Applied Sports Science newsletter – October 29, 2015

The NBA season is long. As a player, you know it’s long, but sometimes we forget that it’s not a sprint…it’s a marathon (or a marathon with a bunch of short sprints depending if you’re a half-full/half-empty type of thinker). That being said, it is important to pace yourself and see the big picture that might be down the road. Everybody wants to start in all 82 games, average so many points, rebounds, assists and become an All-Star. The truth is that everyone can’t accomplish their goals for a particular season at the same time. Many players get inpatient because of their desire to have a complete and fulfilled season. It is a chase that so many of us will have and most will never achieve, but it is also what separates us from the weekend warrior.

In addition to their normal utility bills, over 50 million households and businesses also receive customized energy reports several times a year from a company called Opower. These energy reports compare the amount of energy a specific household uses to the energy usage of the surrounding homes, thereby providing feedback to households about their relative energy consumption.

These reports have been highly effective at changing people’s behaviors and reducing energy consumption. Thus far Opower’s intervention has saved eight terawatt-hours of energy worldwide, which is about the amount of energy needed to power all the homes in New Mexico for one year. But even more importantly, the Opower mailings generate a long-term reduction in energy usage. Households not only decrease their energy consumption after receiving a mailing, but they continue to use less energy for years, even after the Opower mailings stop.

This is noteworthy because many interventions that initially have positive effects do not produce long-term behavior change.

With the commonplace use of data and technology in elite sport, also the norm for many athletic medical teams, physiotherapists and trainers looking to prevent injury, are sophisticated athlete monitoring tools. These tools aim primarily at monitoring training load (exposure) and an individual’s response to this exposure. Those responsible, then closely analyze the link between the monitoring data and injury incidence.

If you want to ace your exams, you’ll need to study hard. fred_davis_125But, says Fred Davis, a biology pro­fessor with exper­tise in cir­ca­dian rhythms, you’ll also need to put down the books and catch a little shuteye. Here’s why.

… My formulation of “micro-dosing” protocols has come from two significant sources. Firstly, when I was doing work with Charlie Francis on speed programs for high performance athletes, he introduced some common-sense protocols for use of speed and maximal strength work during taper protocols as the total volume of work was being reduced. During the preparatory training periods, he would always place all high-intensity elements on three days of the week, separated by no less than 48 hours of recovery to allow for appropriate central nervous system regeneration. However, in a 10-day taper program, Charlie allowed for high-intensity elements to occur on almost every day – speed on one day and weightlifting on the next – because the overall volume of work was significantly less than prescribed during the preparatory periods. In effect, he was “micro-dosing” high intensity elements throughout the taper period to keep the athlete sharp and ready, but not prescribing too much density of work to create fatigue (central or peripheral) or soreness.

The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), which puts on the massive CES event in Las Vegas every January, just published a set of voluntary guidelines for how technology companies should approach privacy and security for personal wellness data collected by wearable devices and other connected wellness devices.

The CEA said the guidelines represent a consensus among its member companies, which include Apple, Google, Fitbit, Qualcomm, and Under Armor, and about 2,000 others.

At a recent meeting of the owners of the NBA teams, Nike CEO Mark Parker laid out a plan to bring more inventive technology to the company’s ever-expanding collection of athletic apparel. Two of the major pieces of technology Parker focused on were sensors to control body temperature and the much publicized self-lacing — that is, Power Lacing — technology the company unveiled recently.

At the league’s board of governors meeting earlier this month, Parker explained how a person’s body temperature could be controlled on a computer through body sensors. It’s safe to assume that one article of athletic apparel Nike is planning to use these body sensors on will be NBA jerseys in 2017 when Nike will begin its service as the uniform provider of the NBA for eight years. Nike is paying $1 billion to become the NBA’s first apparel partner to have its logo on all on-court uniform designs.

… MLB teams use the fall instructional leagues (“instructs”) to try out new technologies they are considering purchasing. Organizations get to use their minor league talent as guinea pigs, rather than their stars. And tech companies get more access to players than they would during spring training or the regular season, when their schedules are much more regimented.

The result is a who’s who of baseball-related companies making their way to the Arizona and Florida. Over the past year, deCervo, Motus Global, SmartKage, and Zepp all reported spending time at fall instructs, and that’s just the companies I’ve personally written about. Motus brought their pitching sleeve — later officially christened the mThrow — to last year’s fall instructs, where they reported metrics such as arm slot, arm speed, and elbow torque to coaches during game action.

For a glimpse into football’s immediate future, you have to go back in time. Nestled among the silos and wheat fields and wind turbines that dot the rural northwest Ohio landscape, there’s a large white factory in the town of Ada. There are no sign markers to lead you there but drive toward the “ADA”-emblazoned water tower and, there in its shadow, you’ll come upon the Wilson Football Factory. It’s been in constant operation for 60 years with one primary purpose: manufacture official NFL game footballs. Every ball in every Super Bowl has come from here, crafted by the gnarled, taped-up hands of 120 or so local residents, who clock in at 7:30 a.m. and leave by 3:30 p.m. Many of the workers have been here 10, 20, even 30 years or more; one recent retirement party celebrated 48 years of service. [video, 2:32]

Which came first, the winning or the attitude? This is sport’s version of “the chicken or the egg?”. The vivid subplot of this year’s Rugby World Cup is the contested concept of “team culture”: is it myth or reality? If winning is all about bonhomie, the former Australian captain Michael Lynagh quipped, then pick the comedian James Corden.

The England head coach, Stuart Lancaster, a devotee of holistic management, has been ridiculed. Chuck him out, the game’s great voices have thundered – and if the ­potential replacement ever mentions “team culture”, show him the door as well. Mike Atherton, the former England cricket captain, went further, implying that sporting “culture” is a conscious fraud, cooked up to attract sponsors.

“Culture” is now used so loosely that its meaning has reversed. Positive team culture, far from being a cuddly and corporate-friendly “niceness”, is straight-talking and brutally exacting. It’s not fluffy, it’s flinty.

In Stronger: Develop the Resilience You Need to Succeed there is a section on the Biological Bases of Human Resilience that is fascinating.

It turns out the key to developing resilience at the biological level is to interpret experience in a way that increasing performance and facilitates homeostasis. Changing attitudes and developing resilience through training is key. Optimism is your friend.

… A number of recent studies find that athletes really do experience temporary bursts of improved performance. Past returns may not guarantee future results, but they can be predictive. Murphy, these studies suggest, isn’t merely on a run of luck. He will enter the World Series, in effect, as a different, better hitter.

These are the dog days for NFL scouts as they traverse the country during arguably the most important portion of the predraft evaluation process.

Life on the road for an area scout can be loosely described as a grind during the regular season, but those who are on the road throughout the regular season seem to prefer a different descriptive term: time intensive.

Others appreciate the value of the work being done by these traveling talent evaluators.

“It’s a physical and mental grind,” former NFL general manager and owner of FootballEducator.com Ted Sundquist said.

Adam Silver hinted last week that we could see a reduced preseason schedule soon. What’s the right number of preseason games for an NBA team?

David Aldridge, TNT analyst: I won’t be a smart aleck and say zero. Teams can get the work in they need for their squad with 2-4 games, max.

Steve Aschburner, NBA.com: Four. That’s plenty. We’ve seen the league get prepped with just two tune-up games coming out of lockouts, and I don’t recall players and coaches griping about the ones that got away back then. Four preseason games would provide enough game exposures for everybody to get their work in, yet free up anywhere from a week to 10 days of time that could be sprinkled through the regular season to loosen the schedule for added rest. Way overdue change.