Applied Sports Science newsletter – November 26, 2015

… Sigurðsson was, like countless other children at his age with a strong Icelandic mentality, keen on improving, training long hours, and his will to win was huge, whatever the situation, adds [Magnus] Jónsson.

“He always trained very well and wanted to win every competition in training, whether that was a penalty shootout or football golf. On top of that he always did extra things, he was always taking part in football schools and stayed behind after every training to do something extra,” says Jónsson.

… the Budenholzer Administration is now officially on the clock. The Hawks have undergone what some in the organization call a cleanse. From Golden State, Budenholzer brought in Keke Lyles as the executive director of player performance and Mike Roncarati as director of rehabilitation. The ranks of the front office have swelled with more junior execs, more scouts and more quant heads. Even the administrative staff has received a makeover. It’s a cultural revolution from a franchise determined to make culture its calling card.

The organization might be structurally stable and bringing in forward-looking personnel, but the future is anything but certain. Teague and Dennis Schroder can co-exist at the point … for now. Defenses are affording Korver, who will be 35 when the playoffs begin, zero space on the perimeter and he hasn’t averaged fewer 3-point attempts per 36 minutes since his final season in Utah. Tiago Splitter can help the Hawks fortify their longstanding issues on the glass, but only when he’s able-bodied.

To fully understand how the Golden State Warriors keep humming along — undefeated and one win away from the NBA’s best start ever at 16-0 — you have to go back long before Steve Kerr was even a flicker of an idea as the team’s head coach.

You have to go back in the memory banks of the man who acquired most of the players that Kerr coached to the NBA title last season. Those same players are now taking their marching orders from the coaching staff that Kerr assembled while he continues to recover from complications resulting from offseason back surgery. And even the man who put the team together can’t believe the results.

“You win the title, lose your head coach, and you figure you’re going to have some down time,” Larry Riley, the Warriors’ former GM, told CBS Sports on Monday. “I’ve had 27 years in the league at various levels — assistant coach, player personnel, GM, scout, all those things — and common sense says to you, ‘This can’t happen.'”

I spent some time over the weekend at this year’s RCCSSC Train Smarter conference in Toronto, which once again had a great lineup of speakers. The highlights from the sessions I was able to attend were Joe Baker on talent development and identification, Mike Young on cutting-edge techniques for high-performance training, and Stuart Phillips on beliefs versus evidence in strength training.

Phillips addressed several common myths about strength training, some of which I’ve written about before—most recently in this article about how lifting light weights to failure can produce similar muscle gains compared to conventional heavy weights.

In an effort to reduce fatigue and minimize the effects of jet lag, The Union of Sports Ministry in India recently made the decision to send their athletes to Rio for the 2016 Olympics a full month before the Games. In previous Olympic games, athletes were arriving as close to 2 days before their scheduled events. This focus on body-clock synchronization speaks to the effects of jet lag on athletic performance.

In Part one of this three part series, we focused on defining jet lag, the exact mechanisms involved, and how it affects an athlete’s performance. This post will explore some of the most effective intervention techniques designed and proven to help cope with jet lag.

Context: Many factors, including anatomy, neuromuscular control, hormonal regulation, and genetics, are known to contribute to the noncontact anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury risk profile. The neurocognitive and neurophysiological influences on the noncontact ACL injury mechanism have received less attention despite their implications to maintain neuromuscular control. Sex-specific differences in neurocognition may also play a critical role in the elevated female ACL injury risk. This report serves to frame existing literature in a new light to consider neurocognition and its implications for movement control, visual-motor function, and injury susceptibility.

Evidence Acquisition: Sources were obtained from PubMed, MEDLINE, Web of Science, and LISTA (EBSCO) databases from 1990 onward and ranged from diverse fields including psychological and neuroscience reviews to injury epidemiology and biomechanical reports.

Study Design: Clinical review.

Level of Evidence: Level 5.

Results: Neurological factors may contribute to the multifactorial ACL injury risk paradigm and the increased female injury susceptibility.

Conclusion: When developing ACL injury prevention programs, considering neurocognition and its role in movement, neuromuscular control, and injury risk may help improve intervention effectiveness.

… A handful of ACL injuries have already occurred in the Premier League this season. At Liverpool, the Reds lost striker Danny Ings last month to a clear tear of the ACL. Ings will have company on the sideline, as promising left back Joe Gomez also suffered an ACL injury while serving U-21 duties for England. Down south, Bournemouth kicked off its first-ever Premier League season with a trio of ACL injuries to Callum Wilson, Max Gradel, and Tyrone Mings, who joined the Cherries after the club broke its transfer fee record to get him.

As ACL injuries continue to make headlines, there continues to be much speculation as to their root cause. Some people engaged in the sport contend that the footwear is to blame, while other explanations suggest that hard playing surfaces which don’t offer enough cushioning are the major contributing factor.

However, these speculations are often just that: speculation. Research indicates that non-contact ACL injuries account for 70-84 percent of all ACL tears in both females and males. ACL injuries tend to occur during the landing phase of a jump or during a cutting movement, precisely when the ACL is working against the translation and rotation of the lower leg. Causative factors may include asymmetry, lack of strength or indeed the level of fatigue of the muscles which surround the ACL which are normally called upon to control the high force portion of these movements.

… Science, some argue, can lead the way in achieving clean, or at least cleaner, sport. In the face of improved tests to detect doping, it will become harder for athletes to ingest performance-enhancing drugs without getting caught. Many say that the answer might lie with the biological passport, which looks for changes in blood chemistry from an individual’s ‘baseline’ profile that may be indicative of doping. Suspect blood profiles have been used to nab cheats in professional cycling and endurance sports such as biathlons. And there have been claims from scientists at cycling’s international federation, the UCI — itself subject to allegations of misconduct — that rampant blood doping became less common in the pro peloton (the elite professional cycling circuit) after biological passports were introduced.

There is no doubt that science can play a major part in anti-doping efforts. But this can only happen once a governance system is in place that has a genuine interest in clean sport.

This January, at the center of a Las Vegas arena, Anderson Silva secured his legacy as one of the best mixed-martial artists in history. The 40-year-old Brazilian fighter battered his opponent in five rounds of hooks, jabs, and kicks in a fight put on by the Ultimate Fighting Championship.

But four days later, the Nevada Athletic Commission announced that the fighter had tested positive for the steroid drostanolone in the run-up to the fight. It was a body blow to a sport long troubled by rumors of doping. Not only that, but Silva’s opponent in that fight, Nick Diaz, also allegedly tested positive for marijuana in a post-fight test.

As drug scandals buffet marquee sports like pro cycling, track, and Major League Baseball, relatively low-profile, low-budget niche sports are trying to navigate the same treacherous waters. While cage fighting shares few things in common with ultramarathon running, obstacle course racing, CrossFit or mountaineering, there is one important common denominator: each sport is wrestling with the potential for doping—and the public-relations damage that comes with it. It’s also becoming more apparent that it doesn’t take the lure of Olympic gold or a seven-figure contract to make athletes cross the line.

… So what’s the truth about fat?

I decided to sift through the available evidence, interviewing eight researchers and reading more than 60 journal articles on the subject. What I learned is that there’s still a ton of controversy about fat — although there is also clarifying consensus in important areas.

… the Warriors have by far the most efficient offense in the NBA, logging a massive 112 points per 100 possessions. They shoot well above league averages from every spot on the floor, especially in the areas beyond the arc.

Maths professor David Sumpter pinpoints the difference between a Klopp team and a Rodgers team…

One of the most heralded aspects of Jürgen Klopp as a manager is his use of gegenpressing or ‘counter pressing’: the technique of pressing high up the field.

The idea is simple. As soon as the team loses the ball, it should get it back. And the further up the pitch and the quicker a team gets it back, the better they are at gegenpressing. It isn’t something that only one player can achieve. The whole team has to get stuck in and narrow down alternatives for the opposition.

The evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers, a professor of anthropology and biological sciences at Rutgers University in New Jersey, is one of the most influential thinkers on evolution today. Four decades ago, he published a series of papers that teased out the intricacies of our relationships with parents, children, lovers and friends, and laid the groundwork for a Darwinian social theory. His hypothesis about reciprocal altruism explains the profound puzzle of why we help others who are not biologically related to us, even to our own temporary detriment. Quite simply: we expect that the other will return the favour at a later time. Trivers’s ingenious conception of parent-offspring conflict proposes that parents will want to invest equally in all their children (since they are all equally genetically related to the parent), while siblings will each try to get more of their parents’ investment, to the disadvantage of their brothers and sisters. He also came up with a novel explanation for why we so frequently deceive ourselves: the most convincing liar is one who believes his own lies. In the words of the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker at Harvard University: ‘It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that [Trivers] has provided a scientific explanation for the human condition: the intricately complicated and endlessly fascinating relationships that bind us to one another.’ Trivers’s latest book, a memoir entitled Wild Life: Adventures of an Evolutionary Biologist, is published this month. Here, he discusses his two decades of research on symmetry, a phenomenon that seems to span all of nature, from physics to biology to art and architecture.