Applied Sports Science newsletter – November 17, 2015

The Los Angeles Lakers won a game Sunday.

They won it by relying on a 37-year-old with a staggering injury history who frequently details the many ways in which his body continues to fail him.

They won it by playing that very same player heavy minutes even though that’s the exact opposite approach of what they’ve been saying that they’d do all along.

Funny story: Serena Williams is playing at the Australian Open earlier this year—a tournament she would go on to win, of course—and Mark Parker, CEO of Nike, is texting her.

“I said ‘What are you doing between matches?” Parker recounts. “She said, ‘I’m taking some pre-med courses.'”

The anecdote gives us a rare peek inside the world of professional tennis. In fact, Williams has more down time between matches during tournaments than she does during the rest of the year, so she takes advantage of these moments to pursue her hobbies. But it’s also a glimpse into the constant, conversational collaboration between Williams and Nike Williams and Parker shared onstage today at Fast Company’s Innovation Festival.

Heart rate variability (HRV) is an important marker of an individual’s physiological stress level. Due to recent technological improvements in terms of computation power and accessibility to high-quality wearable technology we are seeing all sorts of applications making use of HRV today, from optimizing performance in sports, to monitoring psychological stress in the workspace, to quantifying meditation or better understanding chronic disease.

While HRV is a powerful tool and can be very helpful in better understanding physiological responses to both acute and chronic stressors, interpreting HRV data at the individual level is still challenging.

A lot of people aren’t able to perceive micro expressions. They’re the tiny facial ticks that reveal what we’re feeling when we’re trying not to let it show. So, understanding those micro expressions could allow you to look deeper into peoples’ faces and know what what’s really going on inside.

But even people who can perceive micro expressions aren’t always accurate. In 2012, researchers in Finland described what they claimed to be the first system that used a computer to detect micro expressions. In the paper, they write that computers are particularly attractive in this field, since humans are only correct about 47 percent of the time.

And computers have only gotten better at their craft. In a paper submitted to arXiv, Xiaobai Li and a team of researchers (also in Finland), share their new machine vision algorithm. And they say it’s better at reading human faces than humans themselves.

f you’re tired of wearable fitness trackers fighting for space on your wrist, it might not be a problem in the near future: researchers say they can reliably measure your heart and breathing rates just by looking at data from a smartphone sitting in your pocket or bag.

Researchers at MIT are working on a project called BioPhone that derives these biological signals from your smartphone’s accelerometer, which they say can capture the small movements of your body that result from the beating of your heart and rising and falling of your chest. A paper on the work was presented at a conference in August.

In Sports Performance a holistic approach is necessary to improve the athlete individually and also to prevent injuries. It is each person’s own different ingredients and how they are mixed, that provides the foundation for them to excel or to alternatively stumble.

Athletes, coaches, sports medicine staff and other holistic performance staff need to combine and use the ingredients provided to continually improve the athlete, manage their load throughout a season and decrease their injury risks.

Introduction: Knee injuries are frequent in children, with most studies reporting traumatic knee injuries. Evidence of risk factors for knee injuries in children is sparse. The purpose of this study was to report the extent of traumatic and overuse knee injuries in children and to evaluate intrinsic and extrinsic factors for risk of these injuries.

Methods: Weekly musculoskeletal pain, sport participation and sports type were reported by 1326 school children (8-15 years). Knee injuries were classified as traumatic or overuse. Multinomial logistic regression was used for analyses.

Results: During the study period, 952 (15% traumatic, 85% overuse) knee injuries were diagnosed. Period prevalence for traumatic and overuse knee injuries were 0.8/1000 and 5.4/1000 sport participations, respectively. Participation in tumbling gymnastics was a risk factor for traumatic knee injuries (OR 2.14). For overuse knee injuries, intrinsic risk factors were sex (girls OR 1.38), and previous knee injury (OR 1.78), while participation in soccer (OR 1.64), handball (OR 1.95), basket (OR 2.07), rhythmic (OR 1.98), and tumbling gymnastics (OR 1.74) were additional risk factors. For both injury types, sport participation above two times/week increased odds (OR 1.46-2.40).

Conclusion: Overuse knee injuries were the most frequent injury type. For traumatic knee injuries, participation in tumbling gymnastics was a risk factor. Risk factors for overuse knee injuries were being a girl, previous knee injury and participation in soccer, handball, basket, rhythmic and tumbling gymnastics. Further risk factors for both types of injury were participation in sports above two times/week. Although growth-related overuse knee injuries are a self-limiting condition, a major part of children are affected by these injuries with unknown short and long-term consequences.

It’s in the headlines every week: Professional athletes are hit too hard, and they wind up with a concussion. But when it comes to your own child on the field playing for a youth sports team, what are the consequences? What’s the truth about the sports-related head trauma?

“Every time you get [a concussion], there’s some effect on the brain that doesn’t go away,” says Dr. William Meehan, a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Council on Sports Medicine and Fitness, and director of the Micheli Center for Sports Injury Prevention in Waltham, Massachusetts. “Concussions have a cumulative effect.”

Think about it. Your brain is always “on.” It takes care of your thoughts and movements, your breathing and heartbeat, your senses — it works hard 24/7, even while you’re asleep. This means your brain requires a constant supply of fuel. That “fuel” comes from the foods you eat — and what’s in that fuel makes all the difference. Put simply, what you eat directly affects the structure and function of your brain and, ultimately, your mood.

Like an expensive car, your brain functions best when it gets only premium fuel. Eating high-quality foods that contain lots of vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants nourishes the brain and protects it from oxidative stress — the “waste” (free radicals) produced when the body uses oxygen, which can damage cells.

Unfortunately, just like an expensive car, your brain can be damaged if you ingest anything other than premium fuel.

Doping in sport, particularly in track and field, is a reality.[1] [2] The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) condemned a rife doping culture in Russian Athletics implicating athletes, coaches, doctors, managers, federations and even the Russian minister of sport. [1] The Council of the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) reacted by provisionally suspending the All-Russia Athletic Federation (ARAF) as an IAAF member. IAAF President, Sebastian Coe commented: “This has been a shameful wake-up call and we are clear that cheating at any level will not be tolerated. To this end, the IAAF, WADA, the member federations and athletes need to look closely at ourselves, our cultures and our processes to identify where failures exist and be tough in our determination to fix them and rebuild trust in our sport.” [3] This was, however, not the only recent doping scandal in athletics.

The prevalence of blood doping ranged from 1-48% for subpopulation samples (country, endurance, non-endurance) of a blood-testing program by the IAAF. [4] In a study on Doping in Elite Sports Assessed by Randomized-Response Surveys, the prevalence of reported past-year doping was 29% at the 13th IAAF World Championships in Athletics in Daegu, South Korea and 45% at the 12th Quadrennial Pan-Arab Games in Doha, Qatar. [2] WADA published a list of 113 coaches, physicians and other support staff, guilty of violating anti-doping rules – athletes are not allowed to associate with any of these individuals. [5]

How easy is it then for athletes to beat the system? What help do they get from team medical staff?

Research has long shown that stress is bad for you, but many people are not even aware when they are feeling stressed.

Now, a number of new devices are sold as stress trackers, measuring signs of stress the way fitness tracking devices monitor steps and movement. The gadgets track the biological symptoms of stress — changes in skin perspiration, breathing patterns and heart rate — in hopes of helping people become aware of their stress levels.

There’s a reason companies like Google and Facebook offer their employees so many perks, according to new research: firms that treat workers better are more innovative.

In a recent working paper, currently under review by the Journal of Corporate Finance, researchers from Monash University and LaTrobe University in Australia compared a common measure of worker treatment to patent data, and found that companies with higher worker treatment scores produced more patents, and more highly cited patents. Not only that, firms with better worker treatment scores produced more relevant patents, ones that were more closely aligned with the firm’s existing expertise.

Researchers at King’s College London have found that muscle fitness as measured by power in the legs is strongly associated with an improved rate of ageing in the brain.

The findings, published in Gerontology, suggest that simple interventions, such as increased levels of walking, targeted to improve leg power in the long term may have an impact on healthy cognitive ageing.

Some people sweat more than others. Go for a run with a group of people on a warm day, and the differences become obvious. But what determines these variations? Answers have traditionally focused on factors like body fat percentage (more fat insulates you and makes you overheat sooner) and aerobic fitness (the fitter you are the less you sweat).

At the American College of Sports Medicine meeting this spring, Matthew Cramer of the University of Ottawa and Ollie Jay of the University of Sydney presented some results that challenged those ideas. That data has now been published in the Journal of Applied Physiology, and it has some surprising twists.