Applied Sports Science newsletter – September 11, 2015

Saturday’s game between Michigan State and Oregon packs as much pressure as college football can muster this time of year. There are several generations of Spartans fans who have never seen a matchup with as much at stake. The last time top-10 teams with national-title aspirations played here, in fact, was almost a half-century ago.

Michigan State’s players won’t have to worry about fried nerves, though. This is a team that has already survived what may be college football’s most stressful drill: public speaking.

Getting tired wasn’t the issue for Michigan State last year at Oregon. Getting run out of the building? The Spartans are still gasping.

“You start putting tempo in everything you do,” Michigan State strength coach Ken Mannie said of the game prep for Oregon on Saturday. “Not that it’s an everyday thing.”

… The one academy that is a constant, where young players really do have a chance of making it with their parent club or at another Premier League or top European club, is Arsenal.

Their academy is superb because the players are all trained to play the game in the right way, the Arsenal way, from day one to the day they leave. Because of that, they all have a chance of making it somewhere.

When kids step into the Arsenal team, they know that Wenger trusts them because he knows that they have been trained in the same way as the player they are replacing.

Three decades ago, neighborhood play was alive. Stickball, home run derby, touch football, and even street hockey were all synonymous with Americana, imbedded in the culture of both urban and suburban childhood. It was unsupervised daily activities like these that allowed children to establish the independence needed for enriched cognitive growth and social integration. They were a common language between neighbors that forged community and trust. And then they disappeared.

What happened? In order to better understand the current movement crisis, we must first look back in order to better understand the problem, so we can move forward with a purpose. Instead of asking why our children have become physically illiterate, we should be asking how this came to be. And that is a complex, multifactorial question to answer.

Researchers at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) are working toward a holy grail of sensor technology – non-invasive glucose testing. A team at the university’s Jacobs School of Engineering developed bio-compatible inks that react with several chemicals, including glucose, to create temporary sensors.

Glucose monitoring has become a favorite project among sensor and biotech researchers as the number of Type 2 diabetes diagnoses doubled between 1980 and 2011. San Francisco NPR affiliate KQED reported that the glucose self-monitoring market is currently worth $8 billion.

The very first demo on-stage at Apple’s special event yesterday was presented by AirStrip Technologies co-founders Dr. Cameron Powell and Trey Moore. Powell and Moore showed how a doctor could use her Apple Watch to remotely monitor her patients — in this case pregnant women in labor and delivery wards who are hooked up to fetal heart and contraction monitoring equipment. AirStrip also demo’d how its newest product, Sense4Baby, will be used in combination with the Apple Watch to allow physicians to interact with patients and to remotely review patient-conducted, at-home non-stress tests.

After years of using its digital health feedback system in clinical trials and studies, Proteus Digital Health, and partner Otsuka Pharmaceuticals, are poised to launch the first mass market drug to incorporate Proteus’s ingestible sensor. The companies have submitted a sensor-embedded version of the antidepressant Abilify for FDA approval.

… At the moment, the N.F.L. is being tightfisted with the data. Commentators will have access during games, as will the betting and analytics firm Sportradar. Users of the league’s Xbox One app, which provides an interactive way of browsing video clips, fantasy-football statistics, and other metrics, will be able to explore a feature called Next Gen Replay, which allows them to track each player’s speed and trajectory, combining moving lines on a virtual field with live footage from the real one. But, for now, coaches are shut out; once a player exits the locker room on game day, the dynamic point cloud that is generated by his movement through space is a corporately owned data set, as outlined in the league’s 2011 collective-bargaining agreement.

Some teams already use R.F.I.D. or an equivalent technology in training, and they find it frustrating, Stelfox told me, not to be able to have similar insight into what happens on game day. “It’s almost like doing all the work in college and then, after you take the test, the teacher says, ‘O.K., but I’m not going to tell you the result,’ ” she said. When that data does become available—and the N.F.L. Competition Committee is currently in discussions to approve data dissemination to teams—it is hard not to anticipate a “Moneyball”-style shift in how veteran players and college draftees are evaluated, from old-fashioned subjectivity to R.F.I.D.-enabled statistical detachment.

“I don’t think this chip technology is going to overnight revolutionize the game,” Collinsworth said. “But I do think that the coach that’s going to be the most influential in the N.F.L. in the future is going to be sitting in front of a computer for the better part of the day.”

Take Home Message: Only 55 to 66% of patients who were 3 to 24 months post anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) reconstruction perceived their symptoms following treatment as acceptable.

When we become overawed with stress, the common reaction is a sudden urge to eat food. The majority of the time, foods we consume in this situation will be the ‘convenience foods’ that are considered a quick fix to nullify stress. The theory of a quick fix is entirely false however, as these foods/drinks only make the problem worse. Consuming foods that are of a ‘junk’ nature actually increase the volume of stress on your body. This is because junk foods such as refined carbs cause an increase in your insulin levels which although will provide a short term rush, ultimately it will leaves you feeling worse off.

With this in mind, we’ve put together some top nutritional tips to give you the best chance of leaving those fatty/sugar loaded foods alone and help you to stay as stress free as possible!

Whether you are a budding college athlete or a weekend warrior whose competition days are but a fond memory, self-care is a vital part of anyone’s daily routine.

An often overlooked ingredient to a person’s overall well-being, said Dr. Brian Hainline, chief medical officer at the NCAA, is energy management.

“We always talk about time management, but I don’t buy that,” Hainline said while addressing an audience at the NCAA national office in Indianapolis in July 2015. “I think it’s all about energy management. Whether your workday spans two or 12 hours, it doesn’t matter. It’s really about how that day is focused and how you assess yourself.”

Background: The epidemiology of hamstring strains among student-athletes has been extensively researched. However, there is a paucity of recent data describing patterns of hamstring strains.

Purpose: To describe the epidemiology of hamstring strains in 25 National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) championship sports.

… Results: During the study period, 1142 hamstring strains were reported, leading to an injury rate of 3.05 per 10,000 athlete-exposures (AEs). Most hamstring strains occurred during practices (68.2%). However, the competition rate (5.24 per 10,000 AEs) was larger than the practice rate (2.56 per 10,000 AEs; RR = 2.05; 95% CI, 1.81-2.32). A slight majority occurred during the regular season (52.9%). However, the preseason rate (5.00 per 10,000 AEs) was larger than the regular season/postseason rate (2.34 per 10,000 AEs; RR = 2.14; 95% CI, 1.90-2.40). Men’s football, men’s soccer, and women’s soccer contributed the greatest proportion of hamstring strains (35.3%, 9.9%, and 8.3%, respectively). Most hamstring strains were due to noncontact (72.3%). Of all hamstring strains, 12.6% were recurrent, 37.7% resulted in a time loss of 3 weeks. Variations in hamstring strain patterns existed by sport. The hamstring strain rate was larger in men than in women in soccer (RR = 1.60; 95% CI, 1.22-2.11), baseball/softball (RR = 1.66; 95% CI, 1.07-2.59), and indoor track (RR = 1.88; 95% CI, 1.26-2.78). In addition, proportions of hamstring strains that were recurrent were higher among men in most sex-comparable sports, but this difference was not significant.

Conclusion: Hamstring strain rates were higher in the preseason and in competition. Student-athletes should be acclimatized to the rigors of preseason participation. Meanwhile, further surveillance should investigate the effectiveness of prospective prevention programs in an effort to reduce the prevalence of initial and recurrent hamstring strain injuries.

As Eric Tulsky tries to explain in layman’s terms what exactly he did in his previous line of work, it quickly becomes apparent that there won’t be anyone else quite like him in the Carolina Hurricanes’ front office this season.

The topics of conversation include the unique properties of cadmium selenide, solar panel production, surgical marking and “energy storage things that I can’t really talk about. My previous job was even more secretive than a pro sports franchise, so there’s only so much I can share,” he explains.

Tulsky, 40, is a Harvard- and Berkeley-educated chemist whose field up until two months ago was nanotechnology, which essentially means he’s an expert in the manipulation of matter on a molecular level. Now he’ll be trying to help an NHL team win hockey games.

If you’re about to dive into a piece of work that requires intense mental focus, you might find it helps to sit next to someone else who is concentrating hard. According to an ingenious new study published in Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, mental exertion is contagious: if a person near you is straining their synapses in mental effort, their mindset will automatically intensify your own concentration levels.