Applied Sports Science newsletter – August 6, 2015

Sharpshooter Wesley Matthews was no stranger to proving his naysayers wrong prior to signing with the Dallas Mavericks this summer during free agency.

Matthews entered the NBA in 2009 as an undrafted free agent with Utah after starring at Marquette for four seasons. He then proceeded to prove he could play at the next level, carving out a niche during his five seasons with the Portland Trail Blazers as a three-point assassin and perimeter defender.

Matthews now sets out on another mission, looking to rehab his way back into action after suffering a torn left Achilles tendon against the Mavericks on March 5 that brought his ’14-15 season to an end after only 60 games. And after signing a reported four-year deal worth $70 million to come to Dallas, Matthews says he’s eager to once again prove a point.

The support offered by caddies can help elite golfers stay ‘in the zone’ even under the pressure of major championships, new research has revealed.

The study by sport psychology researchers at the University of Lincoln, Leeds Beckett University, and St Mary’s University in the UK, and University of Canberra in Australia, found that as well as carrying the player’s bag, caddies can help their players perform at their peak – achieving so-called ‘flow states’ – by offering vital psychological support and encouragement throughout the round.

… The first part of this interview covers Kiely’s criticisms of common approaches to periodization and how they are sold to coaches and athletes. At 5,000 words it could have easily been broken down into smaller parts, but I feel it needs to be read in its entirety to fully understand where Kiely is coming from. And despite the criticism, Kiely also offers some process-based solutions for coaches which we will get to in part two. Rather than taking up more of your time, let’s just jump right in.

CHRISTIAN HACKENBERG IS going to be late for dinner. He has been out in the sweltering July heat for three hours, hustling through drills, frustrating defenses with his Winchester of an arm and offering patient instruction to the nation’s top high school quarterbacks. Just three summers ago, he was one of them, here at Nike’s Elite 11 camp held each summer in Beaverton, Oregon.

A whistle blew six minutes ago, signaling it was finally time to break for food. Now a small army of blue-chip preps, college counselors and a handful of retired NFL players are milling in the direction of the cafeteria, weary from a long but productive day. But the 6-foot-4, 228-pound Hackenberg hangs back, stationed in the far end zone, his gray shirt soaked with sweat, obsessing over footwork and the nuances of ball protection.

He takes a snap, backpedals on the balls of his feet and digs his cleats into the turf as he sets up in an imaginary pocket. He ducks his shoulder and shields the ball from an imaginary pass rusher, stands tall again, then zips an outlet pass toward a friendly camper serving as a stand-in safety valve. Hackenberg jogs back to the line and goes through the routine again. Two times. Four times. Ten times. It might be the least sexy drill a quarterback could dream up, but Hackenberg spends a solid 15 minutes perfecting it, starting and stopping several times, clapping his hands in frustration when he doesn’t nail his dropback — one stride too many, his feet not quite the right distance apart.

One of the most important characteristics of successful teams is that team members believe in their collective potential – also known as team potency. But what can be done to foster this shared belief? A new study suggests that teams feel more potent when their members believe they share a common vision of how to work and what to achieve.

Caroline Aubé and her colleagues surveyed employees at a large Canadian public-sector organisation, including team members and managers. Within 101 teams, members reported their perceptions of whether the team agreed on ways of working – such as how to prioritise, or to respect deadlines – as well as the division of labour and overall team objectives.

During a 2014 competition among Netflix employees to create potential new features, one group hacked into a Fitbit and created a “Sleep Bookmark” function, automatically pausing Netflix as the wearer started to fall asleep.

Though used to create a function for the on-demand Internet streaming content company that might be appealing to late-night movie watchers, the competition showed the vulnerability of wearable fitness devices to hacking.

From allowing a user to accidentally post activity logs on social media showing the number of calories burned during sex to helping jealous types keep tabs on their significant others to permitting the owner to transmit false data about physical activity, wearable fitness devices such as Fitbit, Nike FuelBand, Polar Loop and Jawbone UP come with the potential for a number of unintended consequences.

Mobile health tracking apps are the latest thing in mHealth technology, allowing users to keep track of their fitness and nutrition habits. However, many of these apps lack the technology to help users understand aggregated data and give personalized suggestions to help improve overall user health. Researchers from Cornell University have worked to fill that gap, creating a new app called MyBehavior.

Many runners may be wearing the wrong shoes for their particular stride or the right shoes that were chosen for the wrong reasons, according to a new scientific review about running shoes and injury risks.

The study helpfully concludes that there is a reliable, scientifically valid way for each of us to pick the right running shoes, but it’s so simple that most of us ignore it.

Micronutrients such as vitamins are minerals are essential to athletic success, health and wellbeing.

This second blog in the three-part series about micronutrients will focus on the minerals that are crucial for athletic performance and recovery. [video, 0:30]

Check your food pyramid at the door. Local nutrition expert Benjamin Stone, PhD, of Sigma Performance, will turn what you thought you knew about nutrition on upside down.

Stone has a master’s in nutritional biochemistry form Oxford and a doctorate’s in exercise physiology. He combined the two to form Sigma, and has since been working with some of the top athletes in the country, including those from the U.S. Ski Team and various members of the U.S. Triathlon Team.

“A very important takeaway is that people are not taught how to eat,” Stone said. “I can’t think of anything that will have greater fundamental changes on someone’s health or an athlete’s performance than the their source of fuel they use to do everything in their day.”

Athletes make food choices on a daily basis that can affect both health and performance. A well planned nutrition strategy that includes the careful timing and selection of appropriate foods and fluids helps to maximize training adaptations and, thus, should be an integral part of the athlete’s training programme. Factors that motivate food selection include taste, convenience, nutrition knowledge and beliefs. Food choice is also influenced by physiological, social, psychological and economic factors and varies both within and between individuals and populations. This review highlights the multidimensional nature of food choice and the depth of previous research investigating eating behaviours. Despite numerous studies with general populations, little exploration has been carried out with athletes, yet the energy demands of sport typically require individuals to make more frequent and/or appropriate food choices. While factors that are important to general populations also apply to athletes, it seems likely, given the competitive demands of sport, that performance would be an important factor influencing food choice. It is unclear if athletes place the same degree of importance on these factors or how food choice is influenced by involvement in sport. There is a clear need for further research exploring the food choice motives of athletes, preferably in conjunction with research investigating dietary intake to establish if intent translates into practice.

If you’re trying to lose weight, kick off your diet by relaxing. Stress tinkers with your brain chemistry in ways that make it hard to make healthful food choices and maintain self-control, a new study finds.

Study volunteers who endured a somewhat stressful experience were 24% more likely to choose unhealthful snacks afterward compared with volunteers who hadn’t experienced stress. And researchers think they know why: Brain scans showed that the stressed people had altered neurological connectivity between regions of the brain that process tastiness, make value judgments and plan for long-term goals.

In Part 1 of this series, we went over the bare bones of using R–loading data, pulling out different subsets, and doing basic statistical tests. This is all cool enough, but if you’re going to take the time to learn R, you’re probably looking for something… more out of your investment.

One of R’s greatest strengths as a programming language is how it’s both powerful and easy-to-use when it comes to data visualization and statistical analysis. Fortunately, both of these are things we’re fairly interested in. In this post, we’ll work through some of the basic ways of visualizing and analyzing data in R–and point you towards where you can learn more.

iological science these days is all about Big Data. Whether it’s in the form of DNA sequences, photomicrographs, or mass spectra, researchers increasingly need to collect, integrate, manipulate, and interpret enormous pools of information.

For many biologists, that can be pretty intimidating. Traditional training programs tend to focus on scientific fundamentals and experimentation, not computer programming and statistics. As a result, when many researchers find themselves confronted by massive data sets, they have no idea how to tackle them.