Applied Sports Science newsletter – June 1, 2015

… Thibodeau never subscribed to the notion of resting players for the sake of resting them, believing that players prepare themselves for the grind of the season, a lesson he learned, at least in part, from one of his coaching mentors — Jeff Van Gundy. He also believed that games were never fully in control, and usually scoffed at the feeling that players should be taken out of games that appeared to be blowouts, even when Noah and Rose were both coming off major injuries.

That’s why Forman and Paxson came to Thibodeau last summer with an edict: Neither Rose nor Noah was to play more than 32 minutes per game this season.

“We meet with our medical staff headed by Brian Cole, Jeff Tanaka, Jennifer Swanson,” Forman explained months later during a pregame interview on Comcast SportsNet Chicago. “And again if you look historically there’s not an exact number you can put on it, but there have been enough studies that have shown when you became fatigued you become more susceptible to injuries and we wanted to do that with guys who were coming off surgeries. Derrick was coming off one; Joakim was coming off one; and Kirk [Hinrich], who’s been banged up off and on the last couple years. Again, the reason for it, our players’ health is what’s most important, and we want to look at our players’ health as you go through a six-, seven-month season, both short term and long term, to try and put them and us in the best possible position to succeed.”

The Golden State Warriors are a joy to watch. Their offense is based on movement and spacing, all five players working together to create open shots. If Coach Steve Kerr is the conductor, Stephen Curry is his soloist, a 6-foot-3, 190-pound virtuoso in high-tops.

So their practices must be incredibly organized and disciplined, right? Laser-beam focus and all that? It is the only reasonable conclusion, given the way the Warriors steamrollered their opposition en route to the N.B.A. finals. But Golden State, whose best-of-seven series against the Cleveland Cavaliers starts Thursday, has a dirty secret.

“I’ve told Steve, if someone came in and watched the way you practice, it would be embarrassing for you as a coach,” said Bruce Fraser, one of his assistants.

… Nov. 19, 2008

Green got up to 273 pounds as a high school senior, thanks in part to an ankle injury, but he was 248 when he showed up at MSU and got down to 235 by the start of the season. It was a season that would include him, but before the second game at Indiana-Purdue Fort Wayne — coached by Dane Fife — Green was moved to MSU’s scout team.

This study investigated the activity profiles of junior rugby league players competing in three distinct age groups (Under 13, 14, and 15), and two distinct playing standards (Division 1 and 4). In addition, we reported GPS data using pre-defined absolute speed thresholds, and speed thresholds expressed relative to a players’ individual peak velocity. Ninety male junior rugby league players, representing one of six teams competing in the Brisbane junior rugby league competition, underwent measurements of peak velocity (via a 40 m sprint) and global positioning system (GPS) analysis during competitive matches. Data were described as both absolute speed zones, and relative to the individual player’s peak velocity. Absolute measures of moderate, high, and very-high speed running distances increased with age, with the differences among groups typically small to moderate (ES = 0.24 to 0.68) in magnitude. However, when data were expressed relative to a players’ capacity, younger players, and those from lower playing divisions, exhibited higher playing intensities and performed greater amounts of high-intensity activity. Moderate, negative relationships (r = -0.43 to -0.46) were found between peak velocity and the amount of relative high-speed running performed. These findings suggest that individualisation of velocity bands increases the high-speed running attributed to slower players and decreases the high-speed running attributed to faster players. From a practical perspective, consideration should be given to both the absolute and relative demands of competition in order to provide insight into training prescription and the recovery requirements of individual players.

Plays well with others. As a football-loving father of two young children, that’s a phrase you long to hear about your kids. Football is first and foremost a team sport. Despite all the NFL roster peeping that goes on at this time of year, the final factor in determining what teams will be good (and what teams won’t) almost always comes down to which teams play together best – not which teams have the best collection of players.

As one example, the 2014 Chicago Bears had enviable offensive talent with Matt Forte, Brandon Marshall, Alshon Jeffery, and Martellus Bennett. Regardless of your feelings on Jay Cutler, that group ranking as only the 23rd scoring offense in the NFL could never happen if points were scored simply by who ya had. This is one of those inconvenient truths that flies in the face of much of the free agency and draft hype. In the end, it isn’t as much about who ya got as much as how they fit together.

Coaches and players know this, which is why offseason sessions have become so critical in this post-2011 CBA environment of the shrunken offseason. As teams around the NFL transition this week from lifting weights and on-field conditioning into quasi-football training sessions, the accelerated process of making a team is fully underway.

Persuading decision makers that your proposals and recommendations are worthy of their time and attention is a tough challenge – even for the most experienced and admired experts. So what should you do if you find yourself having to persuade an audience that doesn’t know about – or is even skeptical of – your expertise and experience?

Persuasion researchers know that decision-makers will often place their faith less in what is being said, and more in who is saying it. For good reason–following a trusted authority often reduces feelings of uncertainty. In today’s constantly changing business environment, it’s increasingly the messenger that carries sway, not the message.

… What’s one of the most surprising discoveries about human behavior?

One discovery that really surprised me and continues to perplex me is how measures of aptitude or talent in a domain do not reliably relate to how long and hard people work. Somebody who is really able and gets a lot out of every minute they put into something isn’t always that person who persists and works hard.

To some extent, that seems illogical because these types of really talented people have the most to gain from hard work. Rationally, they should spend more time on their endeavors than anyone else. However, they’re often the most fragile and least hardworking. Having discovered that, we can of course come up with post hoc explanations for why that is. But this was an interesting and non-intuitive discovery for me.

Arsenal are renowned for playing some of the most exhilarating, fluid football in Europe, but clearly such high-tempo interaction between the players takes plenty of practice.

That’s where the training sessions come in. Everyday during the season, if it’s not a matchday – and with a few exceptions for days off – the Arsenal first-team squad report for duty at the club’s London Colney training centre.

As Syracuse reboots its offense, it’s turning to a fairly new technology to aid its training.

The football program recently entered a year-long licensing contract with EON Sports to purchase virtual reality software that can simulate various game situations. You can input your playbook and configure various defensive looks to simulate a live view. Maybe most important of all is its ability to simulate — as best as possible — actual game speed.

Syracuse is the only ACC school using the virtual reality software. Ole Miss, UCLA and Kansas are the only other Power 5 schools using the technology, which costs about $800. In total, there are less than 10 colleges across Division I and II but hundreds of high school coaches using it.

In what might be the largest development in smart fabrics, Google announced a project to scale manufacturing of fabrics that use broad gestures to control mobile devices, lights, and more.

Members of Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) team unveiled Project Jacquard, a conductive thread initiative, at its annual developer conference (May 29). Jacquard has been in development since early 2014 and makes it possible to weave touch and gesture interactivity into any textile using standard, industrial looms.

If you wear a fitness tracker, you’re already generating scads of health-related data. It’s the start of a grand experiment. Doctors are now trying to answer a vital question: Can they use your data to make you stronger, healthier, and happier?

IEEE Spectrum’s three-part report begins with “Reading the Code,” which explores the futuristic hardware that will gather your biometric data. Your information will go to the cloud, where analytics software will set to work—as we describe in “Analyzing the Code.” Our third section, “Changing the Code,” looks ahead to the technological interventions, informed by vast amounts of data about how your body works, that may usher in a fundamental revolution in medicine.

In a joint effort with the Dutch Lawn and Tennis Association and the Oslo Sports Trauma Research Center, we charted the injury risks in youth talented tennis players. The first paper that came out of this study has now been published in the Scandinavian Journal of Science and Medicine in Sports. Already at a young age these players already suffer a high amount of injuries that may hamper health, performance and development of their full potential as an elite player.

The objective of this study was to estimate the incidence and prevalence of injury and illness among elite junior tennis players. A cohort of 73 players (11–14 years) in the 2012–2013 Dutch national high-performance program was followed for 32 weeks; all participants completed the study. The OSTRC Questionnaire on Health Problems was used to record self-reported injuries and illnesses and to record training and match exposure. Main outcome measures were average prevalence of overuse injury and illness and incidence density of acute injury.

Many knee joint models have been reported in the literature, but none has been available for everyone to download and use — until recently. In 2010, researchers in the Computational Biomodeling (CoBi) Core in Cleveland Clinic’s Lerner Research Institute provided a detailed computational representation of the tibiofemoral joint as a freely available and open-access resource and called it Open Knee(s).

Joint anatomy and tissue mechanical properties can be represented in a computational model where simulations under various loading conditions can predict knee movements and deformations and stresses within tissues. When developed appropriately and evaluated adequately, such models can be reused for scientific conduct, training, design of engineering interventions and assessment of surgical procedures— and eventually for patient-specific diagnosis and treatment. Open Knee(s) provides an open, collaborative platform grounded in the scientific and translational capacity of musculoskeletal joint modeling and engages engineers, physicians and the user community to tackle the daunting development and evaluation process.

The endangered whooping crane is supposedly a great American symbol of environmental stewardship. In the 1940s, there were only about 20 of the imposing five-foot-tall Grus americana in the country. Today, there are an estimated 600. The International Crane Foundation calls the revived population “one of conservation’s most inspiring success stories.” Which is true, to an extent. But as recently as the late 1800s, there were thought to be 1,500 whooping cranes—and there were many more than that before humans began interfering in their habitats in the early 19th century. This inspiring success story is one of many ecological examples of shifting baseline syndrome: our propensity to construct a sense of what’s “normal” from a relatively recent set of reference points, and hence to miss longer—and often more worrisome—trends.