Applied Sports Science newsletter – August 20, 2015

… “I’ve seen multiple mental coaches,” said Day. “But the biggest thing that prepares you for something like this is the sheer experience of failure.

“Looking at it as a positive and knowing you can learn from anything – that really gets you mentally tough.”

Coming off a season in which star after star was lost to serious injury, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver and NBA Players’ Association executive director Michele Roberts have made player health one of the top priorities to address this offseason.

With that in mind, the union hired Joe Rogowski, a former athletic trainer and strength and conditioning coach with the Orlando Magic and the Houston Rockets, as the director of sports medicine and research. The certified athletic trainer with a master’s degree in exercise physiology from Central Florid is tasked with developing programs and coordinating best practices to try to limit the number of games lost to injury.

About six weeks after taking the position, Rogowski spoke with The AP about making the transition from hands-on work with 15 players to helping an entire league.

Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger is worried a generation of young English talent could be lost if they have no hope of progression from Premier League clubs’ academies.

Football Association chief executive Martin Glenn earlier this week warned home-grown players were falling into a “black hole” because of the number of foreigners in the top flight.

Led by Bolt and Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, Jamaica is once more tipped to be the sprint team to beat at the athletics world championships in Beijing this weekend. Is the Caribbean island’s fiercely competitive school sports system responsible?

In soccer, perhaps more than in any other major sport, the potential for greatness can be recognized from a very young age. Not every wunderkind goes on to become a superstar but most every superstar bore the expectations of future excellence from as far back as their early teen years.

A player on the track to stardom, then, has plenty of time to dream about his career trajectory. Maybe he hopes to star for his hometown club at a precociously young age, then to move on to something bigger to establish his game at a higher level, before finally reaching the pinnacle of the sport by playing for Real Madrid. Maybe he expects to so impress the soccer world at his first club that he can jump straight from there to Bayern Munich. Maybe he was able to wow scouts as a teen and has already been brought into Barcelona’s youth setup, where he plans to spend the rest of his career as a local, homegrown legend.

The specific journey may vary, the destination is almost always the same, but what some players lucky enough to see their fantasy become reality fail to realize is that when you get to Bayern or Barça or Madrid can be as important as whether you make it at all.

It has been a triumphal summer for women’s soccer in the United States. Although the U.S. Women’s National Team began their march through the 2015 World Cup field somewhat haltingly, with narrow wins during the group stage over teams that they were expected to thump, they rapidly gained confidence, cohesion and dominance.

By the championship game against Japan, the U.S. women were unstoppable. They overpowered Japan’s defense and poured in five goals, one of which, a thundering half-field smash by the midfielder Carli Lloyd, would have made the highlight reel of any men’s team.

And they weren’t done. They out-ran and out-muscled the Japanese squad throughout the full 90-plus minutes of play.

If you while away time in a games arcade – play some coin pushers here, a few fruit machines there – you will soon be familiar with that frustrating and enlivening sensation of the near win that follows getting four cherries out of five. New research from INSEAD suggests that these tantalising near wins produce high levels of motivational arousal, that encourage us to chase whatever alternative rewards are then available.

At the beginning of the 2013/2014 season in England and Wales, 90 head coaches of the 92 men’s national professional football league clubs and 20 of the 22 men’s professional rugby union clubs had tenure as a professional elite player in their respective sports. Moreover, Rynne [(2014). ‘Fast track’ and ‘traditional path’ coaches: Affordances, agency and social capital. Sport, Education and Society, 19, 299–313] has claimed that many former elite athletes are ‘fast-tracked’ through formal accreditation structures into these high-performance coaching roles. The reasons why former elite athletes dominate head coaching roles in professional sports clubs and why a ‘fast-track’ pathway from elite athlete to high-performance coach is supported remain unclear. Thereby the present study sought to address this issue by investigating the basis for ‘fast-tracked’ head coaching appointments. Eight male directors of men’s professional football and rugby union clubs in England were interviewed to examine how particular coaching skills and sources of knowledge were valorised. Drawing upon Bourdieu’s conceptual framework, the results suggested that head coaching appointments were often based upon the perceived ability of head coaches gaining player ‘respect’. Experiences gained during earlier athletic careers were assumed to provide head coaches with the ability to develop practical sense and an elite sporting habitus commensurate with the requirements of the field of elite sports coaching. This included leadership and practical coaching skills to develop technical and tactical astuteness, from which, ‘respect’ could be quickly gained and maintained. The development of coaching skills was rarely associated with only formal coaching qualifications. The ‘fast-tracking’ of former athletes for high-performance coaching roles was promoted by directors to ensure the perpetuation of specific playing and coaching philosophies. Consequently, this may exclude groups from coaching roles in elite men’s sport. The paper concludes by outlining how these findings might imply a disjuncture between the skills promoted during formal coaching qualifications and the expectations club directors have of elite coaches in these sports.

Scientists from the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) have invented a colour-changing helmet material that could help to detect concussions and brain trauma much more effectively. The material is a self-assembling polymer made from photonic crystals that changes to different colours depending on the speed and the amount of force that hits it.

When the material is hit by 30 milliNewtons of force – equivalent to a car hitting a brick wall at 80mph – the material turns from red to green, while a force of 90 milliNewtons – equivalent to a truck running into a wall at 80mph – causes it to turn purple.

… By squeezing and compacting the flesh of your arms, legs, or torso, these garments supposedly increase blood circulation, which helps deliver more oxygen to your muscles while speeding the removal of acids and the other byproducts of physical activity. There are other purported mechanisms of action, all of which supercharge performance while speeding recovery. That’s the theory, at least. The only thing missing is the proof.

“So far there is little evidence to suggest that wearing compression garments during an event can improve performance,” says Dr. Mike Hamlin, an associate professor of exercise and sports science at New Zealand’s Lincoln University.

The University of Colorado and Boulder Community Health announce today’s opening of the CU Sports Medicine and Performance Center on the Boulder campus.

The state-of-the-art facility in the new Champions Center at Folsom Field will enable the University of Colorado School of Medicine and Boulder Community Health – longtime partners on community health issues – to provide people across the Front Range and beyond with unprecedented access to world-class sports medicine and performance improvement services.

… The struggle to heal this injury is to ensure that good nutrition races to the injury site, while ensuring that toxins are eliminated.   That’s sports medicine.  That’s sports science.  That’s the brainchild of Dr. David T. Martin.

So what?  Well, research on slow healing bone fractures have shown remarkable improvement with a strict regiment of diet, fluid, supplements, and where appropriate, exercise.   Diet ensures a good healthy and stress free body.  Fluids ensure good blood flow and effective kidney functions.  Supplements ensure the injured area is getting a supercharged blood stream loaded with the building blocks needed to repair the  fracture quickly.  And finally appropriate exercise ensures that the blood is flowing to nourish the site.

Trail Blazers GM Neil Olshey sent off several veterans this summer from a team that was essentially middle-of-the-pack in terms of pace last year. With an entirely new rotation littered with young talent, Portland should be able to out-gun plenty of teams. But just how fast are these guys?

Back in the third grade, I did not like math. It was boring! It was hard! Why did I have to memorize the times tables, anyway?

Did this mean I would have trouble with math for the rest of my life, or would I get over my eight-year-old’s funk and end up being good at it? At the time, there was no way to know. But now, in a longitudinal study published today in The Journal of Neuroscience, a team of Stanford researchers show that scans of third graders’ brains forecast which children will eventually do well in math and which of them will continue to struggle.