Applied Sports Science newsletter – November 9, 2015

A basketball coach has to win games. That’s his main priority.

But how does he win games when one of his best players can help only on certain nights because of health issues?

That’s the dilemma facing Houston Rockets coach Kevin McHale just two weeks into this season. Center Dwight Howard is slowly being brought along by the training staff after lower-back stiffness returned following his second game of the season.

Seattle Sounders striker Clint Dempsey, who captained United States at the 2014 World Cup, says he believes he will play “more games” with the national team despite his unexpected omission from the squad that will begin 2018 World Cup qualifying next week.

In his first public comments since manager Jurgen Klinsmann decided to leave him out of the 23-man team that will contest United States’ first two qualifiers, Dempsey told the “ESPN Soccer Today” radio show on KESN 103.3 FM in Dallas that he understands Klinsmann’s call and does not believe it signals the end of his international career.

“I felt good with my return this year with the national team,” Dempsey said. “I think I played in 10 games, scored nine goals. I’ve enjoyed my time playing for the country. I still think that there’s some more games to be played.

Ryan Fitzpatrick and Geno Smith were both injured last week when they failed to slide after runs. Eli Manning says he has never practiced the maneuver. What’s going on?

Yoga devotees overwhelmingly do their downward dogs to improve their general health — and, by and large, it seems to be working, according to a new roundup of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Health and Human Services.

The study of nearly 35,000 adults in the US looked at wellness practices such as yoga, chiropractic care, acupuncture, and dietary supplement use. The goal: To see how the practices made people feel about their health.

Curry is the best player in the NBA, and if he continues the same trajectory, he could end up as an all-time great. However, the drill above is not the reason for his ridiculous skills. I know this because I used to do this drill with 9-year-olds.

It looks impressive, but it has very little to do with dribbling in a game. First, he’s stationary. The way that your hand contacts the ball changes when you are stationary, walking, or running. We used to do the same basic drill, but add forward and backward movement. Second, in a game, you react to opponents, not to tennis balls. Tennis balls do not provide the same informational cues as an opponent.

If I trained a player such as Curry, I would do similar drills in the offseason primarily because I would want him to rest and not to overtrain. Drills such as these given an illusion of importance, and players are motivated by the challenge. It is easy to see improvement in the drills. This motivation and improvement increases confidence. The increased confidence is the biggest quality that transfers from these drills to game performance, especially when the player believes in the drills.

Legia Warsaw were the first in Poland will benefit from a system for monitoring training loads GPSports Australian company – the so-called world market leader. “integrated” GPS technology.

On ?azienkowska visited new system of monitoring training loads and match orders. Since yesterday legionaries use the “worn” GPS technology that will allow a complete picture of the requirements of physical and physiological each player. This will facilitate far the observation and analysis of many important parameters and variables such as total distance, distance per minute, distance, fast running and sprinting, maximum and average speed of the race, the number of violent braking / acceleration, pace of work in the various stages of the match, and many, many others.

When they were kids, Simon Cherry and Ramsey Badawi both wanted to be astronomers, unlocking mysteries in far off galaxies. That didn’t work out for them. The pair still plan on unlocking mysteries but this time inside the human body.

They’ve received a $15.5 million grant to build the world’s first full body PET scanner. Unlike X-Rays and MRI’s that image structure in the body. Positron emission tomography, or PET, images function on a molecular level.

“We are able to say something about what the cells in the body are doing,” said Simon Cherry a professor of radiology and biomedical engineering at the University of California, Davis.

As the No. 1 team in the first College Football Playoff rankings, Clemson is in a different position this November. Luckily for coach Dabo Swinney and this young but talented Tigers crew, the on-field experiences on the rest of the schedule are easily simulated through the program’s commitment to virtual reality training.

Swinney took some advice from Stanford coach David Shaw, who has installed some of the same virtual reality training for the Cardinal, and has enabled a rapid maturity beyond expectation.

Background

Head impacts and resulting head accelerations cause concussive injuries. There is no standard for reporting head impact data in sports to enable comparison between studies.
Objective

The aim was to outline methods for reporting head impact acceleration data in sport and the effect of the acceleration thresholds on the number of impacts reported.
… Discussion

Linear and angular raw data were most frequently reported. Metrics combining raw data may be more useful; however, validity of the metrics has not been adequately addressed for sport. Differing data collection methods and descriptive statistics for reporting head impacts in sports limit inter-study comparisons. Consensus on data analysis methods for sports impact assessment is needed, including thresholds. Based on the available data, the 10-g threshold is the most commonly reported impact threshold and should be reported as the median with 25th and 75th interquartile ranges as the data are non-normally distributed. Validation studies are required to determine the best threshold and metrics for impact acceleration data collection in sport.
Conclusion

Until in-field validation studies are completed, it is recommended that head impact data should be reported as median and interquartile ranges using the 10-g impact threshold.

Two years ago, John Whitcomb saw something on the 10 o’clock news about concussions that spurred the idea for his now award-winning fledgling startup.

Whitcomb, who won the “Rising Star” award on Thursday at the Wisconsin Early Stage Symposium, an annual startup-focused event in Madison, has invented a technology that he says make helmets more effective at preventing concussions.

Over the span of an NBA season, players have to prepare for the possibility of playing thousands of minutes and burning hundreds of thousands calories. That means preparing for the grueling 82-plus games per season when they’re on and off the court.

The players’ offseason, off-days and post-game/practice times are integral for that preparation, and with that, comes the necessity to fuel properly. That’s where Brett Eisen comes in.

Federal officials, in a scientific journal set for release Monday, raise an alarm about the huge popularity of unregulated — and in some cases, unsafe — dietary supplements among military personnel and young athletes.

The concerns about supplement use, and recommended policy shifts, could affect people such as soldiers in combat zones, high school football players, and consumers purchasing weight-loss pills, multivitamins, botanical remedies, and other supplements.

The journal included articles written by officials at the Pentagon and the US Anti-Doping Agency, who joined medical researchers and public health watchdogs in producing a special edition of the journal Drug Testing and Analysis.

Hello redditors of /r/science.

I am Niklas Ivarsson, PhD student at Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden. Yesterday you showed a great interest in our work regarding why high intensity interval training works.

In the article we found that free radicals produced during high intensity interval training (HIIT) react in particularly with the ryanodine receptor, a critical calcium channel in excitation-contraction coupling. The reaction causes the channel to leak calcium from the specialized subcellular compartment (sarcoplasmic reticulum), into the cytoplasm. This causes a prolonged period of increased basal levels of calcium in the muscle cell.

… To date, there have been 10 ligament injuries this calendar year affecting players from seven different teams. Additionally, nine teams currently have five or more players sidelined due to injury. These cruciate ligament injuries, along with hamstring, groin, quad, calf, hip and knee ailments account for over 50 of the recently reported injuries in the current season.

There are of course, frequent injuries in the game of soccer. The constant change of direction, pace, and frequent cutting, along with the fatigue of intertwined domestic and international play and the infamous physicality of the Premier League impose many opportunities for these muscle and knee injuries, the most common type suffered by players.

Without a doubt, injury prevention can significantly impact a team’s season by curtailing the nasty detriments that accompany injuries. The monetary cost is as abrasive as the injuries themselves; teams spent an estimated 198 million pounds on injured players in 2014-2015, a 2.2 percent increase over the prior season. Teams would much rather pay players to perform on the pitch rather than nurse injuries on the sideline.