Applied Sports Science newsletter – August 5, 2015

The thing I would like to address from the Skill Acquisition field, is distinguishing between “performance” and “learning”.

It seems many coaches have a mindset that practice activities/drills must contain a high level of success and mistakes are “bad”. So to achieve this, it is only natural that activities and drills are used that almost ensure that players have a high level of success (and lots of “blocked” repetition too). In this case the players “performance” in a drill could be very good?—?and coaches are interpreting that as “learning” that will translate into match conditions. This is flawed and hence leads us to the notion of “pseudocoaching” (a term brought to prominence by @innovatefc).

With his British and European mile record having lasted 30 years, Matt Long and David Lowes look at the training philosophy of Steve Cram.

Players, coaches and sports scientists talk us through the pains of pre season – and why it matters…

In discussions of progressive and constructivist teaching practices, math is often the odd subject out. Teachers and schools that are capable of creating real-world, contextualized, project-based learning activities in every other area of school often struggle to do the same for mathematics, even as prospective employers and universities put more emphasis on its importance.

This struggle may come from a fundamental misunderstanding about the discipline and how it should be taught.

That’s the stance David Wees has arrived at after more than 20 years of teaching at many different kinds of schools all over the world. It has taken a long time, but Wees has stopped labeling student work with the word “mistake” and has started paying attention to what he can learn about how students are thinking, based on the work (right or wrong) they produce.

Is Your Foot the Key to Running Injury Free?

Patrick McKeon and collaborators from four American universities laid out their theory in a paper in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.

In the article, the authors draw parallels between the core muscles of the abdomen and spine and the small muscles within your foot itself.

NFL training camp is in full swing as all 32 teams take the first steps to prepare for the 2015 season. Hundreds of hours are being spent at team facilities across the country. And when the players aren’t on the practice fields installing their offensive and defensive schemes and fighting to make the final roster, they’re spending time in the weight room ensuring their bodies won’t break down during the grind of a 16-game season.

But all NFL weight rooms were not created equal. Some are immaculate, while some look like your local rec center. STACK is counting down all 32 NFL team weight rooms. Let’s get started.

Richmond men’s basketball strength and conditioning coach Jay DeMayo knows the value of information and context. When he’s helping the Spiders improve performance, he’s using a number of new technologies that give a fuller picture of the way that exercise is impacting the bodies of his student-athletes.

“Using a technology called Omegawave, we look at heart-rate variability, the functioning state of different energy systems and the state of your central nervous system,” DeMayo says. “Those things help us to know what stresses or exercise they can best adapt to. We want to take all of those things into account so that we don’t fry them out, but actually help them to perform better.”

What the heck is going on at Quanttus, the best-funded wearable device startup in town? The company has raised $22 million in venture capital, but after saying that it would unveil its product — a wristband that can monitor your blood pressure — in April, nothing happened.

Now, former employees say there has been a new round of layoffs and resignations. The chief executive, Shahid Azim, is also out, but a new CEO hasn’t yet been named.

Medical implants and wearable devices that harvest energy from the bearer’s movements and convert it into electrical power could help patients avoid the inconvenience of replacing batteries and the risk of follow-up surgeries to replace them. Zhong Lin Wang, a materials scientist at Georgia Tech in Atlanta and the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, has already shown his group’s energy-scavenging device can power a pacemaker (Adv. Mater. 2010, DOI: 10.1002/adma.200904355). Now he and his Beijing team have shown that they can also power a laser for accelerating bone-healing.

Want to run healthy forever? Start here.

It is well-known that 65-75 percent of runners experience an injury every year (1). This makes running a highly injurious sport, causing researchers to look into what factors lead runners to injury.

The list of risk factors is extensive but near the top is overstriding. Running stride is the distance from where your foot hits the ground back to an invisible line down from your center of mass (anatomically, this is the fifth segment of the lumbar spine).

Coaches and trainers strive to keep their players healthy so they can perform at their maximum potentials. Injury restrictions, or limits on athletes’ physical activity due to illnesses or injuries, can keep athletes on the bench for a game or even an entire season. Now, University of Missouri researchers have found college football players are more likely to experience injuries during test weeks than during training camp. The effects of academic stress on injury occurrences are even more pronounced among starting players, the researchers found.

… The world championships are a remarkably good predictor of Olympic performance for U.S. swimmers. A year before the London Olympics, U.S. swimmers won 16 gold medals and 29 overall at the worlds. They went on to win 16 golds and 31 overall in London.

Sunday, then, was a disturbing day in the run-up to the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Games, which are just over one year away. In addition to the previously unthinkable men’s free relay miss, the U.S. failed to qualify a finalist for the men’s 100 breaststroke and the women’s 100 butterfly, and missed the podium in the men’s 400 freestyle—all races in which Americans medaled in London.

It isn’t often that your crusty great uncle sitting around a Thanksgiving dinner table and a computer scientist hunched over a spreadsheet share a common viewpoint, but here it goes: There isn’t enough scoring in soccer.

Soccer statistics, as sports data goes, are still in their prehistoric period, the time before its version of OPS. There are so few scoring plays that it has proved difficult to tease out the winning moments, to find a formula in determining the difference between title-winners and also-rans.

Analysts in offices all over the world are attempting to crack the code, including in Tukwila.

Sounders sports science and performance manager Dave Tenney and his team have made great strides the past few years with the fitness aspect of the game. They’ve earned the players’ trust, honed their formula to the point where every conditioning drill can be individually customized.

Sky Sports News caused something of a stir amongst the football community on Monday by using the Football Manager database to rate clubs’ new signings.

Several players including Robert Lewandowski and Esteban Cambiasso had their individual attributes displayed on screen as presenters looked to determine who might fit various potential transfer suitors.