Applied Sports Science newsletter – May 29, 2015

Galen Rupp and Mo Farah are 8,000 feet above sea level, and battling hard.

No mercy is asked for or given.

“We don’t take it easy on anybody,” Rupp says, which makes the intensity level for the video soccer game they are playing in the living room of a condo above Park City not that different from the last lap of a 10,000-meter race.

The University of Rochester has teamed up with Cambridge, Massachusetts-based medical sensor company MC10 to test the company’s BioStamp platform in clinical settings and help it develop its disease-specific algorithms for predictive health analytics. The partnership’s efforts will be led by the school’s Hajim School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, but various researchers at the university will be involved. MC10 will open a Rochester office to support the initiative and it plans to work with graduate and undergraduate students there on research projects.

While MC10’s CEO, Scott Pomerantz is an alum of the university and is a member of the dean’s advisory council there, MC10’s relationship with researchers at the school actually pre-dates Pomerantz’s arrival at MC10 last year. The company has had a longstanding relationship with the University of Rochester Medical Center’s Dr. Ray Dorsey, who most recently made headlines as one of the first researchers to leverage Apple’s ResearchKit with a clinical research app, called mPower, with Parkinson’s patients.

… Some athletes are far more efficent than others; they’re able to run faster on less power. “The difficult part [about measuring running power is] that there’s so much variability in how runners run,” says Ewen North, who operates Revolution Running, a 500-odd member club of mostly recreational athletes in Boulder, with his wife, Heather. “There are different stride lengths, and body makeup, and form, and they have to take all of that into account.”

That’s where Stryd comes in. It doesn’t measure force directly, says Shang. Instead, the small pod clips to the back of a runner’s waistband. From there, a collection of sensors (mostly accelerometers) and a powerful processor measure acceleration and deceleration on a variety of axes. Stryd converts those forces of a runner’s forward motion—and her vertical motion—into a similar, but subtly different, value they call running power, or center of mass power. And this is the number that Stryd will allow you to train.

There’s no power associated with forward motion in running, says [Allen Lim, an advisor to Stryd, who helped develop the Powertap hub-based powermeter for cycling]. In running, all power used comes in the energy we expend moving our limbs.

It’s only a centimetre long, it’s placed under your skin, it’s powered by a patch on the surface of your skin and it communicates with your mobile phone. The new biosensor chip developed at EPFL is capable of simultaneously monitoring the concentration of a number of molecules, such as glucose and cholesterol, and certain drugs.

MultiX SA (Paris, France), a company developing sensors for spectroscopic Xray imaging for airport security and non-destructive testing applications, has raised €3 million (about $3.3 million) in equity funding.

The company was founded in October 2010 by Jacques Doremus and Patrick Radisson, both previously with the Thales group, with the support of the French CEA (Atomic Energy Commission).

The company has developed a sensor the ME100 based on CdTe and CdZnTe crystal material. This together with a signal conditioning ASIC and high-speed front-end electronics is capable of measuring the energy of each incident x-ray photon. MultiX supplies complete x-ray detector systems as upgrades to in-the-field x-ray systems to improve performance.

… Anxiety has now surpassed depression as the most common mental health diagnosis among college students, though depression, too, is on the rise. More than half of students visiting campus clinics cite anxiety as a health concern, according to a recent study of more than 100,000 students nationwide by the Center for Collegiate Mental Health at Penn State.

Nearly one in six college students has been diagnosed with or treated for anxiety within the last 12 months, according to the annual national survey by the American College Health Association.

Body composition is a physical measurement that provides more specific information about body make-up than body weight alone. Body composition can be defined as the proportion of fat and fat free mass (FFM) in the body. Fat free mass includes primarily muscle, bone, and water along with some other elements. Fat mass includes fat that is stored as an energy source and fat in the central nervous system, organs, bone marrow and sex tissues, known as essential fat.

Body composition is typically expressed as percent body fat and pounds of FFM. For example, a student-athlete who weighs 180 pounds may have a body composition of 15 percent body fat and 153 pounds of FFM. This means that this athlete has approximately 27 pounds of body fat. If, after training and nutrition intervention, this athlete gains 3pounds., to 183 pounds, with a body composition of 13 percent body fat and FFM of 160 pounds, the athlete has demonstrated an improved body composition. This athlete lost 3 pounds of fat and gained 7 pounds of lean tissue, presumably muscle.

Does body composition impact athletic performance and health?

I’ve written here before about how unusual a pitcher Nolan Ryan was. He was one of a kind in so many ways. Most strikeouts ever. Most walks ever. Most no-hitters, fewest hits per nine innings, most wild pitches (not counting Tony Mullane, who retired in 1894), most stolen bases against, most errors for any pitcher since Deadball and so on.

But in doodling around with some numbers, I came across a category I was SURE Nolan Ryan would lead. I was absolutely sure. But, as it turns out … well, you’ll see.

Let’s begin here with this somewhat quirky but (in my mind) significant statistic: Since the Deadball Era ended, there have been 126 pitchers who started 200 games that their team won.

I know that’s kind of a bizarre category — starts that your team wins — but, as many of you know, I believe this is how we should do the whole pitcher wins and losses dance.

I’m a little late on the bandwagon, but I finally sat down with Nassim Taleb’s bestselling book Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder earlier in the month. I’ve given the book some time to settle and it has already influenced my thoughts on training more than any of the training-related books I have read recently.

The book is a mixture of a handful of subjects, but the main theme is right in the subtitle. Some things become more prone to break with volatility, while other things get stronger. This the difference between fragile and what Taleb calls “antifragile.”

Do you ever worry that the prime of your life has already passed you by – and it didn’t even have the courtesy to let you know as it flew overhead?

They say that life begins at 40, or that 60 is the new 50 – but what’s the truth? What’s the best age to be?

To find out, BBC Future scoured the medical literature, examining how everything from your memory to your sex drive changes across the lifetime. And we were pleasantly surprised by what we found.

… Measuring as a replacement for managing has done enormous damage—undermining the souls of so many of our institutions (as discussed in last week’s TWOG). Think of how much education has been killed by assuming that we can measure what a child learns in a classroom. (I defy anyone to measure learning. You are reading this TWOG: please measure what you are learning.) Must we always deflect teaching from engaging students to examining them?

The amount of technology available to endurance athletes is astonishing. New devices, updated devices, and new brands are hitting the market almost every month, which is continuing to drive the cost down and making it more and more accessible for every-day age group athletes. However, the real question is what do these different numbers tell you about what you are doing (performance) and about how your training is going (fitness).

Technologies such as heart rate monitors (HRM), power meters, GPS devices and speed-distance devices provide a huge advantage to athletes that have them, know how to use them not only in training, but in racing, and most importantly, analyze the files they each generate.

This isn’t an article about analyzing files, it’s about what the technology is actually measuring while you’re training and racing. Understanding what you are seeing when you look at your watch or cycling computer is the first step to getting the most out of technology.

Over the following two articles, we will discuss a study conducted by Dr Robert Morris exploring the youth-to-senior transition in professional football. If you’d like to read the study in full you can do so here [an academic login is required].

The study critiques whether the demands, resources, and barriers associated with the youth to-senior sport transition in Stambulova’s (2003) model help explain transition outcomes. The study revolves around two professional football clubs and includes data from meeting minutes, websites, interviews (N = 17) with players, coaches, support staff, and parents, and e-mail communications. The club with the proactive program aligned with Stambulova’s model had better transition outcomes (e.g., player financial value, retention rates) and spent less on player assistance compared to the club with no transition program.

Heart rate-based training intensity and its impact on injury incidence among elite-level professional soccer players. J Strength Cond Res 29(6): 1705-1712, 2015-Elite-level professional soccer players are suggested to have increased physical, technical, tactical, and psychological capabilities when compared with their subelite counterparts. Ensuring these players remain at the elite level generally involves training many different bodily systems to a high intensity or level within a short duration. This study aimed to examine whether an increase in training volume at high-intensity levels was related to injury incidence, or increased the odds of sustaining an injury. Training intensity was monitored through time spent in high-intensity (T-HI) and very high-intensity (T-VHI) zones of 85-<90% and ?90% of maximal heart rate (HRmax), and all injuries were recorded over 2 consecutive seasons. Twenty-three, elite professional male soccer players (mean ± SD age, 25.6 ± 4.6 years; stature, 181.8 ± 6.8 cm; and body mass, 79.3 ± 8.1 kg) were studied throughout the 2-years span of the investigation. The results showed a mean total injury incidence of 18.8 (95% confidence interval [CI], 14.7-22.9) injuries per 1,000 hours of exposure. Significant correlations were found between training volume at T-HI and injury incidence (r = 0.57, p = 0.005). Further analysis revealed how players achieving more time in the T-VHI zone during training increased the odds of sustaining a match injury (odds ratio = 1.87; 95% CI, 1.12-3.12, p = 0.02) but did not increase the odds of sustaining a training injury. Reducing the number of competitive match injuries among elite-level professional players may be possible if greater focus is placed on the training intensity and volume over a period of time ensuring the potential reduction of fatigue or overuse injuries. In addition, it is important to understand the optimal training load at which adaptation occurs without raising the risk of injury.