Applied Sports Science newsletter – October 22, 2015

… Whether it’s a 6 a.m. workout or hitting the weight room at 10pm, both men find the time to fit in the work that’s required.

During Curry’s five-day UA promo trip in Asia, he brought with him a detailed workout plan put together by [trainer Brandon] Payne.

The one problem of working with a player of Curry’s class is that regular drills just don’t cut it for him.

How are you feeling, and how does it feel to finally be back playing basketball?

I feel great. The last few nights I’ve had my first little bit of game action since my shoulder got ripped out. You know, everything kind of progressed from hitting the pads, playing one-on-one, three-on-three, five-on-five, and then I was able to play 12 or 15 minutes the other night and then 20-plus last night. So it’s mostly been about getting my rhythm back, taking my first few hits on my shoulder in real time, but I feel good. I’m ready to get this week behind me and get to the regular season.

What are the first and last things to come back when you’re rehabbing from an injury like this?

The first thing to come back isn’t even a physical thing; it’s more just being glad to be back out here from a mental standpoint. It’s very refreshing to remember why you love the game, and that plays a big part in the recovery.

… a big part of the Knicks’ success or failure this year figures to rest in the hands—or, rather, the legs—of returning guard Jose Calderon, a starter who missed half of last season due to Achilles and calf injuries, and never looked fully comfortable when he was able to play.

Calderon and coach Derek Fisher both say this season will be much better, owing primarily to the guard’s renewed health. Yet even if he’s past his injuries, it remains to be seen whether the 34-year-old Calderon, whom the Knicks acquired from the Dallas Mavericks in a trade before last season, still has the foot speed to keep up with the league’s quickest, most athletic position.

It is an often used phrase in sport that good relationships among team mates is key to success. However this is more than just cliché as academic research has shown that cohesion

‘is a dynamic process which is reflected in the tendency of a group to stick together and remain united in instrumental objectives for the satisfaction of member affective needs.’

In a new paper researchers in Romania have set out to prove this.

… A time-honored ritual of many endurance athletes is to carbo-load in the days just before a big race. Carbohydrates help provide a ready source of energy for the body – when carbs are broken down by the body, the component sugars are stored in the muscles as glycogen, just waiting for the body to use it during the race. This can improve athletic performance and help delay “hitting the wall.”

Sleep deprivation weakens the body’s ability to store carbohydrates (therefore, less glygocen is stored). Reduced glycogen stores can lead one to hit the wall sooner than usual since they’re depleted too fast. Good sleep (quality and quantity) makes that plate of pasta help you succeed on race day.

… Aczel Balazs, a professor at the Institute of Psychology at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, wanted to find out more. He had taken an interest in studying the bizarre world of unintelligent behavior, precisely, he says, because it’s surprisingly unexplored. In this case, he devised a study. Balazs, along with Bence Palfi and Zoltan Kekecs, two other psychology researchers at Eotvos Lorand University, gathered a sample of stories — 180 in all — from news sites, blogs, forums and other publicly available literature in which an action was described that might be characterized as stupid. The stories were then presented to more than 150 people, who were asked to fill out a questionnaire.

For each story, they answered a range of questions, which included ones like “Would you describe this particular action as stupid?” and, if the answer was yes, “On a scale from one to ten, how stupid was it?” The participants were also asked to explain why they thought any given action was stupid, by choosing one of many categories.

What they found is that people tend to agree about what deserves to be called stupid and what doesn’t — remarkably, there was a roughly 90 percent rate of agreement

… [Ellen] Langer had already undertaken a couple of studies involving elderly patients. In one, she found that nursing-home residents who had exhibited early stages of memory loss were able to do better on memory tests when they were given incentives to remember — showing that in many cases, indifference was being mistaken for brain deterioration. In another, now considered a classic of social psychology, Langer gave houseplants to two groups of nursing-home residents. She told one group that they were responsible for keeping the plant alive and that they could also make choices about their schedules during the day. She told the other group that the staff would care for the plants, and they were not given any choice in their schedules. Eighteen months later, twice as many subjects in the plant-caring, decision-making group were still alive than in the control group.

To Langer, this was evidence that the biomedical model of the day — that the mind and the body are on separate tracks — was wrongheaded.

Three outstanding high performance sports specialists will join the Port Adelaide football department next year, further strengthening the club’s football program in 2016.

The arrivals are headlined by world-renowned strength coach and data scientist Mladen Jovanovic, along withhead physiotherapist Tim McGrath and sports nutritionist Harry Routledge.

They’ll add value to the club’s existing staff in physiotherapist Tim Parham, head of sports science Stuart Graham and head of athletic development Ian McKeown.

… “I think what’s really changed is the Mavs have become a technology product,” he said. “Before I would worry about putting together the right players. Now we focus much more on analytics and biometrics, too. The things that we’re doing with the Mavericks will create changes.”

For example, he says, the team very closely tracks the way that its players run because their running style influences whether and where they’re going to develop inflammation later in life.

… Wenger spoke with confidence at last Thursday’s annual general meeting about the club’s improving injury record before admitting that maintaining a relatively clean bill of health will be critical in determined their Premier League title challenge. It is accepted that little can be done to mitigate the dangers of impact injuries but muscular problems are always the prompt for internal questions.

That Aaron Ramsey should again be the player to suffer on Tuesday night will only heighten the frustration.

Ben is currently the Athletic Performance Coach at the Brumbies, acting as the link between the medical and performance teams. He also has experience working in rehabilitation at Port Adelaide FC (AFL) and Gloucester Rugby. His current research focus is on improving the prevention of ACL injuries, seeing as though rates have not decreased despite improved Sport Science and Medicine provision. Specifically, Ben is researching the role of pretension and preactivation, and the potential relationship between stiffness and injury risk. a

Injuries are part of sport for people at every level. Many are musculoskeletal, such as sprains and strains (the most common sports injuries in the UK), fractured or broken bones, and cartilage and ligament tears.

When a player experiences an injury like this, it can be a very stressful time. The question is, how do coaches help their players manage the stress in these situations? This summary, based on new research from academics in America, provides a range of strategies that coaches can use to actively help players alleviate the stress caused by sporting injuries.

This summary, like the original article, has been written with young participants in team sports in mind.

Jenny Barringer (now Simpson) was the best college runner in the nation in 2009, maybe of all-time.

So before her final meet, the 2009 NCAA Cross Country Championships, Sean McKeon of Competitor was merely stating a fact when he wrote, “If she doesn’t win, it will be the biggest upset in NCAA history, bar none.” He was also right—more right than he knew—to add that nothing short of an “epic collapse” would prevent her from winning the title she coveted.

But something happened. Barringer was leading halfway through the race yet was unable to drop Susan Kuijken of Florida State, Kendra Schaff of Washington or Angela Bizzarri of Illinois.

I had the privilege of attending another Santa Fe Institute “Risk Conference” at Morgan Stanley. There was a stellar lineup of accomplished speakers focusing on Old Wine in New Bottles: Big Data in Markets and Finance. The grand finale was “A Conversation with Daniel Kahneman” led by Michael Mauboussin. These two gentlemen are amongst the finest thinkers in finance and two of the most important influences in my effort to compound knowledge while remaining cognizant of my limitations. As Mauboussin is intimately familiar with the subject matter, he was the perfect person to elicit the deepest insights from Kahneman on the most important topics. Below are my notes, which are reproduced here in the form of a dialogue.

On the first Saturday of the NHL season, my day started in the dark at five in the morning so that I could embark on the three-hour drive to the Rochester Institute of Technology for a hockey analytics conference, put on by Ryan Stimson (with support from RIT professors Matt Hoffman and Paul Wenger). The itinerary for this day was impressive and a good chance to learn new things from passionate hockey fans.

It was a good opportunity to meet with people that I only knew online previously, or to catch up with those that I’ve met at previous conferences. It was a smart group talking hockey that day, and I was fortunate to take part.