Applied Sports Science newsletter – June 2, 2015

A great step towards better sleep is eating balanced, nutritious meals and snacks evenly spaced throughout the day. Research has found that certain nutrients can affect sleep, from how easy it is to fall asleep at a reasonable hour to the quality of rest we get throughout the night. Equally important to all this is what impact certain foods and drinks have on our beloved heart rate variability (HRV).

Sleep is an important part of the recovery process and is one area where every one of us can improve. [video, 2:03]

It can be so tempting to stay up into the late hours of the night scrolling through Instagram. But in the long run, what’s more important: a girl’s Instagram post you barely know or getting the most of your training?

Sleep quality is so important, yet so easy for athletes to overlook. Here’s some things you probably didn’t know about how sleep affects your athletic performance.

I have written about sleep before. In my June 2011 blogpost Sleep, the key to recovery and training adaptation I mentioned the negative impact of insufficient sleep on recovery, training adaptation and competition performance. I also provided some practical tips to promote athletes’ sleep quantity and/or quantity.

This time I just want to share some fascinating texts about sleep that were published 155 years ago (Hitchcock & Hitchcock. Elementary Anatomy and Physiology for Colleges, Academies and Other Schools, 1860). Please note the horrible passing reference to Native Americans being tortured at the stake…

In this week’s episode of the Radar Podcast, O’Reilly’s Mary Treseler chats with Josh Clark, founder of design agency Big Medium (formerly known as Global Moxie). Clark talks about the changing nature of his work as the world itself becomes more of an interface, how to avoid “data rash,” and why in this time of rapid technology growth it’s essential for designers to splash in the puddles. [audio, 35:50]

If you’re surfing the web and you come across a photo of the Mariners’ Felix Hernandez on the pitchers’ mound at Safeco Field, chances are you’ll quickly interpret that you are looking at a picture of a baseball player on a field preparing to throw a pitch.

Now, there is technology that can do that, too.

Whether by accident or design, the details of Google’s plans for artificial intelligence (AI) have been elusive. In some cases, there’s no real mystery, just nothing all that exciting to talk about. AI technology is the foundation of the company’s search engine, and the most obvious reason for Google’s high-profile, $400M acquisition of DeepMind in 2014 is to use the UK firm’s expertise in deep learning—a subset of AI research, but more on that later—to bolster that core capability. But the Googleplex has absorbed other bright minds from the field of AI, as well as some of the most buzzed-about companies in robotics, with only some of that collective braintrust officially allocated to driverless cars, delivery drones or other publicly announced robotics or AI-related projects. What, exactly, are Google’s AI experts up to?

In a word: food.

Why do most sports injuries among professional athletes happen? “The majority of these big superstars think it’s down to pure bad luck,” says Stephen Smith, CEO of Kitman Labs. “We’re here to say that it’s not.”

Smith is not from a tech background; he worked in pro sports as a rehab coach, but he realised that there was a significant role for data to play in preventing injuries, so set up Kitman Labs. “We can see that applying decent, strong analytics and science to what we do everyday is the route forward,” he says, speaking on stage at Pioneers Festival in Vienna.

“The cost of injuries in professional sport in enormous,” Smith tells the audience, reeling off a list of staggering figures. Knee injuries alone cost the NBA $358 million dollars last year and the overall cost of injuries in Major League Baseball in 2014 was $1.4 billion.

I have recently had the opportunity to hear tech industry leaders discuss how the combination of gene sequencing in large populations plus various forms of “big data” were going to transform medical knowledge, medical practice, and ultimately public health. To be frank these have been pretty standard recitations of the catechism that once we know your genome and link it to enough data about you we will be able to Predict and Prevent most diseases and/or Personally (or Precisely) treat them in a way that maximizes your Participation in all of the relevant decision making and outcomes. This general scheme has been called P4 Medicine.

As I heard these recitations, a couple of things hit me and I began wonder just how insulated the major players in the tech world are from medical and biological reality. So I will list a few concepts for the techies to consider.

We don’t want big screens on our wrist, but small screens are tough to interact with unless we use a precision tool like a stylus. If smartwatches are going to be a thing, they’ll need to offer users something other than a touchscreen.

At Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects group, or ATAP, Project Soli is the first of two projects led by legendary interaction designer Ivan Poupyrev that is trying to decouple the way we interact with our devices from touchscreens. It’s a tiny radar, small enough to fit into a 1.5-inch smartwatch, that can understand the gestures your fingers make even though they never touch a screen.

Understanding the diversity of human tissues is fundamental to disease and requires linking genetic information, which is identical in most of an individual’s cells, with epigenetic mechanisms that could have tissue-specific roles. Surveys of DNA methylation in human tissues have established a complex landscape including both tissue-specific and invariant methylation patterns1, 2. Here we report high coverage methylomes that catalogue cytosine methylation in all contexts for the major human organ systems, integrated with matched transcriptomes and genomic sequence. By combining these diverse data types with each individuals’ phased genome3, we identified widespread tissue-specific differential CG methylation (mCG), partially methylated domains, allele-specific methylation and transcription, and the unexpected presence of non-CG methylation (mCH) in almost all human tissues. mCH correlated with tissue-specific functions, and using this mark, we made novel predictions of genes that escape X-chromosome inactivation in specific tissues. Overall, DNA methylation in several genomic contexts varies substantially among human tissues.

In an opinion piece appearing in the AMA Journal of Ethics today, two Stanford physicians – Michael Fredericson, MD, and Adam Tenforde, MD – explore the ethics of how doctors should advise patients recovering from an injury.

As British cyclist Alex Dowsett was preparing last winter for an assault on the one-hour time-trial world record, his sports science team was fretting over the details – like the optimal temperature at the velodrome in Manchester. Warm air lowers air resistance, but risks parching the cyclist, who can’t drink during the race.

Meanwhile, Brock University physiologist Dr. Stephen Cheung, himself an accomplished cyclist and co-author of the book Cutting-Edge Cycling, was poring over the results of his surprising new study. The results showed that losing even three per cent of body mass through dehydration has no discernible effect on cycling performance. He shared the results, which had yet to be published, with Dr. Mikel Zabala, a friend who heads Dowsett’s scientific team.

“He and I were batting around the idea over the winter of just how hot do we want to make the track,” Cheung recalls. “He was obviously worried that Dowsett was going to get really dehydrated. So I shared the data that I had, and perhaps it put his mind at rest.”

With an ever-increasing number of technologies available to monitor athletes, it can be hard to know what to use and then what to do with the information they provide. The last ten years has seen a proliferation of tracking systems (both internal and external load – SpartaPoint) ranging from basic heart rate monitoring to more sophisticated GPS and camera tracking systems. When choosing a system it is necessary to consider budget, ease of use and also how many staff members you have available to collect and deliver the information to athletes and coaching staff.

Over the last couple of years many college and professional teams have purchased tracking systems, given them to a Strength Coach and tasked him/her with the job of figuring how they can help the team. Often these Strength Coaches don’t have the necessary time or experience to create meaningful information and after a period of time the technologies either get shelved, or worse, continue to be collect information that never leaves a spreadsheet. These technologies can spit out thousands of data points with hundreds of potential metrics.

For a concept that we all understand, ‘simple’ is deceivingly difficult to pin down.

We may ‘know it when we see it’, but there’s more to what makes a product or website feel simple than just gut reaction.