Applied Sports Science newsletter – May 4, 2015

LeBron James enters the chamber and the temperature will drop to around -230 degrees!

In her return from a concussion, Ali Krieger wore red during the Washington Spirit’s workout Wednesday at Maryland SoccerPlex.

“Precious cargo,” she said with a smile afterward.

Amid the yellows and grays, Krieger’s distinct pinny was both a repellent against contact in practice and a reminder of a head injury suffered 17 minutes into the season opener three weeks ago.

… They are far more of a Mourinho team than that which had wilted on occasion last season and no rival, for all the flurries of victories summoned in a game of catch-up, can match the relentless consistency – two league defeats in 35 games and a solitary one in cup competitions all campaign – this team have mustered.

Club, manager and owner up high in the West stand had good reason to reflect on the metamorphosis with pride as their project yielded reward. The trophy celebrated with such gusto here is the result of long-term planning. “If we don’t [win the league] but show an evolution in the first season, show we’re moving in the right direction, we’ll be champions in the second season,” the returning manager had said at his inaugural press conference in June 2013. Those words seemed like typical Mourinho bluster at the time, though they have since been proved prophetic. “Last season we were building something,” he said once Palace had been beaten. “This season there was work ethic, group ethic and a few players we brought here gave us qualities we didn’t have before.”

In his book Fueled by Failure, entrepreneur and philanthropist Jeremy Bloom shows readers how rebound and reprogram themselves after defeat and how to use the lessons from those failures to achieve winning results. In this edited excerpt, the author reveals his method for successfully bouncing back from a setback or failure.

The creative mind behind one of the most successful music videos of all time has turned her attention to bringing out the best in Australia’s elite athletes.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of training muscle groups 1 day per week using a split-body routine versus 3 days per week using a total-body routine on muscular adaptations in well-trained men. Subjects were 20 male volunteers (height = 1.76 ± 0.05 m; body mass = 78.0 ± 10.7 kg; age = 23.5 ± 2.9 years) recruited from a university population. Participants were pair-matched according to baseline strength and then randomly assigned to 1 of 2 experimental groups: a split-body routine (SPLIT) where multiple exercises were performed for a specific muscle group in a session with 2-3 muscle groups trained per session (n = 10), or; a total-body routine (TOTAL), where 1 exercise was performed per muscle group in a session with all muscle groups trained in each session (n = 10). Subjects were tested pre- and post-study for 1 repetition maximum strength in the bench press and squat, and muscle thickness of forearm flexors, forearm extensors, and vastus lateralis. Results showed significantly greater increases in forearm flexor muscle thickness for TOTAL compared to SPLIT. No significant differences were noted in maximal strength measures. The findings suggest a potentially superior hypertrophic benefit to higher weekly resistance training frequencies.

Most of the time, we learn only gradually, incrementally building connections between actions or events and outcomes. But there are exceptions—every once in a while, something happens and we immediately learn to associate that stimulus with a result. For example, maybe you have had bad service at a store once and sworn that you will never shop there again.

This type of one-shot learning is more than handy when it comes to survival—think, of an animal quickly learning to avoid a type of poisonous berry. In that case, jumping to the conclusion that the fruit was to blame for a bout of illness might help the animal steer clear of the same danger in the future. On the other hand, quickly drawing connections despite a lack of evidence can also lead to misattributions and superstitions; for example, you might blame a new food you tried for an illness when in fact it was harmless, or you might begin to believe that if you do not eat your usual meal, you will get sick.

… Habit formation—or rather the difficulty of habit formation is an issue to which most humans can relate. In this amazing world we live in, it seems as though psychology should have a few tips for us on how to make this easier. And if not psychology, then technology should definitely be able to solve the problem…right?

Enter Moti, your new Tamagotchi-like friend who sits in your environment and gives you just the push you need to create that habit you’ve been trying to get going for years. Moti began as a project of Kayla Matheus, developed through 30 Weeks, a New-York based founders program for designers operated by Hyper Island and supported by Google. The program boasts a lineup of partners and mentors with some familiar names including John Maeda of KPCB, David Kelley of IDEO and the d.School and many more from academia, venture capital and industry.

Isatin, a potential biomarker for stress found in blood, might become easier and faster to detect and quantify, thanks to a new enzymatic assay (ACS Chem. Neurosci. 2015, DOI: 10.1021/cn500346x). The new, potentially higher throughput method could help scientists study isatin’s role in stress more quickly and open the door to routine blood testing for the molecule, the researchers say.

Stress is a silent contributor to many health problems, since there is no single biomarker to detect it and patients may not tell physicians about it during routine medical exams. Isatin inhibits monoamine oxidase B, an enzyme found in the brain that is elevated in neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases. Some research has also linked blood levels of isatin to stress and anxiety in humans and lab animals. Many scientists wonder whether elevated levels of the compound could serve as a potential warning sign of stress in people.

But to study what role isatin plays in stress-related molecular processes, researchers need quick analytical tools that can test many samples for isatin at once.

An international team of scientists has discovered what amounts to a molecular reset button for our internal body clock. Their findings reveal a potential target to treat a range of disorders, from sleep disturbances to other behavioral, cognitive, and metabolic abnormalities, commonly associated with jet lag, shift work and exposure to light at night, as well as with neuropsychiatric conditions such as depression and autism.

Recent studies have identified genetic markers associated with risk for certain sports-related injuries and performance-related conditions, with the hope that these markers could be used by individual athletes to personalize their training and diet regimens. We found that we could greatly expand the knowledge base of sports genetic information by using published data originally found in health and disease studies. For example, the results from large genome-wide association studies for low bone mineral density in elderly women can be re-purposed for low bone mineral density in young endurance athletes. In total, we found 124 single-nucleotide polymorphisms associated with: anterior cruciate ligament tear, Achilles tendon injury, low bone mineral density and stress fracture, osteoarthritis, vitamin/mineral deficiencies, and sickle cell trait. Of these single nucleotide polymorphisms, 91% have not previously been used in sports genetics.

We conducted a pilot program on fourteen triathletes using this expanded knowledge base of genetic variants associated with sports injury. These athletes were genotyped and educated about how their individual genetic make-up affected their personal risk profile during an hour-long personal consultation. Overall, participants were favorable of the program, found it informative, and most acted upon their genetic results.

This pilot program shows that recent genetic research provides valuable information to help reduce sports injuries and to optimize nutrition. There are many genetic studies for health and disease that can be mined to provide useful information to athletes about their individual risk for relevant injuries

… a remarkable 69 percent of players in the men’s World Cup reported some type of medication; more than half of the players reported using NSAIDs (non-steroidal anti-inflammatories like Advil). Women actually reported slightly higher use, with 0.85 medications per player per match compared to 0.77 for men. Why is this a problem? “The routine use of NSAIDs in sport is harmful in the short term and potentially also in the long term,” the authors note. “Owing to its anti-inflammatory effect, NSAIDs delay bone healing, decrease protein synthesis and inhibit peritendinous hyperaemia and satellite cells in skeletal muscle after exercise.”

When hockey players talk about a game, or about a playoff series, they often frame their understanding in terms of intangibles such as “momentum.” The common usage of momentum is similar to how it is used physics, where inertia develops when something begins to move in a particular direction. Coaches loathe changing anything when the team is on a roll, and sometimes adjust their lineups to “shake things up” when the team has momentum in the wrong direction and goes on a losing streak. When it comes to individual players, momentum is also thought to be at play when it comes to “streaks,” riding a “hot hand,” or being “in the zone.” Play by play announcers and individuals providing color commentary commonly use momentum as a way of building a story, where the drama of a mounting comeback draws viewers into the game. For example, the home team may be down by a goal in the third but is starting to come back, and the crowd, which is often referred to as being like an extra player for the home team, is going wild. So announcers, sports writers, and fans, all make a huge deal of it when a player, for example, registers 14 points in a 10 game stretch. They also make note of when a player “goes cold” and has only a small number of points, if any at all, in a block of games.

Despite the fact that players, coaches, team managers, sports announcers, writers, and fans, commonly identify momentum as a real factor that influences sports outcomes, there is a great deal of debate among academics and sports analysts regarding whether momentum is a real thing. At the heart of this debate is that of all of the “intangible” elements in sport, momentum is arguably the toughest to quantify because it blends elements of psychology (feeling like you can’t miss) and social interaction (crowd noise, interaction with teammates, trash talk from opposition who is on a run). This blend of factors pose significant challenges to accurate measurement, which always depends at a minimum upon three core components: 1) a well defined starting point for a given phenomenon, 2) a well defined end point for that phenomenon, and 3) a well defined method of measuring the phenomenon that occurs between the given start and end points. While accurate measurement of momentum is challenging in all sports, hockey is particularly difficult because it is a team sport, and because line changes occur during the course of play.

China’s long-term goal is to win the World Cup, says Simon Chadwick, professor of sports business strategy at Coventry University.