Applied Sports Science newsletter – August 7, 2015

Given his five national outdoor titles in the 800 meters, perhaps nobody should have counted Nick Symmonds out of contention at the USA Track & Field Outdoor Championships in June. But the usual signs and signals of a forthcoming breakthrough weren’t there—not leading up to the meet and, really, not even for the first 650 meters of the 800-meter final.

Then, in signature Symmonds style, he came from behind in the final kick to claim his sixth title in a time of 1:44.53 and earn a spot on the world championship team heading to Beijing later this month. He came into the meet ranked 14th and left with a win.

The mystery of DeMarco Murray’s absence from Sunday’s first training camp practice was explained Tuesday by coach Chip Kelly.

Two words: sports science.

“That was our decision,” Kelly said. “We do a hydration status test and he was a little bit high. When we see guys that are high from a hydration standpoint, then you kind of pull them back a little bit because that’s when they’re susceptible from an injury standpoint.”

The first signs of how difficult 2014 would be for Vikings left tackle Matt Kalil came in training camp. Kalil headed to practice each day knowing he wouldn’t be able to do much more than try to maintain his skills. His health wasn’t going to permit extra work, and Kalil wasn’t sure if he’d be able to trust his knees fully in games.

After a pair of knee surgeries this past spring, this training camp is already a different story. Kalil is doing extra footwork drills with Vikings coaches during practices. He’s got time to click with Brandon Fusco after the former right guard moved to Kalil’s side of the line. And his health, Kalil says, is no longer the first thing on his mind.

In case there was any doubt, Katie Ledecky made it official Wednesday: She is the new queen of swimming.

Coming from behind in the final stretch, Ledecky out-touched Federica Pellegrini of Italy and American star Missy Franklin to take the 200-meter freestyle at the FINA World Championships in 155.16. The win completed a remarkable 24 hours for the 18-year-old Ledecky, who broke her own world record and won the gold medal in the 1,500 Tuesday night, then came back 29 minutes later to qualify for Wednesday’s 200 final.

Wednesday’s victory gave her a third gold medal of the meet, with a fourth one in the 800 freestyle all but guaranteed later this week, given her domination of the event. If she wins that race, Ledecky would become the first swimmer–male or female–to sweep every freestyle distance from 200 to 1,500 meters at a world championship, an exhibition of freakish versatility.

… Desynchronosis, or more colloquially, jet lag, is a physiological condition that occurs when the body’s natural circadian rhythm is out of sync with the time zone it is in. Anyone who has travelled across time zones has felt the effects of being unable to sleep at night while struggling to stay awake during the day. Now imagine having to train like an elite athlete for a game in hostile territory in a few days’ time.

“The biggest challenge with jet lag and resynchronisation is with training, as the intensity of performance is significantly reduced,” says Dr Jason Suter, the Medical Director at the Western Province Rugby Union. “As a coach, you have to manage the loads to protect your players because they are subpar.” As a result of irregular sleeping patterns and the difficulty of staying awake, training hours are lost. That time could have been spent on conditioning, skills acquisition, and team cohesion.

“What we’ve started doing is trying to take that traditional 10 day resynchronisation period and halving it,” adds Suter. “An important part of that is improving the sleep hygiene of the players as sleep is often ignored but has a major impact on recovery and performance.”

Doing frequent 5Ks or 10Ks is one way to find out if you’ve gained run speed, but because of the inconvenient weekend timing—hey, we have to get on our bikes after all—cost and recovery needed, it’s not a realistic gauge during triathlon season.

By using a consistent, quantifiable test that doesn’t take long to recover from, you’ll have a more accurate measure of progress, plus a more realistic vision of your real race pace. “Age-group athletes often have a false impression of their racing fitness because they measure it based on volume, or speeds in fractionalized (interval) workouts,” says Bobby McGee, an acclaimed triathlon and running coach who has assisted athletes in every Olympic Games since 1998. “Then they’re perplexed when they blow up in races at these incorrectly determined paces.”

If you like bromides about persistency, or if you savor the common-sense logic known as the 10,000-hour rule, you’ll love this quote from Bruce Lee: “I don’t fear the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks. I fear the man who practiced one kick 10,000 times.”

In other words, focused repetition and practice are crucial to the art of kicking ass–in case you didn’t know.

Mental toughness can be viewed as aggression or an unwavering ability to endure or the ability to perform at your best when the stakes are very high. These are all good examples of mental toughness but a closer look would likely reveal that these are all rooted in the ability to achieve a deep state of presence.

To be entirely engaged in the present moment is something that is very difficult to achieve. Humans are both blessed and cursed with a brain that not only thinks but can also be entirely aware of the fact that it is thinking. More often than not, thought takes you everywhere but the present moment. This is exacerbated when you feel pressure or nervousness or anxiety, which is ever-present leading into and during competition. Our thoughts will take us everywhere but the present moment because we like to obsess, rehearse, deliberate and worry about what’s coming or what happened. The problem is that the present is where you need to be if you want to perform at your best.

… We’ve all heard it before: hip structures are different so therefore you have to squat differently than someone next to you. This should be pretty common sense, especially when dealing with as broad of a population as there is in the world. What would be a bang-up fantastic recommendation for one individual may be beyond the realm of possibility for someone else, and still so incredibly rudimentary for another person.

From the sideline of every Cardinals training camp practice, a member of the team’s strength and conditioning staff monitors the endurance and effort of players, just as coaches have done since football was invented.

Only this assistant isn’t watching the action on the field.

Instead, he stares at a laptop screen filled with data provided by tracking devices worn by players.

… At the top-level, coaches have to factor in players being involved in international tournaments during the summer. It’s the nature of the game. In reality players will probably have between two and four weeks off. From a physiological point of view they are unlikely to decondition significantly from a strength perspective, there is however an immediate decrease in cardio-vascular fitness. It is important for coaches to consider how to integrate the player back into training with the rest of the group. Usually this means a modified programme and extra time with the backroom staff. There will be progressive exercises and they will be monitored with heart rate variability (HRV) technology to see if there are any warning signs.

With that in mind, each player’s response to training must be monitored, and training sessions adjusted accordingly. Using HRV at this point in the season is perhaps more crucial than at any other time. An important role for the coaching staff during pre-season is in the handling of “unfit” players.

In Jay Blahnik’s first extended interview since Apple hired him to help launch the Watch, the company’s director of fitness for health technologies insists activity tracking is overemphasized, elite athletes have a sitting problem, and the real breakthrough apps for the device will probably be created outside of Cupertino.

When the NFL kicks off its season in September, a few female athletic trainers will be on the sidelines.

But for many years, there was just one, and she was from the University of Wisconsin.

Sonia Gysland, hired by the Pittsburgh Steelers in 2011, made sure her gender was not nearly as important to her as how she did her job.

Stony Brook researchers publish experimental findings in the Journal of Neuroscience that show the lateral position more efficiently rids the brain of solutes that may contribute to disease
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The brain’s glymphatic pathway clears harmful wastes, especially during sleep. This lateral position could prove to be the best position for the brain-waste clearance process.