Applied Sports Science newsletter – August 17, 2021

… Rodgers, on his first vet off-day of the summer, was sitting in the shade on a bench at the Packers’ practice field across the street from Lambeau Field, when I asked him about it. Wearing a ballcap and featuring the faintest spritz of gray around his chin in his customary scruffy short beard, Rodgers thought about that post-practice session. “I can’t remember the exact words,” he said, “but I said your thoughts are becoming real things. I talked about a positive mindset. I did want to assure the guys how special it was to be back, how committed I am to the team, how special the relationships are to me, how focused I am on this season and accomplishing all of our goals. But I talk a lot about positivity, about a mindset, about manifestation, about embracing the journey. That stuff that’s really important to me. Be present. This is a great time in our lives.”

Top level football is all about marginal gains. At the very top level players aren’t that much better than each other. The differences in ability are marginal, you need to do whatever you can to grab as many marginal gains as you can. One Liverpool star has taken a pretty unique approach to getting the edge over opponents. Trent Alexander-Arnold has been wearing an eye-patch as part of his vision training.

A 27-year-old pitcher making his first start kept one of baseball’s best-hitting teams out of the hit column all game. And that’s just the beginning of what made something so unlikely happen on Saturday.

Thomas Tuchel has already transformed Chelsea into trophy winners, but the German coach’s journey towards conquering Europe has been far from plain sailing. Brilliance has often collided with belligerence, to dramatic effect…

Seven wins from their final 10 games. The highest points total by a newly-promoted side in two decades. A top-half finish achieved in bold and brilliant style. Leeds United’s first season back in the Premier League was one to remember.

For Marcelo Bielsa, though, the manager responsible for the club’s transformation over the last three years, the sole focus ahead of his fourth season in charge is to ensure further improvement.

… The realities of rationality are humbling. Know things; want things; use what you know to get what you want. It sounds like a simple formula. But, in truth, it maps out a series of escalating challenges. In search of facts, we must make do with probabilities. Unable to know it all for ourselves, we must rely on others who care enough to know. We must act while we are still uncertain, and we must act in time—sometimes individually, but often together. For all this to happen, rationality is necessary, but not sufficient. Thinking straight is just part of the work.

Objective

We examined the impact of simulated Tokyo 2020 environmental condition on exercise performance, thermoregulatory responses and thermal perception among Dutch elite athletes.
Methods

105 elite athletes from different sport disciplines performed two exercise tests in simulated control (15.9 ± 1.2 °C, relative humidity (RH) 55 ± 6%) and Tokyo (31.6 ± 1.0 °C, RH 74 ± 5%) environmental conditions. Exercise tests consisted of a 20-min warm-up (70% HRmax), followed by an incremental phase until volitional exhaustion (5% workload increase every 3 min). Gastrointestinal temperature (Tgi), heart rate, exercise performance and thermal perception were measured.
Results

Time to exhaustion was 16 ± 8 min shorter in the Tokyo versus the control condition (− 26 ± 11%, whereas peak power output decreased with 0.5 ± 0.3 W/kg (16 ± 7%). Greater exercise-induced increases in Tgi (1.8 ± 0.6 °C vs. 1.5 ± 0.5 °C, p < 0.001) and higher peak Tgi (38.9 ± 0.6 °C vs. 38.7 ± 0.4 °C, p < 0.001) were found in the Tokyo versus control condition. Large interindividual variations in exercise-induced increase in Tgi (range 0.7–3.5 °C) and peak Tgi (range 37.6–40.4 °C) were found in the Tokyo condition, with greater Tgi responses in endurance versus mixed- and skill-trained athletes. Peak thermal sensation and thermal comfort scores deteriorated in the Tokyo condition, with aggravated responses for power versus endurance- and mixed-trained athletes. Conclusion

Large performance losses and Tgi increases were found among elite athletes exercising in simulated Tokyo conditions, with a substantial interindividual variation and significantly different responses across sport disciplines. These findings highlight the importance of an individual approach to optimally prepare athletes for safe and maximal exercise performance during the Tokyo Olympics. [full text]

Respiratory rate (RR) is a clinical metric used to assess overall health and physical fitness. An individual’s RR can change from their baseline due to chronic illness symptoms (e.g., asthma, congestive heart failure), acute illness (e.g., breathlessness due to infection), and over the course of the day due to physical exhaustion during heightened exertion. Remote estimation of RR can offer a cost-effective method to track disease progression and cardio-respiratory fitness over time. This work investigates a model-driven approach to estimate RR from short audio segments obtained after physical exertion in healthy adults. Data was collected from 21 individuals using microphone-enabled, near-field headphones before, during, and after strenuous exercise. RR was manually annotated by counting perceived inhalations and exhalations. A multi-task Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) network with convolutional layers was implemented to process mel-filterbank energies, estimate RR in varying background noise conditions, and predict heavy breathing, indicated by an RR of more than 25 breaths per minute. The multi-task model performs both classification and regression tasks and leverages a mixture of loss functions. It was observed that RR can be estimated with a concordance correlation coefficient (CCC) of 0.76 and a mean squared error (MSE) of 0.2, demonstrating that audio can be a viable signal for approximating RR.

… “I went and looked at the data,” [Nate]Nurse told FiveThirtyEight. “To see if there was anything I could see that was different in this 10-game slump he was in versus his history.”

But what was the data Nurse wanted? His staff wasn’t breaking down Lowry’s last 10 box scores or shooting charts; hell, they weren’t even looking at his shots from those actual games.

Instead, they were using the Noahlytics Data Service, a proprietary program designed by a company called Noah Basketball. The system uses high-quality motion tracking cameras positioned on or above the backboard of a standard basketball hoop, tracing the ball as it enters the basket area while also noting the shooter’s origin on the floor to allow for uniform “straight-on” analysis with every shot. Through detailed measurements of the ball’s arc, its depth in the basket and its left-right alignment on the cylinder, players and coaches alike get exponentially more detail about a shot — or set of shots — than raw make-or-miss notations could ever tell.

Samsung Electronics has announced its new wearable processor, the Exynos W920, intended for the next generation of wearable devices.

The processor integrates an LTE modem and is the first to be built with an advanced 5nm extreme ultra-violet (EUV) process node, offering the powerful and efficient performance demanded by next-generation wearable devices.

“Wearables like smartwatches are no longer just a cool gadget to have. They’re now a growing part of our lifestyles to keep you fit, safe and alert,” said Harry Cho, vice president of System LSI marketing at Samsung Electronics. “With the Exynos W920, future wearables will be able to run applications with visually appealing user interfaces and more responsive user experiences while keeping you connected on the go with fast LTE.”

… Associate Professor Guy German and Zachary Lipsky, PhD ’21, recently published research in the journal Acta Biomaterialia that explores how human skin can control the way cracks form and why tensometers offer imprecise results when measuring the mechanical properties of biological tissues.

Along the way, Lipsky developed a method to bond human skin to rubber-like polymeric materials without an adhesive. Originally a way to make their experiments easier, he and German understood they had made a significant discovery.

In this one, I want to talk about soccer analytics, its bright but contested future, and what in my opinion is an urgent shift in mindset needed to prevent the foreclosure of this exciting horizon.

But let’s just talk about soccer for a minute cuz soccer analytics is about generating insights based on measurements of soccer that we can capture. And, soccer is hard as hell.

– 1808 total athletes competed in Athletics in Tokyo (including relays, walks, and road racing events)
– 342 (18.9%) of the athletes competed at an U.S.-affiliated collegiate institution at some point in their careers and represented 75 countries in the Olympics — athlete count by country (with 5 or more): USA 116, CAN 32, JAM 20, GBR 15, AUS 13, TTO 11, BAH 11, BAR 5, NGR 5

While other baseball fans in the Bay Area and around the globe were engrossed by Barry Bonds’ home run chase and enigmatic stardom, [Samantha] Schultz was drawn to the pitching — Jason Schmidt, Robb Nen and, later, Matt Cain and Sergio Romo. But it was the undersized Tim Lincecum, with his powerful delivery and the supernatural movement on his pitches, that gave flight to her love of pitching.

“It was the dominance,” she said. “Watching him be dominant with mechanics that are not routine and something you wouldn’t teach. The beauty of his changeup. The way he used his pitches, it made me fall in love with pitching as its own art form.”

After leaving St. Mary’s with her astrophysics degree and math minor, Schultz enrolled in the sports management program at Columbia University. It was there, while working with the baseball team, that opportunity began to knock. And knock. And knock.

Gamblers would give anything to peek at Ian Rapoport’s notes. In late April, Rapoport—a reporter at the NFL Network, known on air as an “insider”—was sitting on a scoop about the draft’s most intriguing story line. Until then, it had been considered a done deal that the San Francisco 49ers would select an Alabama quarterback named Mac Jones with the third overall pick; bettors, expected to risk tens of millions of dollars on the draft, were counting on it. But Rapoport’s sources told him that the 49ers were seriously considering Trey Lance, a quarterback from North Dakota State otherwise thought to be a long shot for the top five. Landing the story placed Rapoport in a devilish dilemma, one that sports journalists now confront often: publish the news and send sportsbooks scrambling to update their odds, or wait a few seconds, place a bet first, and give himself a good shot at winning a small fortune. “It’s kind of like insider trading,” he said.