Applied Sports Science newsletter – June 10, 2015

… Okafor continues to train at P3. Not only do their staffers do on-court training with the 19-year-old, they also put him through a customized workout designed to reduce the risk of injuries and maximize his potential and efficiency. P3’s staff includes biomechanists and data analysts, and each player who trains at P3 is assessed using state-of-the-art technology. Using the results from these evaluations, players are given specific “corrective exercises” to strengthen specific body parts that may have had a higher injury risk or could have potentially limited a player’s effectiveness on the court, as explained in-depth in a recent Sports Illustrated article. Going through this process, Okafor has learned a lot about his body and its strengths and weaknesses.

“It’s amazing; they give me all of these details, more than I’ve ever had, about my body and the way I move,” Okafor said of P3’s assessment. “They are able to pinpoint certain things that will help me move better and help me get certain [parts of my body] stronger and make me more explosive. I’m excited about it. It’s been a lot of fun and I’m going to continue to work with them.

… Resistance running has long been a part of sprint training programs. Parachutes, hills, bungees, sleds, tires, weighted vests, and simply running into the wind are some frequently used methods. In a simplistic way of thinking in athletics, bigger is better, more is better, heavier is better.

But this way of thinking has to change. I’ve always believed that resistance sprinting should involve lighter weights than what has commonly been accepted. Yet for some reason, we have a hard time believing that lighter and faster is more beneficial than slow and heavy.

The Summit theme in 2015 was The Future of Coaching.

This year’s Summit was attended by 280 delegates from across the UK. It had a number of innovations: Panel debates with audience voting technology and immediate feedback; Twitter highlights from every session using #ukcoachingsummit reached over 300,000 people and some sessions were streamed via Periscope. You can read a summary of the Future of Coaching debate here and see the background material at right. As Day Two of the Summit coincided with Workforce Wednesday of Women’s Sport Week 2015, there was a strong focus on the topic of women in coaching. For a summary of the Women and Coaching debate, click here. The Summit closed with an important announcement from Dr Tony Byrne, sports coach UK CEO.

To view the full programme, click here. Presentations from this year’s UK Coaching Summit are available to download.

Athlete recovery-adaptation is crucial to the progress and performance of highly trained athletes. The purpose of this study was to assess peristaltic pulse dynamic compression (PPDC) in reducing short-term pressure-to-pain threshold (PPT) among Olympic Training Center athletes after morning training. Muscular tenderness and stiffness are common symptoms of fatigue and exercise-induced muscle microtrauma and edema. Twenty-four highly trained athletes (men = 12 and women = 12) volunteered to participate in this study. The athletes were randomly assigned to experimental (n = 12) and control (n = 12) groups. Pressure-to-pain threshold measurements were conducted with a manual algometer on 3 lower extremity muscles. Experimental group athletes underwent PPDC on both legs through computer-controlled circumferential inflated leggings that used a peristaltic-like pressure pattern from feet to groin. Pressures in each cell were set to factory defaults. Treatment time was 15 minutes. The control group performed the same procedures except that the inflation pump to the leggings was off. The experimental timeline included a morning training session, followed by a PPT pretest, treatment application (PPDC or control), an immediate post-test (PPT), and a delayed post-test (PPT) after the afternoon practice session. Difference score results showed that the experimental group’s PPT threshold improved after PPDC treatment immediately and persisted the remainder of the day after afternoon practice. The control group showed no statistical change. We conclude that PPDC is a promising means of accelerating and enhancing recovery after the normal aggressive training that occurs in Olympic and aspiring Olympic athletes.

It’s been 20 years since the Dallas Cowboys won a Super Bowl — but maybe some cutting-edge technology will help them turn things around.

The Cowboys have inked a two-year deal with StriVR Labs, a virtual reality sports startup, to train all of its quarterbacks using a VR headset, according to a source familiar with the deal. After donning the headset, players see a live-action 3-D video replay of a football play from the quarterback’s perspective, and can review that play from a first-person view over and over, looking in any direction.

“Engineers could use some help from neuroscience,” DiCarlo told his audience, “that is, understanding tricks that can help build machines.” [video, 1:03:01]

This study aimed to determine: (a) the spatial patterns of hamstring activation during the Nordic hamstring exercise (NHE); (b) whether previously injured hamstrings display activation deficits during the NHE; and (c) whether previously injured hamstrings exhibit altered cross-sectional area (CSA). Ten healthy, recreationally active men with a history of unilateral hamstring strain injury underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging of their thighs before and after six sets of 10 repetitions of the NHE. Transverse (T2) relaxation times of all hamstring muscles [biceps femoris long head (BFlh); biceps femoris short head (BFsh); semitendinosus (ST); semimembranosus (SM)] were measured at rest and immediately after the NHE and CSA was measured at rest. For the uninjured limb, the ST’s percentage increase in T2 with exercise was 16.8%, 15.8%, and 20.2% greater than the increases exhibited by the BFlh, BFsh, and SM, respectively (P?<?0.002 for all). Previously injured hamstring muscles (n?=?10) displayed significantly smaller increases in T2 post-exercise than the homonymous muscles in the uninjured contralateral limb (mean difference ?7.2%, P?=?0.001). No muscles displayed significant between-limb differences in CSA. During the NHE, the ST is preferentially activated and previously injured hamstring muscles display chronic activation deficits compared with uninjured contralateral muscles.

Months before Illinois offensive lineman Simon Cvijanovic went in for knee surgery at the end of the 2013 season, he recalls pleading with coaches and doctors to give his aching legs a rest.

The team medical staff seemed to sympathize, Cvijanovic said, but ultimately deferred to coaches who told him he needed to stay on the field.

“I felt like I’d just run a marathon after camp, my legs would just give out, I’d get beat all the time,” Cvijanovic said. “The doctors would say, ‘We’ll talk to the coaches about giving you a break,’ but the biggest break I got was not really a break.”

Degenerative meniscal tears are common and correlate poorly with symptoms; no clinical features are diagnostic

Avoid routine magnetic resonance imaging in primary care unless the patient has a locked knee (sudden inability to fully extend) or serious disease is suspected

First line treatment comprises non-operative modalities, such as education, self management, exercise, weight loss if overweight or obese, walking aids if indicated, paracetamol, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, and intra-articular glucocorticoids. Current evidence does not support a role for arthroscopic debridement, washout, or partial meniscectomy

… With multiple stress factors like long work days, short night sleep and hard training, it becomes more challenging to recover sufficiently and resources start to decrease. In this situation you should be able to hit the brakes and reconsider if some of the stressful factors could be cut off and how to enhance recovery. Unfortunately people often tend to do the opposite and cut down on sleep, eat less healthy and increase the use of alcohol and other stimulants, which makes the situation even worse.

Nine-time French Open champ Rafael Nadal is one of the slowest players of the last 25 years. Roger Federer is faster than average. Novak Djokovic is slower than average — but has gotten faster. Andy Murray, on the other hand, has slowed down.

I’m not talking about foot speed, or about the speed of the ball off the racket. I’m talking about how long it takes to play a point of tennis. Like baseball, tennis isn’t bound by a clock, but it does keep time. A match isn’t over until one player wins two sets or three. And who the players are goes a long way to deciding how long it takes to go from start to finish.

Stress-injury models of health suggest that athletes experience more physical injuries during times of high stress. The purpose of the current study was to evaluate the effect of increased physical and academic stress on injury restrictions for athletes (n=101) on a Division I college football team. Weeks of the season were categorized into three levels: high physical stress (i.e., preseason), high academic stress (i.e., weeks with regularly scheduled examinations such as midterms, finals, and week before Thanksgiving break), and low academic stress (i.e., regular season without regularly scheduled academic examinations). During each week, we recorded whether a player had an injury restriction or not, thereby creating a longitudinal binary outcome. The data was analyzed using a hierarchical logistic regression model to properly account for the dependency induced by the repeated observations over time within each subject. Significance for regression models was accepted at p<0.05. We found that the odds of an injury restriction during training camp (high physical stress) were greatest compared to weeks of high academic stress (OR=2.05, p=0.0003) and low academic stress (OR=3.65, p<0.001). However, the odds of an injury restriction during weeks of high academic stress were nearly twice as high than during weeks of low academic stress (OR=1.78, p=0.0088). Moreover, the difference in injury rates reported in all athletes during weeks of high physical stress and weeks of high academic stress disappeared when considering only athletes that regularly played in games (OR=1.13, p=0.75), suggesting that high academic stress may affect athletes that play to an even greater extent than high physical stress. Coaches should be aware of both types of stressors and consider carefully the types of training methods imposed during times of high academic stress, when injuries are most likely.

Identifying future stars is an important goal of recruitment for football’s top teams. Many of them won’t look at a young player unless he already has some minutes in a top league under his belt. But quite a few of these rookies will still flame out before realising their apparent potential. The key is to find consistent indicators that pick the genuine stars whose performance levels can be sustained over multiple seasons. … To be marked as top prospects, players have to be 20 years old or younger on 1st August of a given season, play at least 360 minutes during the season, and achieve a certain score relative to their peers in the two models. My goal was to select players who could become Premier League regulars and full internationals for their countries.

For some time, the New Zealand institute of High Performance Sport has been using daily HRV measures with the guidance of Dr Martin Buchheit (Aspire, PSG) in order to optimize the training of elite athletes in their care.

As part of his PhD program, Daniel Plews and supervisor Prof Paul Laursen performed an in-depth case study on two elite triathletes during two and a half months of preparation for a national level Olympic distance event.

This study differs from many others that we have summarized in two respects:

It is a very detailed examination of the response to carefully planned training in elite athletes who are 100% focused on winning national & international events.
And it provides a contrast between training that was effective in delivering the required performance on the day vs a situation where the athlete became non-functionally overreached (NFOR) and required unplanned time out in order to recover.