Applied Sports Science newsletter – April 30, 2015

… a question: Why Morris, who wasn’t even on a list of the top 100 American soccer players as of July 2014?

Part of the answer is fortuitous circumstance. Before the World Cup, the Americans trained at Stanford and played the Cardinal during a closed-door scrimmage. Morris impressed Klinsmann with his ability to read the game and his one-on-one skill.

The second part is that Klinsmann and tactician-in-chief Berti Vogts are obsessed with speed.

… Chris Korfist and I are looking forward to sharing cutting-edge ideas on speed development. We are offering a two-day clinic, June 19th and 20th. We decided to call it the “Speed Activation Consortium.” … The Holler-Korfist Speed Activation Consortium will feature 11 one-hour presentations. This is NOT a track & field clinic. We have an eclectic collection of speakers, unlike any clinic I’ve ever attended.

Passion, dedication and persistence count the most when children are cultivating their intelligence and talents, a Stanford scholar says.

Carol Dweck, a Stanford psychology professor, said that when children are praised for the process they engage in – hard work, strategies, focus, persistence – they become better learners. The Stanford News Service recently interviewed Dweck on this topic.

Sport talent identification and development (TI and TD) in youth continues to attract strong interest among coaches, sport scientists and sport administrators. TI for sport in youth with the anticipation of future elite level sport achievement is both an art and a science, and is strongly influenced by within athlete and extraneous-to-athlete factors (ecosystem of support or the lack of). The returns from investment on current TI and TD models of sport in youth are subpar in that few continue in the sport to achieve podium positions at the elite sport level in adulthood. Why, where and how one succeeds in sport, and what that success means to the athlete and stakeholders are dependent on the culture and context of the country. We advocate harnessing the power of sport to help in youth development, to be holistic in its nurturance, to allow for individual idiosyncratic expressions of the athletes, to provide for talent transfer across sport, and to facilitate key stakeholders to ‘join’ hands to work for the common interest and understanding for as many youth and adults so as to provide them with opportunities through support and coaching to compete at the different levels of competition in sport. Governments, policy makers and administrators of sport must decide, within their specific circumstances, if TI and TD in sport in youth is serving a meaningful purpose and is a viable return on investment; in short, is it mission possible or is it… a quest for the Holy Grail for a podium finish in elite level sport competition?

When you’re standing on the start line, your muscles aren’t using much energy. Then the gun fires, you take off, and suddenly they’re burning a lot of energy. It takes time for your body to catch up to this sudden surge in energy demand – to get your heart and lungs pumping, the relevant blood vessels dilated, and the metabolic reactions in your muscle cells working at full speed.

During the transition period, you’re relying on “borrowed energy” from phosphocreatine stores and anaerobic processes. This is what researchers refer to as “VO2 kinetics”: how quickly can you get your more efficient aerobic energy system running at full capacity? Optimizing your VO2 kinetics by, for example, getting your warm-up just right saves a bit of energy and minimizes fatigue.

But what causes the delayed response in the first place? That’s been a topic of research for many years, focusing on two basic possibilities: either your muscles can’t get enough oxygen during the transition period, or they have enough but aren’t able to make use of it.

Context
The explosion of technologic advances in information capture and delivery offers unparalleled opportunities to assess and modify built and social environments in ways that can positively impact health behaviors. This paper highlights some potentially transformative current and emerging trends in the technology arena applicable to environmental context?based assessment and intervention relevant to physical activity and dietary behaviors.

Evidence acquisition
A team of experts convened in 2013 to discuss the main issues related to technology use in assessing and changing built environments for health behaviors particularly relevant to obesity prevention. Each expert was assigned a specific domain to describe, commensurate with their research and expertise in the field, along with examples of specific applications. This activity was accompanied by selective examination of published literature to cover the main issues and elucidate relevant applications of technologic tools and innovations in this field.

Evidence synthesis
Decisions concerning which technology examples to highlight were reached through discussion and consensus-building among the team of experts. Two levels of impact are highlighted: the “me” domain, which primarily targets measurement and intervention activities aimed at individual-level behaviors and their surrounding environments; and the “we” domain, which generally focuses on aggregated data aimed at groups and larger population segments and locales.

Conclusions
The paper ends with a set of challenges and opportunities for significantly advancing the field. Key areas for progress include data collection and expansion, managing technologic considerations, and working across sectors to maximize the population potential of behavioral health technologies.

Very sadly for many of us, cartilage is a tissue not known to naturally repair itself. That’s an important reason why so many professional sporting careers end abruptly and why knee replacements as common as they are. Researchers at the University of Iowa may help change that thanks to a new way of activating a healing mechanism with the help of a bioactive hydrogel. The researchers discovered precursor cells existing within cartilage that mature into actual cartilage tissue and identified a molecular signal that attracts these cells to migrate towards it. They seeded this compound, called stromal cell-derived factor 1 (SDF1), within a special hydrogel and injected it into injured cartilage. Amazingly, the hydrogel worked as intended, drawing the chondrogenic progenitor cells towards itself and filling the openings within the cartilage with new tissue.

The new tissue is not as strong as healthy cartilage, but the researchers believe that by adding a bit of stress training to it might toughen it up. The research is still in a laboratory stage and there’s a long way to go before it can be developed into a clinical therapy, but things are looking promising.

Baseball is a game of ritual and tradition: lucky socks, pre-game meals, stepping over lines, special handshakes, and on-deck habits are all part of the “rhythm” of the game. Unfortunately, other “old-school” traditions are still the norm when it comes to the management and prevention of injury on the diamond. It is clear that we are moving in the right direction with new technologies and smarter training; however, injuries continue to pile up. A difficult question to answer is: are any of these injuries avoidable or are players already “damaged goods” by the time they get to the professional ranks? Some things are out of our control, but clearly we can do better.

Here are four opportunities for us to make a difference:

1. Identify the signs before there are symptoms.

… In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman concludes that in situations where the odds of success are poor, holistic gut intuitions are most likely to fail, meaning decision-making can benefit most from a guiding formula. And since drafting quarterbacks fits the mold of the low-success enterprises Kahneman describes, it stands to reason that NFL teams would benefit from following a decision-making formula. But what kind of formula? Predicting whether a prospect will be a successful pro requires assessing a variety of tangible and intangible factors; one can’t simply point to a high collegiate completion percentage and deduce that the passer who posted it will be a star in the NFL. Relying on advanced analytics can also prove problematic, as Kahneman notes that in unpredictable environments, “complex statistical algorithms” often “add little or no value” over “simple equally weighted formulas based on existing statistics or on common sense.”
… To build a similarly rigorous but flexible model for evaluating quarterbacks, I’ve followed Kahneman’s advice to first select “a few traits that are prerequisites for success in this position (technical proficiency, engaging personality, reliability, and so on). Don’t overdo it — six dimensions is a good number.”

The New York Mets recently won 11 games in a row, which got a lot of attention.

How likely is it that a given baseball team will win 11 games in a row by chance, if its probability of winning a single game is 50%?

Athletes often claim that their breakthroughs come when a game starts unfolding at a slower pace. Can psychology explain the phenomenon they’re describing?

If Stanford scholar Kathleen Eisenhardt has learned anything over the years, it’s that rules of thumb matter. They can prime you for success or doom you to failure. It all depends on what those rules are, how many you have and how you use them.

Rules, it turns out, have rules of their own.

Eisenhardt, a professor of management science and engineering, has gleaned scholarly insights from years of research into the strategies of entrepreneurial and established companies. She’s also explored how groups behave under different types of rules.