Applied Sports Science newsletter – August 20, 2021

… The key to Pogba’s performance was not just the attacking role he was played in, it was his fitness.

The Athletic report Manchester United’s coaching staff were pleasantly surprised with Pogba’s conditioning upon his return.

The report states Pogba returned in the best pre-season shape of his stint at United to date, and credits his fitness work with NBA team the Miami Heat during the summer while he was away.

… Aaron Temkin Beck—Tim to his friends and family—is often called the father of modern psychotherapy. A capsule summary of his paradigm-shifting insight: Our emotions are a result of our thoughts, and therefore, to understand our emotions, we must understand the thoughts that give rise to them.

Consider anger. Just the other day, toward the end of one of those family Zoom calls that substitute for getting together in person, a perfectly pleasant conversation turned sour. Before I knew it, I was quite literally flush with anger. What happened?

Rhys Carr, the former Individual Development Coach at Bristol City and Sheffield United, says the search-decide-execute loop is key in football and should be the basis of session planning and design. [video, 2:39]

Millennials – the much-maligned generation of people who, according to the Pew Research Center, were born between 1981 and 1996 – started turning 40 this year. This by itself is not very remarkable, but a couple of related facts bear consideration. In the United States, legislation that protects ‘older workers’ from discrimination applies to those aged 40 and over. There is a noteworthy irony here: a group of people who have long been branded negatively by their elders and accused of ‘killing’ cultural institutions ranging from marriage to baseball to marmalade are now considered ‘older’ in the eyes of the government. Inevitably, the latest round of youngsters grows up, complicating the stereotypes attached to them in youth. More importantly, though, the concept of a discrete generation of ‘millennials’ – like that of the ‘Generation X’ that preceded these people, the ‘Generation Z’ that will soon follow them into middle adulthood, and indeed the entire notion of ‘generations’ – is completely made up.

As an industrial and organisational psychologist, I have dedicated my career to the scientific study of people at work. I often have conversations with people about my research, and when I tell them that part of what I do is to study the idea of generations and generational differences at work, I typically get one of two reactions. Most often, people react by telling me about the various things that their younger or older coworkers ‘do’ because they are (assumed to be) a member of one generation or another. For example, and reflecting common age-based stereotypes, I often hear complaints such as ‘My millennial coworkers are all so entitled and self-absorbed!’ or ‘My boomer coworkers are all so rigid and set in their ways!’ Less often, people react with a more sceptical tone, questioning whether there is truth behind the ideas they have heard about generational differences. Either way, these conversations generally lead me to explain that research suggests there is little evidence for the existence of actual generations.

Consumer-grade sleep trackers represent a promising tool for large scale studies and health management. However, the potential and limitations of these devices remain less well quantified. Addressing this issue, we aim at providing a comprehensive analysis of the impact of accelerometer, autonomic nervous system (ANS)-mediated peripheral signals, and circadian features for sleep stage detection on a large dataset. Four hundred and forty nights from 106 individuals, for a total of 3444 h of combined polysomnography (PSG) and physiological data from a wearable ring, were acquired. Features were extracted to investigate the relative impact of different data streams on 2-stage (sleep and wake) and 4-stage classification accuracy (light NREM sleep, deep NREM sleep, REM sleep, and wake). Machine learning models were evaluated using a 5-fold cross-validation and a standardized framework for sleep stage classification assessment. Accuracy for 2-stage detection (sleep, wake) was 94% for a simple accelerometer-based model and 96% for a full model that included ANS-derived and circadian features. Accuracy for 4-stage detection was 57% for the accelerometer-based model and 79% when including ANS-derived and circadian features. Combining the compact form factor of a finger ring, multidimensional biometric sensory streams, and machine learning, high accuracy wake-sleep detection and sleep staging can be accomplished. [full text]

Early in winter we talked to high performance managers at the Port Adelaide Football Club (PAFC) and their external collaborators – the ARC Centre of Excellence for Nanoscale BioPhotonics – about the innovative blood biomarker research the footy club had undertaken during pre-season training, as part of implementing sports science into AFL.

With the AFL finals just around the corner and Port Power firmly entrenched in the top four, we caught up with PAFC Head of High Performance Dr Ian McKeown to learn about the data-driven sports science they use during the season, and how that affects player performance and welfare. [audio, 22:12]

… Turner Sports welcomed a large cross-section of vendors to demo various technologies during the opening week of Summer League, including shallow–depth-of-field and other specialty cameras, lenses, microphones, and AI technologies. Onsite in Vegas were C360, Canon, CP Communications, Fletcher, JibTek, LMG, Mirriad, Q5X, Ross Video, Shure, and Sony.

“We wanted to look at a variety of technologies for NBA but also for other properties,” says [Lee] Estroff. “We were looking for [production tools] for hockey and baseball and things that could be used across multiple properties.”

Also onsite in Vegas were members of his production team, who gained first-hand experience with the new technologies and provided valuable feedback to the vendors.

A former women’s basketball player at Seton Hall has been added to a lawsuit filed against the school by former men’s player Myles Powell over what they claim were misdiagnosed knee injuries.

In an amended complaint to Powell’s lawsuit filed Tuesday, Jasmine Smith alleges team staff told her she had suffered a bone bruise during practice in the fall of 2020. She alleges she was cleared to play and played the rest of the season despite suffering knee pain and swelling.

The incidence of obesity has been steadily increasing, tripling globally between 1975 and 2016, at a high cost to public health1. Obesity predisposes individuals to various diseases, including cancer, and the number of obesity-associated deaths globally each year1 (estimated at 2.8 million) is similar in scale to the reported COVID-19-associated deaths in the ongoing pandemic. Although fat-rich diets have taken much of the blame for the rise in obesity, excess consumption of processed sugars, and high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) in particular, is strongly implicated in diet-induced obesity. Whether and how fructose causes obesity in humans remains a hotly debated question2,3. In a report in Nature that should make one think twice before gulping down sugar-sweetened drinks with fatty snacks, Taylor et al.4 propose that HFCS promotes obesity by boosting the ability of the intestine to absorb nutrients.

Today, the British Journal of Sports Medicine quietly publish a correction to a 2017 paper. Corrections are common in research, as scientists are human and make mistakes, like anyone else. But one of the most important features of science is that it is self-correcting, and mistakes are identified, admitted and corrected. But the correction published today is not simply the admission an error in a inconsequential paper, it is an admission of error by World Athletics in the only empirical analysis which underpins its eligibility regulations for female athletes. The implications are massive.

The original 2017 paper was authored by World Athletics (WA, then called IAAF) employees Stéphane Bermon and Pierre Yves Garnier (hereafter BG17). The paper argued a causal relationship between testosterone levels and athletic performance among women, but just for certain events (which happened to include the events run by Caster Semenya, the South African runner targeted by the regulations). In 2018, when WA issued its regulations governing eligibility for female athletes the BG17 analysis was the only data and evidence provided in support of the events that were being regulated, from 400m to one mile.

Load management? Load management!

What about our load management? How much more of this garbage ball does MLB think we can take?

This week new-money Steve Cohen distributed a tweet expressing his exasperation with the Mets’ sustaining inability to hit the ball.

To that, we ask Cohen, “Where ya been?

The Mets? It’s not only the Mets; it’s an untreated, business-wide affliction. A little market analysis by a hedge fund billionaire would have told Cohen he’s buying into a sport/business in serious and persistent self-ruin, diminished returns to follow. He bought goods delivered to MLB’s top market in a fundamentally substandard state.

There’s a new version of SwimmeR
available, 0.12.0
, which includes capabilities for parsing swimming results from the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Naturally I’m going to use it to investigate the theory I have about volleyball.

It’s time for basketball analytics, folks, with a focus on the NBA! This tutorial is for beginners and intermediate sports analytics enthusiasts. I will show you how to extract and prepare NBA data, create basic plots, and run two clustering algorithms.

It’s been a while since my first tutorial. Raising a daughter has nothing to do with it! The EURO 2020, Copa América, and NBA playoffs drained a lot of my energy. I did manage to publish the article on getting started with sports analytics so that’s something, I guess!

Major League Baseball introduced a new economic plan Monday in a face-to-face meeting with the MLB Players Association about the collective bargaining agreement, sources told Evan Drellich and Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic.

The league’s proposal reportedly involves a new first tier of the luxury tax, with the threshold set at $180 million, along with a new salary minimum of $100 million.

This would add another level to the current three-tier tax system, and taxation would reportedly begin at 25% for teams spending more than $180 million. Currently, the first luxury-tax threshold is $210 million.