Applied Sports Science newsletter – January 26, 2016

True evaluations will not be made until April and over the months that follow. But for now, the Red Sox are pleased with the progress Hanley Ramirez and Pablo Sandoval are making.

Manager John Farrell met with both players in Florida earlier this month to get a personal gauge on their condition.

“Physically they look great,” Farrell said Thursday before the 77th Boston Baseball Writers dinner at the Marriott Copley Place.

It’s a good time to be a running geek. Just a few decades ago, digital watches still seemed like a pretty neat idea; now heart-rate monitors and GPS watches are standard, and new gadgets analyse your stride and cadence, compute your power output or measure your lactate levels, all in real time midrun. But how do you pick out what’s useful without drowning in an ocean of data? Here are some guidelines to keep in mind.

The Detroit Lions have made some major changes when it comes to the team’s strength and conditioning staff. Coordinator of physical development Jason Arapoff and assistant strength coach Ted Rath were among those fired, according to Dave Birkett of the Detroit Free Press.

Although general manager Bob Quinn did not confirm these firings, he spoke openly about the importance of a quality strength and conditioning department during an interview with Alex Marvez and Gil Brandt on Sirius XM NFL radio Wednesday night.

… [Sashi] Brown wants to eliminate as many excuses as possible as he leads it into a new era.

The new director of football operations acknowledged as much Thursday as Brown and chief strategy officer Paul DePodesta met with the media at their introductory news conference. One of the more revealing nuggets from the 30 minute-plus chat was the decision to hire a new strength and conditioning staff. (A few members might be retained, Brown said.)

Injuries are a reality for every team playing a violent game, but the Browns’ fitness level was an underlying issue all season and we’re not just talking about the league-high 16 concussions. Head traumas are difficult to prevent in a collision sport.

In sports, fast and accurate execution of movements is required. It has been shown that implicitly learned movements might be less vulnerable than explicitly learned movements to stressful and fast changing circumstances that exist at the elite sports level. The present study provides insight in explicit and implicit motor learning in youth soccer players with different expertise levels. Twenty-seven youth elite soccer players and 25 non-elite soccer players (aged 10–12) performed a serial reaction time task (SRTT). In the SRTT, one of the sequences must be learned explicitly, the other was implicitly learned. No main effect of group was found for implicit and explicit learning on mean reaction time (MRT) and accuracy. However, for MRT, an interaction was found between learning condition, learning phase and group. Analyses showed no group effects for the explicit learning condition, but youth elite soccer players showed better learning in the implicit learning condition. In particular, during implicit motor learning youth elite soccer showed faster MRTs in the early learning phase and earlier reached asymptote performance in terms of MRT. Present findings may be important for sports because children with superior implicit learning abilities in early learning phases may be able to learn more (durable) motor skills in a shorter time period as compared to other children.

It’s that time again, the new year when people are frantically trying to keep their resolutions to exercise more and eat healthier. Gyms are flooded with people trying to work off their holiday overindulgences and the air is filled with the smell of… ammonia? What’s the deal here, why does sweat sometimes smell like highly concentrated pee? If this has not happened to you, you’re lucky because it’s pretty gross. Ask me how I know.

Here’s the thing, a couple of years ago I actually started my resolution early, before Thanksgiving. It seems I had a common problem… doing too much too fast. My first clue was when I was running all out, heart rate way up, feeling great, and then suddenly smelled like I was standing in a very wet litter box. What the heck? I had recently had mice in my kitchen and I was using a kitchen dishrag as a sweat rag so I wondered if the mice had gotten into the drawer and peed on the rags. I was instantly grossed out and quit wiping my sweat for that workout. It happened a second time about a week later as I was pushing myself to run just a little farther than I felt like I should and I realized it was ME that smelled!

… if adding tech does not detract from the benefits compression gear brings, because it is so seamless and hidden that you forget it is there, then there is no additional lifestyle cost. Logic says you will wear tech-enabled compression gear any time you would wear normal compression gear.

Economists will tell you that when a marginal cost hits zero, weird and wonderful things happen. Entirely new business models become possible, and old industries tumble before the new. Remember what digital photography did to Kodak? In this case of smart compression gear, users can tap into their body metrics whenever they want, not only for the gym, but for endless applications.

This new business model, called the “device as a service” model, is different than the current standard.

Purpose To compare patient-reported and clinician-reported outcomes, and radiographic results between patients who had had revision ACL reconstruction and those who had had primary ACL reconstruction.

Design Systematic review and meta-analysis

Data sources The MEDLINE, CINAHL, EMBASE and SPORTDiscus electronic databases were searched on 6 August 2015, using 3 main concepts: (1) revision ACL reconstruction, (2) primary ACL reconstruction and (3) treatment outcomes.

Eligibility criteria for selecting studies Articles that compared patient-reported or clinician-reported outcomes or radiographic results between patients who had had revision ACL reconstruction and those who had had primary surgery with a minimum of 2?years follow-up were included. The outcomes evaluated were the Lysholm Knee Scoring Scale, objective International Knee Documentation Committee (IKDC) classification, Tegner Activity Scale, side-to-side difference in anterior tibial translation measured with KT-1000/2000 arthrometer, pivot shift test, tibiofemoral osteoarthritis grading on plain radiographs and subsequent knee surgeries.

Results 8 studies (300 revision ACL reconstructions and 413 primary ACL reconstructions) were included in the meta-analysis. Patients who had had revision surgery reported inferior Lysholm Knee Scoring Scale scores (mean difference: 7.8 points), had inferior clinician-reported knee function as assessed with the objective IKDC classification (IKDC category A: 27% vs 57%; IKDC category C or D: 22% vs 8%) and pivot shift test (grade II or III: 7% vs 2%), and more radiographic evidence of tibiofemoral osteoarthritis (50% vs 25%) compared with patients who had had primary surgery.

Conclusions Revision ACL reconstruction restored similar anterior-posterior knee laxity compared with primary ACL reconstruction. Patients who had had revision surgery reported inferior Lysholm Knee Scoring Scale scores, had inferior clinician-reported knee function and more radiographic signs of tibiofemoral osteoarthritis compared with patients with primary ACL reconstruction.

Background: Professional basketball players have a high incidence of injuries requiring surgical intervention. However, no studies in the current literature have compared postoperative performance outcomes among common injuries to determine high- and low-risk procedures to these athletes’ careers.

Purpose: To compare return-to-play (RTP) rates and performance-based outcomes after different orthopaedic procedures in National Basketball Association (NBA) players and to determine which surgeries are associated with the worst postoperative change in performance.

Study Design: Cohort study; Level of evidence, 3.

Methods: Athletes in the NBA undergoing anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction, Achilles tendon repair, lumbar discectomy, microfracture, meniscus surgery, hand/wrist or foot fracture fixation, and shoulder stabilization were identified through team injury reports and archives on public record. The RTP rate, games played per season, and player efficiency rating (PER) were determined before and after surgery. Statistical analysis was used to compare the change between pre- and postsurgical performance among the different injuries.

Results: A total of 348 players were included. The RTP rates were highest in patients with hand/wrist fractures (98.1%; mean age, 27.0 years) and lowest for those with Achilles tears (70.8%; mean age, 28.4 years) (P = .005). Age ?30 years (odds ratio [OR], 3.85; 95% CI, 1.24-11.91) and body mass index ?27 kg/m2 (OR, 3.46; 95% CI, 1.05-11.40) were predictors of not returning to play. Players undergoing Achilles tendon repair and arthroscopic knee surgery had a significantly greater decline in postoperative performance outcomes at the 1- and 3-year time points and had shorter career lengths compared with the other procedures.

Conclusion: NBA players undergoing Achilles tendon rupture repair or arthroscopic knee surgery had significantly worse performance postoperatively compared with other orthopaedic procedures.

The brains that come through Ann McKee’s lab don’t lie. But they are only the beginning of the story about head trauma and its role in neurodegenerative disease.

… Certainly what will happen to [Thomas] Davis is not the standard of care in the community; however, it is the standard of care in the NFL community. In his 11th season, this will be his first Super Bowl and he will have the “might not get back here again” mentality. A re-fracture might mean more surgery but would likely not end his career or create permanent disability.

I have worked two Super Bowls, but my teams have never made it to play in one. Even so, I witnessed the power of an AFC Championship game where Philip Rivers played six days after knee surgery with an ACL tear. I can only imagine what happens during the two weeks before a Super Bowl.

The FA’s director of football governance and administration, Darren Bailey, has responded to media reports today on the subject of doping in football, and comments made by Arsene Wenger in September last year.

… No club, no association, no analytics firm, not even FIFA has amassed a cache like the one compiled over 20 years by Sports Interactive Games (SIG), who own FM.

From an office block HQ near Old Street Tube station in east London, SIG employ more than 1,200 scouts across the world to gather intelligence. Their database has details of 650,952 people. Precisely 325,429 are currently active as players, managers, coaches or support staff at thousands of clubs in hundreds of divisions in dozens of countries. The majority of the rest are ex-players.

… As we moved on to have a look at the noticeboards there were stacks of numbers on the board from the last U18 and U21 game. GPS data, HR lines and graphs of a variety of forms for every player. One such graph showed the average running speed for all the players compared with each other. And this is where I start to have an issue.

For starters, why compare one player with another? In football, where is the value in looking at running data of a full-back and comparing that with that of your centre forward? The goalkeeper made it onto the list as well! Who were the opposition and what type of game was it? Did they have much possession and what tactics were they playing? This data in isolation is meaningless so why show it to everyone?

Aging is a fact of life, and a fact of baseball. After a certain age, a baseball player must expect to see his performance diminish. They may defy it for a time, but eventually, year by year, the aging curve takes its toll and brings down even the greatest players.

However, even though we measure the process year by year, it does not occur in such large and discrete increments. It is a continuous and gradual process, punctuated by injuries big and small. Theoretically, just as we measure decline from last year to this year, we should be able to measure it last month to this month, or at least beginning of the season to end of the season.