Applied Sports Science newsletter – September 24, 2015

If you ever wondered why Premier League managers make changes for the League Cup then look no further than John Stones.

Look at the scare the 21-year-old defender handed Everton last night at the Madejski Stadium.

The Blues squeezed into the fourth round of the Capital One Cup but the sight of Stones limping off with a knee injury, early in the second-half, tempered any celebrations.

… What is your general philosophy on strength training for footballers?

I feel that strength is such an under rated part of a player’s physical preparation. I think there is a common misconception that strength training causes injury and/or slows players down. But for me it is a key component of fitness that underpins the development of all other aspects of fitness, as well as being an important element of injury prevention. It should also form part of training and development for young players, with the introduction of specific movement patterns and body weight exercises to develop good technique, which can form the foundation for better strength gains as players mature physically. For female players especially regular strength training, with good technique, should form the basis of injury prevention strategies.

SPAIN, GERMANY AND BELGIUM are countries that the rest of the world have looked to regarding the production of players in recent years. Iceland, however, has started to make similar waves in their pool of players plying their trade abroad, if only with their Scandinavian neighbours in the short-term.

The education of coaches is one of the key aspects in the development of Icelandic football in recent years. KSÍ, the Icelandic Football Association, began to overhaul its system in 2002 – and its outlook today is vastly different to what it was prior to their now-heralded revolution.

Using endurance training or strength and resistance training not only prepares an athlete for different types of sports, they can also change the way the brain and muscles communicate with each other.

A University of Kansas study shows that the communication between the brain and quadriceps muscles of people who take part in endurance training, such as running long distances, is different than those who regularly took part in resistance training and those who were sedentary. The findings may offer clues to the type of physical activity humans are most naturally suited to.

It’s time to help some coaches understand the title to this blog, sung of course to the tune of “It’s all about the Bass…” The principle of specificity says, “You must PRACTICE that which you want to DO, ” and that “What you SEE determines HOW you move…” There are millions of methods that do not follow that principle, and more often than not, these methods also fail the principle of learning by doing.

We learn by doing. Primarily. Always. We are hard-wired to MOVE and learn as we move. Do we learn by watching? Of course, but only a little in regard to motor learning – that of getting a new idea, or mirroring. That might only take one view, or ”a-ha!” moment. Then you must DO it. What exasperates me is how many drills have kids standing in line. The reason for small sided games is that the kids are DOING. Every coach in every sport needs to take time to look at their practices and ponder – how can I get more reps in this same amount of time; how do I limit having athletes standing in a line?

Background Adolescent female football and handball players are among the athletes with the highest risk of sustaining anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries.

Aim</b. This study evaluated the effects of evidence-based lower extremity injury prevention training on neuromuscular and biomechanical risk factors for non-contact ACL injury.

Methods 40 adolescent female football and handball players (15–16?years) were randomly allocated to a control group (CON, n=20) or neuromuscular training group (NMT, n=20). The NMT group performed an injury prevention programme as a warm-up before their usual training 3 times weekly for 12?weeks. The CON group completed their regular warm-up exercise programme before training. Players were tested while performing a side cutting movement at baseline and 12-week follow-up, using surface electromyography (EMG) and three-dimensional movement analysis. We calculated: (1) EMG amplitude from vastus lateralis (VL), semitendinosus (ST) and biceps femoris 10?ms prior to initial contact (IC) normalised to peak EMG amplitude recorded during maximal voluntary isometric contraction and (2) VL-ST EMG preactivity difference during the 10?ms prior to foot contact (primary outcome). We measured maximal knee joint valgus moment and knee valgus angle at IC.

Results There was a difference between groups at follow-up in VL-ST preactivity (43% between-group difference; 95% CI 32% to 55%). No between-group differences were observed for kinematic and kinetic variables.

Conclusions A 12-week injury prevention programme in addition to training and match play in adolescent females altered the pattern of agonist-antagonist muscle preactivity during side cutting. This may represent a more ACL-protective motor strategy.

… When training camp shifted back home from Halifax, the balcony was occupied by a laptop and some high-tech equipment designed to give the organization an entirely different view of what is happening on the ice.

The Leafs are one of the NHL’s early adopters of the Catapult Sports tracking technology, which sees GPS units placed inside or below shoulder pads that transmit approximately 300 pieces of data per second — per player — in real time.

For Australian start-up SMG Technologies, elite sports has proved a perfect testing ground for its predictive analytics platform SportsMed, adopted by some of the biggest teams and athletes in the world, from West Ham United FC in the Premier League to Super Rugby’s Queensland Reds.

The thing people miss about this bizarre free-for-all over Matt Harvey’s innings between Harvey, the Mets, Scott Boras and Sandy Alderson is that it isn’t really about the pitcher’s health. Oh, sure, on the surface the whole mess is about how to keep pitchers healthy in 2015, but the trouble is: When it comes to health, everybody’s guessing. Nobody knows.

Harvey’s agent, Boras, citing doctors, says that because Harvey is coming off Tommy John surgery, he absolutely should not pitch more than 178 innings he pitched in 2013 or he will be putting his arm in very real danger.

Might be true. But they don’t know if that’s true.

Want to mend your chocolate ankle, but don’t know how? FFT goes to St George’s Park to find out how the best bounce back.

When your body is under a lot of stress, especially if you’re training hard for a race, you can experience chronic inflammation. Inflammation can hinder your performance, increase your risk of injury, and make you more fatigued.

Research suggests that a diet rich in both antioxidants and fibre can reduce inflammation.“By incorporating more anti-inflammatory foods in your diet, you’ll help maximise immunity and fuel working muscles,” explains Sports Dietitian Teri Lichtenstein.

Purpose: The aim of this study was to identify contributing factors to the incidence of illness for professional team-sport athletes, utilizing training load (TL), self-reported illness and wellbeing data. Methods: Thirty-two professional rugby league players (26.0 ± 4.8 yr; 99.1 ± 9.6 kg; 1.84 ± 0.06 m) were recruited from the same club. Players participated in prescribed training and responded to a series of questionnaires to determine the presence of self-reported illness and markers of wellbeing. Internal-TL was determined using the session rating of perceived exertion (sRPE) method. These data were collected over 29 weeks, across the preparatory and competition macrocycles. Results: The predictive models developed recognized increases in internal-TL (strain values of >2282 AU, weekly-TL >2786 AU and monotony >0.78 AU) to best predict when athletes are at increased risk of self-reported illness. In addition, a reduction in overall wellbeing (<7.25 AU) in the presence of increased internal-TL as previously stated, was highlighted as a contributor to self-reported illness occurrence. Conclusions: These results indicate that self-report data can be successfully utilized to provide a novel understanding of the interactions between competition-associated stressors experienced by professional team-sport athletes and their susceptibility to illness. This may assist coaching staff to more effectively monitor players during the season and to potentially implement preventative measures to reduce the likelihood of illnesses occurring.

… For all of football’s tactical and technical innovation, pace remains the great leveller. Fans are roused by it while defenders are supposedly terrified of it, leading to their own dedicated sub-section of phrases to describe its effect on them. Pace gives them a torrid time; it roasts them, turns them inside out, destroys them and worst of all, it exposes them.

The only time such a simple concept becomes a little confusing is when players are deemed to have “real” or “genuine” pace. They seem like unnecessary qualifiers but serve to distinguish these players from the Mesut Ozils and Dimitar Berbatovs of this world, whose pace is described as “deceptive.” That only adds to the general distrust of players who don’t obviously have jets for heels.

Identifying future NHLers is critical to building a successful NHL team. However, with a global talent pool that spans dozens of leagues worldwide, drafting is also one of the most challenging aspects of managing an NHL team. In the past, teams have relied heavily on their scouts, hoping to eek out a competitive advantaging by employing those who can see what other scouts miss. Quite a challenge for many scouts that may only be able to watch a prospect a handful of times in a season. While there has been some progress in the past few years with teams incorporating data into their overall decision making, from the outside, the incorporation of data driven decision making in prospect evaluation has been minimal.

To address this, Josh Weissbock and myself have developed a tool for evaluating prospect potential which we call Prospect Cohort Success (PCS), with the help of others in the analytics community including Hockey Graphs Supreme Leader, Garret Hohl.