Applied Sports Science newsletter – May 6, 2015

… When Pirlo left AC Milan in 2011 few would have predicted the trajectory that the Italian midfielder’s career has taken. During his last season at Milan, Pirlo saw his playing time severely limited and he was frozen out of the squad by then AC Milan manager—and current Juventus boss—Massimiliano Allegri.

Like many players of his age he was facing the downward slope of the dreaded aging curve. Most players reach their peak— depending on their position—around their mid-to-late 20s then start to decline. Some players such as Ryan Giggs or Paolo Maldini can prolong the decline throughout their 30s, but even for a player with their longevity they still see their offensive production numbers and defensive intervention numbers decline.

Incredibly Pirlo has bucked this trend by maintaining—and in some cases even improving—his performances levels.

Relaxing with a cup of coffee in the Minnesota Twins’ clubhouse one day last year at spring training, Eddie Guardado looked around.

All the heads he saw were down.

“Nobody’s talking to anybody,” said Guardado, then a guest instructor during camp, in discussion with the team’s equipment manager.

Dejection? Contemplation? No, mostly consumption, made convenient by those ubiquitous hand-held electronic devices.

… We were briefed by the AIS staff – team manager Rochelle Gilmore, sports psychologist David Martin and national women’s coach Martin Barras – about what we could expect. Days would be packed with activities, both in the lab and in the field – to test us mentally and physically. We would receive no feedback – just directions. We would start early and, following an intense debriefing session, finish late. This experience was meant not only to prepare us for the mental and physical challenges we would face racing in Europe but also demonstrate to the selectors who would survive and thrive when faced with those challenges.

Researchers at the University of Salzburg, Austria and the University of California wanted to test the idea that if daytime heart rate variability (HRV) is strongly linked to physical and mental health, would HRV also be a predictor of healthy sleep?

Jay Dicharry, MPT, SCS, is one of the world’s leading biomechanists and the director of the REP Lab in Bend, Ore., the only comprehensive lab of its sort in the U.S. not in a university setting. For runners, Dicharry uses a force plate treadmill and high-speed 3D camera technology to measure and record step frequency, leg stiffness, stance time, loading and unloading rates, as well as various body position angles. Using this data, along with his clinical experience as a physical therapist, he is better able to understand and eliminate the cause of overuse injuries in endurance athletes, while also accurately measuring and validating improvement over time.

Here, he shares his three keys to running with better form.

Training frequency and progressive overload are explored by Matt Long and Geoff James

With the help of a case study of a world-class coach and athlete, this piece explores the principle of long-term athlete development in the context of whether and when it may be appropriate for an athlete to begin training twice daily. The primary focus is on endurance running, but some of the questions it raises may also have an application for jumpers and throwers.

As single-sport specialization increases with today’s youth, take note that nearly 90 percent of this year’s NFL Draft picks were multi-sport athletes in high school.

The team at TrackingFootball.com put together put together the numbers and figured out that 224 of 256 draft picks (88 percent) played multiple sports in high school.

This paper examines the video-based pedagogical practices of Terry (pseudonym), a head coach of a professional junior academy squad. Data were collected through 6 in-depth, semi-structured interviews and 10 field observations of Terry’s video-based coaching in situ. Three embracing categories were generated from the data. These demonstrated that Terry’s video-based coaching was far from apolitical. Rather, Terry strategically used performance analysis technologies to help fulfil various objectives and outcomes that he understood to be expected of him within the club environment. Kelchtermans’ micropolitical perspective, Callero’s work addressing role and Groom et al.’s grounded theory were primarily utilised to make sense of Terry’s perceptions and actions. The findings point to the value of developing contextually grounded understandings of coaches’ uses of video-based performance analysis technology. Doing so could better prepare coaches for this aspect of their coaching practice.

MyFitnessPal has updated its health and fitness tracking app and launched a paid version, called MyFitnessPal Premium. This is the first major product change since the company was acquired by Maryland-based athletics apparel company Under Armour in February for $475 million.

MyFitnessPal’s new premium offering costs $9.99 per month or $49.99 for the entire year. Users who choose to upgrade will receive an ad-free experience and are given priority when they need to contact MyFitnessPal’s customer service team. Users will also receive exclusive access to the app’s dietitian-approved recipes, meal plans, and nutrition tips as well as the ability to customize their dashboard.

Of all the rumors ever to swirl around the world’s most valuable company, this may be the first that could involve spitting in a plastic cup.

Apple is collaborating with U.S. researchers to launch apps that would offer some iPhone owners the chance to get their DNA tested, many of them for the first time, according to people familiar with the plans.

In April, Joshua Quick boarded a plane to Guinea with three genetic sequencers packed in his luggage. That fact alone is astonishing: most sequencing machines are much too heavy and delicate to travel as checked baggage in the hold of a commercial airliner. What came next was even more impressive. For 12 days, Quick used these sequencers — called MinIONs — to read the genomes of Ebola viruses from 14 patients in as little as 48 hours after samples were collected.

That turnaround has never been available to epidemiologists in the field before, and could help them to trace sources of infection as they try to stamp out the West Africa epidemic. The European Mobile Laboratory Project, based in Hamburg, Germany, is building a dedicated MinION lab at a treatment centre in Coyah, Guinea, where the machines will be used to sequence patient DNA.

“This is democratization of sequencing,” says Quick, who studies Ebola genomes with Nicholas Loman (both are bioinformaticians at the University of Birmingham, UK). “You don’t have to rely on expensive infrastructure and costly equipment.”

… Zach Whitman, owner of 3sigmaathlete, and staff writer over at Field Gulls, took this work and ran with it, and has used an approximation of the original formula (pSPARQ) to advance how we judge players’ measurable characteristics. You can read a more in-depth description of how it came about over on the website; but to put it simply, Zach has taken the formula public and provided a tool to further evaluate draft talent. The number turned out by the pSPARQ formula is not perfect, but it is meant to give a good approximation or snapshot of a player’s athleticism.

So, how does this relate to the Broncos’ late round picks, you ask? Well, Josh Furman and Taurean Nixon happen to both score in the upper tier of the SPARQ scale at their respective positions in the 2015 draft class.

… American football is clearly a different beast to baseball, and the use of data analytics is arguably a far more difficult proposition for a number of reasons. Last week’s NFL draft, however, involved nine teams who have embraced analytics, including last season’s Super Bowl champions, the New England Patriots. Seven more teams use it to some degree.

Data analytics is used in American football in a number of ways, such as developing strategy and evaluating opponents. One of the most challenging ways for it to applied in the sport, particularly in comparison with baseball, is in its evaluation of individual players. Football is a far more complicated game than baseball, one less reliant on individuals and more on the coordination of all 11 players’ efforts. This also makes it exceptionally difficult in the context of the draft in that NFL teams must judge whether a player’s success playing at college will translate into the pro leagues, where the step up in terms of quality is arguably greater than most other sports.

Almost two years ago, I wrote an article for Bloomberg Sports about the common traits of ideal soccer/football metrics. Given the recent proliferation of metrics for players and teams, I think it’s worth adding a few ideas about what makes some metrics valuable and others almost worthless.

Winning versus style. The biggest question about metrics is whether they measure something that leads to winning. If a metric isn’t correlated with results, then it’s probably answering a question about style. Style can be important – some teams are known for a certain style of play and want to maintain it – but winning is what ultimately leads to trophies and, in a properly managed club, profits. Some metrics that may seem useful, like a team’s share of possession, are only weakly related to winning. Aiming to dominate possession is therefore a stylistic choice as much as a step towards winning.

Agnostic versus mechanistic. Whether the goal is to win or to play a chosen style, the metrics that track progress to an outcome fall into two categories. Agnostic metrics try to gauge a player’s contribution to an outcome without asking how he produces it. Mechanistic metrics do the same thing by calculating a player’s contribution based on his actions.