Applied Sports Science newsletter – June 22, 2015

… By logging countless repetitions next to one another in practices in games, Strief and Evans have developed a level of chemistry that allows them to communicate through shorthand and nonverbal gestures.

Such chemistry takes time to build, and now the offensive line is looking to redevelop the same level of comfort after making some changes to the group this offseason.

Sometimes the key to progress is to take one step back before taking two steps forward. Unlike most people, however, Josee Belanger has stepped back a good 100m. Normally fielded as a forward by 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup™ hosts Canada, the 29-year-old has been hugely impressive since the tournament began. Only, instead of trying to score goals, she has been thwarting them as a defender.

Repositioned by coach John Herdman due to a number of injuries at the back, Belanger feels just as comfortable at the base of Canada’s formation as she does further upfield. “As a forward who plays out wide, I already had a lot of defensive duties,” she explained to FIFA.com. “I had that experience of defending from one end of the pitch to the other. What’s interesting as well is that I have a lot of pace. That helps if my positioning isn’t perfect. I can ‘cheat’ a little thanks to my speed.”

Jordan Spieth is an immense talent. To succeed on the PGA TOUR at such a young age, you have to have a certain measure of natural ability. Add a relentless drive, level head and physical prowess, and you’ve got a chance to play golf at a very high level.

But there is more to Jordan’s success than the work he has done as a golfer. In many ways, the work he did as a quarterback, pitcher and point guard laid the foundation for a successful career. This multi-sport development is the embodiment of the model that we preach at TPI. Develop the athlete first, then the golfer.

The science of getting elite footballers from one game to the next is a fiercely guarded trade secret. GPS devices, blood tests and complex algorithms are the fitness coaches’ tools of trade. For one of the AFL’s fastest and fittest clubs, that science has been the secret to its recent success. The Port Adelaide Football Club has become synonymous with stamina and speed.
Tonight, 7:30 has been granted rare insider access to the club’s fitness regime. [video, 6:27]

Q: Am I setting myself up for burnout or injury if I have no rest/recovery days?

A: Rest days are one tool in your recovery toolbox. Others include post-workout refueling and rehydrating, dynamic stretching, foam rolling and active recovery. Without adequate recovery, your long-term improvement will be hindered. So it’s helpful to understand how rest days can help you adapt to your training load.

A rest day allows for extended recovery, thus permitting the body to adapt more fully to a previous training cycle. Rest days also give the body time to refill glycogen stores, prevent overtraining and avoid mental burnout.

… Following your work in Canada you moved to UK Athletics (UKA) as Strategic Head of Coaching & Development. One of the success stories coming from your time there was the inception of the National Coach Development Program (NCDP) and UCoach – a cutting edge online coaching resource. Can you tell us more about these projects?

The direction we took in the UK was very similar to the direction we established in Edmonton. A number of people recognized the need to provide greater support to coaches. Two of many programs were the NCDP and UCoach. The NCDP was an England Athletics initiative that paired promising coaches with mentor coaches. The NCDP is different because it is integrated with the larger coach development program – and it is applied – thus providing coaches with hands on coach development opportunities.

We had a lot of success at the CACC with online coach development, so it made sense to replicate this program in the UK. In the UK there was a tremendous economy of scale as well because we were generating enormous amounts of quality content. UCoach is now the best online coach development resource in the world, viewed by thousands of British coaches a month.

… JB: You’ve recently published some interesting articles in the area of sleep and athletic performance, some of which have received huge downloads already. What would be some of the top headlines from these papers?

HF: The recent review articles mainly focus on two main interactions: i) the first one in Sports Medicine looks at the effect of sleep loss on performance (i.e. the effect of losing sleep before a match and how it might affect the subsequent physiological performance) and ii) the second one that we collaborated together on in the International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance focuses on the interplay between sleep and the recovery process (i.e. the effect of losing sleep following a match and how this might affect the recovery timeline). From the first paper, it seems although exercise and athletic performance drops following sleep loss there are many instances where it can be maintained, such as acute maximal efforts. This is also backed up by anecdotal evidence by many coaches. Perhaps more concerning is when athletes continually suffer sleep loss, where it appears a reduction in sleep quality and quantity could result in an autonomic nervous system imbalance, simulating symptoms of the overtraining syndrome. But the most concerning of all is definitely the almost unequivocal reduction in cognitive function, findings that would predictably suggest negative consequences for athletes requiring high neurocognitive reliance (e.g. almost any sport!).

The sporting goods business, Art Chou says, is starting to resemble the pharmaceutical business.

Rather than spending money to create new products, big companies increasingly let small startups do the innovating. Buying the startup is cheaper than investing in research and development.

For that model to work, though, entrepreneurs need to get their ideas in front of deep-pocketed companies. Corporate executives need to be confident that they’re seeing all of the best deals.

One of the most practical applications of precision medicine lies within the field of pharmacogenomics, a portmanteau of pharmacology and genomics. It is a discipline designed for tailoring drug treatments to an individual’s genetic make-up.

While scientists have had clinically relevant pharmacogenetic examples of drugs functioning only for patients with specific genetic backgrounds for several decades, the field has burgeoned into the encompassing specialty of pharmacogenomics, shifting away from observing a small number of candidate genes to searching for genome wide biomarkers.

Most people will experience tiredness or fatigue at some stage during training. And, in most cases, this may be due to increases in the amount or intensity of training, stress-related or simply due to lack of sleep (although it’s always a good idea to see your GP to check for any underlying medical conditions as well). However, adequate nutrition is often overlooked as a contributing factor to fatigue. In many cases, a simple change in eating habits can increase energy levels and improve performance.

Do you know why you eat?

We eat because we are hungry. We eat for energy. You might know some of the reasons we crave certain foods, but most of our food decisions come from hidden forces.

… “It’s not like each memory takes a cell and then that cell is used up,” says Nelson Cowan, cognitive psychologist at the University of Missouri. Over the long term, memories are encoded in neural patterns—circuits of connected neurons. And your brain’s ability to knit together new patterns is limitless, so theoretically the number of memories stored in those patterns is limitless as well.

Memories don’t always keep to themselves, though. They can crossbreed, like similar but distinct species, creating the recollection equivalent of a mule. If you can’t remember it, a memory is pretty much worthless—and similar memories can interfere with each other, getting in the way of surfacing the right one. Though memory interference is well documented, researchers like Cowan are still guessing at the phenomenon’s neural mechanics.

In surveys, majorities of Americans disapprove of twelve hypothetical nudges (seven involving default rules, five involving education campaigns or disclosure requirements). These results provide an illuminating contrast with majority support for twenty-two nudges that were also tested, and that are much more realistic examples of the kinds of nudges that have been adopted or seriously considered in democratic nations. In general (and with some interesting exceptions), there is a strikingly broad consensus, across partisan lines, about which nudges do and do not deserve support. The best understanding of the data is that people dislike those nudges that (a) promote what people see as illicit ends or (b) are perceived as inconsistent with either the interests or values of most choosers. It follows that people do not take default rules, warnings, and even tendentious and arguably manipulative public education campaigns to be objectionable as such; the overriding concern is whether nudges are legitimately motivated and consistent with choosers’ interests and values. An important qualification is that several nudges, in the domain of health and safety, attract significantly more support from Democrats than from Republicans. A ranking of the thirty-four nudges, in terms of their popularity, is provided, along with reports of differences (when they exist) among Democrats, Republicans, and Independents.

People who believe they know a little something about a topic – confident though they may be – commonly and easily claim knowledge that is impossible for them to have, say Cornell University researchers in a newly published study in Psychological Science.

The researchers catch people claiming impossible knowledge by observing when they assert familiarity with made-up concepts, fabricated events and people who do not really exist. In psychology, it’s a phenomenon called “overclaiming.”