Applied Sports Science newsletter – November 14, 2015

… But Michu, or at least the one that we had come to know, never really returned. Rushed back by an under-pressure Laudrup in December, he was once again forced out by injury – an ankle issue which was to sadly become a recurring problem. By the time he recovered, there was no Laudrup to be rushed back by.

The Dane had been replaced by Garry Monk, who had gone from being a team-mate to the manager. Michu didn’t feature until March 15 and only played five times in the second half of the season, plagued by lingering issues and swarmed by questions about his loyalty. He didn’t even feature against Napoli in the two-legged Europa League tie, where a potential move was reportedly first discussed.

Arsène Wenger has admitted he is very concerned about Arsenal’s injury situation, particularly as the club’s schedule is only going to get heavier as the Christmas period looms.

The manager said Laurent Koscielny had an 80 % chance of returning for Sunday’s derby at home to Tottenham Hotspur, after missing the 5-1 Champions League defeat at Bayern Munich in midweek because of a hip problem.

Mikel Arteta faces a late fitness test and David Ospina is expected to come back into the squad but Wenger is still without seven other players. He hopes Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, Aaron Ramsey and Héctor Bellerín will return shortly after the international break, with Theo Walcott’s comeback likely to be December and Jack Wilshere, Danny Welbeck and Tomas Rosicky longer-term absentees.

… It is mid-morning in October at Ari­zona State University, and the autumn sun has already pushed the temperature into the low 90s, en route to 104°. Bowman stands in precious poolside shade, wearing a yellow Sun Devils T-shirt emblazoned with maroon pitchfork logos. He was named the school’s head coach of men’s and women’s swimming last April, and also brought—or was followed by—a postcollegiate training group of 13 swimmers. The most significant of these is Phelps, who climbs out of the water after a light swim. A more rigorous session will follow in the evening. He is bearded and deeply tanned, his skin pocked with baseball-sized welts left behind by cupping therapy, a suction-based practice that approximates rapid deep-tissue massage. It’s foolish to assess an athlete’s appear­ance; slow swimmers can look sensational on the blocks. But the rumors appear to be true: Phelps has a different profile—leaner and more muscular than in past Olympic years.

Phelps returned to training last fall after 45 days at The Meadows, and almost immediately the swimming world buzzed with talk of his workouts and renewed commitment. He trained hard and swam unevenly at several meets, and then in August, while most top U.S. swimmers raced in the world championships in Kazan, Russia, from which Phelps was barred under the terms of his suspension, he lit up the national championships in San Antonio. Phelps first won the 200-meter butterfly in 1:52.94, his fastest time since setting the world record in 2009. One night later, after South African Chad le Clos had won the 100-meter butterfly at worlds in 50.56 and dogged Phelps in a postrace interview—“I just did a time [Phelps] hasn’t done in four years. So he can be quiet now”—Phelps took the event in 50.45, also his fastest time in six years.

The Bulls aren’t leading their conference or division as they prepare to host the Charlotte Hornets Friday in the United Center. In the Bulls 5-3 start, the team isn’t leading in scoring or defense. But there is one important category the Bulls are leading the NBA: the building of the team through the draft. That’s because the evolution of the NBA continues to lean more toward the importance of the draft over free agency.

… Sports science has come to the league in a hurry, and through a dozen different front doors. Companies like P3 do detailed offseason assessments. Data company SportVU tracks on-court player movement from in-arena cameras. Australian start-up Catapult processes performance data by outfitting players with sensors worn in practice and summer league. There are dozens more tools and startups besides.

Put that in a stew with the convictions of all the trainers and doctors around the NBA, and you have nothing close to accepted wisdom from all the medical data. Companies like P3 often disagree with team staffs on how to best take care of players.

But Budenholzer is trying to be a leader in making a symphony out of that cacophony. The Lyles hire comes not just with proven training programs, but also a strong framework to build trust among all involved.

After two fabled years at Swansea City and one all too forgettable season wrecked by injury, Michu has departed with the Swans today. He heads to Langreo, a fourth division Spanish side managed by his brother, to salvage what is left of his career, ruined by an ankle injury. He takes with him the legacy of a one-season wonder, scoring eighteen goals for Swansea in 2012/2013 from the midfield. His Swansea career unravelled just as quickly as it had burst onto the scene; but to define Michu’s career by this one season would be a pity.

More than two months after Illinois fired head coach Tim Beckman, the university released the full report that led to Beckman’s dismissal.

When the university decided to move on from Beckman on Aug. 28, then-athletic director Mike Thomas (who was fired Monday with the release of the report) said the preliminary results from the report showed “efforts to deter injury reporting and influence medical decisions” and inappropriate treatment of players with regard to scholarships.

The report, which was completed “through more than 100 interviews and review of more than 200,000 documents,” found that Beckman “employed a wide array of motivational tactics directed primarily at players and athletic trainers that violated” sports medicine “standards and protocol.”

Georgia Tech will start the 2015-16 season with pretty much all of its players at 100 percent.

The sight of guards Marcus Georges-Hunt, Josh Heath, Corey Heyward, and Travis Jorgenson, and center Ben Lammers playing injury-free is a wonderful one for Coach Brian Gregory, but is also rewarding for assistant athletic trainer Richard Stewart. Stewart in his eighth season on The Flats helping rehab Georgia Tech men’s basketball — he also works with the men’s and women’s tennis teams — played a key role in getting those five players back on the court. He’s earned the coaching staff’s admiration.

“I’ve learned through 25 years of coaching how valuable having a great trainer is and Richard is as good as I’ve been around,” said Gregory. “He does all the stuff medically. He’s obviously top-notch in that but he has a tremendous relationship with the players. He’s very good at reading where guys are not only physically but mentally. He’s an important part of our coaching staff. You have to have the best of the best and that’s exactly what Richard is.”

… When I initially worked with her, I followed the path of most coaches and trainers: I did the things that I had done as a player. When I played, much of my individual practice and learning occurred in my driveway. I grew up pre-Internet, and I learned my drills at practice or at basketball camp or made up on my own. As a private coach, I started with the same drills. When she mastered these drills, I made up new drills on my own. Before our workouts, I practiced and made up new drills to challenge her. I created drills that made sense to me and overloaded her skill to force continual adaptation to the drills.

They were good drills; most of the dribbling drills are featured in my DVD Great Ball Handling Made Easy, which we produced almost a decade later. The shooting drills are featured in 180 Shooter, which I wrote more than a decade later. After working with this 10-year-old girl, I used the same drills with high-school and college players. They were solid drills.

The problem, however, is that I did the learning. I did the trial and error. I used my imagination and creativity. The player simply repeated my demonstrations.

The aims of this study were to estimate the magnitude of variability and progression in actual competitive and field vertical jump test performances in elite Paralympic sprinters with visual impairment in the year leading up to the 2015 Parapan American Games, and to investigate the relationships between loaded and unloaded vertical jumping test results and actual competitive sprinting performance. Fifteen Brazilian Paralympic sprinters with visual impairment attended seven official competitions (four national, two international and the Parapan American Games 2015) between April 2014 and August 2015, in the 100- and 200-m dash. In addition, they were tested in five different periods using loaded (mean propulsive power [MPP] in jump squat [JS] exercise) and unloaded (squat jump [SJ] height) vertical jumps within the 3 weeks immediately prior to the main competitions. The smallest important effect on performances was calculated as half of the within-athlete race-to-race (or test-to-test) variability and a multiple regression analysis was performed to predict the 100- and 200-m dash performances using the vertical jump test results. Competitive performance was enhanced during the Parapan American Games in comparison to the previous competition averages, overcoming the smallest worthwhile enhancement in both the 100- (0.9%) and 200-m dash (1.43%). In addition, The SJ and JS explained 66% of the performance variance in the competitive results. This study showed that vertical jump tests, in loaded and unloaded conditions, could be good predictors of the athletes’ sprinting performance, and that during the Parapan American Games the Brazilian team reached its peak competitive performance.

Shawn Arent, director of the Center for Health and Human Performance at Rutgers University, explains why you shouldn’t stretch before you start your workout.

The University of Southern California (USC) Center for Body Computing has launched an app to study how the integration of biometric data with social media could affect how we connect with each other.

A growing number of health and medical apps are integrating social media tools and people are becoming increasingly comfortable sharing personal health data. And that could be a powerful tool, for example when it comes to motivating healthy behavior change. This study aims to understand how sharing that data affects our digital interactions.

Biogram 2, developed in collaboration with Medable, lets participants embed biometric data, starting with heart rate, into images that they share on social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

As anyone who owns a smartwatch can tell you, one-handed operation isn’t exactly their forte. Beyond the “flick-to-wake” gesture found in a number of smartwatches and Android Wear’s wrist-based notification scrolling, there’s not much you can do without a second hand and set of fingers. But a team of researchers may have developed solution: a strap called Tomo that translates subtle muscle movements into software actions.

The prototype, developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction group, uses tiny impulses to sense wrist muscle movements. Operating on a principle of Electrical Impedance Tomography, similar to PET and CT machines, eight metal contacts send a continuous series of tiny electrical impulses through the wearer’s wrist. Sensors measure the strength of the impulses on the other side and, over time, collect enough data to generate and analyze a digital image of the finger and hand gestures being performed.

After each and every Maple Leafs practice, a figure, mostly unknown to the public, stalks around the team’s dressing room and scoops up palm-size devices that look like beepers and blink both green and red.

He’s Jeremy Bettle, the club’s director of sports science and performance, and he’s picking up the individual GPS units players wear at practice – there’s also a vest – that provide all kinds of data on health and fitness.

Imagine playing a virtual-reality boxing game, complete with a menacing opponent aiming a haymaker at your head. You get your gloves up in time to block the punch, but you feel no impact when it hits, breaking the otherwise immersive experience.

Impacto, a prototype developed by researchers in the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) lab at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Germany, sidesteps this deficit in mainstream VR experiences. The technology consists of an armband that combines basic haptic feedback (a tap or vibration on the skin) with electrical muscle stimulation to push or pull the user’s limb in a way that convincingly simulates a physical impact.

“It’s kind of an illusion,” says Patrick Baudisch, who leads the HCI lab. “We want the user wearing a VR headset to believe that he was really hit by something.”

It’s no surprise that ballet dancers, who spend hours rehearsing high impact jumps, experience a high incidence of lower extremity injuries. A new study, however, shows that dancers can reduce loading on lower extremity joints and help reduce injury risk by performing ballet jumps, also called sautés, on a reduced-stiffness floor.

The study, published in September 2015 in the Journal of Dance Medicine & Science by a team of researchers from the Department of Physical Therapy at Missouri State University in Springfield, included 15 female dancers aged 18 to 28 years. All the dancers had at least five years of dance experience and no history of lower extremity injuries, surgeries, or recent pain. They performed sauté jumps on both a reduced-stiffness floor (also called a sprung floor) and a vinyl-covered concrete floor. Investigators measured maximum joint flexion and negative velocities of the ankles, knees, and hips on both types of floors.

The results: Jumping on the reduced-stiffness floor led to decreased maximum joint flexion angles and angular negative velocity in the lower extremity joints compared with performing the same jumps on the concrete floor.

… Thanks for the kind words. Glad you’re digging the series. 1. Incorporating psychology/brain science into grade school: I would like to see that attempted, although I don’t know with certainty that it would be useful. To my mind, the most important thing that ends up missing from education is critical thinking. I run into adults all the time who believe something simply because they heard it, or because they read it online. To the degree that brain science could be used as part of a broader initiative to refine thinking skills, I’d be all for it. 2. Mental illness: The good news is that there’s a lot of progress being made in de-stigmatizing mental illness, although clearly there’s still a great deal more required. Tying back to your previous Q, I think an understanding of mental illness — and in general the vast differences between individual brains — would be a very useful thing to teach children. Also, we really need to repair our social policy on this point: about 30% of our prison population has mental illness; after deinstitutionalization, this is where our mentally ill flowed. Our prison system has become our de facto mental health care system. This has low utility and high cost. We need to do better as a society.

Dr. Brian Hainline of the NCAA Sports Science Institute visited the University of Chicago campus on Thursday to discuss developing national health initiatives with student-athletes, coaches and administrators. … “It’s very important for me to make school visits,” he said. “I meet with the coaches, the student-athletes, the athletic trainers and the team physicians – that’s where I really learn what’s important and where we need to go. It’s not just for me to come and tell people ‘this is what we’re doing’; it’s really a two-way street. I need to hear what’s happening at the ground level.”

John Meyer DPT ’98 got some very good news in early October.

The adjunct faculty member and senior physical therapist for USC Athletics found out that he was being promoted to associate athletic director of sports science and performance.

Meyer’s promotion comes as part of a larger Athletic Department restructuring following the recent departure of senior associate athletic director Mark Jackson, according to an Oct. 1 email from USC Director of Athletics Pat Haden ’75. Jackson left USC to take an athletic director position at Villanova University.

… By cutting back sugar for your kids, you can see dramatic improvements in just 10 days. That is pretty remarkable, if you think about it.

We typically think diets take months, or even longer, to make a positive dent. For 43 children, however, Dr. Robert Lustig and his team at University of California, San Francisco, decreased triglyceride levels by 33 points on average. The LDL — bad — cholesterol dropped 5 points, as did diastolic blood pressure, the lower number.

All of the children dramatically reduced their risk of diabetes, as their blood sugar and insulin levels normalized. Again, just 10 days. And while the study was done in children, there’s no reason to believe the benefits wouldn’t extend to adults, as well.

… “I was so gutted in London to miss the final by just a hair, because I knew that there were girls in there that shouldn’t be,” [Hilary] Stellingwerff said. “You just know athletes shouldn’t be in there, and it’s just like ‘Come on!”‘

Stellingwerff greeted Monday’s accusations of widespread, state-supported doping in Russian track and field with mixed feelings, calling it a “little bit gut-wrenching, and a little bit not surprised.” The 34-year-old from Sarnia, Ont., will breathe easier knowing the field next summer in Rio should be cleaner. But it can’t replace what Stellingwerff missed out on in London.

“I think a lot of things would be different, but it’s hard to go back,” Stellingwerff said. “There’s shoe contracts. There’s carding (athlete funding) from Athletics Canada, that changes if you’re a finalist. There’s so many endorsements. There’s the prize money, the races you don’t get in because the spots are taken up by athletes that shouldn’t be there.

More than 25 million people rely on Adderall™ and other similar drugs to help treat narcolepsy, depression and attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). But how does amphetamine, the active ingredient in Adderall™, work? This week, Reactions explains how amphetamine helps you focus. [multiple videos]

The common pattern of play in ‘team sports’ is ‘stop and go’, i.e. where players perform repeated bouts of brief high-intensity exercise punctuated by lower intensity activity. Sprints are generally 2-4 s long and recovery between sprints is of variable length. Energy production during brief sprints is derived from the degradation of intra-muscular phosphocreatine and glycogen (anaerobic metabolism). Prolonged periods of multiple sprints drain muscle glycogen stores, leading to a decrease in power output and a reduction in general work rate during training and competition. The impact of dietary carbohydrate interventions on team sport performance have been typically assessed using intermittent variable-speed shuttle running over a distance of 20 m. This method has evolved to include specific work to rest ratios and skills specific to team sports such as soccer, rugby and basketball. Increasing liver and muscle carbohydrate stores before sports helps delay the onset of fatigue during prolonged intermittent variable-speed running. Carbohydrate intake during exercise, typically ingested as carbohydrate-electrolyte solutions, is also associated with improved performance. The mechanisms responsible are likely to be the availability of carbohydrate as a substrate for central and peripheral functions. Variable-speed running in hot environments is limited by the degree of hyperthermia before muscle glycogen availability becomes a significant contributor to the onset of fatigue. Finally, ingesting carbohydrate immediately after training and competition will rapidly recover liver and muscle glycogen stores.

They say an army marches on its stomach, well then so does the future of a nation’s sporting ambitions. There is no such thing as a successful elite athlete who goes to bed hungry. Could the solution to South Africa’s transformation problem be found on the empty dinner plates of hungry children? Are quotas and government interventions providing results, or are we merely papering over gaping cracks that are indicative of an unequal society? CONQA Sport explores the relationship between transformation and nutrition and finds that the challenges we face are heavier than first imagined.

… I’ve been curating some data so that I can look at teams’ attacking buildup play. There’s some more in-depth stuff coming, but I thought it was fascinating to just look at the basic geometry of different teams’ attacks. So, let’s measure the passing moves that lead to shots (rebounds and direct free kicks excluded), starting with a turnover or dead ball situation. For each team I’ve calculated:

the average ‘X’ position, this is the position of the ‘centre’ of the move, as a percentage up the the field towards the opponent’s goal, 50 being the half-way line

the average width of the move, sideline to sideline, with 50 being half the pitch

the average height of the move, box to box, again 50 being half the pitch

the average duration in seconds

… Chad Hennings: When people talk about the San Antonio Spurs, they mention the five championships, they talk about you and Tim Duncan and David Robinson, and inevitably they talk about the high character of your team. How have you gone about building that reputation and infusing character into your organization?

Gregg Popovich: Sometimes when I hear people talk about character I think it’s a little too general of a term. We’ve all seen a million books on it and everybody’s got a different definition of what makes up character. People always say our teams have character and they know how to win, know how to lose, all sorts of those things. I try to be a little more specific in my definition, especially when it comes to the character of players we bring in.

Can you explain that process a little bit and get into the nitty gritty of your definition of character?

GP: When I’m interviewing a kid to draft I’m looking for specific things. Over the course of sitting in the gym and talking, having lunch, watching him at free agent camp, this is what I’m after and not necessarily in this order.

The Premier League has become one of the most popular football leagues in the world, with a continuously growing global audience. The league features world-class players from every continent, demanding the close attention of the football world from August to May.

Like in all other sports leagues, however, be they professional, amateur, or recreational, injuries remain a nagging problem in the Premier League.

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.

It’s no surprise that Mesut Özil, Arsenal’s mercurial playmaker, has been grabbing the headlines. He has 10 assists after featuring in just 11 matches, and he’s the new owner of the Premier League’s record for consecutive matches with an assist. But a closer look at his statistics shows that he may be starting to go downhill – albeit from a very high peak.

If Özil’s only job were to assist goals, then there’d be no point writing this post. His real job, though, is to make Arsenal better than anyone else would at the same position on the field. That means he has to support the collective effort, helping other players to make assists as well – not to mention defending. If he finished the season with a mammoth total of 30 assists, but no one else had even one, then Arsenal would probably be relegated. So how is he fitting into the team as a whole?

One of NYA’s tools for answering this question is the Shapley value, which measures a player’s overall contribution to winning. It captures a player’s intangible benefits or disadvantages as well as anything that can easily be counted on the field. In both 2013-14 and 2014-15, Özil’s Shapley value stayed pretty close to the average across Arsenal’s squad (weighted by minutes played), with the equivalent of fewer than 25 full matches played in each season. In other words, he was no more or less pivotal than other players at the club, even as the club’s level of success varied. And this situation appears to have persisted.

… On the Sunday before Halloween, 22-year-old Teddy Bridgewater threw for 316 yards in a Vikings win over the Lions. Blake Bortles, 23, launched a 31-yard touchdown with 2:16 left to lead his Jaguars over the Bills. Derek Carr, 24, amassed 289 yards with three TDs and no picks to lead the Raiders past the Chargers. Ryan Tannehill, drafted in 2012 by the Dolphins, pasted the Texans for four touchdowns and 44 points. Kirk Cousins, also drafted in ’12, passed for three TDs and rushed for a fourth as the Redskins overcame a 24-point deficit to clip the Buccaneers — despite the efforts of 21-year-old Jameis Winston, who threw for 297 yards and two TDs. Young guns have been firing all season — and earning the trust of their organizations. Nearly half the league’s teams are starting quarterbacks who were drafted in the past five years.

The average age of starting QBs across the league doesn’t change much: It’s 29.3 this season, compared with 29.2 in 2010, 29.1 in 2005 and, for that matter, 29.5 in 1975. Any given year will witness a familiar mix: a few superstars who are closer to AARP membership than college, a batch of stable veterans and a handful of bad clubs experimenting at quarterback with recent draft picks. The average performance of 35-year-olds will always be better than that of 25-year-olds because of something financial analysts call survivorship bias — only the best players last in the NFL for a dozen or more years. But here’s what has changed: Clubs are drafting quarterbacks at earlier ages and entrusting them with more responsibility, and on the whole, they are delivering. Since 2011, nine QBs age 23 or younger have started every game in a season 10 times — a historically huge number.