Applied Sports Science newsletter – November 12, 2015

Standing 6-foot-5 and weighing 245 pounds, there aren’t many quarterbacks who are as physically imposing as Cam Newton. As a matter of fact, there aren’t many defenders who are as big as Newton.

There have been 828 players to log a snap on defense this season. Newton is taller than 90 percent of those 828, and he outweighs 52 percent of them. Of those 828 defensive players, 79 — 9.5 percent — match Newton’s height and weight combination.

When Gordon Hayward’s shots weren’t falling often enough to start the season, the Utah Jazz star wasn’t worried.

Neither was the man who spends the offseason getting him ready.

“He shot the ball this summer better than I’ve ever seen him shoot it,” said Rob Blackwell, a trainer who works with Hayward as well as NBA players Josh McRoberts and Carl Landry.

In their never-ending quest to find a winning edge, NFL teams are turning their players on to the most accessible and natural performance-enhancer: a good night’s sleep.

There’s no shortage of advice out there claiming to make you better, but mindfulness meditation is the rare, research-proven technique that boosts your performance by physically altering your brain.

Researchers from the University of British Columbia recently pooled data from more than 20 studies to understand how practicing mindfulness affects the brain. While the researchers found significant changes in eight brain regions, there are two regions that are of particular importance to you.

… Henning Berg, manager of Legia Warsaw, has previously labelled Icelandic players as “very interesting”.

“Their mentality is the first thing you notice,” he said. “They are always trying their best, train very hard and are mentally strong. They handle stress very well and are extremely professional.”

This emphasis on the mentality of Icelandic players has not gone unnoticed by Freyr Alexandersson, manager of Leiknir in Iceland’s top flight and the women’s national team boss. He says he often gets phone calls from foreign clubs who are looking at youngsters in Iceland. “They tell me that the player is technically good and what not. But what they need to know is whether he has the Icelandic mentality.” The ‘Icelandic mentality’ – it’s becoming a buzz word in the European game, one that teams are looking for in Iceland and using to train their own youngsters around Europe.

Everton has announced an extended agreement with sports science software company Kitman Labs.

Silicon Valley’s leading Sports Science and Technology Company has installed the Kitman Labs system into Everton’s Finch Farm training base in a multi-year deal.

… “The question in basketball is not if but when,” says Dr. Rory A. Cooper, Director of Human Engineering Resources Laboratories at the University of Pittsburgh who is also the founding director of the Veteran Affairs Rehabilitation Research and Development Center. “Basketball is a little behind, but it’s already happened in track and field.”

The Los Angeles Dodgers’ championship hopes may have ended against the Mets in mid-October, but Dodger Stadium opened its gates last night for a pitching demonstration of an entirely different sort. The inaugural class of the Dodgers Accelerator explained their products to about 300 investors, industry leaders, press and other representatives from sports, technology and entertainment huddled under heat lamps behind home plate.

The first accelerator of its kind dedicated to sports and technology, the Dodgers Accelerator received 575 applications from 37 countries, winnowing them down to 10 companies ranging from early-stage startups to category leaders with rapidly scaling operations.

BSX Athletics, a sports tech company leading the industry in real-time muscle monitoring, just launched the second generation BSXinsight. It has extended its capabilities to include real-time monitoring of muscle oxygenation, daily activity tracking, and third party connectivity. BSXinsight collects personal workout data, and shows athletes how to use it in real-time. Athletes are now equipped to make meaningful on-demand adjustments during their workouts with the security of knowing they are training at optimal performance.

“Muscle Oxygenation [SmO2] is a new concept to the athletic world, but one that is gaining tremendous traction, and will soon be recognized as the most important real-time metric possible. Oxygen is the central piece of energy production which makes muscle oxygenation critical for any athlete to keep track of during their training,” says Dr. Dustin Freckleton, CEO of BSX Athletics. “Similar to heart-rate training, muscle oxygenation can help you understand your daily training. However, where heart-rate is influenced by conditional factors like stress, temperature, sleep, and hydration, SmO2 is constant, more dependable and accurate. Muscle oxygenation is also much more immediate.”

Your adult body contains 206 bones. They form a balanced and symmetrical skeletal structure that puts even the best Lego toys to shame. They’re also your primary defence against gravity, with your femur (thigh bone) alone capable of supporting up to 30 times your weight.

Of course, we runners tend to push gravity defiance to the limit. A single step during a distance run creates an impact force about two to three times your body weight. Luckily for us, bone is a living tissue that undergoes constant renewal. Under normal conditions, about four per cent of your bone is broken down and replaced through a process called remodelling. When you run, this process goes into overdrive. Just as your body strengthens muscle fibres by replacing damaged myofilaments, it also uses remodelling and modelling – a separate process that fortifies bone with extra bone tissue – to create bigger, stronger bones.

“There is no systematic doping culture in football,” said FIFA’s Chief Medical Officer Jiri Dvorak two years ago.

Since then, words spoken by FIFA executives have come under plenty of scrutiny but this is one area where football can hold its head high, especially in the company of other sports such as cycling and athletics. Mention ‘doping in football’ and one incident that springs to mind is when Diego Maradona’s international career with Argentina came to a sensational end, being sent home from the 1994 FIFA World Cup in the United States for testing positive for the performance enhancing drug ephedrine

In the scale of wider doping scandals of recent years, the Maradona incident is viewed with some humour – especially given the caricature that the Argentine legend has become since then. But it is not simply an anomaly in football’s long history.

Anti-doping science has been through a revolution, with the introduction of “biological passports” for athletes. But this week’s scandal in Russia shows that technology alone cannot keep sports clean.

Scientists have begun to identify the symphony of biological triggers that powered the extraordinary expansion of the human brain.

Psychological scientists Adam Galinksy and Maurice Schweitzer go over the research on cooperation and competition in their new book, Friend and Foe: When to Cooperate, When to Compete, and How to Succeed at Both, according to Psychological Science.

Inspired by NBA team the Miami Heat — who managed to add LeBron James and Chris Bosh to a roster that already had Dwayne Wade in 2010 — Galinsky and organizational psychologist Roderick Swaab posited that the relationship between talent and team performance was not totally positively linear.

For their study, Galinsky and Swaab analyzed a decade (2002-2012) of NBA data. The duo identified elite talent by whether they were selected for inclusion in the NBA All-Star game and if they were in the top third of their cohort. They then compared the data to play-by-play data and teams’ winning percentages.