Applied Sports Science newsletter – June 17, 2015

Though the 2015 summer transfer window officially opens on July 1, clubs have been planning their moves in advance. They can announce signings now, but a player’s registration cannot be transferred until that date, which is approximately a week before most players begin preseason training.

The window is open until Sept. 1 but the whole summer is a busy time for an ever-expanding number of football agents — at least those who actually represent players. Most are seldom quoted, but one leading and longstanding British agent, who represents several Premier League players, was willing to offer an inside view on condition of anonymity.

The Cleveland Cavaliers are in dire shape heading into Game 6 of the NBA Finals on Tuesday. Down 3-2 to the Golden State Warriors, the first title in franchise history is slipping away, while it has become increasingly obvious that their only shot is for LeBron James to outdo himself.

But does he have anything left?

… The raw version of Sanchez offered bold acceleration and a seemingly impossible ability to stop on the spot. Not only that, he had the ability to speed up, stop and then accelerate again. Watching him was a spectacle within the game, without caring about results or team performances.

Experienced players would end up lying on the ground in training sessions against Sanchez, his reputation as the Wonder Kid already crossing borders. Sanchez was a diamond in need of polishing, but one with endless possibilities.

Over the past decade, ultrarunning has gone from a fringe pursuit for distance freaks to a hypercompetitive sport attracting big-time sponsors. But a mysterious training condition is suddenly plaguing its ranks, robbing a generation of top athletes of their talents and forcing victims to wonder: Is it possible to love this sport too much?

Overtraining is an issue runners, cyclists and other endurance athletes might not know about — even though they might be doing it. Fortunately, physiologists can test for it.

The question “What is recovery?” seems too obvious to answer. Surely everyone understands what we mean by recovery? Everyone also has an understanding of the foods that are good for recovery. These are foods with protein, no? Maybe with carbohydrate as well. When I ask athletes and coaches what recovery is I get different answers. Recovery is a broad term that refers to restoration of performance capacity. After a workout you are fatigued and performance capacity is down. In the hours and days after the workout you “recover” and performance capacity returns to normal (and can even become better). The time course depends on many factors including how hard the workout was (intensity and duration as well as environmental factors such as altitude and heat). This blog will address the first of 3 questions I want to discuss in future blogs:

What exactly do we mean by recovery?

What nutritional methods do we have to improve rapid recovery?

Is there a role for protein in rapid recovery (hours after exercise)?

… [the San Francisco 49ers] consulted with experts ranging from Stanford University researchers to advertising executives to learn how, exactly, the young brain works.

As players arrived for voluntary workouts and minicamps this spring and summer, they noticed sweeping changes designed to cater to how research shows millennials learn. That means making concessions for people with shorter attention spans, a desire to multitask and, yes, a need to check their phones all the time.

Misfit has long since expanded its product line beyond its original Shine fitness tracker and now offers a range of devices from the more affordable “Flash” to the pricier Swarovski Shine collection, as well as connected smart bulbs and the “Beddit” sleep monitoring system. Today, the company is introducing a new feature that will allow users to make better sense of all the data their Misfit devices are collecting – it’s rolling out a web-based dashboard on My.Misfit.com where you’ll be able to compare your steps, calories or distance data, as well as zoom in on weekly or monthly trends related to your activity, weight or sleep data.

… Sources told the Financial Times that Hello plans to use the new funding to take on larger fitness tracking device companies like Fitbit and Jawbone.

The Sense device is a small orb-shaped one that sits on a bedside table and tracks the noise, light, humidity, and temperature in the user’s bedroom. It turns green when it senses the room is at an appropriate temperature, light level and noise level. Sense pings a user’s app if it finds their room is not a proper atmosphere for sleeping yet. The system also includes a small clip, called Sleep Pill, that attaches to the user’s pillow. After a night of sleep, the Sense app shows user’s sleeping patterns detected by the Pill clip as well as environmental data tracked by the bedside device

The underlying mechanisms of altered movement patterns in individuals with ACL injury are not fully understood. The current study assessed single and double leg squat movement patterns using surface EMG on 6 muscles of the lower limb as well as video analysis. The authors found reduced activiy in at least 3 of the 6 muscles during both squats and, interestingly, the differences were greater during the double leg squat.

… The sports science community has identified hamstring injury research as too important to have inaccurate measurements [4] [9]. In the future, we encourage sports scientists and especially postgraduate students to develop software programming skills in order analyse raw data files by themselves, and better distinguish data that make no sense. Such skills will help to identify when invalid signals appear, and how to correct the problem. We also encourage journals editors and reviwers to pay particular attention to the raw signals and processed data reported, and not only to the results and conclusions drawn from them. We share the hopes expressed by Barreari et al. that a critical attitude should be adopted for the development and validation of assessment protocols in sport club settings. However, simply relying on software for data analysis from equipment companies is not accurate science, and could lead flawed results and a damaged reputation of sports science/scientists in the sports industry.

To help discover how well a self-selecting crowd with no money at stake can predict the winner of sporting events like this year’s Tour de France, please cast some (or many) votes in the pairwise wiki survey I’ve created at this link:

2015 Tour de France Winner Wiki Survey

A pairwise wiki survey involves a single question with numerous possible responses—here, rider names—on which participants vote in pairs, one randomly-selected pair at a time, as many times as they like in as many sessions as they like. A Bayesian hierarchical model converts those pairwise votes into the aggregate ratings that can be treated, in this case, as a predicted finishing order.

… There are many reasons for Barça’s sustained excellence: great players such as Lionel Messi, Neymar Santos, and Luis Suarez; terrific managers like Johan Cruyff, Luis Enrique, and Josep “Pep” Guardiola; and state-of-the art facilities. However, our research suggests that Barça’s organizational identity — the collective sense of “who we are” that players, managers, and employees share — lies at the core of its success. Such is the power of its identity that fans often say that Barça is més que un club (more than a club).

Identity is different from culture, the values, beliefs, and assumptions that establish behavior. While culture tells us how to behave, identity tells us who we are. That serves two purposes. By serving as a lens, identity helps make sense of the environment. It also informs action by guiding employees’ responses. Together, these dimensions allow organizations to maintain a sense of balance between “who we are” and “what we do.”

… I’d like to look at James’s production from a slightly different angle. Rather than just look at how James’s production stands on its own right, let’s see how much impact James has had on the series relative to everyone else — combined.