Applied Sports Science newsletter – November 21, 2015

More than 75 athletes, including Olympic medallists and footballers from England, Canada and the US, have backed calls for at least 30% of roles within Fifa’s executive committee to be filled by women.

The Australian Moya Dodd, one of only three women on Fifa’s executive committee, has been lobbying the reform committee to force a step change in the underrepresentation and under-resourcing of women’s football as part of the reform process precipitated by the meltdown of the world governing body.

In the letter the Athlete Ally organisation has called on François Carrard, the head of Fifa’s reform committee, to introduce immediate measures to ensure that at least 30% of positions on the Fifa ex-co are held by women.

… Through 17 games, the Buffalo Sabres have quietly been playing at a point-per-game pace. That early performance is impressive. This is a team that actively tried to tank last year by stripping out useful part after useful part to guarantee the right to select one of Connor McDavid and Jack Eichel in the draft lottery. They also, interestingly enough, retained a struggling Ted Nolan through the duration of the season, firing him after locking up first place in a frantic race to the bottom.

Since then, there’s been a lot of talk about how new general manager Tim Murray’s accelerated the rebuild process. Guys like Eichel and Ryan O’Reilly instantly improved the team, but recognize that this organization was already shifting to buyer mode well before the off-season. Look no further than the acquisition of a very talented (and at the time, very injured!) Evander Kane last March – a savvy buy that allowed them to furnish team depth without sacrificing any chance at finishing dead last in the standings.

He’s the best NBA player in the league right now—and incredibly, the Golden State point guard has shown even better ball-handling skills this season than he did last year, his MVP season. How? We pressed him on his routine.

There wasn’t a single member of the Lionesses’ squad out in Canada who didn’t remember women’s football as it used to be. The rotten pitches, paying to play, being allowed to kick around with the boys as long as you didn’t outshine them too much. No professional teams, no kit, no changing rooms. Nothing except an unquenchable love for the game which carried them all the way from hometown kickabouts to the World Cup finals in North America this summer.

“Yes, I remember and that’s what keeps us grounded,” said England captain Steph Houghton. “I had to pay about £200 a year for me to travel as a 13-year-old in the Sunderland first team. Fortunately Mum and Dad paid it. I didn’t have enough pocket money for that. We had a train in daylight, too. There wasn’t the money for floodlights.”

“I was just a skinny kid who fell in love with a football round the back lanes,” Jill Scott, the England and Manchester City midfielder, reminisced. “It’s all I remember. Football, football and more football. Wherever I went I had a ball with me. It was hard sometimes. Obviously, boys didn’t like it if a girl was doing well and beating them. But your love of the game got you through.”

Greg Hauck has resigned as the Cardinals’ head athletic trainer after five seasons in that role and six as an assistant, general manager John Mozeliak said on Friday.

Mozeliak, who said his search for a replacement would extend both internally and externally, said Hauck had cited “the wear and tear of travel,” as a reason for his leaving.

Say what you will about opposites attracting — the fact is that for the most part, we feel drawn towards those who are most like us. This is especially the case in upper levels of management. A quick look at leaders within companies will reveal that there tends to be a common culture — a workplace not of diversity, but sameness — in thought and action.

But while it’s only natural to appreciate those who follow and never challenge us, being too comfortable can obstruct the innovation, leadership and direction necessary to drive your company forward. When I hire, I look for people who will challenge me — those who aren’t afraid to tell me things that may be tough to hear. When making key decisions, I want to be surrounded by those who will question my strategies and suggest changes that I may not have thought of.

… I think it is of critical importance to add to the discussion some commentary on the interplay of fatigue-decay and training monotony.

Here’s my Top Five management tips for avoiding injury.

James Washington hauled in a third long touchdown pass against TCU, adding an element of difficulty to the play, first rising above safety Nick Orr, then pulling off a pirouette on the landing, before completing the 74-yard scoring reception.

And the Cowboys wide receiver made it all look so easy.

He always makes it look easy; the blow-by deep routes, the jump balls, the one-handed catches, all of it.

An effective weapon against coughs and colds this winter is a great night’s sleep according to The Sleep Council, which has been looking at research into sleep and the immune system.

“Experts agree that those who sleep better have a stronger immune reaction, suggesting that sleep can banish bugs as well as making you feel a lot healthier,” says Lisa Artis, of The Sleep Council. “A longer night’s sleep – around seven to eight hours for most adults – seems to guard against common winter nasties such as coughs and colds, while scrimping on sleep appears to make you more likely to succumb to the sniffles. This seems to be particularly common in young people.”

JIM McINALLY helped make history when he guided Peterhead to their first ever senior cup final at Hampden on Saturday. Yet it was a few days earlier, as he prepared for the semi-final against Queen’s Park, that the manager did Scottish football a much wider service.

For perhaps the first time, a respected figure within the game said publicly what anybody taking a close interest in Club Academy Scotland has known for a very long time. Namely, that it has bloated and unrealistic pretensions; that it is a job creation scheme for aspiring coaches; and that it is destroying grassroots football in Scotland.

… The fans only see the finished product. What they don’t see is the dedication from these players, and the tools that help produce this so-called ‘finished product.’

The Husker Football department, staff, and players have a rich history of utilizing different tools to help that succeed on the field. Not only do they use these technologies to help the athletes on the field, they use them to improve the player’s health and year-long training programs. To understand these sport sciences and technologies a bit better, we sat down and talked with Sam Cotton, Junior tight end, and Brandon Reilly, Junior wide receiver, and they gave some interesting insights on the different tools they use on a daily basis.

Monitoring human energy expenditure (EE) is important in many health and sports applications, since the energy expenditure directly reflects the intensity of physical activity. The actual energy expenditure is unpractical to measure; therefore, it is often estimated from the physical activity measured with accelerometers and other sensors. Previous studies have demonstrated that using a person’s activity as the context in which the EE is estimated, and using multiple sensors, improves the estimation. In this study, we go a step further by proposing a context-based reasoning method that uses multiple contexts provided by multiple sensors. The proposed Multiple Contexts Ensemble (MCE) approach first extracts multiple features from the sensor data. Each feature is used as a context for which multiple regression models are built using the remaining features as training data: for each value of the context feature, a regression model is trained on a subset of the dataset with that value. When evaluating a data sample, the models corresponding to the context (feature) values in the evaluated sample are assembled into an ensemble of regression models that estimates the EE of the user. Experiments showed that the MCE method outperforms (in terms of lower root means squared error and lower mean absolute error): (i) five single-regression approaches (linear and non-linear); (ii) two ensemble approaches: Bagging and Random subspace; (iii) an approach that uses artificial neural networks trained on accelerometer-data only; and (iv) BodyMedia (a state-of-the-art commercial EE-estimation device).

You’d think landing the Ohio State University Marching Band as a client would be big enough news.

But in quick succession Privit Inc. has topped its hometown win by landing a global distributor for a version of its paperless, mobile personal health history for student-athletes.

The American College of Sports Medicine, with 50,000 sports medicine professionals and organizations and 500,000 affiliates, is selling a rebranded version of Privit’s product as ACSM Prep Profile under a revenue-sharing agreement with undisclosed terms. (In software this is called “white labeling.”)

“It helps propel us to more of a global audience,” said CEO Jeff Sopp, who invested in the Canadian company and moved its headquarters to Columbus in spring 2013.

Technology has caused huge disruption in almost every industry imaginable over the last decade. Sport, however, has managed to get by relatively unscathed. In terms of team performance, things like wearables and data analytics have been widely embraced, and these have undoubtedly provided a boost to the fitness and skills of participants. But given the money in many sports, innovations in other areas have been few and far between. This is finally beginning to change though. Sports organizations and broadcasters are increasingly looking at tech startups to improve every facet of their operations, from ticket sales to their digital media output.

Technology and sports come together at FC Barcelona. The mobile first, Smart Stadia and Big Data were the defining subjects of the morning session of the first edition of the Sports Technology Symposium organised by Barça and that will take place at the Club every November.

The forum brought together professionals from both sectors who enjoy shared experiences and debating about the impact of technology on sporting performance and the business possibilities that the digital world offers.

The idea is to convert the forum into a world renowned event in the field. Despite being an event directed solely at professionals from the sectors of sport and business, it has generated considerable interest.

… With chronic hamstring soreness, athletes tend to complain more of stiffness and soreness that persists long after exercise and is especially prevalent when warming up. They note that the pain often goes away after warming up and can often compete or train well, but the soreness gets worse the following few days. This process continues for a while until it suddenly seems to get worse and more persistent. This also tends to lead them towards more massage therapy and more stretching. Unfortunately, if these measures are aimed at the wrong things, such as attempts to break up scar tissue, adhesions, or trigger points they may perpetuate the issue, increasing anxiety and frustration.

This article will discuss the causes and implications of chronic hamstring soreness and dysfunction and what the best management approach would be.

Multiple studies indicate that poor movement, as assessed using the Functional Movement Screen, and past history of injury are risk factors for future injury, and a recent investigation suggests that risk is compounded in athletes with a combination of those two factors.

Brain wave scanning computer algorithms and flexible “tethers” which harden upon impact are several cutting-edge technologies being explored through an NFL-Army collaborative effort to better diagnose and treat concussions from both combat and football collisions.

Unambiguous scientific determination of the existence of a concussion could allow soldiers to return to combat and NFL players to return to play without needing to follow certain protocol, receive an MRI or wait 24 hours to see if symptoms worsen to indicate a more serious problem.

One such technology being explored, created by a firm called BrainScope, uses software and computer algorithms to quickly analyze electrical activity in the brain, or brain waves, to determine if a mild concussion has occurred, industry officials explained.

An Alabama player had gotten hurt against Middle Tennessee Sept. 12.

Shortly after, Tide football head athletic trainer Jeff Allen grabbed his walkie-talkie and made a first-time request, “Raise the tent up. We’re on our way.”

In the past, Alabama — like most schools — had people hold up towels and surround the trainer’s table while players were being evaluated in an attempt to provide privacy.

With the tent, that’s unnecessary.

“When will I be able to play again?” is usually the reflex thought when an athlete suffers an injury. When making return-to-play decisions, clinicians (including physiotherapists, athletic trainers and physicians) and athletes might engage in a risk–benefit analysis of sorts, consciously or unconsciously weighing up the risks associated with participation and the extent to which those risks can be tolerated.1 There are a number of questions to contemplate: How does the clinician determine when the athlete is ready to return to play? Is physical recovery alone enough for return to play? What is successful return to play? What are the sports medicine clinician’s responsibilities within the team, and to the athlete? Should athletes even return to play?

But what evidence can be used to answer these questions? We highlight some of the complexities in making the return-to-play decision, and key areas that need to be addressed.

November 13th, 2015 by Eunan Whyte
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No matter how well an athlete is prepared in terms of their training regime, they will never be able to achieve optimum performance level without proper nutrition. As everyone knows, a car will not be at its best unless it has a full tank of quality fuel, and likewise your body also needs to be fuelled correctly if your to reach your peak.

This involves achieving the right balance of carbohydrates, proteins, fats, minerals, vitamins, and water to ensure you get the most from your training, are able to recover and, most important of all, produce your best when it comes to competition.

The importance of a proper diet which is appropriate to the particular individual is highlighted in ‘Nutrition and Hydration for Sports Performance’ when they remind us just how diet significantly influences athletic performance.

Marie Katrin Kanitz was just 16 years old when, unbeknown to her, she first started doping.

The innocuous-looking blue pill she was first handed by a coach as an impressionable teenager turned out to be the anabolic steroid Oral-Turinabol — a fact she only became aware of when German authorities notified her via a letter in 1997.

At the time, Kanitz was told the pills were vitamins that would help her become a world-class figure skater and, afraid to question an authoritarian coach, she took them for the next seven or eight years.

Pre-exercise creatine supplementation may have a beneficial effect on aging muscle performance. Using a double-blind, repeated measures, cross-over design, healthy males (N = 9, 54.8 ± 4.3 years; 92.9 ± 11.5 kg; 179.2 ± 11.1 cm) were randomized to consume creatine (20 grams) and placebo (20 grams corn-starch maltodextrin), on 2 separate occasions (7 days apart), 3 hours prior to performing leg press and chest press repetitions to muscle fatigue (3 sets at 70% 1-repetition maximum; 1 minute rest between sets). There was a set main effect (p < 0.05) for the leg press and chest press with the number of repetitions performed decreasing similarly for creatine and placebo. These results suggest that a bolus ingestion of creatine consumed 3 hours prior to resistance exercise has no effect on upper or lower body muscle performance in healthy aging males.

A major goal of training to improve the performance of prolonged, continuous, endurance events lasting up to 3 h is to promote a range of physiological and metabolic adaptations that permit an athlete to work at both higher absolute and relative power outputs/speeds and delay the onset of fatigue (i.e., a decline in exercise intensity). To meet these goals, competitive endurance athletes undertake a prodigious volume of training, with a large proportion performed at intensities that are close to or faster than race pace and highly dependent on carbohydrate (CHO)-based fuels to sustain rates of muscle energy production [i.e., match rates of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) hydrolysis with rates of resynthesis]. Consequently, to sustain muscle energy reserves and meet the daily demands of training sessions, competitive athletes freely select CHO-rich diets. Despite renewed interest in high-fat, low-CHO diets for endurance sport, fat-rich diets do not improve training capacity or performance, but directly impair rates of muscle glycogenolysis and energy flux, limiting high-intensity ATP production. When highly trained athletes compete in endurance events lasting up to 3 h, CHO-, not fat-based fuels are the predominant fuel for the working muscles and CHO, not fat, availability becomes rate limiting for performance.

Dick Pound has stepped up the pressure on Kenya’s athletes, saying that it is “pretty clear that there is a lot of performance-enhancing drugs being used” in the country.

Pound, who led the independent commission report into systemic doping in Russian athletics, also admitted that the situation in Kenya was not only a matter of concern to the World Anti-Doping Agency but should worry every athlete in endurance events.

“It is pretty clear that Kenya have enjoyed huge success in the endurance events and it is also pretty clear that there is a lot of performance-enhancing drugs being used in Kenya,” he said.

… A river of cash is flowing into college sports, financing a spending spree among elite universities that has sent coaches’ salaries soaring and spurred new discussions about whether athletes should be paid. But most of that revenue is going to a handful of elite sports programs, leaving colleges like Georgia State to rely heavily on students to finance their athletic ambitions.

In the past five years, public universities pumped more than $10.3 billion in mandatory student fees and other subsidies into their sports programs, according to an examination by The Chronicle of Higher Education and The Huffington Post. The review included an inflation-adjusted analysis of financial reports provided to the NCAA by 201 public universities competing in Division I, information that was obtained through public-records requests.

The average athletic subsidy that these colleges and their students have paid to their athletic departments increased 16 percent during that time. Student fees, which accounted for nearly half of all subsidies, increased by 10 percent.

… The fortunes of two preseason Super Bowl contenders, both now with only four wins, will be determined by the availability of their QBs. Can Sam Bradford return quickly to save the Eagles season? The Colts have struggled through Andrew Luck’s shoulder and rib injuries. Now Indianapolis needs to wait for his return from a kidney laceration and abdominal injury.

We all know where the Cardinals were last year without Carson Palmer. Would Arizona be vying for a first-round playoff bye if Palmer’s ACL were slow to recover this year?

Quarterback injuries are key. That statement has never been more telling.

With the dust now settling despite the early exit of the host nation, the Rugby World Cup 2015 has been widely acclaimed as an exciting tournament that enthralled fans around the world, producing an array of memorable moments; none more so than Japan’s thrilling last-gasp win over South Africa. It was a tournament in which the Southern Hemisphere exerted its dominance by taking all four semi-final places and the Webb Ellis Trophy was ultimately lifted by New Zealand to claims that this All Blacks team is arguably the best ever.

So what did we learn from the 2015 Rugby World Cup – specifically from the All Blacks – about what makes for effective, tournament-winning rugby?

… according to one of the world’s leading experts in the field. Frans Bosch, professor of biomechanics and motor learning at Fontys University in the Netherlands and a specialist in athletic performance, is one of the speakers at a groundbreaking conference in London this week. He believes that many predictions, often based on statistical calculations, are fundamentally flawed.

“As long as nobody knows the limiting factor in sprinting, then a prediction in that area makes no sense,” says Bosch. “If you look at all the predictions that have been made so far, they’re all based on one small aspect of sprinting. When you only look at that you lose perspective.”

The aim of this study was to investigate the occurrence of repeated sprinting bouts in elite football. Furthermore, the construct validity of current tests assessing repeated-sprint ability (RSA) was analysed using information of sprinting sequences as they actually occurred during match-play. Sprinting behaviour in official competition was analysed for 19 games of the German national team between August 2012 and June 2014. A sprinting threshold was individually calculated based on the peak velocity reached during in-game sprinting. Players performed 17.2 ± 3.9 sprints per game and during the entire 19 games a total of 35 bouts of repeated sprinting (a minimum of three consecutive sprints with a recovery duration <30 s separating efforts). This averages one bout of repeated sprinting per player every 463 min. No general decrement in maximal sprinting speed was observed during bouts with up to five consecutive sprints. Results of the present study question the importance of RSA as it is classically defined. They indicate that shorter accelerations are more important in game-specific situations which do not reach speeds necessary to qualify them as sprints. The construct validity of classic tests of RSA in football is not supported by these observations.