Applied Sports Science newsletter – August 21, 2015

Young retirees are handed a radar gun and sent on the road to assess the same players they were competing against a few months before.

When the University of Pittsburgh football team reported back to campus for the first day of fall camp, they were surprised to discover that they would be sharing their dormitory with a new roommate.

Their head coach.

“I feel like I’m back in college!” said Pat Narduzzi, the Panthers’ first-year coach, who has moved out of his six-bedroom home and into the dorm for the duration of preseason camp.

Luke Kuechly sits on the edge of a six-foot wide, two-foot deep metal tub filled with ice and water contemplating the shock his body is about to endure.

“Oh, I dread it every time,” Kuechly says with a grin.

But he gets in. He always gets in.

Vanderbilt coach Derek Mason vows to never have a two-hour practice again, and Monday’s first day in full pads was no exception.

A new high-tech approach to planning, analyzing and condensing practices has the Commodores fitting more work into less time.

… Anecdotal evidence suggests the Ducks’ dwindling reliance on two-a-days is part of a larger trend, as football coaches at all levels juggle growing concerns over players’ physical and mental health with the demands from longer seasons than ever.

At Big 12 media day in July, Dana Holgorsen told the Associated Press that he hasn’t conducted any two-a-days in his four seasons as West Virginia head coach. Arkansas coach Bret Bielema echoed that, saying that the Razorbacks also would not don full pads and hit twice in one day.

“We want that season to be special,” Bielema told ESPN. “We’ve got to make sure we’re fresh when we get there.”

… The Fighting Irish men’s soccer team worked their core every day under head coach Bobby Clark, and some days it took everything to fight through the darn things.

“There were many times when I was pretty tired and my abs were burning and I kinda wanted to cheat a little bit,” said Besler, the United States men’s national team veteran and Sporting Kansas City captain who played at Notre Dame between 2005-08.

“But I look over my shoulder and here’s this 65-year-old guy who’s like a rock, sitting there solid, whistling away.”

We are creatures of habit, nearly mindlessly executing routine after routine. Some habits we feel good about; others, less so. Habits are, after all, thought to be driven by reward-seeking mechanisms that are built into the brain. It turns out, however, that the brain’s habit-forming circuits may also be wired for efficiency.

New research from MIT shows that habit formation, at least in primates, is driven by neurons that represent the cost of a habit, as well as the reward. “The brain seems to be wired to seek some near optimality of cost and benefit,” says Ann Graybiel, an Institute Professor at MIT and also a member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research.

… Defence group BAE Systems, for example, is UK Sport’s official research and innovation partner on the road to next year’s Olympic and Paralympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

The group signed an £800,000 agreement in August 2013 to give 20 Olympic and Paralympic sports, including athletics, access to cutting-edge technology to apply scientific innovation to training, recovery, injury prevention and participation in competitions.

The issue of doping in sport has been widely discussed in recent weeks, but what exactly is it?

BBC Sport explains what it means, why it has become a hot topic, what the types of doping are and what is being done to tackle it.

In part one of this article series we examined the chemistry of sodium bicarbonate (NaHCO3) and the basis behind its effects on enhancing athletic performance. Now that the mind-numbing biochemistry is out of the way, let’s talk about timing and dosing, available commercial formulations, potential positive psychological effects, and the side effects of use. McNaughton, Dalton, Tarr and Buck published a paper in Sportscience, a peer-reviewed journal and website for sport research, titled Neutralize Acid to Enhance Performance . This article provides an excellent overview of NaHCO3 use to enhance athletic performance.

James Collins, head nutritionist at Arsenal and lead nutritionist for England at the last World Cup, tells Mark Bailey about the food that fuels Premier League footballers, from pre-match quinoa porridge to post-match sashimi.

A cache of leaked blood tests showed hundreds of track athletes have recorded results “suggestive of doping.” With the 2015 world track championships about to start, a look at why anti-doping tests are so ineffective.

It’s game, set-piece and match to Danish champions Midtjylland, who take statistics very seriously and are hoping they can help them take down Southampton…

“You won’t find another club in the world like Midtjylland,” says former manager, Glen Riddersholm. And indeed, the club from the middle of nowhere – well, the middle of Denmark – are extraordinary in many ways. Plus they have the numbers to prove it.

In 2013 Jeff Zimmerman published a fascinating article that found current players are peaking earlier than in prior eras, and players in the “steroid era” declined more slowly than in prior eras. Ever since I read Jeff’s piece I have wondered how the ebb and flow of the overall talent level in the majors might confound aging analyses.

The bumper crop of rookie stars in 2015 certainly has been a topic of discussion, and I hear those Mike Trout and Bryce Harper fellows are still pretty good. Is this much young talent historically unusual, and if so, is it possibly causing other players to appear to decline faster?

But it’s not just young players thriving in unprecedented quantity and magnitude. There also has been an influx of international veterans in recent years, and many have succeeded in the majors immediately. Is that having an effect on aging calculations? Conversely, in periods of expansion, is it possible talent didn’t keep up with the sudden increase in available roster slots?