Applied Sports Science newsletter – October 6, 2015

… “Preparing for U.S. Open Cup games around an already busy regular season schedule and national team duties for players can be challenging,” said EXOS performance specialist Mateus Manoel who serves as the team’s fitness coach. “But the entire organization, from ownership, coaches, and especially the players, was dedicated and focused on bringing the U.S. Open Cup title back to Kansas City, and I’m very proud of the physical and mental toughness our guys showed in winning in penalty kicks on the road.”

… In the coming few days, the Dodgers figure to use closer Kenley Jansen in scheduled outings rather than reserving him for the pressure-packed parts of games. They will scale back the starts of pitchers Clayton Kershaw and Brett Anderson. Players like Gonzalez, Howie Kendrick and Justin Turner, who have been nursing ailing body parts, will have their playing time closely monitored. None of those players were in Wednesday’s starting lineup.

Does this sound like a team pressing hard to gain home-field advantage in the playoffs? Mattingly said it mattered to him, but not enough to risk jeopardizing the health of any of his recuperating players.

Holding stat sheets and peeling off suits that had wrinkled under the stress of an NBA Finals game, the Cleveland Cavaliers’ coaching staff was in the middle of digesting a miraculous victory when one of the trainers brought the report.

They’d won a battle with Matthew Dellavedova, but there was a sudden concern over the war.

A few rooms away, the Cavs’ medical team was aggressively rubbing ice all over Dellavedova’s body as team doctors installed an IV into his arm as they tried to pull him out of what had turned into almost a full-body cramp.

… “Jo’s been awesome,” Bulls coach Fred Hoiberg said recently. “His energy, he’s been a great leader out here. He’s knocking down shots right now. Offensive rebounds, he’s finishing with explosiveness. He’s been, I’d say, one of the top guys in camp so far.”

So what happened?

Noah spent much of the summer working out in Santa Barbara, California, at P3 The Peak Performance Project, an athletic training facility that, at least in part, is known for helping athletes get back on track after various injuries. Former Bull Kyle Korver swears by the facility. Alongside his trusted friend and trainer Alex Perris, Noah spent much of the offseason in Santa Barbara trying to get his body back in order. The difference in his game early in training camp has been noticeable to teammates who watched him hobble through last season.

Bethesda’s Katie Ledecky was named USA Swimming’s Athlete of the Year for the third consecutive year late Saturday, becoming the first female swimmer to earn that distinction since the award was introduced in 1981.

The honor came less than two months after Ledecky, 18, pulled off an unprecedented sweep of the gold medals in the women’s 200-, 400-, 800- and 1,500-meter freestyles – setting three world records in the process — at the FINA World Championships in Kazan, Russia. She added a fifth gold as the anchor leg in the women’s 4×200-meter freestyle relay.

West Ham have refused to allow their exciting midfield prospect Reece Oxford to play for England at the Under-17 World Cup as they fear the exposure to an international football tournament will lead to burn out.

International rugby stars and place kickers Dan Carter, Jonny Sexton and Jonny Wilkinson, among many others place the ball, set themselves, say something to themselves and mostly go about their business and put the ball between the posts.

So what exactly should they be saying and why?

The book Bounce by Matthew Syed is an interesting look at the science of success, filled with stories and interviews of some of the most recognized names in sport.

While Syed focuses the majority of the book on what it takes to excel in sport, or anything for that matter, there is a really interesting chapter on why we choke.

… We know very well that individual responses to an exercise training program are highly variable and influenced by a multitude of determinants and interactions between factors affecting training efficacy. Individual athletes adapt differently to the same training stimulus, and there is currently no accurate quantitative means to describe the pattern, duration, and intensity of training required to produce specific physiological adaptations. Individualizing training prescription and continuous assessment of specific athlete adaptation is absolutely necessary to best prepare elite athletes for the demands of competition. This approach is well described by 4-time Olympic Champion Michael Johnson in his book Gold Rush6:

Since I retired and started Michael Johnson Performance, my training staff and I have been obsessed with the effectiveness of our training programmes. So we have taken the concept of “smart training” to a whole other level from when I was competing. We liken our philosophy to a rifle approach, as opposed to a shotgun approach. With a shotgun you get a lot of small attempts at hitting the target. With the rifle you have to put more time into aiming, but you have a much bigger and more effective bullet to hit the target.

Mental practice with motor imagery improves motor performance, for example reducing the duration of goal-directed movements. However, it is not known whether an experimental session involving prolonged sequences of motor imagery induces mental fatigue and alters motor and mental performances. In this study, participants imagined 100 point-to-point arm movements combined with actual pointing movements every 10 or 50 imagined movements. Participants reported a subjective feeling of mental fatigue after imagining 100 pointing movements. When participants performed actual movements every 50 imagined movements, the duration of both actual and imagined movements increased at the end of the protocol. On the contrary, no change in actual and imagined movement duration was observed when participants performed actual movements every 10 imagined movements. These results suggested that the repetition of many imagined movements induced mental fatigue and altered the mental simulation and the actual execution processes of the movement. However, the regular execution of actual movements seemed to counteract the negative effect of mental fatigue as both actual and imagined movement duration remained constant with actual trials inserted between mental rehearsals. We suggest that during training or rehabilitation programs, actual movements should be executed and/or imagined movement duration should be controlled to avoid the negative effects of mental fatigue on motor performance.

Today as organizations attempt to leverage Big Data and compete on analytics, there are “kinks” in the data supply chain—slowing the process that collects, stores, analyzes, and transforms data into insights. The kinks are information silos, and they stand between analysis and actionable insight.

Unfortunately, the task of unclogging the data supply chain often falls to various subject matter experts (SMEs), each of whom may only know what a small subset of an organization’s data sources contain.

As the Hawks’ finished the final session of their camp at the University of Georgia Thursday, director of rehabilitation Mike Roncarati made his way around the gym, stopping for a few seconds with each player. The final player he approached was Kent Bazemore, who stepped away from a free throw competition to turn his back toward Roncarati, a member of the Hawks’ newly reconstructed training staff. Roncarati reached between Bazemore’s shoulder blades, slipped his hand inside a compartment sewn into a compression shirt, and plucked away an electronic device the size of a chicken nugget.

The device is part of a larger system designed by Catapult, an Australian company that specializes in using wearable technology to monitor biomechanical processes. The idea is that in studying the performance of athletes on a day-to-day basis and establishing a baseline level of performance, teams can work to improve those baselines. Perhaps more importantly, they can also use their records to spot signs of exhaustion, with the goal of reducing fatigue-based injuries.

There are monitors attached to the chests of Celtics players under their jerseys that measure heart rate. More monitors, strapped to the back, record movement.

Players occasionally will be wired for science this week in Europe, with an exhibition game today against Olimpia Milano and on Thursday against Real Madrid. There’s a quick turnaround and a transcontinental flight between the two games, which should alter the data for Johann Bilsborough, an Australian sports scientist hired by the Celtics last summer. He’s traveling with the team as an intrigued observer, a recorder of everything that influences the system of a professional athlete. [commercial video autoplays in right column]

echnology provides some incredible data on sports performance. We’re able to see how fast a football player sprints and how long he runs in a game. But what does all this data mean and how can we use it to our advantage?

That’s been the missing link. We’re inundated with data, but have no idea how to put it all together.

This is a problem that Kitman Labs, a sports science software company, has tackled head on.

Nebraska has a lot of experience with the pioneering spirit. One hundred and fifty years ago, the state was settled by those willing to put caution to the wind and blaze a new trail. Decades ago, the Nebraska athletics program was changed by a man named Boyd Epley and two simple words: Husker Power. On July 1, 2015, Nebraska started another chapter of innovation with Tucker Zeleny and the advent of the Department of Sports Analytics and Data Analysis.