Applied Sports Science newsletter – November 24, 2015

… what really makes the Warriors unstoppable is a lineup they bust out only when they have to. This lineup is the Warriors’ cheat code. No one in the NBA has figured out how to beat it, because the NBA has never seen anything like it.

The deadly lineup consists of five players—Curry, Klay Thompson, Andre Iguodala, Harrison Barnes and Draymond Green—who are all shooting threats and shorter than 6-foot-8. This small-ball unit, in which the shooting guard is the same size as the center, has scored a total of 200 points in 56 minutes this year. That is silly. This lineup also has been 70.8 points per 100 possessions better than whatever the other team puts on the court. That is sillier. Since the NBA started tracking these statistics in 2008, no lineup with at least 100 minutes has had a net rating better than 36 points, let alone anything in the same area code as 70 points.

Dirk Nowitzki played 34 minutes on Wednesday, a number that used to be a regular occurrence back in the days when he routinely logged over 3,000 in a season. Things are different now. A short time after dropping another familiar set of figures on the Celtics — 23 points on just 14 shots — Nowitzki laid down on the training table with his legs up against the wall. They were wrapped in recovery boots from his hips to his toes that made him look like the world’s tallest goalie.

He didn’t used to have to do this kind of thing. Nowitzki would spend hours in the gym, honing his shot and perfecting his craft. That was work. Now, it takes almost as long just to get him to ready. This is harder. It happens to everybody in this game, even to one of the greatest shotmakers to ever play. Yet Nowitzki is not slowing down as much as transitioning gracefully into the final act of a brilliant NBA career that we’ve been privileged to observe for nearly half his life.

LeBron James says there is a not-so-secret ingredient — beyond a talented roster that features reigning MVP Stephen Curry — to the Golden State Warriors’ success: avoiding injuries.

“I think it comes with a lot of health,” James said when asked about the Warriors tying the all-time mark for best start to a season at 15-0. “They’ve been healthy. They’ve been the most healthy team I’ve ever seen in NBA history, and they have great talent. Those guys all play for one common goal and that’s to win, and that’s all that matters.”

The Club will welcome this Thursday 19 November, between 9.30am and 6.00pm CET, the first symposium of applied technology in which renowned world experts will take part. It is an even directed solely at professionals from the area, be it from the world of sport or industry. Given the profile of those attending, the symposium would like to have an important impact internationally, especially in the USA and Asia.

The objective of this event, which Barça is organising jointly with the ESADE Business School and Oracle, one of the leading firms in the area of technology, is to offer a world forum for debate on the subject of the impact of technology and data analysis on sport and business performance, focusing on football.

FC Barcelona successfully hosts first sports technology symposium.

Endurance experts have two words for recovery-obsessed athletes: stop it. The stuff you do for short-term recovery, from downing antioxidant shakes and NSAIDs to massage and ice baths, might actually impair long-term gains.

Exercise and training are all about adapting to stress, and as world-renowned sports nutrition scientist, Asker Jeukendrup wrote in a blog post, recently, researchers are discovering that “removing the signals of stress (which may help short term recovery), will also reduce the signals needed to adapt.” In other words, the more time you spend forcing recovery, the less chance your muscles have to build up the strength and endurance they need to perform.

Still, the solution isn’t to quit pampering yourself entirely—recovery is still an important part of reaching your athletic goals. Instead, experts say, you should periodize recovery in the same way you periodize training.

… mistakes are desirable, which is a positive message and part of what we want students to learn. An appreciation of mistakes helps us overcome our fear of making them, enabling us to take risks. But we also want students to understand what kinds of mistakes are most useful and how to most learn from them.

A global sport psychologist and author specializing in soccer, Abrahams is based in England and has helped hundreds of professional soccer players – many of them who play in the English Premier League (EPL). Recently helping a Crystal Palace player succeed on the field, Abrahams has held contracts with QPR, Fulham, and West Ham United among other clubs and works quietly, behind the scenes with many coaches from top clubs across the Atlantic.

Over the next couple of months GoalNation has invited me to talk a little about each chapter of my new book, Soccer Tough 2. These exclusive articles also give me the platform to expand on the contents of each chapter, providing you, the reader, with plenty of new philosophies, tools and techniques to play your very best soccer in 2016.

or my fortieth birthday, I decided to climb the Grand Teton, a 13,770-foot peak in my backyard of Jackson, Wyoming. The Grand is technical, requiring rock climbing and rappels on exposed faces with 5,000-foot drops. Make a mistake and you’re dead. I’d decided the ascent would help me feel less 40. I gathered the gear I needed and did all the necessary training, including steep, hourlong hikes wearing a 60-pound weight vest. The one thing I was missing to perform at my best? Enough sleep.

If you’re like me, work and life prevent adequate time to snooze. That’s bad. Besides weakening your immune system (a recent study shows that getting only six hours of sleep a night makes you four times more likely to catch a cold, compared with those who get more than seven), not getting enough rest can sabotage athleticism. A new study in Sports Medicine determined that inadequate sleep results in decreased motor skills and cognitive function, as well as increased inflammation—symptoms similar to overtraining. Conversely, researchers at Stanford University found that when the school’s basketball players got ten hours of sleep each night, their shooting accuracy improved by 9 percent.

There’s no way I’m sleeping ten hours. I usually get six. But I wondered if I could make a few simple changes to squeeze out another hour.

The electronics industry is evolving quickly, with innovations in emerging technologies, including printed electronics, wearable technology, 3D printing, sensors, energy harvesting, electric vehicles and new advanced materials, appearing at an astonishing rate. Last week, at the IDTechEx Show! in Santa Clara, CA, ten such startup companies showcased their tech as part of IDTechEx Launchpad.

“The show will have over 200 exhibitors.” Raghu Das, chief executive officer of market research firm IDTechEx told EBN in an interview before the show. “However, there are many young companies who raise money on Kickstarter or come out of a university, and we wanted to be able to put them in front of the 3,000 or so people who will be at the show,” Das said. “They probably couldn’t do that on their own. So we decided to take the 10 most exciting embryonic technologies and let people see what they can do. All of them are bringing prototypes.”

Fitbit has added a new functionality to its Fitbit Charge HR and Fitbit Surge trackers that will enable the device to readily distinguish between different kinds of movement, and has also upgraded the heart rate sensors in the trackers.

The automatic exercise recognition feature, called SmartTrack, will be automatically pushed out to current users of the two devices in an update. With the update, the user’s Fitbit will be able to automatically identify when users are on the elliptical, biking outdoors, running, or walking. It can also pick up the general categories of sports and aerobic activities. Users can decide which activities they want to count as exercise and how long they need to participate in an activity before the Fitbit starts tracking it.

One of the most often discussed topics among injured athletes and parents, coaches and healthcare personnel is “When can I go back and play?” Return-to-participation (RTP) recommendations following injury can be a difficult decision for health-care professionals and athletes/parents/coaches due to the various factors that must be considered to make an educated decision.

One preventative measure to avoid all sport-related injury is to refrain from play; however, sports medicine clinicians don’t solely want to keep athletes from playing sports. A clinician wants to encourage sports participation, but in a healthy and evidence-based manner to ensure optimal performance and health sustainment (Shrier et al 2014).

It is still one of the most difficult questions clinicians have to answer: “When can I play again?” Not only the player, but also the coach and/or family members will push you for an answer. And then we all rub our crystal ball, get out the magic wand, and give them something we feel is sort of close to the mark. But in reality, we still have very little on which to base our predictions. Most of the time we’re guessing. (Educated guessing maybe, but guessing nonetheless.) But before that happens, we first have to get them through the rehab. Rehabilitation has moved away from time, and grown into criteria-based progression – the paradigm has begun to shift.

… The main result of trying to find the single thing that explains defense is quickly you see there is no secret sauce to judge a teams defense on right now. I thought teams that force teams into a high ratio of shots per deep passes would allow a low goal/shot because it indicated opponents had few options but that didn’t really work out. I then thought the % of deep passes completed would be a clear indicator that teams couldn’t cope, but it’s messy as well. Shots from inside 10 yards? The ability to stifle a midfield? All explain bits and pieces but there are generally exceptions to everything and these categories are subject to wilder swings than offensive numbers. For now, a wider, more descriptive view of a teams defense is better than trying to find the single number to describe a team.

Takeaway #1: Team defense can take many forms, to get a feel for how a team is playing multiple metrics should be involved