Applied Sports Science newsletter – October 1, 2015

Houston Rockets coach Kevin McHale said Monday the team will monitor the workload of star center Dwight Howard this upcoming season.

McHale said during the Rockets’ media day session he doesn’t have a specific plan for number of minutes played or whether Howard will participate in back-to-backs, but team doctors and the strength and conditioning staff will play a significant role in determining what guidelines the team might use.

How will Jordan Spieth improve upon one of the greatest seasons in golf? A clue could be found on the seventh hole Sunday here at East Lake Golf Club.

Walking off the tee box after making back-to-back bogeys to fall into a share of the lead at the Tour Championship, an out-of-sorts Spieth received a pep talk from his caddie, Michael Greller. “No more talking about anything that just happened,” Spieth said Greller told him.

Spieth’s facility at putting the past behind him, and Greller’s ease in steering him back on the right thought path on those rare occasions when he doesn’t, are reasons for optimism that Spieth, 22, can build on a season in which he won two majors and five tournaments over all, ascended to No. 1, captured the FedEx Cup title and locked up Player of the Year honors.

… “It took me a full year, plus another six, seven games into the next season, to really feel comfortable again and not see ghosts,” recalls Palmer. “There would be times when I’d drop back and I’d see color flash, and I’d pull my leg back or not step into a throw because the memory was fresh.

“This time, with this injury, I haven’t seen any ghosts.”

The Warriors might not have formally scheduled any two-a-days during training camp, but Stephen Curry on Day 1 was spotted back on the practice court at around 9:30 p.m.

“There’s no sense of entitlement, there’s no sense of … ‘I was MVP,’ ” said Draymond Green, who was also in the gym at the time. “It’s working to get better, and that’s who he’s always been.”

… Alex Grimaldo is a hugely talented footballer, extraordinarily mature for his age with excellent decision-making ability and linkup play on the ball – exactly where Mathieu struggles. But he is also young, slight, and, from my experience, occasionally prone to defensive lapses or being bullied by opposing forwards. If thrown into the starting XI against Bayer Leverkusen, it’s doubtful to me that Grimaldo would have fared much better than the Frenchman.

That’s an important piece of perspective to hold onto, but it also can’t be the end of the conversation. Right now, neither Grimaldo nor Mathieu is at the necessary level to be a substitute for Jordi Alba – but that doesn’t mean they can’t be.

… So how is it that some players adapt quicker than others? Every situation is different, of course. A team’s relative form, the system that it plays, and quality of the players already on board all have an impact on a DP’s assimilation process. But a look at Drogba’s play, as well as the success that Jermaine Jones had with New England last year, do reveal a commonality in that a player’s ability to cope with the physical aspects of MLS is a huge asset to have upon his arrival.

MLS is still very much a physical league, both in terms of the frenetic pace and the body-to-body contact. At age 37, Drogba’s powers of recovery aren’t what they used to be, but interim manager Mauro Biello has been judicious in his allocation of minutes for Drogba, even opting to send him home early from a West Coast road trip in a bid to get him extra rest. The maneuver allowed Drogba to use his power and strength that he still has to good effect, and it paid off with him netting four times in the three home games that followed.

The AIS Recovery Centre in Canberra has helped many NRL players, including four-time Dally M Medal winner Johnathan Thurston and his North Queensland Cowboys, get through the bumps and bruises of the 2015 NRL season.

When athletes learn how to be more aware of their bodies they may also change the workings of their brains and become more resilient to stress, according to a new study of the effects of mindfulness meditation on brain function in serious athletes.

The study, which was published recently in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, had its unusual origins in a balk at the starting gate by one of the top riders for the U.S. Men’s National BMX team. Watching, his baffled coach wondered how he could help his riders to better handle the anxiety and psychological rigors of competition. So he approached scientists affiliated with the department of psychiatry and the Center for Mindfulness at the University of California, San Diego, near where the team trains, and asked if they might be interested in working with and studying his seven-man team.

In the late 1880s, an Italian physiologist named Angelo Mosso made a curious observation: He tested the muscular endurance of two fellow professors before and after they administered oral exams and found that after their mental efforts their muscles tired more quickly. It was the first demonstration that mental fatigue affects physical performance—a lesson to remember in the days leading up to a race. Just as you taper your mileage to rest your legs, you should also taper your mind.

Mind Power

Maintaining your goal pace is like holding your finger close to a flame: You have to overcome your inclination to pull away from the discomfort. This “response inhibition” is a mental skill you use in everyday life (when being polite to someone you don’t like or passing up a second helping of dessert, for example). But it’s a finite resource. Last year, British researchers showed that subjects completing a computer test designed to require response inhibition ran a subsequent 5K time trial 5.3 percent slower than when they completed a similar computer test that didn’t require response inhibition.

KEVIN PLANK IS GETTING warmer. Sunlight is streaming into Under Armour’s New York office, a gym-themed space filled with young designers and racks of neon shirts and stretchy running shorts. Plank, though, is suited in bespoke gray flannel and paying the price. He hops out of his leather chair to a shady couch. We’re talking about the future of fitness apps and health-tracking watches and bracelets.

Plank, as he does often, is trash-talking rivals. Most of the technology, he says, is boring and ineffectual, made by fashion-challenged people in Silicon Valley. He chuckles at the irony of technologists dictating fashion for devices. “San Francisco is one of the worst-dressed cities in the world, bar none. … Doesn’t anybody just dress up?”

Under Armour, headquartered in Baltimore, is far from the center of the wearable-tech action, but that market is growing faster than sports clothes. Combined sales of mobile health apps and gadgets are expected to hit $120 billion by 2020. Plank went on a spree to shore up that weakness.

Wearables are the hottest Internet of Things (IoT) market since consumer electronics surpassed industrial electronics—in market size and volume—with the smartphone. IDC Research Inc. (Framingham, Mass.) recently predicted that wearable device worldwide shipments will reach 173.4 million units by 2019, achieving five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22.9 percent.

To meet that growing demand, motion-software specialist Hillcrest Laboratories, Inc. (Rockville, Maryland) has created a version of its Internet of Things (IoT) platform—MotionEngine Wear—especially designed for alway-on operation (without running down the battery) and with all the functions built-in that most wearables require.

The basic feature set includes accurate activity tracking, advanced sleep monitoring, context awareness, intuitive gesture controls, precise compass heading and orientation, plus Hillcrest will add any other special functions required by the original equipment manufacturer (OEM).

Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have reportedly developed a means of mass producing wearable patches that can continuously monitor vital signs.

As reported by the university and published in Advanced Materials, a team of students at UTA’s Cockrell School of Engineering has developed a repeatable “cut and paste” method that could reduce the manufacturing process from several days to 20 minutes. The wearable, disposable patches, similar to temporary tattoos, are created in a two-step process using free-form manufacturing, which is similar to 3D printing, and don’t require a clean room, wafers or other expensive equipment or resources.

A recently published study including 180 male athletes concluded that the additional value of MRI for predicting time to return to sport (RTS) after acute hamstring injuries was negligible, compared to baseline patient history and clinical examinations alone.

Heart rate variability (HRV) trends over long periods of time (e.g. from weeks to months) are one of the most interesting and complex aspects to analyze. While day to day acute changes reflect rather well training load in the day(s) before the measurement, in the long term things get much less linear.

Often for example, a bell-shaped HRV trend has been reported for athletes following a training program of 2-3 months before a competition. Thus, HRV does not simply increases with better physical condition and fitness, but typically increases up to a point (e.g. upon reaching functional overreaching), and then decreases (e.g. during tapering) before the competition. Results from research studies have shown that optimal performance was sometimes achieved after bigger reductions in rMSSD in the week preceding the competition. Thus, relations between HRV, training load, fitness and recovery get more complex to analyze when we move beyond day to day acute changes.

In this post, I will go over recent literature analyzing HRV trends in athletes preparing for a competition, and try to extract rules that can help you better understand longer term trends.

Conventions in visualization can seem arbitrary, and quite a few are. But there is also a vast body of research, and it is growing every day. Just how does visualization research work? How do we learn new things about visualization and how it can and should be used?

There are really just two ways: make a new thing and test a thing. Visualization is not a natural science where we can observe planets or classify bugs. Instead, we make things. The engineering side of visualization is exciting, but it can also be confusing.

When we’ve made a thing, we need to test it. Does new my new way of showing data work better than an existing one? Under what circumstances?

There’s a bit more to it than that, but those are the main ideas. I describe the engineering side of visualization research below, and will write a separate piece about studies.