Applied Sports Science newsletter – November 28, 2015

Heading into the 1999 WNBA draft, there was no doubt that University of Tennessee star Chamique Holdsclaw would be the No. 1 overall pick.

Holdsclaw was dubbed the “Female Michael Jordan,” and like MJ, she was expected by many to use her electrifying talents to raise the league’s popularity and visibility. But as chronicled in the newly released documentary, “Mind/Game: The Unquiet Journey of Chamique Holdsclaw,” her battle with mental illness would eventually trump any opponent she would ever face on the hardwood.

The US women’s national team may be the world champion after winning the Women’s World Cup this summer, but coach Jill Ellis knows a team is only as good as its last tournament. Her focus these days is on the 2016 Olympics in Rio, which are inching closer as qualifiers begin in February.

With four members of the World Cup-winning team retiring and the number of goalkeeper slots shrinking from three to two, Ellis doesn’t need to cut a single field player before the 2016 Olympics. If she wants to simply bring the rest of World Cup squad, she can.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right? Not exactly.

“It’s not a matter of whether it’s broken,” Ellis told the Guardian this week. “It’s a matter of we’ve got to be better. It’s never sitting and thinking, OK, what we have is good enough.”

… Miazga is part of a shift in American player development. He not only skipped college, giving up a scholarship from Michigan, he bypassed his final season of soccer at Clifton High School to join the Red Bulls Academy. While his buddies were playing big matches against rival schools such as Passaic Tech and Wayne Valley, he was receiving frequent training sessions with elite coaches.

“MLS teams are spending a lot more money on development and investments in those academies, so it’s a natural alternative for some players,” U.S. Soccer Federation President Sunil Gulati said.

… When asked why he did not take Sanchez off toward the end of Tuesday night’s 3-0 win over Dinamo Zagreb, a match in which the forward scored twice and assisted the other goal for Mesut Ozil, Arsene Wenger gave a memorable and completely counter-intuitive answer: “Because a break makes him tired.”

It doesn’t make any sense. But Sanchez is not a player for whom the usual rules apply. Fatigue seems like a foreign concept to a man who would play every second of the season if it were possible. Even his post-Copa America rest — following a tournament in which he contested until the very last kick, scoring the winning penalty in a shootout against Argentina in the final — lasted only 67 minutes of the Premier League season, as he was introduced from the bench in the 2-0 defeat to West Ham on the opening weekend.

When Richard Thaler signs copies of the best-selling book Nudge, which he co-authored with legal scholar Cass Sunstein, he always writes “Nudge for good” next to his name.

“That’s a plea, not an expectation,” explains the Chicago Booth professor, and one of the fathers of nudge theory, which describes how small interventions in the environment or incentives can encourage people to make better decisions.

Marquette has been thrust into the national soccer scene since men’s head coach Louis Bennett arrived on campus in 2006. After accumulating just three wins in his first two years at Marquette, the team now gets top-15 recruiting classes, has made two NCAA tournament appearances and earned its first BIG EAST title in 2012.

The program is at the forefront once again, this time for its forward-thinking when it comes to interweaving technology into the beautiful game. The Golden Eagles took things to a level rarely seen among college teams. The coaching staff is no longer sitting around a TV watching game film. They are tracking players, analyzing detailed infographics about their play and making adjustments to practice, pregame, warmups and strategy based on players’ feedback.

“There are a few (using this), but they are few and far between,” Bennett said. “It’s not cookie cutter… I can’t actually say how many people are doing it. It might be in the teens. It might be less than ten.”

This study investigated the activity profiles of junior rugby league players competing in 3 distinct age groups (Under 13, 14, and 15), and 2 distinct playing standards (division 1 and 4). In addition, we reported global positioning system (GPS) data using predefined absolute speed thresholds and speed thresholds expressed relative to a players’ individual peak velocity. Ninety male junior rugby league players, representing 1 of 6 teams competing in the Brisbane junior rugby league competition, underwent measurements of peak velocity (through a 40-m sprint) and GPS analysis during competitive matches. Data were described as both absolute speed zones and relative to the individual player’s peak velocity. Absolute measures of moderate-, high-, and very high-speed running distances increased with age with the differences among groups typically small to moderate (effect size = 0.24–0.68) in magnitude. However, when data were expressed relative to a players’ capacity, younger players and those from lower playing divisions exhibited higher playing intensities and performed greater amounts of high-intensity activity. Moderate and negative relationships (r = ?0.43 to ?0.46) were found between peak velocity and the amount of relative high-speed running performed. These findings suggest that individualization of velocity bands increases the high-speed running attributed to slower players and decreases the high-speed running attributed to faster players. From a practical perspective, consideration should be given to both the absolute and relative demands of competition to provide insight into training prescription and the recovery requirements of individual players.

Dopamine (DA) has been widely investigated for its potential role in determining exercise performance. It was originally thought that DA’s ergogenic effect was by mediating psychological responses. Recently, some studies have also suggested that DA may regulate physiological responses, such as thermoregulation. Hyperthermia has been demonstrated as an important limiting factor during endurance exercise. DA is prominent in the thermoregulatory centre, and changes in DA concentration have been shown to affect core temperature regulation during exercise. Some studies have proposed that DA or DA/noradrenaline (NA) reuptake inhibitors can improve exercise performance, despite hyperthermia during exercise in the heat. DA/NA reuptake inhibitors also increase catecholamine release in the thermoregulatory centre. Intracerebroventricularly injected DA has been shown to improve exercise performance through inhibiting hyperthermia-induced fatigue, even at normal ambient temperatures. Further, caffeine has been reported to increase DA release in the thermoregulatory centre and improves endurance exercise performance despite increased core body temperature. Taken together, DA has been shown to have ergogenic effects and increase heat storage and hyperthermia tolerance. The mechanisms underlying these effects seem to involve limiting/overriding the inhibitory signals from the central nervous system that result in cessation of exercise due to hyperthermia.

Every job, no matter how glamorous, can get tedious from time to time. So then how do they do it? How do those elite athletes who reach over 100 caps for their country or compete in multiple Olympic Games stay hungry and focussed over many years in the same sport? Of course the pursuit of glory is a driving factor, and motivation comes easy when things are going well, but every athlete goes through dips in form and enthusiasm. This is when motivation can be used as a tool to set things right. CONQA Sport speaks with Professor Pieter Kruger, Performance Psychologist for the South African national rugby team, the Springboks, and debunks a few misconceptions surrounding sports psychology, and finds how motivation affects performance in elite sport.

We introduce statistical methods for predicting the types of human activity at sub-second resolution using triaxial accelerometry data. The major innovation is that we use labeled activity data from some subjects to predict the activity labels of other subjects. To achieve this, we normalize the data across subjects by matching the standing up and lying down portions of triaxial accelerometry data. This is necessary to account for differences between the variability in the position of the device relative to gravity, which are induced by body shape and size as well as by the ambiguous definition of device placement. We also normalize the data at the device level to ensure that the magnitude of the signal at rest is similar across devices. After normalization we use overlapping movelets (segments of triaxial accelerometry time series) extracted from some of the subjects to predict the movement type of the other subjects. The problem was motivated by and is applied to a laboratory study of 20 older participants who performed different activities while wearing accelerometers at the hip. Prediction results based on other people’s labeled dictionaries of activity performed almost as well as those obtained using their own labeled dictionaries. These findings indicate that prediction of activity types for data collected during natural activities of daily living may actually be possible.

Like the pro sports teams it works with, Kinduct Technologies Inc. has been on a bit of a winning streak lately.

Several members of the Halifax software and data analysis company spent the last three months in southern California as part of a sports and entertainment accelerator program organized by the Los Angeles Dodgers and R/GA, a United States advertising agency.

The program culminated last week with an invite-only demonstration day for industry leaders, partner organizations, investors and media at Dodger Stadium, with Travis McDonough, founder and CEO, standing at home plate talking about his company.

We propose a deep learning approach for finding dense correspondences between 3D scans of people. Our method requires only partial geometric information in the form of two depth maps or partial reconstructed surfaces, works for humans in arbitrary poses and wearing any clothing, does not require the two people to be scanned from similar viewpoints, and runs in real time. We use a deep convolutional neural network to train a feature descriptor on depth map pixels, but crucially, rather than training the network to solve the shape correspondence problem directly, we train it to solve a body region emph{classification} problem, modified to increase the smoothness of the learned descriptors near region boundaries. This approach ensures that nearby points on the human body are nearby in feature space, and vice versa, rendering the feature descriptor suitable for computing dense correspondences between the scans. We validate our method on real and synthetic data for both clothed and unclothed humans, and show that our correspondences are more robust than is possible with state-of-the-art unsupervised methods, and more accurate than those found using methods that require full watertight 3D geometry.

We are living in a world where we are surrounded by so many intelligent video-capturing devices. These devices capture data about how we live and what we do. For example, thanks to surveillance and action cameras, as well as smart phones and even old-fashioned camcorders, we are able to record videos at an unprecedented scale and pace. There is exceedingly rich information and knowledge embedded in all those videos. With the recent advances in computer vision, we now have the ability to mine such massive visual data to obtain valuable insight about what is happening in the world. Due to the remarkable successes of deep learning techniques, we are now able to boost video analysis performance significantly and initiate new research directions to analyze video content. For example, convolutional neural networks have demonstrated superiority on modeling high-level visual concepts, while recurrent neural networks have shown promise in modeling temporal dynamics in videos. Deep video analytics, or video analytics with deep learning, is becoming an emerging research area in the field of pattern recognition.

The goal of this special issue is to call for a coordinated effort to understand the opportunities and challenges emerging in video analysis with deep learning techniques, identify key tasks and evaluate the state of the art, showcase innovative methodologies and ideas, introduce large scale real systems or applications, as well as propose new real-world datasets and discuss future directions.

Deadline for Paper Submission: March 1, 2016.

Retired four-star general Paul F. Gorman recalls first learning about the “weakling of the battlefield” from reading S.L.A. Marshall, the U.S. Army combat historian during World War II. After interviewing soldiers who participated in the Normandy beach landings, Marshall had learned that fatigue was responsible for an overwhelming number of casualties.

“I didn’t know my strength was gone until I hit the beach,” Sergeant Bruce Hensley told Marshall. “I was carrying part of a machine gun. Normally I could run with it … but I found I couldn’t even walk with it. … So I crawled across the sand dragging it with me. I felt ashamed of my own weakness, but looking around I saw the others crawling and dragging the weights they normally carried.” Another officer told of the effects of “fear and fatigue.”

“Soldiers get tired and soldiers get fearful,” Gorman told me last year. “Frequently, soldiers just don’t want to fight. Attention must always be paid to the soldier himself.”

For the NFL, the effort to curb concussions is for high stakes. Now, a handful of companies are working with the league, looking well beyond observable physical symptoms to find better ways to test for the head injuries.

Quanterix is among the companies aiming to bring an objective concussion test to market, as testing is still largely limited to subjective measures like observing eye movement. About 2.5 million emergency room visits were related to traumatic brain injuries in 2010, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and early detection can be crucial to limit further damage.

Achilles tendinopathy is a painful condition commonly affecting the general and athletic population and presents with localized pain, stiffness, and swelling in the mid-portion of the Achilles tendon. The physical stress placed on the tendon results in micro-trauma, which leads to subsequent inflammation and degeneration. While it is not surprising that this condition affects the physically active, nearly one third of Achilles tendinopathy cases occur in sedentary individuals. Etiology for this condition stems from a change in loading patterns and/or overuse of the tendon, thus resulting in microscopic tearing and degenerative changes. There are numerous causes contributing to the maladaptive response in these patients, such as mechanical, age-related, genetic and vascular factors. The treatment for these patients is typically load management and eccentric strengthening of the gastroc-soleus complex. Unfortunately, conservative treatment can lead to surgical intervention in up to 45% of cases. A relatively new phenomenon in the treatment of this condition is the use of autologous blood injections (ABI) and platelet-rich plasma injections (PRPI). This need for a less invasive treatment fostered more investigation into ABI and PRPI to treat these non-responsive patients. However, the evidence concerning the effectiveness of these treatments in patients with Achilles tendinopathy has not been synthesized.

Objectives

Plantar fasciitis, a common injury in runners, has been speculated to be associated with weakness of the intrinsic foot muscles. A recent study reported that atrophy of the intrinsic forefoot muscles might contribute to plantar fasciitis by destabilizing the medial longitudinal arch. However, intrinsic foot muscle volume difference between individuals with plantar fasciitis and healthy counterparts remains unknown. This study examined the relationship of intrinsic foot muscle volume and incidence of plantar fasciitis.
… Results

There was significant greater rearfoot intrinsic muscle volume in healthy runners than runners with chronic plantar fasciitis (Cohen’s d?=?1.13; p?=?0.023). A similar trend was also observed in the total intrinsic foot muscle volume but it did not reach a statistical significance (Cohen’s d?=?0.92; p?=?0.056). Forefoot volume was similar between runners with and without plantar fasciitis.
Conclusions

These results suggest that atrophy of intrinsic foot muscles may be associated with symptoms of plantar fasciitis in runners. These findings may provide useful information in rehabilitation strategies of chronic plantar fasciitis.

Footballers who sustain a suspected concussion, either during training or in a game, should immediately be removed from the pitch and not allowed to return until the appropriate treatment has been administered.

Moderator: Jim Whitehead, Executive Vice President/CEO, American College of Sports Medicine
Panelists: Dr. Robert Cantu, Clinical Professor of Neurosurgery, Boston University School of Medicine Jayne Greenberg, District Director of Physical Education and Health Literacy, Miami-Dade County (Fla.) Public Schools Nancy Hogshead-Makar, CEO, Champion Women Stephen Levin, Councilmember, New York City Council

Although the intake of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) intake by athletes prevents soreness, little is known concerning their role in exercise performance. This study assessed the effects of ibuprofen intake on an exhaustive protocol test after 6 weeks of swimming training in rats. Animals were divided into sedentary and training groups. After training, animals were subdivided into two subsets: saline or ibuprofen. Afterwards, three repeated swimming bouts were performed by the groups. Ibuprofen (15?mg/kg) was administered once a day. Pain measurements were performed and inflammatory and oxidative stress parameters were assayed in cerebral cortex and gastrocnemius muscle. Training, ibuprofen administration, or both combined (P?<?0.05; 211?±?18s, 200?±?31s, and 279?±?23s) increased exercise time to exhaustion. Training decreased the acetylcholinesterase (AChE) activity (P?<?0.05; 149?±?11) in cerebral cortex. Ibuprofen intake decreased the AChE activity after exhaustive protocol test in trained and sedentary rats (P?<?0.05; 270?±?60; 171?±?38; and 273?±?29). It also prevented neuronal tumor necrosis factor-? (TNF-?) and interleukin (IL 1?) increase. Fatigue elicited by this exhaustive protocol may involve disturbances of the central nervous system. Additive anti-inflammatory effects of exercise and ibuprofen intake support the hypothesis that this combination may constitute a more effective approach. In addition, ergogenic aids may be a useful means to prevent exercise-induced fatigue.

New research would seem to support what many have enviously suspected while watching a thin friend chow down — the same foods don’t necessarily have the same effect from person-to-person.

A new study from Israel suggests that people have very different blood sugar responses to the same food — with some showing large spikes even after eating supposedly healthy choices.

Researchers said the findings, published in the Nov. 19 issue of the journal Cell, underscore the message that there is no “one-size-fits-all” diet.

Antioxidants—we’ve heard the term over and over in the health and longevity spheres, but what are they, where can we find them, and why are they so important? Several of our food and supplement recommendations are geared towards increasing your intake of antioxidants; particularly vitamins A, C, and E. The benefits of wine and dark chocolate are also buoyed by their antioxidant content. For this blog, we’ll focus on two antioxidants in particular, Vitamins C and E.

… Most cereals fall under this umbrella definition: processed grain—usually corn, wheat, rice, oats, or barley—that has been treated with a combination of sweetener and salt. With the help of Robert B. Fast and Elwood F. Caldwell’s seminal text Breakfast Cereals and How They Are Made, here is an accounting of some of the inventions and innovations that make cereal possible.

… Historically [Newcastle] United have tended to be near the top of the table and last year they had 30 muscle injuries. Dave Billows, who had trained boxer Tony Bellew, and Faye Downey – who came with Alan Pardew’s recommendation – were both added to the staff, but the club still lost players to injury.

Former Everton man Billows came with a fantastic reference from Bellew: “They (Everton) always had the smallest squad in the Premier League, just about, but they hardly got any injuries during his time there.

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.

The Knicks have done well for themselves this season after a disastrous 2014-15 campaign in which they won just 17 games.

Heading into Wednesday’s game at Orlando, New York owns an 8-7 mark despite having played the NBA’s fifth-toughest schedule. It’s an impressive feat considering the Knicks were without starter Arron Afflalo for their first eight games, and Carmelo Anthony continues to work to regain his rhythm following major knee surgery in February.

Still, for all their early-season success, there’s one area holding the Knicks back: Their rotation involves too many players on a night-to-night basis.

The Financial Times had a very interesting article yesterday about the growing interest of American private equity investors in the English Premier League. Of course, American investors have been deeply involved in the biggest clubs for some time now – Manchester United, Arsenal and Liverpool are controlled by Americans, as well as Aston Villa and Sunderland (and some Championship clubs). The idea that a new wave of Americans (and possibly others) is coming, attracted by the growing profitability of the EPL, is worth considering, not least because such investors would not necessarily have a commitment to retaining traditional structures. I think this is especially true of promotion and relegation, which undermines the profitability of football clubs.

The renewed interest is almost entirely a function of the broadcast contracts. In the space of four years the EPL will have signed contracts which will have increased broadcast income about threefold. In 2012/13 the average club received about £50 million from broadcast rights, and by 2016/17 that will have risen to about £150 million.

Jamie Vardy’s record-equalling run of 10 goals in 10 consecutive Premier League matches is a remarkable feat on its own; it’s made all the more astonishing by the fact he was playing in England’s seventh tier just four and a half years ago.

His path from the lower leagues to national team starter is therefore making many of us wonder where and how we might find the next Jamie Vardy. Indeed for many in football this is an obssession.