Applied Sports Science newsletter – October 7, 2015

… When the offence eventually gains a structure, though, the Raptors are still going to need Lowry at the centre of things. The Raptors surely learned that they could not place the demand of bulk minutes and a sky-high usage rate on Lowry, but that does not mean the team can thrive with anything other than the prime version of Lowry.

Whether Lowry’s work on his body is the key to sustaining that for a whole season, which has always been a problem, remains to be seen. Watching him torch the Clippers in a game where nobody else looked in rhythm was enough to make any Raptors fan hope that it is.

“This is not new. It’s what I’m accustomed to,” DeRozan said. “The only thing is he just thinks he’s more athletic now.

The Guardian looks at some of the best young talent coming through at Premier League clubs, identifying one player from each club born between 1 September 1998 and 31 August 1999, an age band also known as first-year scholars. We will then follow their progress over the coming years.

… ? Even though he wouldn’t want to hear it, Popovich embodies what InSide Out Coaching author Joe Ehrmann means when he writes that coaches need to be “transformational” instead of “transactional”; in other words, caring about developing players as human beings as opposed to using them to gratify their own egos.

But I will say something about how much this trip meant to John Carlos. Please understand that after Dr. Carlos and I wrote his memoir, we spoke everywhere from high schools and colleges to prisons and Occupy Wall Street. But in the fraternity of pro sports, no one reached out to us. I was stunned teams didn’t respond to my e-mails when we traveled to a given town, but John Carlos was not surprised at all. In the sports world, Carlos had long been treated like he was a toxic element.

For a number of years now, the current dearth of talent in Irish football and the dwindling levels of top players born on these shores has become increasingly apparent, owing largely to a number of disappointing results. … Strange as it may seem, just over a decade ago, German football was having its own crisis and regular bouts of intense self-reflection. In this instance, however, there was a happy ending — football in the Bundesliga is now arguably healthier than ever, with teams consistently impressing in the Champions League, while the national side were crowned world champions last summer.

Planning. All people are really saying when the utter the word periodization. An incorporation of everything a coach’s team should need within a structure that makes the most sense to competition. Amongst S and C coaches and Sport Scientists the cycles from macro to meso and micro will have been a part of every degree course. Sensibly planning specific physical load manipulating athletic capabilities using both volume and intensity to eventually bring about an increase in performance. Nothing revolutionary there. However it is not always a given that this physical periodization will compliment the plans and intentions of the technical coach.

Most recently however the evolution of ‘tactical’ periodization within football is looking to marry these together much more efficiently.

Peterborough United Academy players are to undergo regular scientific testing as they make the long journey towards becoming professional footballers.

During the course of this season, a comprehensive study will take place on the U12-U18 age categories at their Mick George Training Academy base to better understand the development of physical characteristics. It will consider actual and biological ages, to establish the influence training may have on the physical development.

As fall progresses, many runners will end their racing season and then take a break from training. After a few weeks off they will start in on the next training block with early season preparation. I would like to present a concept that may seem unconventional to some, but could ultimately aid in performance.

As a distance runner, have you ever considered replacing a training session with elements that resemble a sprint workout? This idea isn’t really new and some of the concepts have received press and gained traction over the last few years. My hope is to explain this concept a bit more and offer some suggestions for incorporating this into your early season training on a regular basis.

Speed/power athletes employ training modalities that are often explosive or maximum efforts. A way to classify this type of training is to call it neuromuscular, or neural, because the primary driver to accomplish the work is related to the Central Nervous System (CNS).

The promise of fitness wearables is their capacity to raise the population’s health and wellness, primarily by making users aware of their lack of activity or sleep. But, as it turns out, the main users of these devices are not the unfit people they’re supposedly designed for.

Recent polling by Ipsos found that only 11 percent of Americans over 54 intend to purchase a wearable device in the next 12 months, and a separate study by NPD Group concluded that fewer than a quarter of fitness tracker users were over 54. The same research showed that 41 percent of fitness tracker users earned more than $100,000 per year, and that 35- to 54-year-olds (largely healthy, but starting to worry) were the dominant demographic.

So the main users of these gadgets are in the “three W” category: the worried, wealthy, and well, not necessarily the unhealthy users, for whom the technology could make the biggest difference. The problem—and the solution—lies in the approach gadget makers take.

Buying a pair of the latest biometric sports tracking headphones enables you to monitor your heart rate, distances and calories burned right from your ears. It may sound like future tech, but there’s already a host of smart biometric ear-buds hitting the market.

Heart rate training is no longer restricted to professional athletes, and ordinary runners are finding the benefits of training within the different zones.

… The facility represents a chance to connect to that legacy and help it grow. Most who saw it for the first time on Thursday came away agreeing that Huntsman had followed through with his vision: to make it one of the best in America.

“We’ve won a few games without maybe some of the best facilities: It was about the people,” men’s coach Larry Krystkowiak said. “Now when you talk about combining those people with this facility, it has a different ring to it.” [video, 2:59]

New FIFPro research shows that symptoms of mental health problems are more widespread in current and former professional footballers than in the general population. Next to that, FIFPro has found a strong correlation between severe injuries and surgeries and the mental wellbeing of players.

Background Dietary supplements (DSs) are commercially available products consumed as an addition to the usual diet and are frequently ingested by athletes. … Results A total of 159 unique studies met the review criteria. Methodological quality was generally low with an average ± standard deviation of 43 ± 16 % of available rating points. There was low homogeneity for SPEs when compiled by sport, athletic status, and/or specific DSs. Contributing to the lack of homogeneity were differences in studies’ objectives and types of assessments used (e.g., dietary surveys, interviews, questionnaires). Despite these limitations, the data generally indicated that elite athletes used DSs much more than their non-elite counterparts. For most DSs, use prevalence was similar for men and women except that a larger proportion of women used iron while a larger proportion of men used vitamin E, protein, and creatine. No consistent change in use over time was observed because even the earliest investigations showed relatively high use prevalence.
Conclusion

It was difficult to generalize regarding DS use by athletes because of the lack of homogeneity among studies. Nonetheless, the data suggested that elite athletes used dietary supplements far more than their non-elite counterparts; use was similar for men and women with a few exceptions; use appeared to change little over time; and a larger proportion of athletes used DSs compared with the general US population. Improvements in study methodology should be considered in future studies especially (1) defining DSs for participants; (2) querying for very specific DSs; (3) using a variety of reporting timeframes (e.g., daily, 2–6 times/week, 1 time/week and <1 time/week); (4) reporting the sampling frame, number of individuals solicited, and number responding; (5) reporting characteristics of volunteers (and non-volunteers, if available); and (6) using similar methods on several occasions to examine possible temporal trends among athletes

In the last post, I’ve introduced HRV trends analysis and covered the main parameters of interest as well as a few conditions that can be automatically identified using HRV data and some extra information on the current training plan.

In particular, we looked at using HRV (ln rMSSD), HR, HRV/AVNN and CV ln rMSSD as the parameters of interest to analyze HRV trends. We used all of these parameters together to identify the following conditions: no relevant trends detected, coping well with training, maladaptation to training, accumulated fatigue and saturation.

I’ve implemented the same analysis directly in the app, so that you can get the same insights I showed using my own data. Here are a few things you need to know.

… If I took control of a team right now, I’d have little idea of how to train them and manage them man to man. But here are a few things I would do, subject to the constraints of available resources:

1. Use data and video from previous seasons and pre-season matches to assess the strengths and weaknesses of all players, including who combines well with whom.