Applied Sports Science newsletter – May 5, 2015

Football is no longer fun. That was the alarming conclusion placed on the table by the playing groups from all but one AFL club on the eve of the 2015 season.

It was a revelation that stunned Paul Marsh more than any other when the new AFL Players Association boss visited all 18 teams, a priority issue that has been voiced by an increasing number of footballers and has commanded the attention of Mike Fitzpatrick and his commission.

… FREELAP USA: Olympic-style lifts are very specific to body types and technique, making them more than just a simple summary of peak or average output. Besides using feedback for motivation and accountability, what else can be done to use the data beyond estimating work?

BRYAN MANN: Well, for one, the bar path can be tracked with the GymAware. For those who are big in Olympic lifts, it is good to see what happened and where it happened. From a longitudinal standpoint, I don’t think that is it. A quick turnover of force is one of the main reasons (besides speed-strength development) why Olympic lifts are great for sports. With certain devices, you have the ability to measure the descent of the bar as well as the speed of the descent. I will say that this really only matters for Olympic lifts done from the hang, and this is the only type of Olympic lift that most teams do consistently here at Mizzou.

We have had great successes with it. Engaging the stretch/shortening cycle requires fast and violent movements. Some devices let you see the length of time for the eccentric, the dip that occurs, and the speed that it occurs at.

It’s inevitable that the wearable technology we see now, with its various biometric sensors, will start to move from our wrists to different parts of our body. The sensors will start showing up in different parts of our clothing.

One research firm believes this change will happen before the end of the decade. A new report from Tractica says we consumers will be buying more than 10 million pieces of smart clothing yearly by 2020.

For Australia’s new Journal of Fitness Research, Hugo took a historical look at the use of inertial sensors as a tool in sports science, where its come from and where its going.

This thesis includes four papers based on three different prospective cohort studies on injury characteristics in men’s professional football. The same general methodology was used in all papers. Time-loss injuries and player individual exposure was registered for match and training separately. The general aim was to investigate potential internal and external risk factors for injury, with a focus on age, playing position, time in professional football, playing surface (artificial turf and natural grass), changes between surfaces and climate; and to evaluate the study methodology.

The NFL Draft this past weekend led me to think that much has changed medically since I first attended the Combine in 1994. Of course there are technological advances; however, the largest change is not related to new surgical procedures. The biggest difference is in how teams look at medical information.

The medical evaluation process has remained similar but the way the data is interpreted is different. My marching orders from the team morphed over my almost two decades as a NFL team doctor. In the late 1990s, general managers and head coaches would want to know if a potential first-round pick would last a decade or more and be a source of long-term stability. Years later, the question asked of me became if the player would make it through a first contract. Early in my time in the NFL, I recall specifically being asked by management if a certain offensive lineman’s knees would hold up for a 10 or 12 year career. Towards the end of my team physician tenure, that question often became “can he help us now?”.

A report on television station France 2 has demonstrated how the UCI Biological Passport can be circumvented by the use of micro-doses of EPO, Human Growth Hormone, blood transfusions and corticosteroids.

Background

Numerous supplements are used by sportspeople. They are not always appropriate for the individual or the sports activity and may do more harm than good. Vitamin and mineral supplements are unnecessary if the energy intake is sufficient to maintain body weight and derives from a diet with an adequate variety of foods. The study objectives were to evaluate the main nutrients used as supplements in sports and to propose a nutritional quality index (NQI) that enables sportspeople to optimize their use of supplements and detect and remedy possible nutritional deficits.

Material and Methods

A nutritional study was performed in 485 sportspeople recruited from Centros Andaluces de Medicina del Deporte, (CAMD). All completed socio-demographic, food frequency, and lifestyle questionnaires. The nutritional quality of their diet and need for supplementation were evaluated by scoring their dietary intake with and without supplementation, yielding two NQI scores (scales of 0-21 points) for each participant.

Results

A superior mean NQI score was obtained when the supplements taken by participants were not included (16. 28 (SD of 3.52)) than when they were included (15.47 (SD: 3.08)), attributable to an excessive intake of some nutrients through supplementation.

Conclusions

These results indicate that sportspeople with a varied and balanced diet do not need supplements, which appear to offer no performance benefits and may pose a health risk.

Minnesota Timberwolves swingman Andrew Wiggins was named the NBA’s 2014-15 Rookie of the Year on Thursday. The announcement came as no surprise: It’s an award he’s essentially been a lock to win since at least February.

But there’s a big disconnect between what the eye test (plus basic statistics such as points per game) and the analytics say about Wiggins, both in terms of his current production and his future potential. And because of that discrepancy, Wiggins is emblematic of what’s long been one of the most difficult problems to solve in basketball analysis.

Gillette World Sport visit the Australian Institute of Sport and speaks to Wayne Spratford and Dr. Megan Ross about the work being done to increase performance, reduce injury and analyse performance gain from nutritional planning and experimentation.

… Let’s focus on star PG VICTOR OLADIPO; he was the #2 pick in the entire 2013 draft out of INDIANA. In the 2012/13 season he played only 2 games on “2nd nights of back-to-back” and the 2nd was 3/6/13 when he shot only 4 for 12 in a BIG TEN TOURNEY LOSS to WISCONSIN.

In his ROOKIE year his SHOOTING in “ 2nd games of back –to-backs” was 39.4% in 18 such games; for the other games he shot 42.6%.

… Real Madrid will offer a revamped digital platform built on Azure and use Microsoft’s technology to analyze fan engagement data based on age, gender, and location, host video content, track fan apparel inventory, and more. The team also has plans to use big data to measure player performance on the field and prevent injuries, similar to what the Sounders FC does in Seattle.

Sánchez, who joined Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella today on stage at Microsoft’s Ignite conference in Chicago, said that his club picked Microsoft as a partner based on previous work it had done with the company and after realizing that the organization needed to re-asses its business model — particularly with Real Madrid’s massive international following, as just 3 percent of its fans live in Spain.

The team over at Baseball Prospectus led by Jeff Long came to us at the end of last year with collaboration request. The concept was to use Ayasdi’s Machine Intelligence software to look at baseball in the same way that Muthu Alagappan looked at basketball.

The result of this collaboration is really cool and underscores how domain experts can leverage our software – without a stats background. It is a superb use of the software, and based on the comments to the article, is just the start of our partnership together as the roto community is already asking for different looks, looks over time and more granularity.

This study proposes a computational method to inspect the tactical position of players during the match and a new metric to analyse the defensive pressure made by a soccer team. These metrics only require Cartesian information about the players’ positions on the field. As a case study, three matches played by the same professional soccer team were considered, including variables computed for the half of the match (first half vs second half) and the final score of the game for an analysis of variance of tactical performance, trying to identify the influence of such variables on the collective organisation. The data were collected at 1?Hz and from this process, 9218 instances of useful time were collected. The results revealed that the different kinds of final scores had significant effects on the tactical performance. The comparison between two halves of the match revealed significant differences with a small effect size on tactical performance. In summary, this study showed that these new tactical metrics can be a computational option to increase a coaches’ knowledge about the defensive organisation of soccer teams, giving them the possibility to augment their own perception with metrics that can provide specific information.