Applied Sports Science newsletter – November 30, 2015

A key component to the U.S. formula for beating the world in the Rio Games next summer might come as a surprise to anyone focused on Michael Phelps’ comeback.

As the world championships in Summer Olympic sports wind down, it’s clear, the heavy lifting for the U.S. medal haul is going to fall to women, just as it did in London, and as it likely will for years to come. On water and land, in competitions new to the Games and those that are very old, women have become a force for the Olympic team in ways their male teammates may never match again.

It’s every strength and conditioning coach’s job to put his players in the best position possible to endure the rigors of a 34-game MLS season.

But FC Dallas’ Fabian Bazan has had a unique challenge. In his first year with the club, he inherited a roster that suffered from a handful of injuries in 2014, most notably talismanic playmaker Mauro Diaz.

The club’s Argentine star has been electric on the field – “he turns the lights on,” says head coach Oscar Pareja – but has missed 27 games since joining MLS midway through the 2013 season. Most of those have been due to injuries to his right leg, ranging from his quad to his knee.

“Mauro had some factors that were limiting his work and his performance,” Bazan told MLSsoccer.com. “His muscular composition, his eating and nutrition, the stability in his knee had a lot of problems, and his daily rest. He wasn’t resting as much as he needed.”

Ross Barkley is not one for partying, he claims, and prefers to spend his spare time studying footage of Zinedine Zidane, Paul Gascoigne plus, as his interest in boxing develops, Mike Tyson. A choice of sportsmen synonymous with grace, audacity and power respectively is revealing. That combination has fuelled Everton’s expectations of Barkley since he joined the club aged 11. A decade on, they are coming to fruition.

“I feel I’m a player who entertains and gets people on the edge of their seats, as well as trying to be a game-changer who can win a game for the team,” says the England international. “But I’ve been working on the other side of the game a lot with the gaffer. I’ve been working hard on being more disciplined and staying in shape.” The rewards are evident.

… football fitness means fitness in the context of football and isolated fitness means fitness in a non-contextual way. So, to start with football fitness. If you analyze the game. First of all. Communication is what is happening between players – they are exchanging information. For example, players are creating space and they are non-verbally communicating to the player who is in possession of the ball, or the goalkeeper is verbally communicating to the player in possession of the ball. So this communication is of the highest order. And based on this communication, the player with the ball receives all this information; based on that information he makes a decision. So decision making based on game insight is of the second order in football. And then finally, after the player makes his decision, he must execute his decision based on his technique. And therefore, execution of a decision with technique is of the third order in football. So communication, decision making, and the execution of a decision together is what you call a football action.

We know that a doughnut is not a well-balanced breakfast. We know that an hour spent scrolling through Facebook could be put to better use. We know those extra 10 minutes of sleep will likely make us late for work.

When it comes to resisting temptation, we have a hard time acting with our long-term interests in mind.

Dan Ariely, professor of behavioral economics at Duke University and founder of The Center for Advanced Hindsight, recently visited Cornell Tech to speak about temptation and overcoming it through self-control.

Performance in most sports is determined by the athlete’s technical, tactical, physiological and psychological/social characteristics. In the present article, the physical aspect will be evaluated with a focus on what limits performance, and how training can be conducted to improve performance. Specifically how intensified training, i.e., increasing the amount of aerobic high-intensity and speed endurance training, affects physiological adaptations and performance of trained subjects. Periods of speed endurance training do improve performance in events lasting 30 s–4 min, and when combined with aerobic high-intensity sessions, also performance during longer events. Athletes in team sports involving intense exercise actions and endurance aspects, such as soccer and basketball, can also benefit from intensified training. Speed endurance training does reduce energy expenditure and increase expression of muscle Na+, K+ pump ? subunits, which may preserve muscle cell excitability and delay fatigue development during intense exercise. When various types of training are conducted in the same period (concurrent training), as done in a number of sports, one type of training may blunt the effect of other types of training. It is not, however, clear how various training modalities are affecting each other, and this issue should be addressed in future studies.

Do athletes need more sleep than the average person? Peta Bee sifts through the findings

Two recent studies have cast doubt on the idea that the average person needs a solid eight hours of sleep every night. It’s a myth, the sleep scientists suggested, and most people can get away with six or seven hours without ill effect. But will the same hold true for athletes or does missing out on nightly recuperation impact your ability to train and perform?

In this interview we speak to two of Tottenham Hotspur’s prominent medical advisors, who discuss the importance of data at the Premier League club, and what it should mean to coaches.

How would you engineer a baby? I mean really, actually do it.

Last April, Chinese researchers reported that they had tried genetically editing human embryos for the first time to correct a disease gene. Out of more than 80 embryos, however, only a handful came out correctly. In the rest, the gene didn’t get fixed properly, or they ended up with unintended alterations to their DNA (see “Chinese Team Reports Gene-Editing Human Embryos”).

The scientific community pounced on the problems with a collective phew. Don’t worry, they said, it’s not even practical. Not yet.

Several years ago, I fell at the gym and ripped two tendons in my wrist. The pain was excruciating, and within minutes my hand had swollen grotesquely and become hot to the touch. I was reminded of a patient I’d seen early in medical school, whose bacterial infection extended from his knee to his toes. Latin was long absent from the teaching curriculum, but, as my instructor examined the leg, he cited the four classic symptoms of inflammation articulated by the Roman medical writer Celsus in the first century: rubor, redness; tumor, swelling; calor, heat; and dolor, pain. In Latin, inflammatio means “setting on fire,” and as I considered the searing pain in my injured hand I understood how the condition earned its name.

Inflammation occurs when the body rallies to defend itself against invading microbes or to heal damaged tissue. The walls of the capillaries dilate and grow more porous, enabling white blood cells to flood the damaged site. As blood flows in and fluid leaks out, the region swells, which can put pressure on surrounding nerves, causing pain; inflammatory molecules may also activate pain fibres. The heat most likely results from the increase in blood flow.

Recent research suggests that match-to-match variation adds important information to performance descriptors in team sports, as it helps measure how players fine-tune their tactical behaviours and technical actions to the extreme dynamical environments. The current study aims to identify the differences in technical performance of players from strong and weak teams and to explore match-to-match variation of players’ technical match performance. Performance data of all the 380 matches of season 2012-2013 in the Spanish First Division Professional Football League were analysed. Twenty-one performance-related match actions and events were chosen as variables in the analyses. Players’ technical performance profiles were established by unifying count values of each action or event of each player per match into the same scale. Means of these count values of players from Top3 and Bottom3 teams were compared and plotted into radar charts. Coefficient of variation of each match action or event within a player was calculated to represent his match-to-match variation of technical performance. Differences in the variation of technical performances of players across different match contexts (team and opposition strength, match outcome and match location) were compared. All the comparisons were achieved by the magnitude-based inferences. Results showed that technical performances differed between players of strong and weak teams from different perspectives across different field positions. Furthermore, the variation of the players’ technical performance is affected by the match context, with effects from team and opposition strength greater than effects from match location and match outcome.

A group of us in Google’s People Operations (what we call HR) set out to answer this question using data and rigorous analysis: What makes a Google team effective? We shared our research earlier today with the Associated Press, and we’re sharing the findings here, as well.

Over two years we conducted 200+ interviews with Googlers (our employees) and looked at more than 250 attributes of 180+ active Google teams. We were pretty confident that we’d find the perfect mix of individual traits and skills necessary for a stellar team — take one Rhodes Scholar, two extroverts, one engineer who rocks at AngularJS, and a PhD. Voila. Dream team assembled, right?

We were dead wrong. Who is on a team matters less than how the team members interact, structure their work, and view their contributions. So much for that magical algorithm.

BY now it’s a correlation you can’t fail to have been exposed to. Teams regularly playing Thursday-Sunday matches suffer results-wise. With debates raging about how seriously Liverpool should take the Europa League — and how strong the sides should be that Jürgen Klopp picks in the competition — The Anfield Wrap’s GLENN PRICE spoke to world-renowned Dutch fitness coach Raymond Verheijen, who studied 27,000 football matches to demonstrate a performance drop off when teams have only two days’ recovery.

That is the paper’s subtitle, the title is “An Offer You Can’t Refuse,” and that is the job market paper (pdf) of Sandro Ambuehl of Stanford University. I found this to be the most interesting job market paper of the year, noting that “most interesting” and “best” are not synonymous, that said I found the quality to be very high too. The main point is that having commercial economic incentives in place causes us to perceive new information in more positive-sum terms than otherwise would be the case, or at least that is how I interpret his results.

Few psychological traits are as desirable as creativity — the ability to come up with ideas that are both novel and useful. Yet it is also true that creativity has been associated with a wide range of counterproductive, rarely discussed qualities. Being aware of these tendencies is important for anyone trying to better understand their own creativity, or that of other people.

First, research has established a link between creativity and negative moods. You don’t have to be depressed to be creative — and it’s important to note that crippling depression is more destructive than generative — but it is true that there is some empirical backing for the stereotype that artists tend to be depressive or suffer from mood swings. As Nietzsche once noted: “One must have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.” On average, people who are very emotionally stable may be too happy to feel the need to create. After all, if the status quo is fine, why change it?

Second, the very thinking patterns that define the creative process and help lead to original thinking can have a maladaptive side. For example, creativity requires the inability to suppress irrelevant thoughts and inappropriate ideas. And creative thinkers also tend to have poorer impulse-control.