Applied Sports Science newsletter – October 17, 2015

… The Cubs have held three team meetings this season: before Opening Day, at the All-Star break and just before the postseason began. First baseman Anthony Rizzo thought they might have been in store for a fourth in New York, but it turned out Maddon had just invited a magician to perform in the Cubs’ clubhouse.

And, really, why bother with the formality of a team meeting? If he wants to send a message to his team — or perhaps to the entire Cubs’ fan base — Maddon is adept at doing so through the media before and after games.

Luke Puskedra is so unheralded a runner that he purchases his own sneakers. “No, I’m not sponsored,” he says with a laugh.

On Sunday, Puskedra finished fifth overall and first among Americans at the Bank of America Chicago Marathon. At 2:10:24, his finish was the fastest this year for an American marathoner. In fact, it was faster than any American finish since Meb Keflezighi won the 2014 Boston Marathon in 2:08:37.

The 25-year-old Puskedra’s performance suggests that the future of American marathon running may not be riding on the 40-year-old legs of Keflezighi.

… When a group of NBA players showed up late for their training session at Peak Performance Project (P3) in Santa Barbara, they had to explain that they’d gotten sidetracked — driving by the beach at about 7:30 a.m., they saw Noah’s big head of hair coming out of the water. They decided to stop and say hi. For Noah, a dip in the Pacific Ocean was the standard way to start to the day. Three or four mornings a week, he’d be on FaceTime before that with his yoga instructor. He liked to get a session in, then eat breakfast.

Five days a week, Noah went to P3. There, he followed a precise training program based on enormous amounts of data in an effort to get healthy and reduce his risk of injury. In the afternoon, he worked out with former Los Angeles Lakers guard Mike Penberthy, who now specializes in player development. Noah ate dinner and went to bed early so he could recover and repeat the process.

… As Canada slept, including the Toronto Blue Jays and Texas Rangers, anxiously awaiting dawn on a defining day for the city, the Italian made his way to the airport to get back in time for the match, scheduled to start seven minutes past the 7pm hour local time. 1.07am in Rome.

Giovinco greeted coach Greg Vanney with a smile when he arrived and hoped he wasn’t joking when it was suggested to him that he would start. He wanted to but instead spent the first half in an enormous jacket keeping warm while sitting on the bench. Wednesday had become Thursday in Italy by now while across town another number 10 had turned the game back into the Jays favour.

In a famous chapter of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, a beautiful library of books is admired, only for it to turn out that the works contained within are uncut and have therefore never been read.

It is meant to speak for the falsified image people often present the world, and there is nowhere that is more obvious than for football managers.

Trying to make sense of why Samper continues with the B team while Gumbau is with the first team, and the obstacles the canteranos face to establish themselves at Barcelona

… You know what most NHL hockey players do after a game? They head from the change room, straight to the gym down the hall to put in a workout with the trainer. AFTER THE GAME!

Now why do you think they would put professional athletes through even more work, considering the length of their season?

… It is legitimately argued that these are early days for American soccer. That would particularly be the case on the coaching front. American players are now a common presence in the Old World top divisions of England and Germany, for instance, though less so among its biggest clubs. Nowhere in that same equation, however, is there an American manager. That should probably come as no surprise. The approach to managerial appointments in Europe can often seem almost incestuous. An old boys’ mentality persists, a propensity for club kin sometimes predominant. If not kin, a visit to the known quantities of those who served the neighbors to a reasonable standard serves as a useful substitute.

The benefits of warming up prior to physical activity is well-established. The purpose of warming up is to prepare the body for the upcoming activity, in order to optimize performance. From a physiological standpoint, a warm up is an important factor in “waking up” the body. Several physiological mechanisms take place, where some of the most important are increased breathing volume and rate, increased stroke volume and dilation of blood vessels, in order to transport more oxygen to meet the metabolic demand of the working muscles. All these processes are improved by increased body temperature from a gradual warm-up.

The internal unit is aiming to collaborate with outside designers by giving them access to new technologies like 3-D-printed soles.

The two clues that foretold Tom House’s future as a quarterback specialist emerged way back in the late 1980s. The first came with the footballs that he used as pitching coach of the Texas Rangers, pointing out in his quiet voice that throwing with proper mechanics was the only way to produce a tight spiral.

Then came the cameras that could capture high-speed video of pitchers—and fly fishermen, golfers, and quarterbacks. House was curious about all of them. He sent footage to a lab to be digitized for 3-D motion analysis, which led to an aha moment: From a biomechanical standpoint, the throwing motion for quarterbacks and pitchers is pretty much identical. House was no longer just a baseball coach; he became a professor of throwing.

It’s a fairly established fact that there are pros and cons to running with friends—and ways to fit those group runs into your schedule without compromising your training. But what about virtual friends?

As social running apps have become more ubiquitous, and the technology to enable them more sophisticated, sharing your runs online is getting to be the norm. You can track your miles with RunKeeper, log your routes with MapMyRun, get cheers from friends on Nike+ and Motigo, hang out on the runner’s social network dailymile, or see how you rank on Strava.

“The biggest problem is it can cause you to do some dumb things,” says Rob Manning, who runs Tailwind Coaching, since people tend to go faster and harder than they should.

FIFA is asking the producers of wearable sports trackers to disclose their technologies, as it looks to create a standard for wearables in world football.

At the moment there are a host of different brands providing electronic performance and tracking systems (EPTS) systems for big teams, including STATsports and Catapult.

The use of wearable EPTS systems was only ratified by the International Football Association Board (IFAB) earlier this year. Now it seems it wants to go further by making sure that teams aren’t getting an unfair advantage by using systems unavailable to other clubs.

If you’re an athlete who regularly pushes your limits and could benefit from faster recovery between workouts, neuromuscular electrical stimulation, also known as e-stim might be for you, says Cedric Bryant, PhD, exercise scientist and chief science officer for the American College of Exercise. The treatment does seem to improve muscle tone and reduce post-workout pain and soreness.

But the machines aren’t cheap—they range from $250 to over $1,000—and the idea of hooking yourself up to electrodes and sending jolts through your body may not sound too tempting. So before you give it a go, or rule it out completely, here’s what you should know.

BACKGROUND:

No previous studies have investigated the optimal technique for pivoting with regard to reducing peak knee abduction moments and potential knee injury risk. The aim of this study was to investigate the relationships between technique characteristics and peak knee abduction moments during pivoting.
METHODS:

Twenty-seven female soccer players [mean (SD); age: 21 (3.8) years, height: 1.67 (0.07) m, and mass: 60.0 (7.2) kg] participated in the study. Three dimensional motion analyses of pivots on the right leg were performed using 10 Qualysis ‘Pro reflex’ infrared cameras (240Hz). Ground reaction forces were collected from two AMTI force platforms (1200Hz) embedded into the running track to examine penultimate and final contact. Pearson’s correlation coefficients, co-efficients of determination and stepwise multiple regression were used to explore relationships between a range of technique parameters and peak knee abduction moments. Significance was set at P<0.05.
FINDINGS:

Stepwise multiple regression found that initial foot progression and initial knee abduction angles together could explain 35% (30% adjusted) of the variation in peak knee abduction moments (F(2,26)=6.499, P=0.006).
INTERPRETATION:

The results of the present study suggest that initial-foot progression and knee abduction angles are potential technique factors to lower knee abduction moments during pivoting.

It’s getting harder to remain unmedicated in the Altered States of America. Street drugs, speed and heroin, have come in, out of the cold, and are now Adderall or Vyvanse, OxyContin or Zohydro as Big Pharma expands into the recreational market.

Context: Isolated chondral and osteochondral defects of the knee are a difficult clinical challenge, particularly in younger patients for whom alternatives such as partial or total knee arthroplasty are rarely advised. Numerous surgical techniques have been developed to address focal cartilage defects. Cartilage treatment strategies are characterized as palliation (eg, chondroplasty and debridement), repair (eg, drilling and microfracture [MF]), or restoration (eg, autologous chondrocyte implantation [ACI], osteochondral autograft [OAT], and osteochondral allograft [OCA]).

Evidence Acquisition: PubMed was searched for treatment articles using the keywords knee, articular cartilage, and osteochondral defect, with a focus on articles published in the past 5 years.

… Results: In general, smaller lesions (4 cm2), ACI or OCA have shown the best results, with OCA being an option for large osteochondritis dissecans lesions and posttraumatic defects.

Conclusion: These techniques may improve patient outcomes, though no single technique can reproduce normal hyaline cartilage.

OBJECTIVES:

The incidence of running-related injuries is high. Some risk factors for injury were identified in novice runners, however, not much is known about the effect of training factors on injury risk. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine the associations between training factors and running-related injuries in novice runners, taking the time varying nature of these training-related factors into account.
… RESULTS:

The results of the multivariable analysis showed that running with a higher intensity in the previous week was associated with a higher injury risk. Running frequency was not significantly associated with injury, however a trend towards running three times per week being more hazardous than two times could be observed. Finally, lower running volume was associated with a higher risk of sustaining an injury.
CONCLUSIONS:

These results suggest that running more than 60min at a lower intensity is least injurious. This finding is contrary to our expectations and is presumably the result of other factors. Therefore, the findings should not be used plainly as a guideline for novices. More research is needed to establish the person-specific training patterns that are associated with injury.

I’ve forgotten most of my childhood experiences – which is perfectly normal. But apparently my body remembers many of those experiences – and I learned while editing the new Stanford Medicine magazine that’s normal too. The fall issue’s special report, “Childhood: The road ahead,” is full of stories of researchers realizing the impact early experiences can have on adult health. Some of their discoveries are surprising.

“Some people think kids are protected by virtue of being kids. In fact, the opposite is true,” pediatric psychiatrist Victor Carrion, MD, told writer Erin Digitale, PhD, when she interviewed him for her story on the long-term effects of childhood trauma. Other writers found the same goes for other types of early damage: Kids are resilient but they also carry hidden scars.

The 2015 NESSIS page has been created, and contains the full program, selected presentations and talk videos, and a link to pictures from the conference.

… there are quite a few modern-day Nap Lajoies on the football pitches of Europe. These are either proven elite players, or young players with the potential to become elite players in a short time. For these players and the clubs that employ them, Szymanski is wrong to claim that we are “not haggling about contract terms.” For under his view, clubs and players are precluded from voluntarily choosing to allocate the uncertainty over how well a player might perform in the coming four years.

In many ways, the contracts for these special players – elite stars or those with the potential to become stars at the highest level – are very similar to the sort of long-term contracts that characterize commodities markets. I presume that European sugar and baking markets are workably competitive.

Oliver Gage began his career as a Volunteer Assistant for the Performance Analyst at Sheffield Wednesday, currently in the second tier of English football – the Championship.

After finishing the season with Sheffield Wednesday, Oli took on the role as Operations Assistant at the University of Virginia men’s soccer program. Putting his analytics to good work, Oli contributed over an 18 month period culminating in an NCAA Division I National Championship in 2014. In May 2015, Oli took on the role as Performance Analyst with Houston Dynamo.

What does it take to succeed? This question has fueled a long-running debate. Some have argued that humans are fundamentally competitive, and that pursuing self-interest is the best way to get ahead. Others claim that humans are born to cooperate and that we are most successful when we collaborate with others. But what if, rather than being hardwired to compete or cooperate, we had actually evolved to do both? And how can we unpack the psychology of when and how to interact with people as our friends and our foes, and use this knowledge to get the best outcomes in life?