Applied Sports Science newsletter – April 12, 2021

… In 2015, Muncy worked his way up to the big league club, making his MLB debut on April 15. He recorded a hit in that first game, but he finished the season batting .206/.268/.392 with three home runs in 45 games. The next season went similarly, hitting .186/.308/.257 with two home runs in 51 games.

Mentally, he was in a place he didn’t like.

“When I was running out of my time in Oakland, it was a lot of depression and a lot of just not being happy with who I was,” Muncy said. “Showing up to the field every day was really a grind. It was something I almost didn’t even want to do.”

In February 2020, Aliphine Tuliamuk won the women’s marathon at U.S. Olympic Trials. When the COVID-19 pandemic caused the Tokyo Olympics to be postponed by a year, Tuliamuk and her partner Tim Gannon decided to reassess their own family planning timeline. In December, Tuliamuk announced that she was pregnant and due in January, but still planned to race at the Olympics this summer. With just over 100 days until the start of the Games, On Her Turf caught up with Tuliamuk about the birth of her daughter Zoe and her goals for this summer.

Joe Harris arrived in Brooklyn in 2016 a castaway, a former second-round pick who’d been waived by the Cleveland Cavaliers after a season-ending injury. During his first year with the Nets, Harris started only eleven games, and the Nets finished with a league-worst 20 wins. Since then, Harris has turned himself into quite possibly the best sharpshooter in the NBA. The Nets, meanwhile, have loaded up with Hall of Fame talent and all-league personalities in Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving, and James Harden.

Harris might be the greatest beneficiary of that shift. In a league charmed by analytics and three-pointers, Harris has carved out his niche—and reaped the benefits, signing a four-year, $75 million contract last fall. And with three all-world scorers occupying the defense’s attention, he’s taking even greater advantage than before: hitting more than 48% of his three pointers, the unassuming Net is on the brink of the greatest shooting season in NBA history.

GQ: You’re hovering around 50% from three on the season. How often are you looking at that percentage?

Joe Harris: I never look at it.

… Smith credits Ledecky for raising the stakes of what’s possible in women’s distance swimming.

“She elevates the sport in general, but helps everybody put their sights on bigger and bigger goals,” said Smith, who has practiced against Ledecky at training camps and leading up to meets.

“I’ve been overall extremely impressed with the way she trains and how fast she goes in practice. If anything, that’s something that I’ve looked at and been inspired by.”

Just don’t call their back-and-forth a rivalry.

Things haven’t always been easy for USA international Chris Richards, but the 21-year-old centre-back has overcome financial setbacks, sporting rejection and racism to emerge as one of the Bundesliga’s rising stars.

Prolonged or repeated respiratory tract illness is not inevitable for your athlete – do you just need to systematically assess respiratory health to help prevent it?

Respiratory tract illnesses (RTI) are the number one acute medical cause of time loss for athletes during major competitions and is an often-overlooked area of athlete care. RTI have traditionally been thought of as an unfortunate and unavoidable by-product of intense training, illness-inducing environments and hectic travel schedules(1). Over the last decade however, several studies have consistently demonstrated that respiratory issues are prevalent, often under-diagnosed, and not treated optimally in professional athletes, leaving them at higher risk of RTI susceptibility. We explore how a systematic approach to athlete respiratory health could help reduce the risk of illness and improve availability for performance.

… Losada’s daunting physical requirements for the team matter for two reasons. There is the obvious stylistic change that has been discussed throughout the preseason, with Losada’s emphasis on aggressively pressing opponents and relying on a high-speed style that results in a lot of transition play. For players, that translates as having to sprint more often, and for longer distances than they did in last year’s more conservative tactical approach.

Frederic Brillant acknowledged the the tactical side being a major factor. “We work very hard physically, and the reason why it is because we want to press the opponent… The last two games, the pressing was very intense, very high. We went a lot to press the opponent, on the (touchline) especially. And, yeah, we are pretty compact, the way we press, and when we have the ball we want to get forward as quick as possible.”

… He tends to keep a very low profile, but has done a fascinating interview with the AREACOACH.it website, which is run by Sampdoria Academy coach Marco Ferri.

The interview is in Italian, with quotes here translated into English (bear that in mind), and the theme that runs throughout is how Mauri focuses on quality rather than quantity, intensity instead of volume.

This was encapsulated in a sentence from Ronaldo, with whom he had worked at Madrid: “Too much water kills the plant”.

The idea that athletes need to take care of their sleep, nutrition, and physical attributes to perform better on game night is more prevalent than ever before.

More and more organizations in professional sports and development leagues are introducing departments that look at sports science and how it helps teams win championships and perform better on a nightly basis.

Dr. Tom Hazell is an Associate Professor in Kinesiology and Physical Education at Wilfrid Laurier University and he said sports sciences is an amalgamation of different disciplines in science related to sport.

“The idea would be understanding how the body moves in terms of its physiology, biomechanics, and even nutrition related to recovery and fueling the body for performance are the three that come to mind right away and then the fourth one would be psychology in terms of mental performance for athletes,” he said.

In the darkest days of the COVID-19 pandemic, I swore I’d never again complain about driving carpool for my kids’ rock-climbing team through Seattle traffic. Medical science has long touted the physical and mental health benefits of children’s sports. Add in social interaction, and youth sports feels like an all-in-one pandemic fix.

But as youth teams and leagues return, it’s worth examining what our children are actually signed up for. Youth sports are no longer the neighborhood pickup games of American lore. In recent years children as young as 6 and 7 are increasingly enrolling in high-level sports programs with professional coaches and year-round competition schedules.

By age 13, up to 70% of children have dropped out of organized sports. I was certain the stats wouldn’t apply to my family — until two of the best, strongest, older athletes on my kids’ climbing team dropped out.

… A bottom-up solution for anxiety

While talk therapy and medication are still the mainstream solutions offered for chronic anxiety, other modalities exist that offer a body-first approach. And while these modalities are still considered “alternative,” an increased interest in “brain science” and neurobiology along with continued research on mindfulness and mind-body connections are shifting our psychological understanding from focusing only on the mind to seeing the brain and body as a cohesive unit.

Part of the challenge, according to Pat Ogden, PhD, the creator of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, is that you need to close the loop that was started when your body first went into a stress response.

Despite what some people think, bone is not merely a passive component of the body. The skeleton is structurally dynamic and responds to life’s physical stresses with continual equilibration between bone mass loss and reformation. This ensures healing and remodeling in tune with the ebb and flow of calcium and phosphorus in the bloodstream. Now, researchers at Osaka university have identified a molecule–secretory leukocyte protease inhibitor (SLPI)–that helps mediate this critical balance, which could be used in the development of new treatments for bone diseases such as osteoporosis.

Skeletal tissue changes are orchestrated primarily by parathyroid hormone (PTH), a regulator of blood calcium levels that is secreted by the parathyroid glands in the neck. PTH is known to have a dual effect on bone–its action is primarily catabolic, causing bone dissolution and removal. However, in small intermittent doses, PTH can also increase bone mass (anabolic). Though PTH has long been used for the clinical treatment of osteoporosis, the precise mechanism and pathways whereby PTH promotes bone formation are poorly understood.

The latest exercise in NIST’s Health Assessment Measurements Quality Assurance Program (HAMQAP) is open for registration. HAMQAP, a collaboration with the National Institutes of Health Office of Dietary Supplements, helps natural products, food, and clinical laboratories demonstrate measurement competence.

The accuracy and precision of measurements made by natural products and food labs is important so that manufacturers and consumers are confident in the claims on nutrition and ingredients labels, and to comply with regulations from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The accuracy of measurements made in clinical labs is important so that patients are properly diagnosed and receive the correct treatments. In some clinical trials, researchers test both consumed products and their metabolized outputs in body fluids like blood and urine to better understand how consumption of a food or natural product can influence a person’s health status.

“One of the big challenges for companies today is that you have processes for nearly everything. You have a process for … financial reporting, for managing a supply chain, for dealing with marketing. But if you go back and ask yourself, ‘Do we have a well-established process for doing AI and analytics in the company?,’ the answer most places is no,” says [Eric] Anderson.

Instead, many companies develop an ad hoc approach to using artificial intelligence and analytics to solve individual problems—which limits the impact, making it unlikely that these tools will ever transform the company’s culture, or be used to drive its most critical decisions.

During a recent The Insightful Leader Live event, Anderson, who is also director of the new MBAi program, offered advice for leaders who want to develop an analytics and AI process robust enough to make a real difference in their business.

… If I had a dime for every time I mentioned that analysts spend 50 to 80 percent of their time preparing data, I might not need to write a blog.

So, how do we lighten that load? Traditionally, Excel wonks have made great use of keyboard shortcuts to speed up their workflow. UX research does indeed indicate that using the keyboard shows more productivity gains than using a mouse. Let’s extrapolate that to understand that coding is generally more productive than pointing-and-clicking. Of course, it takes longer to learn the former. So this becomes a break-even decision of code versus GUI.

For the early stages of a project, or one-off needs, a GUI could be fine. But there’s something to be said for “codifying” a project such that it can be automated. In a job with this much grunt work, it’s a learning investment that pays off.