Applied Sports Science newsletter – May 15, 2015

For 21 years, sport scientist David Martin has been urging athletes at the Australian Institute of Sport in Canberra to push their boundaries, embrace challenge and never stop striving for improvement.

“So it’s probably important for me to take a page out of that book,” said the 50-year-old, who will leave the AIS next week to become head of sport science with NBA franchise the Philadelphia 76ers. “It’s definitely going to take me out of my comfort zone.”

Martin has known no different since he left America with his new wife in August 1994, assuring her he wanted to spend only “one or two years” working in Canberra with international “trailblazers” of sports science.

… For clubs that have rarely been up to a higher division, there can be a lot of restructuring required. … The Premier League imposes a lot of mandatory procedures, especially with medical issues.

Such as having a team doctor always present at games and a tunnel doctor present, too; and enhanced training for the on-field medical staff and new anti-doping facilities for random drug testing.

Pity the poor pineal gland, tucked behind the thalamus in a gap between the brain’s hemispheres. It has a simple task—to make melatonin, a hormone that regulates sleep. In days gone by, it would start doing so after sunset, ramp up to a maximum in the middle of the night, and then taper off toward the morning. The result was regular, dependable periods of sleep and wakefulness.

Modern life, though, is confusing for the pineal because its signal to start work is the absence of light—specifically, of blue light. This part of the spectrum radiates by the bucketful from light-emitting diodes in the screens of phones, tablets and laptop computers. As far as the gland is concerned, that turns night into day. Study after study has suggested night-time use of screen-based gadgets has a bad effect on peoples’ sleep. Indeed, things are getting worse as screens get smaller and are thus held closer to the eyes. As a consequence there is a tidy market in devices and apps which regulate the amount of blue light a screen emits.

The latest research suggests one group of people—teenagers—may be particularly susceptible.

Empathy, as it’s been talked about recently, is most often framed as something important to practice for our users. It’s important to make sure we’re helping our users get the content they desire or get through the flow of our site to do what’s important to them.

What is getting lost, though, is that empathy is just as important for us to practice as we interact with our team members—all of us, developers, designers, writers, and project managers, can practice empathy as we work with our teammates. Empathy is just as much about our interactions with each other while we build our sites, as it is about how we treat our users.

As I’ve thought more about this, I’ve come up with a few ways to practice empathy with my teammates.

Watch highlights from our first symposium of 2015, exploring the scientific background and practical applications of fuelling, acute and long-term recovery and adaptation.

Activity tracking can be beautiful, and it doesn’t require a screen or a battery.

Emulsion is an “analog activity tracker” from Norwegian design studio Skrekkøgle. It takes the form of a watch, but instead of mechanical components or a microprocessor, it relies on a mix of mineral oil and colored water. When you’re at rest, the water settles into one big blob. When you’re active, it disperses into an attractive splatter. It’s maybe not so much an activity tracker as an activity indicator. It’s also cheeky and poetic and frankly smart in ways today’s wearables usually are not.

A legitimate homecoming has taken place at Sportvision. Former CTO Marv White has returned in the same position, following five years as chief technologist for innovation at ESPN. He resumes his leadership over Sportvision’s efforts in creating and innovating data-driven virtual technologies that enhance sports-video content.

Background Current knowledge on anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury mechanisms in male football players is limited.

Aim To describe ACL injury mechanisms in male professional football players using systematic video analysis.

Methods We assessed videos from 39 complete ACL tears recorded via prospective professional football injury surveillance between 2001 and 2011. Five analysts independently reviewed all videos to estimate the time of initial foot contact with the ground and the time of ACL tear. We then analysed all videos according to a structured format describing the injury circumstances and lower limb joint biomechanics.

Results Twenty-five injuries were non-contact, eight indirect contact and six direct contact injuries. We identified three main categories of non-contact and indirect contact injury situations: (1) pressing (n=11), (2) re-gaining balance after kicking (n=5) and (3) landing after heading (n=5). The fourth main injury situation was direct contact with the injured leg or knee (n=6). Knee valgus was frequently seen in the main categories of non-contact and indirect contact playing situations (n=11), but a dynamic valgus collapse was infrequent (n=3). This was in contrast to the tackling-induced direct contact situations where a knee valgus collapse occurred in all cases (n=3).

Conclusions Eighty-five per cent of the ACL injuries in male professional football players resulted from non-contact or indirect contact mechanisms. The most common playing situation leading to injury was pressing followed by kicking and heading. Knee valgus was frequently seen regardless of the playing situation, but a dynamic valgus collapse was rare.

Since the NCAA finally relaxed regulations on how and when schools can feed student-athletes, sports programs have had a new world opened up to them. To better fuel athletes to perform their best — and also to capitalize on a great new recruiting tool — several schools have build new eating and snack facilities catered specifically to student-athletes.

At the University of Miami, that means a new dining hall for athletes equipped with all the trimmings. As Canes defensive lineman Calvin Hertelou explains, players can get whatever food they want, whenever they want. That goes for omelettes, waffles, junk food, even prime rib.

If you’re looking to eat healthier, think C.A.N. Not as in willpower, but as in these three critical food musts: Convenient (easy to reach), Attractive (enticingly displayed), and Normal (an obvious choice).

That’s the conclusion of a recent study from Cornell University, which analyzed 112 studies that gathered information about healthy eating behaviors. People who ate healthiest did so when a grocery store, restaurant, or partner offered up food following this formula. Think about a bowl of fruit displayed on a countertop versus fruit buried in a drawer in your fridge and you get the idea.

On Monday I called Jim Ryun, thinking it would be cool to tell the greatest miler in American history something he might not know about the mile: Last weekend, a high-school student named Matthew Maton ran it in 3:59.38.

But Ryun was way ahead of me, having heard that news within minutes of it happening. “That makes six of us,” Ryun said, referring to the number of American high-school students who have run the mile under four minutes.

… For the average NBA Draft prospect, the battery of tests they’re put through this time of the year tend to be a formality, but for other players the stakes are a bit higher. It seems that at least one player per draft cycle is faced with concerns based around how they move on the court and what kind of toll the resulting forces are taking on their musculoskeletal system. Sometimes those questions are raised about a bruising big man struggling with lower back pain late in the season or a prospect who is particularly knock-knee or bow-legged relative to the norm, but they can also pop up for more subtle reasons like unsteady running form or a lack of ideal knee bend in the post.
This season, Myles Turner is perhaps the highest profile player in this draft to face scrutiny specifically for how he moves. DraftExpress’s video scout, Mike Schmitz, broke down Turner’s specific mobility issues in our preseason video scouting report on the potential top-10 pick. The following video is linked to start with that section: https://youtu.be/sU_qZL9LevA?t=6m22s

Turner’s somewhat ginger, choppy running stride was a part of not only our scouting report on him, but of those published by most major NBA Draft outlets as well. As Schmitz notes, Turner is plenty mobile for a 7-footer. He moves better than numerous center prospects we’ve covered over the years, but with the lamentable history of big men with injury problems over the last two decades and the increased attention to detail in the internet era of scouting, Turner’s gait was still viewed as a concern.

Turner selected Andy Miller of ASM Sports as his representation earlier this spring. Miller, in concert with Turner, Turner’s father David, and renowned Dallas strength coach Ken Roberson, decided to be proactive about the questions facing the 19 year old center and look for answers in advance of the NBA Combine. That search led Turner and his team to undergo a trio of tests at the Hospital for Special Surgery based in New York.

… The lines between wellness and illness keep moving. Last year, for example, the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence changed the guidelines that suggest who should take statins to reduce the risk of a heart attack, widening the net to take in an extra 5 million people in England and Wales. For increasing numbers of people, breakfast is no longer just about food. It is also time to pop a pill or two, or three or even more (see “Everyday drugs: Are we taking too many preventive pills?”).

Such measures seem like a good thing. Where’s the harm in catching potential problems early and using modern medicine to deal with them? We should tread carefully. A decade ago, another form of preventive medicine – routine screening for diseases, including some cancers – seemed a sure-fire route to saving lives. But overall, most mass screening programmes proved to be ineffectual or even harmful and were duly dropped; only a few remain. Over-screening is a real problem: false positives lead to unnecessary medical intervention and psychological trauma, while false negatives can lead people to ignore genuine symptoms.

We’re much loftier than we were 150 years ago. How has this happened, asks Adam Hadhazy, and what will people look like a century from now?