Applied Sports Science newsletter – August 10, 2015

… Wenger believes West Ham’s superior fitness due to their Europa League participation was key.

He said: “We were not convincing offensively or defensively. I knew it could be a tricky game, if you can’t win the game, make sure you don’t lose it.

While heart rate (HR) is often used to control exercise intensity during high-intensity interval training (HIT), this approach has several limitations, including the difficulty for practitioners to regulate running intensity. To overcome these limitations, using the speed reached at the end of the 30-15 Intermittent Fitness Test (VIFT) as the reference for running intensity has been suggested. The aim of the present study was to compare the effect of HR- vs. VIFT-based HIT on high-intensity intermittent running performance in young soccer players. Twenty two soccer players (15.12 ± 0.5 yrs) were divided in two different experimental groups including HR-based (n=10) or VIFT-based (n=12) HIT during their preseason preparation. The VIFT-based HIT group performed a 30-15 Intermittent Fitness Test before the intervention to detect player’s VIFT. All players performed a Yo-Yo Intermittent Recovery Test level 1 (YYIRT1) before and after the intervention. All players underwent the same conditioning and technical/tactical training programs for 4-5 weeks, except the method of individualizing soccer-specific HIT sessions with the ball (2 sessions of HIT=3 sets of 3:30 min): either according to 90-95% of maximal HR, or 65-70% VIFT. We then compared the between-group differences in weekly improvement in YYIRT1 using magnitude-based inferences. VIFT-based HIT produced likely greater weekly improvement in YYIRT1performance than HR-based HIT (+86%, 90%CL (1.5- 240%); standardized difference: +0.7(0.02- 1.40), chances for greater/similar/lower values of 95/4/1). Using VIFT as a reference speed for HIT programming may elicit greater high-intensity intermittent running performance improvements than using percentages of maximal HR in young soccer players.

AFC Bournemouth’s seemingly perennial struggle between life and death was once the annual focus of a small band of hard-core supporters at the traditional pre-season fans’ forum. It goes without saying that the mood at Monday night’s event was anything but morbid. The evening sold out within three hours, began with terrace-like chants of “Eddie, Eddie” as manager Eddie Howe entered the club’s Balfour Suite and ended with a genuinely spine-tingling message of thanks from a fan who had been a Dean Court regular since 1957. He grasped the microphone, simply said “Thank you” on behalf of the town and told Howe that his team had “made my life”.

The Premier League has had its moments of extraordinary drama, excellence and controversy since its inception in 1992 but it is hard to think of anything more romantic than what has unfolded down in Dorset. It is why Bournemouth will be the favourite club of just about every neutral this season and why Richard Scudamore, the League’s executive chairman, will not be at Old Trafford or Stamford Bridge today but on the south coast at his competition’s smallest stadium. The fairy-tale narrative is now well rehearsed but, ahead of the club’s first Premier League fixture later today, it is still worth pausing for a moment fully to digest the scale of their achievement.

From smoking to petty jealousy, we can all behave in ways we know are bad for us. Author Michael Singer shares his tips for letting go.

Based at the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS), the National Lead Sport Biomechanics is a new exciting role supporting ‘Australia’s Winning Edge’ strategy. The role will lead a national network of sport biomechanists to deliver quality assured services to Australian athletes training for the Olympic Games. This includes managing 6 AIS employed biomechanists and networking with state employed biomechanists across Australia. Developing and implementing high quality service and technical standards with consensus across Australia and collaborating with the academic sector to facilitate R&D initiatives and outcomes are key features of the role.L

The managerial feedback was excellent — crisp, clear, and constructive. Its tone was caring, compassionate, and compelling. Each criticism was consequently heard, acknowledged, and understood. Message received; next steps agreed. A potentially awkward and painful conversation became a bonding experience. It was a best-case scenario.

Fifty days later, alas, nothing substantive had changed. A quick fortnight of self-awareness yielded to “business-as-usual.” It was as if that open and honest exchange had never taken place.

Sound familiar? People understandably invest significant time and care trying to get better at giving feedback that matters. Unfortunately, those investments typically underperform. The reasons are simple and obvious: The true purpose of better feedback is not to improve receptivity or enhance understanding but to effect measurable change.

With another Premier League season about to kick off, Swansea City FC players have been undergoing fitness testing at Swansea University’s sports village, to make sure they are in the best possible shape. They’ve been working alongside our Elite and Professional Sports (EPS) research group, who are amongst the UK’s leading experts in the field.

Wearable technologies and big-data analytics are enabling coaches, trainers and general managers to analyze previously unquantifiable aspects of athletic performance in fine detail. But as more technology gets strapped on to professional athletes, some are beginning to express concern over how such devices could be used to track their diet, sleep patterns and life off the field.

“The pros have to be careful,” said Brian Bulcke, a defensive lineman in the Canadian Football League. “They’re working in a very small cluster of highly competitive people, they’re highly monitored and highly scrutinized.”

As technology continues to penetrate arenas, training facilities and even the daily lives of athletes, Bulcke anticipates a continued debate over the role of such innovations in sports moving forward.

A lot of press concerning athletes and their sleep coaches over the past few months makes me wonder if anyone is going to talk about the underlying problems with elite sport. The general public gravitates to professional athletes, and unfortunately assumes if an elite talent or team is doing something, it will also work for them. The truth is hard to swallow, but sleep tracking is a starting place, not an end game for those looking to improve overall human performance—be it an average Joe or Jane wanting to feel better the next day or someone training for the 2016 Olympics. Instead of the vague overview of superficial information anyone can get, this blog will tackle the reality of the new challenges of getting better shuteye that few readers even know about. … The dirty secret is that poor sleep is a symptom of something more systemic, usually an inability to manage stress that is sabotaging the body. Real problems—emotional, financial, or overall workload—present issues that must be solved. If not, you are simply putting a digital Band-Aid on your body and hoping the numbers get better.

Polar has confirmed it is working on a new low-price fitness wearable, with a built-in optical heart rate monitor, aimed at gym goers.

Speaking exclusively to Wareable, Polar’s UK MD Malcolm Douglas said the company’s fitness trackers will finally join the optical heart rate (OHR) trend, but that accuracy remains paramount to the product. The new products will be aimed at consumers rather than elite athletes.

Since the Jets drafted him with the fourth overall pick of the 2006 NFL Draft, D’Brickashaw Ferguson hasn’t missed a snap for the team, starting in 144 straight games at left tackle.

Part of that success stems from his diet. After struggling to eat well at the University of Virginia, Ferguson figured out a formula to maintain his playing weight of 305 pounds in the NFL. It involves a giant breakfast, a relatively small lunch and dinner, several protein drinks throughout the day—and a piece of coffee cake.

In an effort to understand how an NFL player eats his way into playing shape during training camp, we asked Ferguson and a nutrition specialist, Luke Corey of the Mayo Clinic, to analyze his diet.

Here’s a quick look at a recent study of ours in press with the Journal of Sports Science and Medicine. We’ve shown previously that lnRMSSD can be validly assessed in 60-s from an isolated measure in a variety of athletes, but in this paper we demonstrate that 60-s measures are capable of tracking lnRMSSD changes in elite athletes.

… In the context of monitoring fatigue or training status in athletes, a common belief is that high HRV is good and low HRV is bad. Or, in terms of observing the overall trend, increasing HRV trends are good, indicative of positive adaptation or increases in fitness. Decreasing trends are bad, indicative of fatigue accumulation or “overtraining” and performance decrements. In this article I address the common notions of both acute and longitudinal trend interpretation, and discuss why and when these interpretations may or may not be appropriate. We will briefly explore where these common interpretations or “rules” have come from within the literature, and then discuss some exceptions to these rules.

This article will mostly focus on the log-transformed root mean square of successive R-R interval differences (lnRMSSD), which is the vagal-HRV index used in popular smartphone apps. For several important reasons lnRMSSD appears to be the preferred HRV parameter for athlete monitoring.

“When you think of Harvard the first thing that comes to mind usually isn’t sports,” said Harvard junior Kurt Bullard. And of course he’s right, historically speaking. Of all the historic achievements that the prestigious Cambridge university has made through the decades, comparatively few of them have pertained to athletics.

Yet Bullard has a unique vantage point of a place that’s helping to alter that perception. As a member of the Harvard Sports Analytics Collective (HSAC), he’s part of the latest generation of students to help blur the lines between academic study and sports analysis.

In a recent interview, BostInno was able to catch up with three members of HSAC. Bullard, the collective’s treasurer, was joined by co-president Harrison Chase and president emeritus, Henry Johnson.