Applied Sports Science newsletter – August 4, 2021

Until a few years ago, elite Colorado track and field athlete Annie Kunz used to feel fatigued — even during her warmups. And then there was the constant hunger: Sometimes her stomach would growl in the middle of practice. She felt like she was always thinking about food, always restricting what she ate, avoiding whole categories — such as carbohydrates — completely, because she thought they were unhealthy. Add to that awful, debilitating cramps when she got her period. Kunz, who is representing the U.S. Olympic team in the women’s heptathlon this week in Tokyo, just didn’t feel like she was performing at her best much of the time.

Any of the above could be signals of an underlying health problem and could also affect her performance. But Kunz says she rarely, if ever, discussed these issues with her coaches. They’ve almost always been men, Kunz says, many of whom just weren’t used to broaching topics such as weight, hormones and menstrual cycles with their female athletes.

Kunz moved to California after graduating from college in 2016 to focus on preparing for the Olympic heptathlon — a competition with seven events that requires strength, speed and a heaping amount of all-around athleticism. She sought out advice to improve her health and performance and learned that recent research on females in sports has yielded insights that could help.

… Brady’s gone from being a Patriots player his now-QB coach, Clyde Christensen, was afraid to talk to when they were on rival teams to cracking with him about pumped-in crowd noise at the RCA Dome, where Christensen’s former team, the Colts, used to play.

Brady acknowledged the metamorphosis and said it has been a combination of his new environment, getting older and a desire to create a more authentic relationship with fans, whom he now contacts directly using a text messaging service.

“It’s nice that I’ve found my voice more,” Brady said. “I really enjoy being around my teammates, my coaches — it’s been a different environment. [I’m] just really enjoying the experience of playing football, playing with this group of guys.”

The Olympics we’re watching in Tokyo shows the best of sports: perseverance, achievement, grace. We cheer for underdogs and cry over heartbreak. We share in moments of glory, too fleeting, where talent that is “1 in a million” triumphs over adversity.

The Olympics we’re not watching has the same stories, but with even higher stakes. Around the world, the extraordinary potential of human beings shows in inventions big and small: in the triumph of vaccines that come together in months; in the ingenuity of shoes that generate power for small villages; in the resourcefulness of telehealth apps that bring support to the elderly.

In the first instance, we work systematically as a society to find the best talent and elevate it to glory. In the other, we don’t. It isn’t that we need an Olympic Games for human ingenuity; life presents that. What we need is Olympic preparation for talent to solve our hardest problems.

This panel “Supporting Performance and Health of Female Athletes” is one of three panels that took place during the launch event for the Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance. [video, 16:56]

Although many say it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert in any field, research shows that not everyone has what it takes to become an Olympian or Paralympian. We can all improve performance through dedicated practice, but genetic factors, influencing both brawn and brains, probably make the difference between ‘good’ and ‘great’ sportspeople.

A 2016 analysis found that a mere 18 per cent of athletes’ sporting ability was explained by the amount they’d practised; for athletes competing at the international level, this number dropped to 1 per cent.

Sporting success is also affected by factors you can’t control, such as when you were born. For example, in the 2010-11 UEFA youth football tournaments, 43 per cent of players had birthdays between January and March (those born early in the selection period), compared to just 9 per cent born from October to December.

… So, it came to pass that in the summer of 2020, a summer like no other in our lifetimes, we decided to poke around the manuscript and see if we wanted to make some changes. It helped that Thaler managed to find a set of Microsoft Word files that had been used for what we called the international edition, and those files were (barely) usable. Without those files, this edition would not exist, because we would never have wanted to start over from scratch. We admit to then falling into a bit of a trap. We are supposedly experts on biases in human decision making, but that definitely does not mean we are immune to them! Just the opposite.

We are not sure that this particular trap has a name, but it is familiar to everyone. Let’s call it the “while we are at it” bias. Home improvement projects are often settings where this bias is observed. A family decides that after twenty years of neglect, the kitchen really needs to be upgraded. The initial to‑do list includes new appliances and cabinets, but of course, the floor will be ruined during the construction, so we’d better replace that, and gosh, if we just pushed that wall out a bit, we could add a new window, which looks out on the patio, but oh dear, who wants to look at that patio . . . In the military this is called mission creep. Here we plead guilty to book revision creep.

During these days we are watching the best athletes of the world competing in their sport disciplines during the Olympic Games in Tokyo 2020. We can observe differences in their abilities, and we want to show you using thermography how their thermoregulation and physiology is also creating different thermal patterns.

A mechanical and aerospace engineering professor at The University of Texas at Arlington is developing advanced helmets to ensure that members of the military are as protected as possible from blasts and other types of attacks.

Ashfaq Adnan received a three-year, $1.5 million Distinguished Fellow Award from the Office of Naval Research (ONR) to develop a process using additive manufacturing, or 3D printing, to build helmets with advanced multi-layer cellular materials.

He and his team will use enhanced polymers and nanomaterials to build these layers, which will consist of complex, optimized structures that, while lightweight, are strong enough to be more effective against impact by absorbing as much energy as possible. Since directed energy always travels in waves, the helmet will include a layer of materials designed to deflect those waves and mitigate their strength, much like stealth technology on aircraft.

To enable the development of wearable devices that possess advanced ultraviolet (UV) detection functions, scientists from NTU Singapore have created a new type of light sensor that is both flexible and highly sensitive.While invisible to the human eye, UV rays surround us in our environment, and excessive exposure can cause health issues including skin cancer and premature skin ageing. The intensity of UV rays is typically reported through an index during weather reports. A wearable device, such as a T-shirt or watch that monitors the actual personal UV exposure throughout the day, would be a useful and more accurate guide for people seeking to avoid sun damage.

In their study, which was featured on the front cover of the peer-reviewed journal ACS Nano, the NTU researchers reported that their flexible UV light sensors were 25 times more responsive, and 330 times more sensitive, than existing sensors, exceeding the performance level required for optoelectronic applications – or light-based electronics.

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic created new challenges and obstacles with regard to sports medicine. The discovery of this novel, highly transmissible disease, which carried potentially severe impacts on the health of the general population, had a significant effect on the sporting world. When COVID-19 was officially declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) on March 11, 2020, a rapid, widespread shutdown of sports soon followed. This included cancellation or rescheduling for almost all professional and recreational sports organizations, as well as major events, such as the 2020 Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo. The novelty and reported severity of COVID-19 required a rapid response, and important decisions had to be made every day, even while new information emerged regarding transmissibility, at-risk populations, natural course of the illness, and medical management options.

… [Mike] Ryan visited the Storrs campus to learn more about KSI’s MISSION Heat Lab, a space designed to simulate environments of extreme heat and humidity. He participated in a series of exercises and tests to report and share the experiences of elite athletes who use the facility for heat acclimatization, hydration, and other elements of performance and safety in warm weather conditions.

Question What is the association of field position, career length, and playing era with risk of neurodegenerative disease in male former professional soccer players?

Findings In this cohort study of 7676 Scottish male former professional soccer players and 23 028 general population control individuals matched by sex, year of birth, and area socioeconomic status, risk of neurodegenerative disease among former soccer players varied by field position and career length but was similar across era of participation.

Meaning In this study, risk of neurodegenerative disease was higher among former professional soccer players with longer careers and among those in nongoalkeeper positions, indicating that factors associated with nongoalkeeper positions should be scrutinized to mitigate risk; meanwhile, strategies to reduce head impact exposure may be advisable to reduce negative outcomes in this population.

The NCAA announced Friday it will convene a constitutional convention in November in an effort to dramatically alter the future of college athletics.

The organization has been confronted with a number of major changes just in this calendar year with approval of athletes being able to monetize their name, image and likeness, the proposal to increase the College Football Playoff to 12 teams and Oklahoma and Texas moving to the Southeastern Conference.

The redrafting convention will be led by a 22-person Constitution Review Committee, which will feature presidents, commissioners, athletics directors and students from Divisions I, II and III. The committee will explore proposals for a new system of governance and rules enforcement that examines the role of the NCAA’s national oversight.

Football recruitment is about finding exceptional talents that fit into your team style.

Often we try and find similar players to a player we like. But is there anyone like fan favourite Kevin De Bruyne?

Here I instead find players that stand out, the outliers.

These outliers may flag up a few exceptional talents for you to look at in your scouting process.

… Women’s basketball coaches were mulling over the report Tuesday, and are hopeful that it means steps will be taken to not just lessen the disparities, but allow the women’s NCAA tournament to truly flourish.

“Women’s basketball is not a loser,” said Tara VanDerveer, coach of defending national champion Stanford. “That is the most important thing that needs to be addressed by the NCAA leadership.

“In fact, women’s basketball and other sports — women’s and men’s sports — have more potential to be income-producers. It’s been very painful to know this, but have the message always be that we’re losers. I know women’s basketball has great potential, and it has not been realized.”