Applied Sports Science newsletter – September 28, 2015

The procedure that Dallas Mavericks forward Chandler Parsons had on his right knee on May 1 was a “minor hybrid” microfracture operation, according to sources.

Parsons, who averaged 15.7 points per game in his first campaign with the Mavs last season, has not been fully cleared for the beginning of training camp but remains optimistic that he will be able to play in the Mavs’ Oct. 28 season opener.

… “I want to make sure I’m not swaying forward and backwards and up and down too much,” Votto said about the mechanics of his swing. “I’d rather move up and down than forwards and backwards. My April and May video you’ll see a lot of swaying because I wasn’t bracing with my back leg enough, part of the process of trusting my leg again. When I moved along, I was moving less forward and backwards and more up and down. If you look at Miguel Cabrera, Bryce Harper, those guys are picture perfect when it comes to their ability to slightly load back but also sit down and load into their body, and you can see this coiling action, and then to brace against it and turn the bat through, that’s what I try to do.”

The body is the engine of age. That hurt knee counts, since injuries happen more with age, but players also generally get bigger and slower as they age. And hitters that show some speed age better than others.

Zlatan Ibrahimovic has been one of the most successful soccer players of the last decade. He’s won league titles with six different teams in four different countries and scored 340 club goals at the time of writing, as well as 56 for his country. The Swedish striker is also a Taekwondo black belt and many believe it is his martial arts background which allows him to score spectacular goals with such remarkable consistency.

The NBA Champion Golden State Warriors announced the addition of three new members of the team’s physical performance and sports medicine staff, adding Chelsea Lane as head performance therapist, Michael Irr as performance coach and therapist, and Kurtis Rayfield as physical performance coach. The new additions join Warriors Head of Physical Performance and Sports Medicine Lachlan Penfold and Athletic Trainer Drew Yoder.

The concept of marginal gains was first born when Sir David Brailsford took over at UK Cycling in 2003. It makes the assumption that the athletes they work with are at a point where they are pushing their training capacity and natural talent to almost their max. Subsequently it then requires the coaches and practitioners to assess how they can improve their area of expertise in the sport by another 1% and thereby the total sum of all areas increases the overall performance of the participant. The supposition being that the marginal gains will lead to an improvement that, in theory, should give them the edge over their rivals. The areas that are assessed for improvement can include but are not limited to: nutrition, video analysis, physiology, biomechanics, technology and psychology.
…
Many football clubs in the UK have tried to employ this concept as it has become the new buzzword within sports science but the concept is flawed when applied in the “football sporting” domain.

… Our brains seem to lose the ability to distinguish between the innocuous and emotional in such circumstances, turning us into overreacting, exhausted wrecks.

We all know that a good night’s sleep is vital for a day of clear thinking, but exactly why sleep is so important remains a mystery. Talma Hendler of Tel Aviv University in Israel is particularly interested in how lack of sleep leaves us with a short emotional fuse. “We know that sleep affects our emotional behaviour, but we don’t know how,” she says.

With players far more used to mid-afternoon kick-offs in the Aviva Premiership, England’s nutritionists and conditioning staff have specially tailored training and meal times to ensure Stuart Lancaster’s men are in peak condition for 8pm World Cup duty.

Nutrition, hydration and rest are vital — too much or too little can negatively affect performance and with such a small gap in ability between the top rugby nations, getting preparation spot on can be the difference between winning and losing.

Here we look at how England’s players will prepare for Saturday’s Twickenham showdown with Wales.

When it comes to kids, growth mindset is a hot topic in education. Studies indicate that children who view intelligence as pliable and responsive to effort show greater persistence when encountering new or difficult tasks. In contrast, children who view intelligence as static or “fixed” have a harder time rebounding from academic setbacks or are reluctant to take on new challenges that might be difficult.

Students are not the only ones encountering new challenges at school: Teachers face an evolving profession, driven in part by technology and a rapidly changing economy.

The entrepreneur is one of the archetypes of our age, defined above all – if countless commencement speeches and hagiographies are anything to go by – by the passion they hold for their business, allowing them to devote so much to it. New research by Michael Gielnik and colleagues published in the Academy of Management Journal suggests this common belief has things backwards: in fact entrepreneurs get passionate because they get stuck in.

In the quest to get the ball well and truly over the line (and far beyond the fretting of the TMO), elite sports teams like those competing in the Rugby World Cup rely on more than the skill and strength of the players on the pitch. A lot goes on behind the scenes in the build-up to tournaments, and even during matches.

“Increasingly elite sports are looking to sports science to support improvements in performance,” says Professor Nick Draper, head of life sciences at the University of Derby. Teams across the international rugby game are recruiting experts in coaching, strength and conditioning, nutritional advice and beyond, he explains. “There are university trained sports scientists working with all the teams, such as Dr Nic Gill with the All Blacks, and Ben Pollard with England.”

In order to better understand the specificity of training adaptations, we compared the effects of two different anaerobic training regimes on various types of soccer-related exercise performances. During the last 3 weeks of the competitive season, thirteen young male professional soccer players (age 18.5±1 yr, height 179.5±6.5 cm, body mass 74.3±6.5 kg) reduced the training volume by ~20% and replaced their habitual fitness conditioning work with either speed endurance production (SEP; n = 6) or speed endurance maintenance (SEM; n = 7) training, three times per wk. SEP training consisted of 6–8 reps of 20-s all-out running bouts followed by 2 min of passive recovery, whereas SEM training was characterized by 6–8 x 20-s all-out efforts interspersed with 40 s of passive recovery. SEP training reduced (p<0.01) the total time in a repeated sprint ability test (RSAt) by 2.5%. SEM training improved the 200-m sprint performance (from 26.59±0.70 to 26.02±0.62 s, p<0.01) and had a likely beneficial impact on the percentage decrement score of the RSA test (from 4.07±1.28 to 3.55±1.01%) but induced a very likely impairment in RSAt (from 83.81±2.37 to 84.65±2.27 s). The distance covered in the Yo-Yo Intermittent Recovery test level 2 was 10.1% (p<0.001) and 3.8% (p<0.05) higher after SEP and SEM training, respectively, with possibly greater improvements following SEP compared to SEM. No differences were observed in the 20- and 40-m sprint performances. In conclusion, these two training strategies target different determinants of soccer-related physical performance. SEP improved repeated sprint and high-intensity intermittent exercise performance, whereas SEM increased muscles’ ability to maximize fatigue tolerance and maintain speed development during both repeated all-out and continuous short-duration maximal exercises. These results provide new insight into the precise nature of a stimulus necessary to improve specific types of athletic performance in trained young soccer players.

Few studies have investigated the effects of exercise training on sleep physiology in well-trained athletes. We investigated changes in sleep markers, mood state and exercise performance in well-trained cyclists undergoing short-term intensified training and carbohydrate nutritional intervention. Thirteen highly-trained male cyclists (age: 25 ± 6y, [Formula: see text]O2max: 72 ± 5 ml/kg/min) participated in two 9-day periods of intensified training while undergoing a high (HCHO) or moderate (CON) carbohydrate nutritional intervention before, during and after training sessions. Sleep was measured each night via wristwatch actigraphy. Mood state questionnaires were completed daily. Performance was assessed with maximal oxygen uptake ([Formula: see text]. Percentage sleep time fell during intensified training (87.9 ± 1.5 to 82.5 ± 2.3%; p < 0.05) despite an increase in time in bed (456 ± 50 to 509 ± 48 min; p = 0.02). Sleep efficiency decreased during intensified training (83.1 ± 5.3 to 77.8 ± 8.6%; p < 0.05). Actual sleep time was significantly higher in CON than HCHO throughout intensified training. Mood disturbance increased during intensified training and was higher in CON than HCHO (p < 0.05). Performance in the [Formula: see text] exercise protocol fell significantly with intensified training. The main findings of this study were that 9-days of intensified training in highly-trained cyclists resulted in significant and progressive declines in sleep quality, mood state and maximal exercise performance.

Breakfast, lunch and dinner? For too many of us, the three meals of the day go more like: morning meeting pastry, mid-afternoon energy drink and midnight pizza. In Cell Metabolism on September 24, Salk Institute scientists present daily food and beverage intake data collected from over 150 participants of a mobile research app over three weeks. They show that a majority of people eat for 15 hours or longer, with less than a quarter of the day’s calories being consumed before noon and over a third consumed after 6 p.m.

The purpose of the app is to pilot a way to objectively study the effects of timing food intake in humans. Primed with evidence of how long people eat each day, senior author Satchidananda Panda–an associate professor in the Salk Institute’s Regulatory Biology Laboratory–along with first author Shubhroz Gill were able to test whether reducing this daily duration impacts health. In addition to cutting out some bad habits, the authors hypothesized that a timed feeding schedule could prevent “metabolic jetlag”–when differences in day-to-day or weekday/weekend meal times cause metabolic organs to become out of sync with the body’s overall circadian rhythms. [video, 1:49]

hen you remember a particular experience, that memory has three critical elements — what, when, and where. MIT neuroscientists have now identified a brain circuit that processes the “when” and “where” components of memory.

This circuit, which connects the hippocampus and a region of the cortex known as entorhinal cortex, separates location and timing into two streams of information. The researchers also identified two populations of neurons in the entorhinal cortex that convey this information, dubbed “ocean cells” and “island cells.”