Applied Sports Science newsletter – August 3, 2015

When fine players are broken, and their careers are threatened, they have the same needs as Humpty Dumpty, the nursery rhyme figure portrayed as having the constitution of an eggshell.

They need a friend, a team manager who believes in them. They need doctors and physiotherapists to help heal them. And they need family and locker room support through the long and vulnerable months back to fitness.

Theo Walcott and Radamel Falcao may have been on different sides when Arsenal faced Chelsea in the Community Shield, the English season curtain raiser at Wembley Stadium in London on Sunday. But they are coming from a similar situation in that each of them ruptured the anterior cruciate ligament in their left knee in January 2014.

Last month, England had more success in the World Cup than for decades – only this time it was the women playing. Simon Hattenstone talks to the female footballers taking their game to the next level.

Chicago Bulls star guard Derrick Rose is still undecided about attending Team USA’s minicamp, according to league sources.

Rose has indicated in the past that he would like to play for Team USA in the Olympics, but sources told ESPNChicago.com that he is weighing the potential benefits of taking more time off before the start of Bulls training camp in late September.

This isn’t your usual PhD program.

Last January, 33-year-old Sasha Gollish took an extended break from the workplace and began her doctoral studies in engineering at the University of Toronto with two related goals: to figure out a way to improve the teaching of math in engineering schools, and to turn herself into a world-class runner.

A consulting sports psychiatrist has been named director of sports psychology for the University of Nebraska Athletic Department in Lincoln.

The department says Dr. Todd Stull will be the university’s first full-time sports psychiatrist and work with the more than 600 student-athletes competing in the school’s 24 varsity sports.

The meters have been swum. The technique has been honed and perfected.

But no matter how well a swimmer trained in practice, inevitably they want to know how to make the most of their training.

How to know that once they get up on the blocks, that both mind and muscles will work together in harmony to produce a result that is deserving of the hard work put in over the months and years in the pool.

Here are 3 powerful ways to make sure that you are not only physically prepared to swim fast at the big meet, but mentally ready as well.

Daniel Memmert is a Professor and head of the Institute of Cognitive and Team/Racket Sport Research at the German sport University of Cologne. He is a football and tennis coach with a PhD in cognition and a habilitation in creativity in team and racket sports from the Elite University of Heidelberg. Daniel is a reviewer for several international sport psychology journals and transfers his expertise to business companies and several professional football clubs (German Bundesliga, Champions/Europa League)

What I am interested in is how the player reads and responds to the ever changing dynamics of the game, the organisation of information and action through perception and decision making and the flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances through high quality adaptive behavior. At the heart of this is an understanding that skill is the technical and tactical dimensions of the game working together as complimentary pairs. Skill development is an ongoing learning process of adaption. Daniel Memmert’s book Teaching Tactical Creativity in Sport: Research and Practice has taken me to the roots of this thought process. A key feature of a traditional sports coaching programme is a focus on decontextualized skill training (movement skills are seen as bits to be assembled, a linear approach). In his book Daniel challenges this pedagogy and promotes the influence of context, the possibilities of creativity in children and how vital it is for young players to experience the global form of the game in early development.

The words come in rapid fire, some actually meaning something, others not a thing, those the dummy calls aimed to confuse the opposition. It is a football symphony at the line of scrimmage, with each guy playing a role, and precision being of the utmost importance.

This is the secretive world of what goes on before the ball is snapped for the NFL’s best offense, the Green Bay Packers, led by the league’s best quarterback: Aaron Rodgers.

The aim of this study was to determine the relationship between perceived respiratory and muscular training load (TL) and changes in physical fitness in elite and non-elite junior soccer players. Twenty-eight elite (n = 14, 17.6 ± 0.6 years, 70.3 ± 4.4 kg, 179.7 ± 5.6 cm) and non-elite (n = 14, 17.5 ± 0.5 years, 71.1 ± 6.5 kg, 178.1 ± 5.6 cm) soccer players belonging to a Spanish first and third division football academies and competing in junior Spanish first division (2012-2013) participated in the study. Countermovement jump (CMJ), CMJ arm swing, 5 and 15 m sprints and the Université de Montreal endurance test were performed in January and 9 weeks later in March. In order to quantify TLs, after each training session and match, players reported their session rating of perceived exertion (sRPE) separately for respiratory (sRPEres) and leg musculature (sRPEmus). Elite players accumulated greater weekly training volume (361 ± 14 vs. 280 ± 48 min; effect sizes (ES) = 5.23 ± 1.74; most likely), and perceived respiratory (1460 ± 184 vs. 1223 ± 260 AU; ES = 1.12 ± 0.79; very likely) and muscular (1548 ± 216 vs. 1318 ± 308 AU; ES = 0.99 ± 0.84; likely) TL than did non-elite players. Training volume, sRPEres-TL and sRPEmus-TL were positively and largely correlated (r = 0.67-0.71) with the changes in aerobic fitness. The present results suggest that a low training volume and TL can impair improvement in aerobic fitness in junior soccer players during the in-season period.

The purpose of the study was to determine performance indices of a repeated sprint test (RST) and to examine their relationships with performance indices of a repeated jump test (RJT) and with aerobic fitness among trained volleyball players. Sixteen male volleyball players performed RST (6 × 30 m sprints), RJT (6 sets of 6 consecutive jumps), and an aerobic power test (20-m Shuttle Run Test). Performance indices for the RST and the RJT were (a) the ideal 30-m run time (IS), the total run time (TS) of the 6 sprints, and the performance decrement (PD) during the test and (b) the ideal jump height (IJ), the total jump height (TJ) of all the jumps, and the PD during the test, respectively. No significant correlations were found between performance indices of the RST and RJT. Significant correlations were found between PD, IS, and TS in the RST protocol and predicted peak V[Combining Dot Above]O2 (r = ?0.60, ?0.75, ?0.77, respectively). No significant correlations were found between performance indices of the RJT (IJ, TJ, and PD) and peak V[Combining Dot Above]O2. The findings suggest that a selection of repeated activity test protocols should acknowledge the specific technique used in the sport, and that a distinct RJT, rather than the classic RST, is more appropriate for assessing the anaerobic capabilities of volleyball players. The findings also suggest that aerobic fitness plays only a minor role in performance maintenance throughout characteristic repeated jumping activity of a volleyball game.

The Fifa Women’s World Cup final this summer was remarkable, and not just because England came within one game of playing in it. One in 12 Americans watched at least part of the game live, making it the most watched football game in US history, while Team USA secured a record third title, thanks in no small part to their midfielder Carli Lloyd scoring a 13-minute hat-trick. The third of these saw her lob the Japanese goalkeeper from the halfway line.

Less obvious, but possibly of more significance, were the small black gadgets about the size of an old Nokia mobile phone that the winning players were wearing between their shoulder blades. The final was the first major international match since the laws of the game were changed in February to allow players to wear performance-tracking devices during a match.

Many believe it is only a matter of time before the technology is given the go-ahead in the Premier League and other major competitions. While managers have had access to post-match data analysis for years, the ability to use it to inform tactical changes and substitutions during the game represents a major shake-up in the world’s most popular sport.

And it’s not the only way in which science is muscling in on what has traditionally been the domain of managers and their coaching staff.

The study of teammates’ interaction on team sports has been growing in the last few years. Nevertheless, no specific software has been developed so far to do this in a user-friendly manner. Therefore, the aim of this study was to introduce a software called the Performance Analysis Tool that allows the user to quickly record the teammates’ interaction and automatically generate the outputs in adjacency matrices that can then be imported by social network analysis software such as SocNetV. Moreover, it was also the aim of this study to process the data in a real-life scenario, thus the seven matches of the German national soccer team in the FIFA World Cup 2014 were used to test the software and then compute the network metrics. A dataset of 3032 passes between teammates in seven soccer matches was generated with the Performance Analysis Tool software, which permitted a study of the network structure. The analysis of variance of centrality metrics between different tactical positions was made. The two-way multivariate analysis of variance revealed that the strategic position (Formula ; F?=?24.394; p?=?0.001; Formula ; large effect size) had significant main effects on the centrality measures. No statistical differences were found in the phase of competition (Formula ; F?=?0.097; p?=?0.907; Formula ; very small effect size). The network approach revealed that the German national soccer team based their attacking process on positional attacks and not in counter-attack, and the midfielders were the prominent players followed by the central defenders. The Performance Analysis Tool software allowed the user to quickly identify the teammates’ interactions and extract the network data for process and analysis.

Former SDSU and New Orleans Saints lineman Kyle Turley says marijuana is the only drug that has really helped him, and that it’s safer than opioids.

The Tour de France is widely regarded as the most strenuous endurance endeavour in sport. Performance levels have become so high that efforts approach the limits of human tolerance and it is clear that optimum nutrition is important to ensure physiological function is not hindered. But unlike the bad reputation carbohydrates get in some ordinary diets and in endurance sport circles, the evidence suggests that this energy source is not a devil in disguise.