Applied Sports Science newsletter – November 2, 2015

Dallas Mavericks mainstay Dirk Nowitzki is in his 18th NBA season, and he credits his committed fitness and nutrition regimen for his pro basketball career longevity. In this blog post, the 13-time NBA All-Star opens up about his early love for sports that began in Germany, how his training has evolved over the years, the health and fitness lessons he’s learned from experience and much more:

History and tradition are ever present at the Basketball Australia Centre of Excellence, located on the leafy Australian Institute of Sport campus in Canberra.

The main walkway to its cavernous basketball gym is named after the first Australian to play in the NBA, three-time championship winner and former program graduate Luc Longley. Dominating a long wall in the centre’s meeting room – aptly labelled the Den – are images of over 220 male and female alumni who later represented their country. And above locker four in the changing room, current NBA players Andrew Bogut and Joe Ingles are listed alongside every individual to wear that number since the program’s inception in 1981.

Despite providing inspiration for similar systems around the world, the Centre of Excellence remains a unique institution at the core of Australian basketball. Promising young players in their mid-teens are selected from around the country to join a residential program where they train, eat and sleep like professional athletes for two years. The group – 12 boys and 12 girls chosen every season – receive access to world class sports science, nutrition, physiotherapy and psychology services while they complete a rigorous training schedule and attend high school. The government-funded program was developed to ensure a bright future for Australia’s male and female national teams, the Boomers and the Opals.

… Syndergaard explained to me in Sacramento: “I have The Mental ABC’s of Pitching by [Harvey Dorfman], and before every start, I just make it routine, I read a few chapters out of that book and get my head right. I get focused. That’s been a big thing for me, is being able to focus for seven, eight innings at a time. That’s what helps when it comes to executing pitches, is extreme focus.”

Syndergaard was not speaking to me like how an athlete would give a quote to a reporter, hitting a talking point or hiding in the bushes of too familiar, pre-approved verbiage. He was speaking honestly, and what impressed me was he was curious to see my reaction, curious for my take, even though he didn’t know me at all and, I’m sure, had never heard of me.

As they report in the November 1 issue of the journal Sleep, researchers studied 62 healthy men and women randomly subjected to three sleep experimental conditions in an inpatient clinical research suite: three consecutive nights of either forced awakenings, delayed bedtimes or uninterrupted sleep.

Participants subjected to eight forced awakenings and those with delayed bedtimes showed similar low positive mood and high negative mood after the first night, as measured by a standard mood assessment questionnaire administered before bedtimes. Participants were asked to rate how strongly they felt a variety of positive and negative emotions, such as cheerfulness or anger.

… He however noted that Nigeria’s failure to excel at the senior level of many U-17 players not transiting to the senior level could be traced to the country’s failure to utilitise age-grade competition as platforms for football development.

“I hear a lot people say we should graduate our players from the cadet level to the senior national team, but if you check the records from 1985, you hardly see more than five U-17 players graduating to the senior national team,” Nakande said.

“In our own set, it was mainly Ugbade and Akpoborie that broke into the senior national team. It all boils down to the effectiveness of our football developmental programmes at the youth level.

… The week will have been cerebral rather than physical, ensuring that the 23 players in each team have total clarity on unit and individual roles and have a full tank going into the game.

The ritual involves finalising the game plan both in attack and defence based on the analysis from previous encounters between the two teams and any other strengths and weaknesses observed during the tournament. Each individual player will have taken some time to view his own game and his opponent’s to sharpen his mind to what he needs to win the individual contest. Then it is about rehearsal, practising what is required as an individual; as a unit, backs and forwards, and as a team.

It is important each step is done methodically and that nobody gets ahead of themselves and loses focus because of the importance and the emotion of the occasion. The plan will have been for the coaches to have all this covered early in the week and then for the captain and senior players to take ownership and rehearse and execute the plan with intensity and accuracy two days prior to the game.

Also it is important absolutely nothing distracts from this focus.

When Sir Dave Brailsford became head of British Cycling in 2002, the team had almost no record of success: British cycling had only won a single gold medal in its 76-year history. That quickly changed under Sir Dave’s leadership. At the 2008 Beijing Olympics, his squad won seven out of 10 gold medals available in track cycling, and they matched the achievement at the London Olympics four years later. Sir Dave now leads Britain’s first ever professional cycling team, which has won three of the last four Tour de France events.

Sir Dave, a former professional cycler who holds an MBA, applied a theory of marginal gains to cycling — he gambled that if the team broke down everything they could think of that goes into competing on a bike, and then improved each element by 1%, they would achieve a significant aggregated increase in performance.

I recently caught up with Sir Dave to learn more about his success in cycling and what lessons his experience holds for managers in other arenas. An edited version of our conversation follows.

Researchers have retrospectively analyzed the training intensity distribution (TID) of nationally and internationally competitive athletes in different endurance disciplines to determine the optimal volume and intensity for maximal adaptation. The majority of studies present a “pyramidal” TID with a high proportion of high volume, low intensity training (HVLIT). Some world-class athletes appear to adopt a so-called “polarized” TID (i.e., significant % of HVLIT and high-intensity training) during certain phases of the season. However, emerging prospective randomized controlled studies have demonstrated superior responses of variables related to endurance when applying a polarized TID in well-trained and recreational individuals when compared with a TID that emphasizes HVLIT or threshold training. The aims of the present review are to: (1) summarize the main responses of retrospective and prospective studies exploring TID; (2) provide a systematic overview on TIDs during preparation, pre-competition, and competition phases in different endurance disciplines and performance levels; (3) address whether one TID has demonstrated greater efficacy than another; and (4) highlight research gaps in an effort to direct future scientific studies.

A few weeks ago, director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Thomas Insel announced his departure from public service—and his move to Google Life Sciences. He stated that the mental health world is “seeing an explosion of interest on the device side,” and that “many technology companies think mental health is the next frontier.”

Those are powerful words, rife with promise and opportunity. But Insel’s comments beg the question: If there is so much interest, why aren’t there many mental health apps? It’s a tricky question, especially since the need for such applications is apparent to those both in the mental health and technology spaces.

“This is a very big, unmeasured gap to fill,” says Deborah Estrin, a computer science professor at Cornell University and one of the founders of Open mHealth, a non-profit start-up focused on bringing clinical meaning to mobile health data. When Estrin first thought about Open mHealth, she thought mental health would be a great use for it.

… During its first year on the market, Jogbra moved 25,000 units. Two decades later, in 1998, the sports bra industry sold $412 million worth of product. A 2002 study estimated that sports bras accounted for about 6 percent of the then-$4.5 billion bra market. Today, the bra market is worth about $15 billion. Factor in that female participation in sports is increasing every year and athleisure appears to be here to stay, and it’s no wonder that from Lululemon to Under Armour to Victoria’s Secret, brands are turning their attention to sports bras.

But researchers are still a long way from understanding exactly how breasts move during exercise. Standing in the way of designing the best sports bra possible is millennia of stigma, powerful marketing forces, and good old-fashioned physics.

… Ankle sprains are the most common injuries associated with physical activity and athletic participation, accounting for approximately 60% of all injuries that occur during interscholastic and intercollegiate sports. In 2010 alone, over 1 million ankle sprains were seen in U.S. Emergency Departments and resulted in $1.2 billion in health care charges. Further, at least 1 out of every 3 individuals who sprain their ankle will go on to suffer from a condition called Chronic Ankle Instability (CAI). CAI is characterized by recurrent ankle sprains, episodes of giving way, and a number of other structural and neuromuscular alterations. These alterations decrease function, cause an individual to be less physically active, and increase the risk of post-traumatic ankle osteoarthritis.

The cause of CAI remains unknown but evidence suggests that an ankle sprain causes the sensory receptors around the foot/ankle complex to send inaccurate information to the central nervous system (CNS). As a result, the CNS then generates altered movement patterns and, over time, these alterations result in impaired function.

Why do some hamstring and quadriceps strains take much longer to repair than others? Which injuries are more prone to recurrence? Intramuscular tendon injuries have received little attention as an element in ‘muscle strain’. In thigh muscles, such as rectus femoris and biceps femoris, the attached tendon extends for a significant distance within the muscle belly. While the pathology of most muscle injures occurs at a musculotendinous junction, at first glance the athlete appears to report pain within a muscle belly. In addition to the musculotendinous injury being a site of pathology, the intramuscular tendon itself is occasionally injured. These injuries have a variety of appearances on MRIs. There is some evidence that these injuries require a prolonged rehabilitation time and may have higher recurrence rates. Therefore, it is important to recognise the tendon component of a thigh ‘muscle strain’.

… When [Charles] Spence analyzed his results, he saw that the Pringles that made a louder, higher-pitched crunch were perceived to be a full fifteen per cent fresher than the softer-sounding chips. The experiment was the first to successfully demonstrate that food could be made to taste different through the addition or subtraction of sound alone. Spence published his results in the Journal of Sensory Studies, in 2004. The paper, written with a post-doc, Massimiliano Zampini, was titled “The Role of Auditory Cues in Modulating the Perceived Crispness and Staleness of Potato Chips.”

Within the small group of scientists interested in multisensory integration, the paper heralded a new direction for the field, a shift from teasing out the mechanics of audio-visual interaction to what Paul Breslin, an experimental psychologist at Rutgers University, described as “the new frontier” of oral perception.

… In football, every time a manager opens his mouth, he’s selling. And he’s selling himself, above all.

There are, generally speaking, two parts to the job.

One is the technical part: your coaching sessions, your philosophy, your tactical set-up, your in-game management, your assessment of players.

The other is the buy-in part. This happens both pre- and post-results. Before a game, the issue is whether the players embrace and understand what you tell them. After, it’s whether the squad, along with the owners, fans and media, accept your reading of what happened on the pitch.

Despite the improved quality of synthetic turf surfaces, players are still expressing their discontent with the perceived greater risk of sustaining abrasion injuries on them relative to natural turf. The validity of the current device, the Securisport®, used to measure the abrasiveness of synthetic turf playing surfaces has been challenged based on its unrealistic interaction with the surface throughout testing. It rotates on the surface at a speed of 40?±?1?r/min. The aim of this study was to compare the abrasion measurements from the current Securisport device with those from a modified device. The modified device moved across the surface in a linear direction at a speed of 5?m/s, replicating a soccer slide tackle. Data were captured for three trials for each device on three different surfaces: sand-only infill, low-rubber infill and high-rubber infill. Overall, it was found that there was a significant mean abrasion difference of 51.7% between the two devices (p?=?0.02) and also significant differences resided between the two devices at specific infill levels. The results of this study found that the specific modifications to the current Securisport device, substantially changed abrasion measurements on synthetic turf, therefore illustrating the need for further work to improve the validity of the Securisport.