flexibility is still part of the curriculum of fitness tests delivered in schools and fitness clubs.

To be clear, the type of stretching in question is static stretching, which requires holding stretches for 10 to 30 seconds. Dynamic stretching, also called range of motion exercises, are movement-based and don’t require any one position to be held for any length of time.

Oftentimes, the various coaching staff, sport science, and medical practitioners of a sports club require a single, holistic indication of an athlete’s athleticism. Currently, there is no consensus on how this is best defined, and thus, a total score of athleticism (TSA) may provide one such method. The TSA is derived from the average of Z-scores (or T-scores in the case of small samples) from a sport-specific testing battery, ensuring athletes are judged across all the relevant fitness capacities that best define the physical demands of competition. To aid readers in using the TSA, this article also details how it is computed in EXCEL. [full text]

Eccrine sweat is a rich and largely unexplored biofluid that contains a range of important biomarkers, from electrolytes, metabolites, micronutrients and hormones to exogenous agents, each of which can change in concentration with diet, stress level, hydration status and physiologic or metabolic state. Traditionally, clinicians and researchers have used absorbent pads and benchtop analyzers to collect and analyze the biochemical constituents of sweat in controlled, laboratory settings. Recently reported wearable microfluidic and electrochemical sensing devices represent significant advances in this context, with capabilities for rapid, in situ evaluations, in many cases with improved repeatability and accuracy. A limitation is that assays performed in these platforms offer limited control of reaction kinetics and mixing of different reagents and samples. Here, we present a multi-layered microfluidic device platform with designs that eliminate these constraints, to enable integrated enzymatic assays with demonstrations of in situ analysis of the concentrations of ammonia and ethanol in microliter volumes of sweat. Careful characterization of the reaction kinetics and their optimization using statistical techniques yield robust analysis protocols. Human subject studies with sweat initiated by warm-water bathing highlight the operational features of these systems.

… Twenty years ago, the connection between symptoms—headaches, blurred vision, and difficulty concentrating—and head injuries was hazy. Now, it’s clear. Before the season starts, students undergo baseline testing through the Micheli Center for Sports Injury Prevention (a Waltham-based research center that seeks to reduce risk of athletic injury) to measure processing speed, visual and verbal memory, and reaction time. If a student sustains a concussion, she or he gets back on the field only after these levels return to normal. “We’ve found out that cognitively, and from a balance standpoint, our brain is taking longer to recover from a concussion episode than what we may have thought 15 years ago,” Berkstresser says. Harvard’s athletics department partners with the Micheli Center, Boston’s Children Hospital, and Harvard Medical School on a longitudinal study that tracks students who have sustained concussions. The results, though preliminary, have already changed the way trainers perform the balance assessment in baseline and post-concussion testing, allowing staff to judge when specific indicators of balance and vision have returned to normal levels. At student athletes’ subsequent reunions, they hope to follow up, looking for certain biomarkers in urine, among other factors, that would help elucidate concussions’ long-term effects.

The athletic department, along with Aaron Baggish of the Massachusetts General Hospital Heart Center, are also studying the impact of anaerobic activities, like heavy weightlifting and short sprints, on the heart. They’re studying football linemen, whose role makes them especially susceptible to conditions like high blood pressure and hypertension. “Most of what they do is within 10 yards,” Berkstresser explains. “It’s a whole lot of power and press and strength” (as opposed to cardiovascular conditioning). A current hypothesis is that a few brief aerobic sessions per week on a stationary bike could greatly decrease heart-remodeling changes that result from high-intensity, quick-burst activities. They’ve tested it out, with encouraging preliminary results. “You may be implementing something that could have a pretty significant change in their quality of life moving forward,” Berkstresser says, adding that potential conclusions could also help non-athletes. “That’s a pretty incredible find.”

Position statement: The International Society of Sports Nutrition (ISSN) provides an objective and critical review of the mechanisms and use of probiotic supplementation to optimize the health, performance, and recovery of athletes. Based on the current available literature, the conclusions of the ISSN are as follows:

Probiotics are live microorganisms that, when administered in adequate amounts, confer a health benefit on the host (FAO/WHO).

Probiotic administration has been linked to a multitude of health benefits, with gut and immune health being the most researched applications.

Despite the existence of shared, core mechanisms for probiotic function, health benefits of probiotics are strain- and dose-dependent.

Athletes have varying gut microbiota compositions that appear to reflect the activity level of the host in comparison to sedentary people, with the differences linked primarily to the volume of exercise and amount of protein consumption. Whether differences in gut microbiota composition affect probiotic efficacy is unknown.

Nothing rallies a divided nation like hatred for referees.

A call or two could impact the ending of any big game, so Alabama wants to stay ahead of the controversy. Answering an audience question at his radio show live in Orlando on Monday, Nick Saban explained his program’s strategy for handling refereeing and the curveballs they can throw.

… No stone is being left unturned in England’s quest for glory. Earlier this year the FA reached a deal to use Google’s cloud technology to improve the performance of the England national teams, enhance youth development and make the overall operations of the FA more efficient.

The partnership is now a few months old and digitizes the previously manual process of collating performance, medical, scouting and video data and storing it in the cloud. This makes it easier to access, but also opens up the possibility of using analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to identify new ways to make sense of this information.

… The fact is that Leonard is only going at 60-game pace, currently playing 28 of a possible 38 matches, or 73.6 per cent. With Leonard’s load management now reality and 60-game pace the norm rather than a reduction in predicated output, the Clippers outlook requires re-evaluating.

Commentary around the issue constantly refers to the fact that a championship will silence all doubters – and it will. Make no mistake: if the Clippers win the title, load management will be a buzz word across all the big four American sports for years if it isn’t already.

Two years, two championships, both won by deliberately missing meaningful games in order to physically preserve your body for action in May and June. It goes directly against the mantra of many elite athletes, like that espoused in Kobe Bryant’s Mamba Mentality. Playing to win every night has long been seen as a respectable trait. The 2020 Clippers just want to win when it matters.

… The problem in soccer is that more revenue doesn’t always mean more profit. Take Manchester United Plc. The English giant’s sales ticked steadily upward over the past decade, rising 75% between 2009 and 2019 to 627 million pounds ($821 million). Profit has been harder to depend on, swinging from 5.3 million pounds in 2009 to a 48 million-pound loss the following year. The team, whose roster boasts French World Cup winner Paul Pogba and England defender Harry Maguire, posted a somewhat measly 19 million pounds profit in the last fiscal year.

While admittedly coinciding with a period of lackluster on-field performances, the team’s shares have underperformed the S&P 500 since their 2012 listing.

It makes investing in a soccer team that’s already near the top of the league table a difficult proposition.