Applied Sports Science newsletter – September 29, 2015

The former Colorado Rapids defender played a key role on the United States U-23 men’s team throughout 2015 but will now miss out on Olympic qualifying through a quirk of fate.

I’m in a great place and I’m extremely excited to get everything underway. Leading into training camp, I feel ready to go. This is what I’ve prepared for the whole summer, so I’m excited.

I think that training camp is more about bonding and chemistry and building team morale than anything else. Everything else falls into place after that. But don’t get me wrong; training camp is a grind. And the main reason for that is the two-a-days, which are tough on your body. Chances are, as an athlete, you’ve had or you have some type of injury, and those can come up during training camp. Coaches work you hard because they know that training camp is all you have to focus on during that time. During the season, coaches don’t usually work you quite as much (for that long of a stretch) because you might have a game, let’s say, the next day. But during training camp, they push you because they want you to be as sharp and as ready for that first preseason game as possible.

This past February, U.S. Soccer launched the Digital Coaching Center (DCC) and an online only F License. The first six months have been highly successful with over 40,000 registered users and over 20,000 F license holders. These latest upgrades provide a platform that allows the coaching department to reach, educate and communicate with coaches of all levels on a more consistent basis.

The DCC main areas of focus are to improve the quality and accessibility of educational content, increase the interaction between candidates and instructors, and create consistent messaging and collaboration with technical leaders. Beginning in 2016, all courses will be administered through the DCC.

Dear budding sport scientist

So you have enrolled on a sports science degree eh? You start this week? Exciting times ahead then. So what lies ahead for you at the end of your studies? Well, I could tell you that this is an exceptional year, for example, we are actually in Games year, or it is critical as it is the first pre-Olympic/Paralympic year since the home Games. All of those might indeed sound a little like the Coleman-balls;

“This evening is a very different evening from the morning we had this morning.”

Professor Samuele Marcora discusses his Psychobiological Model of Endurance Performance.

A simple yoga routine loosens tight spots, strengthens weak spots, and makes you a better, less injury-prone runner.

For Rebecca Pacheco, yoga and running have always been intertwined—much like her legs in this photograph. “I started running when I was 14 and doing yoga when I was 16, so I really don’t know one without the other,” says the yoga instructor in the new DVD, Runner’s World Yoga for Runners. Recognizing the benefits the ancient practice can have on both the runner’s body (improved flexibility, range of motion, muscular strength) and mind (more focus, less stress).Pacheco developed Om Athlete, a class she teaches in Boston to help runners improve performance and prevent injury. “Yoga is the perfect recovery activity for runners,” Pacheco says. “It relieves soreness and tension in your hardworking muscles and restores range of motion so you can run better the next time you hit the road.”

Deep into the second half of Saudi Arabia’s World Cup qualifier away to Malaysia in September, the Ultras Malaya, a group of hot-headed home supporters, threw flares and fireworks on to the pitch of the Shah Alam Stadium in Selangor, a province on Malaysia’s east coast. Smoke rapidly began to fill the ground and left referee Liu Kwak Man from Hong Kong with little choice but to abandon the game.

The incident didn’t disconcert Saudi Arabia’s newly-appointed technical director Jan Van Winckel (pictured left), who was watching the Green Falcons from the touchline. “I have seldom seen so much dominance,” reflected Van Winckel. “We had 78% ball possession, but we were unable to convert this into an early goal. Luckily, we played a very good second half and we deservedly won 1-2, a fourth consecutive win as well.”

From shoe-lace running devices to watches that record one’s physical activity whilst interacting with their smart phone, whether you like it or not, ‘wearables’ are the new black as athletes look to monitor their performance through new and innovative ways.

Enter SMRT Mouth, an American-based company who’ve developed a new wearable in the form of a mouthguard. Currently part of a crowdfunding project, the device is embedded in a mouthguard that offers athletes traditional teeth and mouth protection while tracking athlete’s circulation, respiration, exertion and hydration. This is then processed into date and available to analyse via a smart device.

Irish elite sports firm Orreco is to partner with IBM on its billion-dollar super computer Watson to build an app that will help sports teams to make decisions on training and treatment for their star athlete to avoid injury and maximise performance.

The Sligo-based firm, which is backed by golfers Padraig Harrington and Graeme McDowell, will use data covering 15 years of sport and more than 1,700 elite athletes in the app, called Coach Watson. The company has developed methods to analyse blood, identifying biomarkers that can help monitor performance.

Using the data from Coach Watson, coaches and teams will be able to find detailed information on medical research, and quickly answer questions on games schedules, player sleep, nutrition data, recovery, injury and fatigue.

Three years ago, while weight-training at the University of Toronto, engineer Rami Nabel noticed a varsity team training nearby. They were using “what looked a lot like a lab tool” to track and analyze their performance.

The device, says Nabel, “was really intricate. There was a tripod, a display screen and a big box on the ground, with lots of wires everywhere.” The goal: “to help athletes reduce their risk of injury and optimize their time in the gym.”

Nabel – an engineer and self-confessed numbers geek – was fascinated by the prospect of being able to use solid data to assess when to push further in weight training and when to hold back. But at $1,500, the system he’d seen was expensive, and “the setup was just not practical for anything but a professional sports team.”

So Nabel, founder and CEO of Push Inc., designed a tool of his own using technology that is now widely available. Push is smartphone enabled and relies on a wearable armband to track and analyze strength training.

When it comes to recording accurate performance data for elite athletes, GPS technology can’t keep up, a Griffith researcher claims.

Instead SABEL Labs has developed SABEL Sense, an alternative to GPS for tracking running speeds and distances, which is set to be a game changer in the sports performance and wearable technology industries.

SABEL Sense is timely, as sporting organisations in particular consider their options. The AFL recently announced it had switched its GPS provider.

Context: The Functional Movement Screen (FMS) is an assessment tool for quality of human movement. Research reports a significant difference between FMS scores of subjects who later experienced injury and those who remain uninjured.

Objective: To systematically review literature related to predictive validity of the FMS. From the aggregated data, a meta-analysis was conducted to determine the prognostic accuracy of the FMS.

… Results: Overall bias for the included 7 studies was low with respect to patient selection. Quality assessment scored 1 study 5 of a possible 7, 2 studies were scored 3 of 7, and 4 studies were scored 2 of 7. The meta-analysis indicated the FMS was more specific (85.7%) than sensitive (24.7%), with a positive predictive value of 42.8% and a negative predictive value of 72.5%. The area under the curve was 0.587 (LR+, 1.7; LR–, 0.87; 95% CI, 0.6-6.1) and the effect size was 0.68.

Conclusion: Based on analysis of the current literature, findings do not support the predictive validity of the FMS. Methodological and statistical limitations identified threaten the ability of the research to determine the predictive validity of FMS.

People have been hunting for proof of the hot hand in basketball longer than Stephen Curry has been alive. The search has lasted three decades and exhausted almost all options. But the results were usually the same. There was no evidence of the hot hand. A player who made a shot was no more likely to make his next shot.

Then something strange happened this summer. Economists, psychologists and statisticians started talking about a new paper on basketball. It claimed that the hot hand really does exist. But what made it truly mind-boggling was that the authors used the simplest scientific method: coin flips.

Human Connectome Project finds surprising correlations between brain architecture and behavioural or demographic influences.