Applied Sports Science newsletter – October 16, 2015

… As the spearhead of the attack at Dortmund, everything went through Lewandowski and he capitalised on the aggressive, counter-attacking style of play Jurgen Klopp favoured. In his first season at Bayern he had play with his back to goal a lot of the time. This made finding the space in the box to score almost a secondary job, though the 17 he scored in the Bundesliga in 2014/15 suggests he still took it seriously.

This season Guardiola has discovered, possibly by accident, that focusing the team on Robert Lewandowski is a very good idea. Poland have been doing it for a while now and it seems to work.

If you don’t have a proper handle on the right way to implement strength training into your speed program, you could be doing as much harm as you are doing good.

Last time, we covered important pieces of the strength training equation in speed development with a group of expert coaches, and they are back in the final three questions of our “strength training for speed” roundtable.

Runners have become accustomed to incorporating a warmup routine into their training. After all, warming up is an easy way to ward off injuries and a necessity for getting the most out of higher intensity workouts. For these and other reasons, many of us have developed our own unique warmup ritual that we customarily implement at the beginning of our runs. These warm up activities become such an integral part of our routine that we often perform them without thinking twice about it. But how many of us do the same after a workout?

In this article, I want to make the case for developing a post-run recovery ritual to help you transition out of workout mode.

Ellis also spoke with espnW about the future, both short and long term, for the national team as it continues its victory tour and prepares for Olympic qualifying.

Q: What is the evaluation process you go through in deciding which players to call in for December games and the subsequent training camp?

A: It’s about assessing what we have and determining what we need. We lose one starter from the World Cup final, so we have a lot returning. But as the current players understand, it’s an ongoing process of evaluation. What stuck with me from the World Cup was that for five players this was their first major event, so the Olympics can be a great opportunity to get more players world-class competition prior to the next World Cup.

… Each parent appeared to try and top the others with stories of their children’s injuries and surgeries from their participation in soccer, as though being injured and returning to continue one’s career was a badge of honor. The players who were revered were not the ones who capably moved around the field, avoiding tackles, and skillfully playing the ball, but the ones who limped around the field, showing their toughness as they returned to soccer from an injury, probably far too quickly.

Rene Wormhoudt, the strength and conditioning coach for the Netherlands Football Federation, said at the Seattle Sounders Sports Science Conference that children become good movers, good movers become good athletes, and good athletes become specialists, or skilled soccer players. These u14 girls appeared to have skipped the first two steps and moved directly toward the goal of becoming a skilled soccer player.

Aim

Our study aimed to investigate changes of different markers for routine assessment of fatigue and recovery in response to high-intensity interval training (HIIT).
Methods

22 well-trained male and female team sport athletes (age, 23.0 ± 2.7 years; V?O2max, 57.6 ± 8.6 mL·min·kg?1) participated in a six-day running-based HIIT-microcycle with a total of eleven HIIT sessions. Repeated sprint ability (RSA; criterion measure of fatigue and recovery), countermovement jump (CMJ) height, jump efficiency in a multiple rebound jump test (MRJ), 20-m sprint performance, muscle contractile properties, serum concentrations of creatinkinase (CK), c-reactive protein (CRP) and urea as well as perceived muscle soreness (DOMS) were measured pre and post the training program as well as after 72 h of recovery.
Results

Following the microcycle significant changes (p < 0.05) in RSA as well as in CMJ and MRJ performance could be observed, showing a decline (%? ± 90% confidence limits, ES = effect size; RSA: -3.8 ± 1.0, ES = -1.51; CMJ: 8.4 ± 2.9, ES = -1.35; MRJ: 17.4 ± 4.5, ES = -1.60) and a return to baseline level (RSA: 2.8 ± 2.6, ES = 0.53; CMJ: 4.1 ± 2.9, ES = 0.68; MRJ: 6.5 ± 4.5, ES = 0.63) after 72 h of recovery. Athletes also demonstrated significant changes (p < 0.05) in muscle contractile properties, CK, and DOMS following the training program and after the recovery period. In contrast, CRP and urea remained unchanged throughout the study. Further analysis revealed that the accuracy of markers for assessment of fatigue and recovery in comparison to RSA derived from a contingency table was insufficient. Multiple regression analysis also showed no correlations between changes in RSA and any of the markers.
Conclusions

Mean changes in measures of neuromuscular function, CK and DOMS are related to HIIT induced fatigue and subsequent recovery. However, low accuracy of a single or combined use of these markers requires the verification of their applicability on an individual basis.

With the rollout this season of RFID (radio-frequency identification) player-tracking technology in every NFL stadium—bottle-cap-sized chips are embedded in every set of shoulder pads—the league can keep tabs on all of its players the same way that businesses do their inventories. The system, provided by Zebra Technologies and still largely kept under wraps by the NFL, is geared partly toward improving the TV experience, but when that data is opened up to fans and teams, things could get really interesting. We could soon see the routes every player runs, answering the question, Which Patriots receiver best matches up with Tom Brady? Strength and conditioning coaches could slice and dice data to extract whatever performance metrics they most care about—How far does Adrian Peterson actually run in each game?—and use that information to fine-tune training methods.

… [Twitter] is a wonderful resource, and a great instrument for building networks – enabling us to forge links with others on an intercontinental basis. It allows us to learn in our own time, from a vast number of sources. We are able to follow and acquire the foremost knowledge of the world’s greatest athletes and coaches on a daily basis. We can also read countless scientific papers linked through Twitter, which would have taken huge efforts to obtain in the past. … In this way our coaching education is analogous to the preparation of our athletes: If we skip the fundamentals then for a short time we have success but in the long term we are destined to fail when put to the test.

Stanford engineers have created a plastic skin-like material that can detect pressure and deliver a Morse code-like signal directly to a living brain cell. The work takes a big step toward adding a sense of touch to prosthetic limbs.

… an affordable camera technology being developed by the University of Washington and Microsoft Research might enable consumers of the future to tell which piece of fruit is perfectly ripe or what’s rotting in the fridge.

The team of computer science and electrical engineers developed HyperCam, a lower-cost hyperspectral camera that uses both visible and invisible near-infrared light to “see” beneath surfaces and capture unseen details. This type of camera is typically used in industrial applications and can cost between several thousand to tens of thousands of dollars.

In a paper presented at the UbiComp 2015 conference, the team detailed a hardware solution that costs roughly $800, or potentially as little as $50 to add to a mobile phone camera. They also developed intelligent software that easily finds “hidden” differences between what the hyperspectral camera captures and what can be seen with the naked eye.

Phil Coles SA Spurs Director of Medical Service shared with us his #Smartabase.

Dozens of the nation’s leading medical experts will fly to Pittsburgh on the National Football League’s dime this week to decide on a better way to treat one of the most common injuries in sports: concussions. The gathering Thursday and Friday at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center is intended to shape the future of concussion treatment for every athlete in the United States, from youth leagues to professional sports.

Researchers will wrestle with the question of whether doctors can actively treat concussions rather than simply allow patients time to heal. But this major scientific meeting also poses an even deeper quandary: Can doctors objectively agree on a national concussion treatment plan at a meeting funded entirely by the nation’s wealthiest sports league — one with a checkered history of the injury’s management?

Can the Web make people more fit?

It’s a question hot on the minds of everyone from health insurers to gym owners to public health officials. Although millions of dollars a year are being spent designing promotional ads and social media campaigns, they clearly aren’t working: more than 43 percent of Americans get insufficient levels of daily exercise, and nearly a third are obese.

In a new study, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, led by professor Damon Centola of the Annenberg School for Communication and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, have found a way to make the Web — and social media — more effective for improving people’s exercise habits.

The Brentford owner, Matthew Benham, whose club has been a pioneer in the use of analytics in football, says that he hates the term Moneyball being applied to his team because it is so often misused and misunderstood.

Benham also denied that he was obsessed with data – insisting that it was only one part of the package in running a football club – but acknowledged he felt the kicking he got from some sections of the media after sacking Marinus Dijkhuizen as manager may have been partly justified.

“We just didn’t get it right whatsoever in appointing a head coach,” Benham said.