Applied Sports Science newsletter – December 4, 2015

… Under Steve McClaren, Newcastle United have a plan. It’s underscored by a philosophy that has been worked on for four months by a bright and innovative coaching team who were appointed to squeeze more from a squad of internationals than their predecessors could. But United’s biggest problem is that for the best of 12 months their plan rarely – if ever – survives that first moment of pressing, mind-scrambling crisis.

After 13 games at Liverpool without a goal, Divock Origi needed just 41 minutes at St Mary’s last night to score both a hat-trick and underline the benefits of a quiet conversation with Jurgen Klopp.

The new Liverpool manager had sought out Origi before the match to personally explain what he wanted and expected from a player he clearly already rated highly after a previous failed attempt to bring him to Borussia Dortmund.

“We had a talk and it’s not too often that we agree in everything,” said Klopp. Aside from telling Origi that he wanted him to start last night as the main central striker, Klopp’s basic message to the 20-year-old Belgian international was to relax, keep things simple and not overcomplicate either his on-field contributions or his reaction to those matches he might miss.

… Curry isn’t a product of the math; he’s so good that he has his own math. Indeed, the math is so far in Curry’s favor that the Warriors — and even basketball in general — may not fully understand what they have yet.

While arguing with that Warriors fan, I may have said some things I shouldn’t have. Like that Curry has an outside shot at breaking Wilt Chamberlain’s season record of 50 points per game. Even as MVP, Curry scored only 24 points per game last year, so obviously I was exaggerating for effect … right?

A year ago on Thursday the Football Association launched its ‘DNA’ blueprint for the future of English football. While Dan Ashworth talks of “shoots of development and positivity” and expounds a convincing argument on the work he does, the progress being made, the value of St??George’s Park and the need to “look in a slightly different direction” after nearly 50 years of failure at international tournaments, the FA’s technical director also knows the one fundamental truth: it comes down to results.

Results are results. FC Dallas fell one step short of this weekend’s MLS Cup with a 5-3 aggregate loss to the Portland Timbers in the Western Conference finals. Yet, while taking nothing away from worthy cup finalists Portland and Columbus, a modest step back in search of long-range perspective suggests that the Texas club’s youth movement may prove the most useful lesson from the current MLS season.

For years, FCD have been committed to grooming homegrown talent through a vibrant academy system. Add in head coach Oscar Pareja’s appreciation for a Latino-inflected style of play, and his steadfast willingness to invest his trust in young players. Cap it with the excellent 2015 regular season and deep playoff run that resulted, and you have a potential paradigm shift in the way professional clubs in the country grow talent, how they interact with their communities, and even how they view the reasons for their existence.

Any given performance requires some sort of effort. Generally, higher level performance requires more effort and vice versa.

Many times the leap of logic is to assume the highest (perceived) effort must indicate the highest level of performance. This can be problematic in both training and performance as mind and body can be fooled into connecting too closely effort and performance. The following is a discussion of this principle taken from the insights of Dr. Manfred Steinbach.

On December 5th, in the foothills of Marin, California, the 29-year-old North Face athlete Dylan Bowman will line up against some of the world’s best ultramarathon runners at the North Face 50 Mile Endurance Challenge Championship. Just a few years back, Bowman was just getting into the sport, and running simply to finish. Now, with podium finishes at high-profile races around the world under his belt, the California runner is racing to win.

In advance of race day, we caught up with Bowman to learn more about how he approaches the sport. What follows is must-read material for anyone interested in pushing their body to the limit.

Polar, the pioneer of wearable sports and fitness technology and the leader of heart rate monitoring for more than 35 years, announces a major feature update for Polar M400 users. The Polar M400 now allows users to access Training Load and Recovery Status data after each training session on Polar Flow via the Polar Flow app or web service. Continuous monitoring of training load and recovery helps athletes recognize personal limits, avoid over or under training, and adjust training intensity and duration according to daily and weekly targets.

Polar’s Training Load feature, only available for V800 users until now, makes the training loads of different types of training sessions comparable with each other despite the workouts’ intensities and durations. Training Load helps users understand the amount of effort they are putting into a training session.

Maybe the honeymoon is not quite over yet, but you can bet the hype around fitness and health wearables will die eventually. Everyone with a stake in wearable technology — from component manufacturers, to OEMs, to designers and engineers — is already wondering whether there will be enough application creativity to propel wearables into the next phase of maturation.

I recently read a couple of articles written by Freescale Semiconductor that discuss the future of wearable technology and what its true calling might be, including one by Sujata Neidig, the company’s Americas business development manager. Her article ran on DesignNews.com and sparked two pages of comments from engineering readers who relayed their experiences with health and fitness trackers as consumers. They had familiar concerns: comfort, durability, affordability, user experience, battery life, and data privacy and accuracy. Yet they always circled back to one fundamental question: Do they really tell us things about ourselves that we can’t function without?

The company that made your smartphone is no longer a hardware manufacturer. It has become adept at harvesting and managing data from it users, too. Every device has a series of sensors, as well as a user login and an account where data is stored.

For manufacturers of wearable technology, there’s value in knowing how we spend our time: where we go, what we do, and how we like to exercise. Companies like Nike prove how this works.

Göran Gustafsson looks at people and thinks of cars — the ageing models that rolled off assembly lines a few decades ago. Today, says Gustafsson, cars are packed with cutting-edge sensors, computers and sophisticated communications systems that warn of problems when they are still easy to fix, which is why modern vehicles rarely surprise their drivers with catastrophic breakdowns.

“Why don’t we have a similar vision for our bodies?” wonders Gustafsson, an engineer whose team at the Swedish electronics company Acreo, based in Kista, is one of many around the world trying to make such a vision possible. Instead of letting health problems go undetected until a person ends up in hospital — the medical equivalent of a roadside breakdown — these teams foresee a future in which humans are wired up like cars, with sensors that form a similar early-warning system.

Working with researchers at Linköping University in Sweden, Gustafsson’s team has developed skin-surface and implanted sensors, as well as an in-body intranet that can link devices while keeping them private. Other groups are developing technologies ranging from skin patches that sense arterial stiffening — a signal of a looming heart attack — to devices that detect epileptic fits and automatically deliver drugs directly to affected areas of the brain.

The United States Soccer Federation today introduced a player health and safety program called Recognize to Recover. The first-of-its-kind program aims to reduce injuries in soccer players of all ages and promote safe play by those on and around the field.

Recognize to Recover was developed with the help of medical experts and will provide coaches, players, parents and referees with information, guidance and educational materials to improve the prevention and management of injuries.

Manchester City – rather than Arsenal – have suffered most acutely with injuries among the main Premier League title contenders this season, according to new research seen by Telegraph Sport.

Different injuries have different impacts. In this article I am going to look at how historical injuries have affected teams from the perspective of expected goals. Given each squad member’s xG per 90, and the number of games they missed, what’s the total amount of xG that was sidelined in a season?

I call this metric EGMAYO: Expected Goals Missed due to the Absence of Your Offence.