Applied Sports Science newsletter – October 3, 2015

… While Drogba is new to the Impact, Biello is a lifetime Montrealer who was born in N.D.G. The 43-year-old started playing soccer at age 5 and went on to star at Vanier College and Concordia University before making his professional debut at age 18 with the old Montreal Supra of the Canadian Professional Soccer League. He played 19 seasons at the pro level, including 16 with the Impact, starting in the club’s inaugural 1993 season. He is now in his sixth year as a member of the Impact coaching staff.

Despite that experience, it must be intimidating for an Italian kid from Montreal to suddenly be coaching an international soccer superstar like Drogba.

“I wouldn’t say intimidating,” Biello, who is fluent in English, French and Italian, said Thursday. “I think there’s a lot of respect. Obviously, you got to respect someone like that but, again, I am the coach and there is that line. The respect goes both ways.”

Eliud Kipchoge won the Berlin Marathon over the weekend, a remarkable achievement even before considering the fact that he ran much of the race with insoles that were falling out of his Nike shoes.

The 30-year-old elite Kenyan runner won the race at a 2:04:00 personal best, defying footwear problems, according to the Berlin Marathon’s official website. The insoles were falling out of his shoes by around the 10-mile mark, though Kipchoge was reportedly aware of the issue early in the race.

Golden State Warriors forward Andre Iguodala revealed Monday that he received knee injections in Germany over the offseason.

Iguodala, 31, engaged in a treatment meant to ease joint soreness, but he did not elaborate on whether the treatment was the same as the orthokine shots that Kobe Bryant received annually in Germany.

Chris Bosh spent the worst week of his life lying in a bed at Baptist Hospital in Miami, listening to the slow drip of fluid leaking from his lungs and wondering if he’d ever be able to play basketball again. “Not be able to play, not be able to live,” Bosh says. “It was that close. It was that serious.” He lifts his T-shirt to reveal matching scars on his left side, where two tubes entered his body and ran up through his chest, sucking fluid from the pleural space surrounding his lungs. “I don’t need any drugs,” he mutters, parroting his initial message to the doctors. Then he tilts his head back and howls when he recalls the tubes jabbing at his insides. “Oh, God, no, give me the drugs right now!”

Six months have passed since Bosh left the hospital, and he sits at the dining room table of his off-season home in L.A.’s Santa Monica Mountains, high above Temescal Canyon, the Pacific Ocean sparkling like a sapphire beyond the infinity pool in the backyard.

Bournemouth have potentially lost a third key player for the rest of the season after scans today revealed that striker Callum Wilson has ruptured his anterior cruciate ligament.

With Tyrone Mings and Max Gradel – the club’s two most expensive summer signings – also already out with knee ligament damage, Bournemouth have also now lost their leading goalscorer and a player who was being tipped as having an outside chance of breaking into Roy Hodgson’s Euro 2016 England squad.

Muscle fatigue is a common phenomenon experienced in everyday life which affects both our force capacity and movement production. In this paper, we review works dealing with muscle fatigue and motor control and we attempt to demonstrate how the Central Nervous System deals with this particular state. We especially focus on how internal models – neural substrates which can estimate the current state as well as the future state of the body – face this internal perturbation. Moreover, we show that muscle fatigue is an interesting investigative tool in understanding the mechanisms involved in posture-movement coordination.

For decades strength and conditioning professionals have been seeking optimal training volumes and intensities to yield maximum performance outcomes without the onset of injury. Unfortunately, current studies apply experimental training techniques without considering the individuals’ response to the imposed training load. Due to the vast genetic variability and extraneous environmental factors that affect one’s ability to recover, results from such studies are controversial and inconclusive. Athlete monitoring systems offer an objective assessment that is purported to evaluate an individual’s physiological readiness to adapt to an overload stimulus and thus allow for daily manipulations in training loads (i.e., fluid periodization). However, little is known about the efficacy of this technology to enhance training outcomes. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine the effect of fluid periodization on performance outcomes in American football players. Sixty-one Division 1 collegiate American football players (Age: 19.7 ± 0.9 yr; Height: 1.88 ± 0.3 m; Mass: 107.3 ± 11.1 kg) participated in this study and were stratified into experimental (n=33) and control (n=28) groups. Performance outcomes were measured prior to and following the summer training program. Physiological readiness parameters (heart rate variability and direct current brain wave potential outcomes) were measured daily in the experimental group only with Omegawave technology prior to training sessions and adjustments in training volumes or intensity were made based upon physiological readiness outcomes. The control group trained according to the daily prescribed workout. The findings from this study indicate that the experimental group significantly improved in vertical jump, vertical power, aerobic efficiency and broad jump (P < 0.01) compared to the control group. Additionally, significant improvements and effect sizes between groups were noted for fat-free mass (relative improvement: 54%, effect size: 0.30), vertical jump (relative improvement: 157%, effect size: 1.02), vertical power (relative improvement: 94%, effect size: 0.86), broad jump (relative improvement: effect size: 592%, 0.81), triple broad jump (relative improvement: 338%, effect size: 0.63), aerobic efficiency (relative improvement: 154%, effect size: 1.02), and medicine ball overhead throw (relative improvement: 50%, effect size: 0.26). In addition, the experimental group achieved these improvements with less core (-9.5%) and accessory (-13.2%) training volume (P < 0.01). In conclusion, fluid periodization produced greater improvements in performance outcomes at a reduced training load compared to a similar unmodified periodization scheme. These findings highlight the importance of modifying training parameters based upon the daily physiological state of the athlete.

3 months. This is how much time we take off.
…
It boils down to basic mental fatigue. We’re hard on ourselves. Most days on the track we are failing. We fail to achieve our standards of improvement. We fail to apply the technique correctly. We fail to throw as far as we want, etc. To top it off we take out frustration on ourselves in our running workouts (why we’re strong runners). But we’re challenge feeders. All that keeps us coming back the next day. We’re also hard on ourselves off the track. It’s not like it’s easy to follow our nutrition philosophy all the time. We give it a damn good go, but there are constant mental battles.

The Long-Term Athlete Development (LTAD) framework celebrated its 10-year anniversary this year. During the past decade, all 56 national sport organizations (NSOs) in Canada have adopted and implemented a sport-specific LTAD framework. These frameworks – with variations to suit each specific sport – outline a clear pathway for athletes to develop physical literacy on their way to pursuing excellence and/or becoming active for life.

Athletic excellence takes time. There is no fast-track process. Researchers claim it takes 10,000 hours while sport scientists and coaching experts say 8–12 years, meaning a decade should give us an idea as to how this thing is working. For early adopters of LTAD with almost 10 years behind them, what’s the verdict?

Ask Tony Sharpe, who won a bronze medal for Canada at the 1984 Olympic Games in the 4x100m relay. When Sharpe’s son, Mitchell, began pursuing rep hockey and soccer at the U8-U9 level – right around the time LTAD was launched – some of the other dads asked Sharpe to provide the kids with additional, off-season training.

Have you ever been primed? I mean has anyone ever deliberately influenced your subconscious mind and altered your perception of reality without your knowing it? Whole Foods Market, and others, are doing it to you right now.

Research suggests that compression garments can be effective for improving muscle recovery after fatiguing exercise, but has shown little to indicate an athletic performance benefit.

A World Cup soccer player, a National Basketball Association point guard, a National Football League wide receiver, an Olympic gold-medal-winning short-track speed skater, a mixed martial artist, a professional wake boarder. These are examples of elite-level athletes who wear compression garments with expectations of enhanced performance or muscle recovery.

These expectations are driven by compression gear companies who target professional and recreational athletes alike with website messages advising that the products will “take their sports performance and recovery to the next level,” as one site puts it. Published studies of compression garments, however, don’t fully support these claims.

Travis McDonough acknowledges that his size does not lend itself to athletic success. “I’m, like, 5’8 and 140 pounds,” he said.

Despite his diminutive stature, McDonough, 44, is a member of Ireland’s senior national tennis team (he lived in Ireland for 10 years), and a former five-time doubles provincial champion in Nova Scotia. “As someone with incredibly limited physical capabilities… I always had to look for anything that could give me an edge,” he said.

The desire to neutralize his physical restraints was the impetus for Kinduct Technologies Inc., a Halifax-based company whose performance tracking and enhancement software is now used by 45 professional sports organizations, including 16 of the 30 teams in the National Basketball Association.

Personalized medicine – one of the most important and promising trends in the medical world – tailors treatments to the unique characteristics, genes, and lifestyle of each individual. It’s a fast-moving field, full of innovation and boundary-pushing breakthroughs. This November at TEDMED, The Hive will feature three companies that are helping to accelerate the personalized application to healthcare, each using a very different approach.

Scientists first sequenced the human genome in 2000. That experiment, of course, wasn’t representative of everybody; it was just one sequence, stitched together from the DNA of a handful of volunteers. Consider the diversity of humankind. There was no way it could be encompassed by this small-scale “human genome” project.

That’s why, in 2010, an international consortium of hundreds of scientists announced a new plan: They were going to sequence the genomes of 2,500 people from all over the world. Five years later, the group is releasing the last batch of results from the un-aptly named 1,000 Genomes Project, quantifying how people’s DNA vary from one another. The scientists are publishing their data freely, which future researchers could use to study inherited diseases.

Geometric information such as depth obtained from light fields finds more applications recently. Where and how to sample images to populate a light field is an important problem to maximize the usability of information gathered for depth reconstruction. We propose a simple analysis model for view sampling and an adaptive, online sampling algorithm tailored to light field depth reconstruction. Our model is based on the trade-off between visibility and depth resolvability for varying sampling locations, and seeks the optimal locations that best balance the two conflicting criteria.

As a family doctor, I have seen a dramatic shift in the range of people I work alongside every day — all for the better. When I was in training, most family doctors worked only with other family doctors and registered nurses. Today my health care team is rich with a variety of critical skills, including social workers, psychologists, and dieticians. There are even examples of primary care teams engaging lawyers and accountants to help with health-related issues, such as housing and income.

But what’s missing — and should be an essential part of any health care team — is the digital expert. Here’s why.

In the past 100?years, running shoes experienced dramatic changes. The question then arises whether or not running shoes (or sport shoes in general) influence the frequency of running injuries at all. This paper addresses five aspects related to running injuries and shoe selection, including (1) the changes in running injuries over the past 40?years, (2) the relationship between sport shoes, sport inserts and running injuries, (3) previously researched mechanisms of injury related to footwear and two new paradigms for injury prevention including (4) the ‘preferred movement path’ and (5) the ‘comfort filter’. Specifically, the data regarding the relationship between impact characteristics and ankle pronation to the risk of developing a running-related injury is reviewed. Based on the lack of conclusive evidence for these two variables, which were once thought to be the prime predictors of running injuries, two new paradigms are suggested to elucidate the association between footwear and injury. These two paradigms, ‘the preferred movement path’ and ‘the comfort filter’, suggest that a runner intuitively selects a comfortable product using their own comfort filter that allows them to remain in the preferred movement path. This may automatically reduce the injury risk and may explain why there does not seem to be a secular trend in running injury rates.

A groundbreaking ceremony is set for 10:30 a.m. today for the new orthopedics and sports medicine facility that will be built by the Carle health system at the University of Illinois Research Park.

Construction is set to begin on the $23 million complex at the corner of Gerty Drive and Fourth Street after the ceremony.

… A bone bruise cannot be trivialized. One cannot just take pain medicine and ignore the symptoms. Despite Roethlisberger’s ironman reputation, he can’t just play through it. Edema or swelling in the bone can lead to complications and articular cartilage loss if not careful.

What is a bone bruise? It is not a simple contusion that is treated with ice and managed symptomatically. A deep bone bruise is essentially a microscopic fracture, much like a ligament sprain is a microscopic tear. I am not suggesting it is a true fracture that needs surgery or casting, but there is compromise to the integrity of the bone in order to get the swelling/fluid inside the bone.

Metabolic systems are often the first networks to respond to environmental changes, and the ability to monitor metabolite dynamics is key for understanding these cellular responses. Because monitoring metabolome changes is experimentally tedious and demanding, dynamic data on time scales from seconds to hours are scarce. Here we describe real-time metabolome profiling by direct injection of living bacteria, yeast or mammalian cells into a high-resolution mass spectrometer, which enables automated monitoring of about 300 compounds in 15–30-s cycles over several hours. We observed accumulation of energetically costly biomass metabolites in Escherichia coli in carbon starvation–induced stationary phase, as well as the rapid use of these metabolites upon growth resumption. By combining real-time metabolome profiling with modeling and inhibitor experiments, we obtained evidence for switch-like feedback inhibition in amino acid biosynthesis and for control of substrate availability through the preferential use of the metabolically cheaper one-step salvaging pathway over costly ten-step de novo purine biosynthesis during growth resumption.

The research question posed to University of Florida professor J. Robert Cade, M.D., and his research fellows in 1965 was a simple one: Why were so many Gator football players getting sick in the unrelenting Florida heat?

Are fats better than carbs for fuel for endurance runners and triathletes? Nancy Clark explores the science behind that question.

To find the latest science, I attended the annual meeting of the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM). ACSM is an organization with more than 26,000 exercise physiologists, sports nutrition researchers, and sports medicine professionals—all of whom are eager to share both their research and extensive knowledge. At this year’s meeting in San Diego (May 2015), I was able to verify that carbohydrates are indeed, the preferred fuel for all athletes. The following information highlights some of the research on carbohydrates that might be of interest to hungry runners.

Pre-workout supplements claim to have things like amino acids, arginine, glutamine and electrolytes, which are said to give you energy and help power your muscles through a high intensity workout or weights session. In years gone by they contained ingredients like DMAA (1,3-Dimethylamylamine), a product that’s commonly found in the make-up of party drugs, but that’s now banned.

Darren Bruce, personal trainer and former military leadership coach, told ninemsn Coach that many pre-workouts will give you a big hit of caffeine but not much else, while Katherine Shone, spokesperson for Sports Dietitians Australia, says the claims on labels are often very exaggerated.

… Any team worth their salt in the modern game presses. Managers and players talk of the importance of pressing. Again, though, this is just a new(ish) term to describe an old concept: getting the ball back. Again, it is not the case that prior to Barcelona’s Champions League win in 2009, everyone just waited for the opposition to finish before attempting to win possession. They pressed; they just did not know they were.

This is more than just a semantic point. Over the past decade or so, there has been a rampant intellectualisation of how we discuss football. In many ways, this has been both extremely welcome and long overdue. It has enabled fans (and journalists) to obtain a fuller understanding of how the game is played, of all the many dynamics that are at play over the course of those 90 minutes. Many now have more than a passing familiarity with things like passing lanes. Twenty years ago, that was all but unthinkable, certainly in Britain.

A very experienced NHL coach once said something to the effect of:

“The most difficult players to coach are those in the middle of your lineup. Your best players will always be your best, and your depth players are usually just happy to be there. Catering to the second and third liners is the toughest thing, because they’ll often have a different opinion of themselves than you.”

When I first heard this, I thought it made a lot of sense from a psychological point of view. In every team I’ve been a part of, there were three groups of players: those who were on the powerplay, those who wanted to get on the powerplay, and those who know they’ll never be on the powerplay. Usually the second group experiences the most friction with the coaching staff, and I am speaking from personal experience.

Walk into any fitness center, health club, or gym in the country and you’ll see yourself. Or rather, reflections of yourself. It doesn’t matter whether the gym is one step up from a cave or a posh Park Avenue fitness emporium — you’ll see mirrors, and lots of them. The mirrors aren’t a manifestation of the customers’ narcissism. They’re actually there for an important purpose: to help people do their exercises properly. The mirrors act as a real-time check on your activity, enabling you to immediately adjust to ensure your safety and the quality of your exercise.

Visual feedback goes further than simply mirrors, of course. Today’s high-tech fitness trackers — Fitbit, Jawbone, Nike FuelBand, and the Apple Watch, not to mention the many sophisticated cycling and running computers — provide quantitative measurements on a stunning array of factors. No matter what your fitness activity, you can get visible, quantifiable feedback on what you’re doing and how well you’re doing it while you’re doing it.

It’s not an ordinary feeling to be excited about going to school in the middle of July, but then again, Pro Scout School isn’t your ordinary school. It’s a two-day event in Las Vegas featuring some of the world’s brightest basketball minds sharing their secrets and telling their stories. Whether you’re a high school coach, a college program’s video coordinator, an aspiring scout, or just an avid basketball fan, the event provides you with invaluable basketball knowledge. Where else could you hear Fran Fraschilla, Pete Philo (Director of International Scouting for the Pacers), Willy Villar (GM of CAI Zaragoza), and David Blatt, among others, speak in the span of a few hours?

Research into correlates and determinants of fatigue has burgeoned in the past two decades. However the link between cortical activity and muscle force generation on fatigue that develops during exercise is not very well understood. While there is extensive evidence suggesting that the central nervous system can contribute to the inability of a human being to sustain a motor task, some questions are unsolved. Is fatigue a sensed variable? Could substantial progress in neurophysiological techniques have additional benefits in the understanding of fatigue? What have we learned and what happens next? Answers require likely the combined insights not only from physiologists, but of neuroscientists and psychologists. Recent research in this area presents three trends providing current interests and opinions in the field.