Applied Sports Science newsletter – April 7, 2021

… As opening day approached, Tatis was asked about whether he might tweak his decision-making and approach at times to safeguard his body.

“No,” Tatis said flatly. “I don’t feel like I need to modify nothing. You keep learning through the years. You keep learning about your body every single time. I think changing the way I play, I don’t think it’s a thing … you can say.”

Who knows how the wild slides, collisions and sprawling defensive plays chipped away at a fragile shoulder? Given that it’s been a thorn for so long, the injury was likely to force a decision at some point anyway. A bit of self-applied bubble wrap can only help, though.

Manager Jayce Tingler said the team has talked with Tatis about decision-making on the field in the past. He added that the Padres will seek advice from its doctors, trainers and sports science staff about specific directives moving ahead, such as eliminating headfirst slides.

England players have labelled the alleged conditions for Birmingham City Women’s players “unacceptable” and voiced their support for Birmingham’s squad, after the West Midlands club’s players submitted a formal complaint to their board.

Every member of Birmingham’s squad signed the letter, seen by Telegraph Sport, outlining two pages of specific grievances about access to facilities, medical provisions and a lack of hotels for away games, as well as concerns over wages.

… “I played quarterback and safety,” Williamson told Yahoo Sports. “I honestly liked playing defense better because I was able to deliver the hit, and not get it.”

Williamson went to high school in football country: Spartanburg, South Carolina, just an hour from the Clemson Tigers football program. When he was touring Spartanburg Day High School, he found out their football team went undefeated in its last year. In 1981.

With that, his football career ended, but he took its lessons with him.

… “I think this is a very key component if you want to be successful in CCL: how you adapt to the things you’re going to find in these countries that make, every day, these difficult situations from the grass, to the rain, to so many variables that we will find there,” Timbers coach Giovanni Savarese told reporters last Friday during a video news conference.

The Timbers open the Champions League in Honduras on Tuesday night at Estadio Olimpico Metropolitano in San Pedro Sula. The venue has been a fortress for Honduras during World Cup Qualifying over the last few cycles. Pandemic limitations should offset any home advantage Marathon hoped to have.

The sporting director places emotional regulation of the players at the centre of his philosophy. Psychology is the starting point to success, he tells Fabrizio Romano

Royal DSM, a global science-based company in nutrition, health and sustainable living, launched Hologram Sciences, a consumer-facing company that will create brands targeting various health conditions. By combining health diagnostics, digital coaching and personalized nutrition, Hologram Sciences brands will provide consumers with more holistic solutions to manage health.

Hologram Sciences is backed with a $100 million investment by Royal DSM, which has made personalized nutrition a key pillar in its nutrition strategy, allowing the company to combine a range of capabilities and resources to cover the entire personalized nutrition value chain all the way to the consumer.

Hologram Sciences will provide state-of-the-art consumer-facing personalized nutrition solutions that have been clinically proven to address a variety of consumer health needs. As solutions are validated in-market, they will be available to DSM customers. Hologram will also work to incubate products with DSM customers and partners, based on the latest consumer insights and leveraging their agile approach.

Last fall Stryd announced their intention to add a subscription-based service to their offerings, in conjunction with their existing Stryd running pod. That pod provides running power (as well as acting as an ANT+ & Bluetooth Smart footpod). The pod is compatible with most watches today from Garmin to COROS to Suunto and Polar. They’ve even got an Apple Watch app, and I was also able to get it cookin’ on the Wahoo RIVAL last fall. The exact running power feature-set varies wildly though between each of those watchmakers – a fact that likely slowed Stryd’s long-term growth.

Back when they announced the subscription service, they noted that existing users would get to keep existing functionality, and that the new subscription service would largely be composed of new functionality – primarily in the structured training and race prep realms. Meaning you don’t need their subscription service to use the Stryd pod. In addition to their announcement back then, they’ve been launching various features in beta over the last 6 or so months, giving you a taste of that beverage before a price tag is attached to it.

As of today, they’ve flicked that switch and the price tag is here: $9/month

The benefits of the warp knitting process for the creation of electronic textiles (e-textiles) were outlined by Tony Hoojimeijer, president of Karl Mayer North America, during the latest Techtextil and Texprocess North America webinar.

“When considering the e-textiles market it’s clear there are a number of barriers,” he said during the event, first broadcast on March 25th. “Typically, process costs are very high for such products that come onto the market, because producing e-textiles can be a pretty complex process with add-ons for the sensors always demanding multi-step processes. On the user side, washability can then be an issue, as can wearing comfort.

“The way to address this is firstly to find a suitable production process that is very volume oriented and then reduce the production steps for the different components required, to help in terms of costs. Building the functionality into the fabric, instead of adding it to the fabric later, results in more wearable and attractive garments that will lead to better and higher customer acceptance. This is what the warp knitting route offers.”

While the shift to electronic health records (EHR) in the medical profession was supposed to improve the quality and efficiency of healthcare for doctors and patients alike, many physicians have given the technology low grades.

A new Yale study digs into the data on how physicians are using EHRs, including how time spent using the systems differs by specialty, and what these findings reveal about how the technology can be improved.

One of the key findings is that female physicians spend an average of 30 minutes more per day using EHRs than their male colleagues. The results were published April 5 in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. A related article appeared the same day in JAMA Network.

Although the means to identify datasets using persistent identifiers have been in place for more than a decade, systematic data versioning practices are currently not available. In this work, we analysed 39 use cases and current practices of data versioning across 33 organisations. We noticed that the term ‘version’ was used in a very general sense, extending beyond the more common understanding of ‘version’ to refer primarily to revisions and replacements. Using concepts developed in software versioning and the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) as a conceptual framework, we developed six foundational principles for versioning of datasets: Revision, Release, Granularity, Manifestation, Provenance and Citation. These six principles provide a high-level framework for guiding the consistent practice of data versioning and can also serve as guidance for data centres or data providers when setting up their own data revision and version protocols and procedures.

I recently wrote about a brief strike on the London Underground in 2014 which provoked many commuters to find new routes to work. Quite simply, when our old solutions are closed off, we find new ones. Sometimes the new ones would have been better all along.

This is perfectly well understood by computer scientists. Algorithms created to solve problems such as scheduling deliveries or designing computer chips tend to deploy random shocks to what would otherwise be a search for incremental improvements. Without the randomness, the algorithm gets stuck. So do we.

We can all imagine ways in which Covid-19 might prompt the same fresh thinking, most obviously in using the internet — at last! — to replace grinding, costly and time-consuming travel.

… Speaking at our 2020 Virtual Hockey Summit, San Jose Sharks assistant coach Dan Darrow explained how he incorporates analytics for his pre-scouting work.

Now in his sixth season as the Sharks’ video coach, Darrow moved to San Jose following four years as the director of hockey operations with the University of Massachusetts-Lowell.

“We use analytics a lot, but trying not to be overbearing with them is our philosophy here in San Jose. We don’t want it to be the only thing we look at and we don’t want it to be just video. We want to use it as a tool to help us,” said Darrow, who does 5-on-5 pre-scouts by creating a package and a game plan for each opponent.

What are they actually doing? They’re surveilling athletes 24/7, collecting truckloads of highly intimate and personal information, and calculating ‘workloads’ by way of questionable methods https://link.springer.com/article/10.100 [thread]

Speaking after the Premier League win at Leicester City on Saturday, Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola became the latest to ask a simple question. Why is it alright to compress the schedule and obligate players across multiple competitions for club and country? In Guardiola’s more concise version, it’s a simple statement. “They are human beings, not machines.”

Specifically to Manchester City’s situation, English soccer insisted on playing modified versions of both cup competitions in what was clearly going to be a pandemic season. Then confederations and FIFA allowed three-game international windows. For the type of player employed by City, the commitments stack up. This creates what Guardiola highlights, a club game where squad rotation may be the most significant competitive advantage. Alongside that is an international schedule getting their games in as well. During a pandemic, there are more games over a shorter schedule than usual, leading into a summer of national team competitions.

USMNT coach Gregg Berhalter has already made it clear that the plan is to use different players for the conclusion of the Nations League and the Gold Cup. That’s hardly ideal, especially when weighing the value of those two competitions.

As training partners, professional triathletes Chelsea Sodaro and Sarah Piampiano have shared many miles together: Riding their sleek carbon bikes along the rolling roads along the coastline near their northern California homes, running for hours side-by-side on dusty trails, or meeting up on pool decks for early morning swim sessions.

In the past few months, however, the pair has shared more than just training time. They’re both brand-new first-time moms, their babies born within weeks of each other last month. And, once they’re ready, the highly-accomplished women plan to return to triathlon and once again compete against each other on the world’s stage. In the meantime, they’re still collecting paychecks as pro athletes, thanks to a brand-new maternity leave policy from the Professional Triathletes Organization (PTO).

Though coming back to an elite level of sport after pregnancy is not necessarily novel, being paid during the time off is.