Applied Sports Science newsletter – November 16, 2015

After Ricky Rubio missed so much time last season due to a severe ankle injury, the Minnesota Timberwolves knew he was susceptible to a few nagging muscle pulls and strains as he started his comeback.

That doesn’t make it any easier to get through now that it’s happened.

Rubio was listed as questionable for Sunday’s game against the Memphis Grizzlies with a mild left hamstring strain that has sidelined him for three games so far. Rubio also missed time in the preseason with a strained quad.

Holly Holm’s shocking conquest of Ronda Rousey was rooted in old-fashioned study and hard work.

There were days in preparation, Holm said after Sunday’s second-round knockout of the previously unbeaten Ultimate Fighting Championship champion, that she’d practice five times, the grind bringing her to tears.

… “Michael Carrick doesn’t look good,” said Hodgson. “He’s got a severely twisted ankle which normally means ligament damage. We won’t know that of course until he’s had an X-ray or a scan. We are one further player down which frankly with our midfielders we could do without.”

Hodgson admitted that England struggled to compete with Spain’s possession-based style and rejected the complaint that was made by his goalkeeper, Joe Hart, about the quality of the pitch.

“It’s strange that we played on a Third Division pitch,” said Hart. “I’m not making excuses and I might be talking rubbish but I am upset. We have played well for a long time and it’s difficult when we lose. We need to perform better against France.”

Ian Mitchell is Swansea City AFC & Wales National Team Performance Psychologist.

This week it was revealed that Premier League clubs are bringing fewer players through their academies to the first team than in any of Europe’s other major leagues. There are many reasons for this, but one begins at birth. A baby born at the start of the school year in the UK has a head start in life, sometimes literally. They will be older, bigger and more mature than many of their school year peers. That helps them academically and also, since most age-group cut-off dates follow the school year, in sport.

A fellow student on the Youth Module 2 course described on these pages related a recent under-13s match his team had played. The opposition looked unusually tall. When this was remarked upon the coach said proudly: “I only pick kids born in September and October.”

… I was lucky enough to attend a presentation by Associate professor Cliff Mallett at the University of Queensland. Cliff is actually my academic supervisor, and a bit of a gun.

On UQ’s website they describe Cliffs work saying: “This staff member is a UQ Expert in the following fields: high performance coaching, psychology – sport, sport – motivation, sport psychology, sports coaching, motivation – in sport, coaching high performance sports, sport – professional, athletes – professional, mind – sport, performance – sport.”

Anyway, this Friday Cliff was presenting some pretty incredible research looking into ‘what it takes to be a high performance coach’. In Cliff’s words the study was commissioned to better understand “serial winners”. Fourteen coaches from multiple fields – team and individual sports based around the world – where chosen for their abilities to develop Olympians and title winning dynasties.

… The Warriors, off to a 10-0 start this season, continue to wear devices that help gauge a player’s fatigue by tracking everything from heart rate to the biomechanical load exerted on his legs.

“You have to keep players on the court,” Warriors assistant general manager Kirk Lacob said recently, a reference to keeping players healthy.

“If players don’t play, you can’t win the games. If Steph Curry is not healthy, we’re not winning. If Andre Iguodala is not ready to play 42 minutes in a game in the Finals, we’re not winning.”

… One area of health currently gaining momentum is the growing awareness of the benefits of ‘helpful’ bacteria. And, in fact, the loss of good bacteria is even being named as a contributing factor to modern food allergies, asthma, obesity and diabetes. Daily probiotic drinks and yogurts have increasingly gained a following and you can even now get your daily dose from ‘good’ chocolate. But these serve us on a mass level with varying opinions on their true effectiveness. The key to really optimizing health and effect in this way lies in finding a way to tailor a service that looks at the composition—and more importantly the needs and deficits—of our own microbiomes to create an effective dose for the individual.

And this is where a new breed of ingestibles, smart pills and broadband-enabled digital tools is starting to revolutionize more specific targeting and access to new areas of health. EVN, conceived by the Pearlfisher Futures Studio, is a new ideation concept inspired by this idea of achieving biological balance, with a concept centering around an ingestible bio-bot that helps us deliver, and then monitor, natural bacteria to allow each individual to achieve and maintain their optimum health.

… UO athletics officials announced plans in September for a 29,000-square-foot “enhancement” of the Casanova Center building on Leo Harris Parkway, next to Autzen Stadium. The work would refurbish an equipment room on the east side of the Casanova Center’s first floor into a center with state-of-the-art equipment to improve ­athletes’ health and performance.

The permit application filed with Eugene’s Planning and Development Department on Tuesday covers “tenant improvement primarily to part of the first floor” of the ­building at 2727 Leo ­Harris Parkway — the Casanova ­Center’s address.

What is fascia?

Imagine that a spider with supernatural powers lives within you. And imagine that this spider spends its days spinning a single continuous web that cocoons your body under the skin, a web that spreads inward, surrounding and penetrating every muscle, nerve, organ and bone – every structure, cavity and tissue in your body. That’d be some web. Minus the spider, that web – a weave of collagen and elastin fibres that appears as membrane, sheet, cord and gristle – is your fascia.

Where do things go wrong?

Once considered inactive, fascia has recently been nominated for a status upgrade by researchers who now view it as a reactive tissue. They believe fascia contracts and relaxes like muscles, recoils like tendons, provides sensory feedback like nerves and links all 650 muscles into a single working unit. They also blame it for the majority of chronic pain and injury in runners.

AIM:

Professional soccer players are subjected to substantial physical loads during competitive seasons. We aimed to explore the changes induced by a soccer match on muscle damage and inflammation biomarkers, and their relationship with fatigue parameters.
METHODS:

Twenty young male professional in-field soccer players from an Italian Serie A team (age 17-20 years, weight 73.0±7.0 kg, height 1.81±0.05m) played a 90-minute soccer match. Players’ distances and velocities were recorded during the match. Before the match and 30 minutes, 24 and 48 hours after the match, blood samples were drawn and a full blood cell count was determined, along with serum creatine kinase (CK), interleukin 6 (hsIL-6), cortisol and testosterone. At the same time intervals, counter-movement jump (CMJ) performance was recorded.
RESULTS:

The players covered fewer meters at low velocities in the second period while the meters covered at higher intensity remained unchanged. CMJ height was lower at all post-game time-points compared to the pre-game measurement. Immediately after the match, CK, hs-IL6 and neutrophil counts were elevated. 24 and 48 hours after the match, CK and neutrophil counts remained significantly elevated. The distance covered during the game was found to be correlated with the values for post-match hsIL-6 (?=0.521, p=0.027), post 24-hour cortisol (r=0.502, p=0.034) and the increase in cortisol at 48 hours with respect to pre-match values (r=0.515, p=0.029).
CONCLUSION:

A soccer match provokes a transient systemic imbalance that results in muscle damage and inflammatory and performance- related parameter changes. HsIL-6 and cortisol could be used to monitor recovery processes and as fatigue markers, even for short time periods.

AIMS:

Athletes often engage in various celebration maneuvers during sports events. These celebrations can result in acute injuries. Our objective was to document publicized injuries in collegiate and professional athletes resulting from celebrations and examine associated variables.
METHODS:

A retrospective case series study was performed based on internet searches performed using the following major sporting news websites: espn.com, SI.com, bleacherreport.com, totalprosports.com, cbssports.com, larrybrownspots.com, nfl.com, and mlb.com and PubMed. Keywords used during these searches included “celebration injury,” “score celebration,” and “surgery after celebration.” These same sources were used to document the sport, athlete’s age at time of injury, celebration action, type of injury, previous play, and whether surgery was required.
RESULTS:

A total of 62 athletes sustained 62 injuries resulting from various types of celebrations. All but two athletes were males, and the average age was 26.5 years old. The injuries occurred between 1993 and 2015. Sixteen (25.8%) of these injuries required surgery. Professional soccer players accounted for the greatest number of these injuries with a total of 22 injuries. One celebration in a professional soccer player resulted in a cervical spinal cord injury and subsequent death. Common celebration maneuvers included leaping into the air, pile ups, sliding, and somersaults.
CONCLUSIONS:

Serious injuries occur in a diversity of sports after celebrations. The most prevalent celebration maneuvers resulting in injuries included sliding and pile ups. The most common injuries were ACL ruptures and ankle sprains. The most serious injuries were a spinal cord injury and ankle fractures. Sixteen (25.8%) of the injuries required surgery. By encouraging athletes to temper excessive celebrations and prohibiting certain types of celebrations, many injuries may be prevented.

If you are one of the millions of people who watched football before this broadcast — many of you on this network — you know that NFL players get their brains rattled on a weekly basis and for some of them the long-term consequences may eventually offset the glory of playing the game. After a decade of denying a link between onfield concussions and brain impairment later in life, the NFL finally acknowledged the connection and is now trying to reengineer the sport to fit the medical science. It’s changing the rules, trying to reinvent equipment and funding scientific research that might endanger its future both as the country’s most popular sport and as a multibillion-dollar industry. Not since football was nearly banned a hundred years ago has the sport been under the microscope the way it is today and all of it has to do with matters of the brain. [news video autoplays in right column]

In the land of cycling nutrition, carbohydrate is king. It provides the quick hit of energy required to get riders through the interval sessions that we’re told we need to build power and speed. The result is that we have become loyal subjects to the mighty carbs, and our bodies have become reliant on them for fuelling our rides. But it could be that we are serving the wrong master. Broadly speaking, the average cyclist carries enough glycogen (carbohydrate stored in the muscles) to fuel about 90 minutes of activity – barely enough to get most riders to their first cafe stop. Further, carbohydrate oxidation (ie burning energy) has a strong correlation with lactate production, which limits performance. So to improve, we need to become more metabolically efficient, which is why Cyclist has come to Guru Performance in Mayfair, London, to see Laurent Bannock, a scientist at the forefront of metabolic efficiency training.