Applied Sports Science newsletter – November 3, 2015

… One challenge for us, certainly, is that for some of them the MLS season is already over. They didn’t make the playoffs or they just lost now in the playoffs, in the first round,” said Klinsmann, whose remarks also provided a glimpse of his thinking as he gets set to name his latest roster. “So that makes it tricky for us to make them keep going until we meet up on Nov. 8 for the St. Louis game against St. Vincent & the Grenadines.

“So to give them training plans, to make sure that they keep going, for players like a Jermaine Jones, a Kyle Beckerman, a Chris Wondolowski, a Mix Diskerud, a Lee Nguyen and others is now really, really crucial because they are not playing games any more prior to the World Cup qualifiers.”

I just started doing interval workouts and I love them. I’m running hard then jogging for one minute each, but I’m finding I’m not recovered after the breaks. Can I modify the recovery without losing the benefits of the workout? —Jack

I love your question because it is filled with intellect and intuition. One, you’re in tune with your body enough to realize you’re not recovering. And two, you’re wise to question whether it can be modified.

One of the most effective ways to run these high-intensity workouts is to use a rest-based strategy.

The day before Kentucky’s 2014 season opener, Mark Stoops walked off the practice field feeling good. The Wildcats had just completed a revamped practice week and he relayed his feelings to Erik Korem, the Wildcats’ director of high performance, who had suggested the schedule change.

“‘Man, Erik, I loved it,'” Korem recalls Stoops telling him. “‘I thought it worked out really, really well.

“‘But if we lose, it’s your fault.'”

Nudges, small design changes that can markedly affect individual behavior, have been catching on. These techniques rely on insights from behavioral science, and when used ethically, they can be very helpful. But we need to be sure that they aren’t being employed to sway people to make bad decisions that they will later regret.
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Whenever I’m asked to autograph a copy of Nudge, the book I wrote with Cass Sunstein, the Harvard law professor, I sign it, “Nudge for good.” Unfortunately, that is meant as a plea, not an expectation.

Our high school swim coach had a good strategy for making us work harder in practice. Every once in a while he’d stick four people in a lane, and every 100 yards, the person in the back had to get to the front. But the person in the front was allowed to push the pace and try to hold off the person in the back. What this meant was that by the end of practice, we’d swim hundreds of yards all-out with extra-hard intervals in between—harder than we’d gone if we’d simply been given basic drills.

That, essentially, is what hundreds of apps and devices are now calling gamification, or adding game elements to non-game situations. “It’s just a fancier way of saying motivation, or rewards and incentives,” says Cameron Lister, a public health researcher who recently published a paper on gamification in health and fitness apps in the journal JMIR Serious Games.

In a recent thought-provoking review of research on the default mode network, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang of the University of Southern California and her co-authors argue that when we are resting the brain is anything but idle and that, far from being purposeless or unproductive, downtime is in fact essential to mental processes that affirm our identities, develop our understanding of human behavior and instill an internal code of ethics—processes that depend on the DMN. Downtime is an opportunity for the brain to make sense of what it has recently learned, to surface fundamental unresolved tensions in our lives and to swivel its powers of reflection away from the external world toward itself. While mind-wandering we replay conversations we had earlier that day, rewriting our verbal blunders as a way of learning to avoid them in the future.

If you are trying to achieve a goal, the more often that you monitor your progress, the greater the likelihood that you will succeed, according to research published by the American Psychological Association. Your chances of success are even more likely if you report your progress publicly or physically record it.

“Monitoring goal progress is a crucial process that comes into play between setting and attaining a goal, ensuring that the goals are translated into action,” said lead author Benjamin Harkin, PhD, of the University of Sheffield. The study appears in the journal Psychological Bulletin®. “This review suggests that prompting progress monitoring improves behavioral performance and the likelihood of attaining one’s goals.”

UK Athletics (UKA) has announced a five-year “strategic partnership” with Grant Thornton UK LLP, with the aim of making the national governing body one of the world’s leading high-performance sports organisations.

The announcement comes as UKA prepares to host a number of global events in the coming years, with the IAAF World Championships and IPC Athletics World Championships to take place in London in 2017 and the IAAF World Indoor Championships going to Birmingham in 2018.

Runners, mariners, airmen, and wilderness trekkers beware: Your global positioning system (GPS) is flattering you, telling you that you have run, sailed, flown, or walked significantly farther than you actually have. And it’s not the GPS’s fault, or yours.

Blame the statistics of measurement. Researchers at the University of Salzburg (UoS), Salzburg Forschungsgesellchaft (SFG), and the Delft University of Technology have done the math to prove that the distance measured by GPS over a straight line will, on average, exceed the actual distance traveled. They also derive a formula for predicting how big the error will be. The open-access paper was published in the International Journal of Geographical Information Science; an earlier version is available on Arxiv.

Anyone fleetingly familiar with exercise science will tell you that endurance sports are full of pricks that generate an alarming amount of bio waste. BSX Insight 1.0 overcame this pain point – literally, a “pain” “point” – by developing a non-invasive lactate threshold test. BSX’s optical sensor embedded in a calf sleeve has enabled thousands of athletes to determine their lactate threshold and associated training zones without the need for needles, blood and rubber gloves.

BSX 2.0, currently in beta-testing, measures muscle oxygenation (SmO2). While everyone has at least heard of lactate and knows (or thinks they know) what it means for their workout, incorporating SmO2 into your training is more like a choose-your-own-adventure novel. And that’s exactly why BSX thinks muscle oxygenation may be the next great training metric.

Small wireless trunk accelerometers have become a popular approach to unobtrusively quantify human locomotion and provide insights into both gait rehabilitation and sports performance. However, limited evidence exists as to which trunk accelerometry measures are suitable for the purpose of detecting movement compensations while running, and specifically in response to fatigue. The aim of this study was therefore to detect deviations in the dynamic center of mass (CoM) motion due to running-induced fatigue using tri-axial trunk accelerometry. Twenty runners aged 18–25 years completed an indoor treadmill running protocol to volitional exhaustion at speeds equivalent to their 3.2 km time trial performance. The following dependent measures were extracted from tri-axial trunk accelerations of 20 running steps before and after the treadmill fatigue protocol: the tri-axial ratio of acceleration root mean square (RMS) to the resultant vector RMS, step and stride regularity (autocorrelation procedure), and sample entropy. Running-induced fatigue increased mediolateral and anteroposterior ratios of acceleration RMS (p < .05), decreased the anteroposterior step regularity (p < .05), and increased the anteroposterior sample entropy (p < .05) of trunk accelerometry patterns. Our findings indicate that treadmill running-induced fatigue might reveal itself in a greater contribution of variability in horizontal plane trunk accelerations, with anteroposterior trunk accelerations that are less regular from step-to-step and are less predictable. It appears that trunk accelerometry parameters can be used to detect deviations in dynamic CoM motion induced by treadmill running fatigue, yet it is unknown how robust or generalizable these parameters are to outdoor running environments.

… Eric Nauman, the director of the Human Injury Research and Regenerative Technologies Laboratory at Purdue University, along with his colleagues Tom Talavage and Larry Leverenz, sought to change that by tracking two high school teams and one collegiate level squad over a season. At every training session and match players wore an xPatch sensor behind their right ears, allowing the academics to monitor not only the G-force of every impact to the head but the rotational acceleration of the brain after every impact greater than 20g. The researchers’ thoroughness didn’t end there. They also monitored each session to see what types of impacts were causing the most force – and took MRI scans before, during, and after the season, to track changes in each player’s brain.

Several discoveries startled them. First, the forces generated by heading back goal-kicks and goalkeeper’s punts were much higher than expected. Some registered at between 50g and 100g – similar to American Football players crashing into each other or punches thrown by boxers. What’s more, as Nauman explains: “The percentages of 100g hits was effectively the same between women’s college soccer and American Football, which really surprised us. And while American Football players tend to take more hits overall in a given practice session and game, the college soccer players were getting hit every day and so it evened out.”

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’.

… Many athletes I work with are surprised to learn that their sweat rate does not change just because the temperature drops. This is because sweat rate is determined by numerous factors, including fitness level, pace and acclimatization, not just ambient temperature. I actually find that athletes are just as likely to become dehydrated during winter workouts.

Two days. Three cities. More than 400 participants from across Canada.

SportsHack will bring together teams of hackers in Toronto, Vancouver and Halifax to compete in developing innovative sports-related software solutions.

This year, in partnership with the Canadian Football League (CFL), SportsHack challenges you to develop real world technologies from the CFL’s real world data.

Friday-Sunday, November 27-29