Applied Sports Science newsletter – February 18, 2016

… Drills are akin to memorizing the answers to the math test versus learning how to solve the problems. There’s always the kid that does really well giving the answers to the multiplication table, but can’t solve a word problem to save his life (I was that kid). This is the problem with drills, they don’t teach you how to solve the problem, they give you the answers. How many times have you seen the player that is a complete beast during drills, but can’t play dead in a western? I’m confident you’ve seen it a lot. Drills don’t carry over to performance.

The Inner Game of Tennis may not be taught much anymore, but its relevance outside of tennis seems to be growing.

Discovering the visual features and representations used by the brain to recognize objects is a central problem in the study of vision. Recent successes in computational models of visual recognition naturally raise the question: Do computer systems and the human brain use similar or different computations? We show by combining a novel method (minimal images) and simulations that the human recognition system uses features and learning processes, which are critical for recognition, but are not used by current models. The study uses a “phase transition” phenomenon in minimal images, in which minor changes to the image have a drastic effect on its recognition. The results show fundamental limitations of current approaches and suggest directions to produce more realistic and better-performing models.

Four research teams will receive a total of $100,000 through the NCAA Innovations in Research and Practice Grant Program, designed to enhance college athletes’ psychosocial well-being and mental health.

The program is aimed at funding projects that will bring tangible benefits to college athletes when used by individuals or NCAA member schools’ athletics departments. This year’s grant recipients will produce work that touches a wide range of areas, including sleep health, parental involvement, body image issues and the transition from college athlete to a working life outside sports.

It’s no secret that pitchers in Major League Baseball are getting faster. It’s also no secret that pitchers are getting injured at a higher rate. In just the last four years, the annual rate of Tommy John surgery has increased by over 50 percent per year. Given that one-third of MLB pitchers already have the scar on their elbow from the surgery, an increase is almost unthinkable.

A recent study shows that the two are connected. Led by Brown University’s Dr. Steven DeFroda, the study examined a large number of MLB elbow injuries and determined to a high degree of significance that increasing velocity also increases risk.

… A lot of the focus on athletic nutrition has centered around the ratio of the Carbohydrate/Protein/Fat macronutrient breakdown & its impact on performance and health. I’ve offered my thoughts on the ‘right’ answer for various athletes/activity levels here. However, there is another important nutrient that is often put in the (literal) ‘too hard basket’ for hard training athletes – fiber.

This is a mistake. Fiber is one of the most important contributors to overall athletic health on a number of levels. Not only does it ‘keep us regular’. It provides a critical barrier to pathogens in our gut & provides an important fuel source for some of our most important (& friendly) ‘neighbors’. Let me explain…

In the middle of the last century, popular nutrition author Adelle Davis advised people to eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper. Her advice stuck. Recent examination of the merits of adults eating breakfast has raised the question of whether we should indeed eat like kings at breakfast or just skip it all together.

First of all, the “most important meal of the day” is not a title anybody should give to any meal whether it’s breakfast, lunch or dinner. To attempt to arbitrarily define a specific meal as the most important is not sensible, but there are a few commonly held truths that may have contributed to breakfast receiving this rather lofty title. When considering these ideas, it becomes clear that some don’t have the weight of evidence you might expect.

Here are some of the commonly asked questions about breakfast and some of the evidence. As you will see, it’s not a cut and dry issue.

… he defending NBA champion Golden State Warriors, is impacting the college game stylistically and culturally. College coaches are popping in to watch Warriors practices and coming away impressed by the team’s chemistry and looseness. College teams are watching Warriors film and trying to model certain aspects of themselves after Golden State, which is 47-4 while playing the most watchable brand of basketball in the NBA.

“It doesn’t surprise me, because when you see something successful like we were last year, you want to model after that,” Warriors All-Star forward Draymond Green said. “And it’s fun. It does not surprise me one bit. You also have to know the personnel you have to do it.”

All in this was a great day and easily the best of the 3 conferences Opta have organised. A lot of the speakers this year were annoyingly young and talented. The event has been held at the same venue each year but the room has gotten a lot bigger.

This year the event had 6 presenters rather than 10 but it allowed more space and the day certainly wasn’t lacking for content. A special mention for Neil Charles’ (from hilltop-analytics) poster presentation which seemed to attract the biggest audience of the 4 posters. (Please note; that’s a completely unscientific analysis).

When you run an experiment or analyze data, you want to know if your findings are “significant.” But business relevance (i.e., practical significance) isn’t always the same thing as confidence that a result isn’t due purely to chance (i.e., statistical significance). This is an important distinction; unfortunately, statistical significance is often misunderstood and misused in organizations today. And yet because more and more companies are relying on data to make critical business decisions, it’s an essential concept for managers to understand.

To better understand what statistical significance really means, I talked with Tom Redman, author of Data Driven: Profiting from Your Most Important Business Asset. He also advises organizations on their data and data quality programs.

Unexpected disruptions, plans gone awry, added mess to a project or lesson — it all makes us uncomfortable. And that aversion to an unexpected hitch in the plan makes sense. “We don’t want to overcome unnecessary hurdles,” says Tim Harford is his TED talk about why those messy situations lead to the best results. He examples in disparate fields like music production, performances, classrooms, psychology and engineering where unexpected disruptions actually make people more creative.

But people never enjoy being in those situations or recognize in the moment that they’re producing exceptional work. Harford says social science studies show people often feel the disruption or mess is getting in the way of their ability to complete the task, while in reality, their discomfort is actually helping them reach higher.

Can you jump that gap? Will you even try? Your visual system helps you make such decisions by warping and stretching the things you look at according to your physical traits or abilities, says Jessica Witt, a cognitive psychologist at Colorado State University, Fort Collins. Rather than showing us the world as it is, our vision toys with things like slope and distance. The harder a task, the more it seems to magnify before our eyes. These visual biases may have evolved to help us make quick decisions, letting us know at a glance which tasks to tackle. At the annual meeting of AAAS (which publishes Science) in Washington, D.C., Witt described several ways our physical abilities change what we see.

… In today’s one-and-done era of college basketball, playing for four years generally seems like a signal of total failure. These days, the best players and top NBA prospects are almost always freshman who know from their first day on campus that they’ll be gone after a single season.

Last season, when Duke won the title and Kentucky went undefeated until losing in the Final Four with teams built largely around freshmen talent, it seemed to be another referendum on how to win in college basketball today: recruit the best freshmen, each and every year.

But this season has been a reminder that Duke’s triumph last year and Kentucky’s in 2012 may be more aberrations than the norm. The lesson is one of college basketball’s oldest truths: Old guys still run the court.

It is the biggest goal in club football and not just for the prize money — this season’s winner could expect to pocket nearly €55m without even factoring in an approximate €40m from the “market pool share,” ticket revenue and any commercial bonuses. And so it’s little surprise that European football’s top teams put all their efforts into winning. We asked Sporting Intelligence’s Nick Harris to run the numbers on the past 10 years of winners and runners-up in search of patterns. How did they win it all or come close? What were they doing that their opponents were not? And did it work? Here are some big lessons from a decade of European glory-chasing.

Purpose: Asymmetrical loading patterns are commonplace in football sports. Our aims were to examine the influence of training age and limb function on lower-body musculoskeletal morphology.

Methods: Fifty-five elite football athletes were stratified into less experienced (3 years; n = 28) groups by training age. All athletes underwent whole-body DXA scans and lower-body pQCT tibial scans on the kicking and support limbs.

Results: Significant interactions between training age and limb function were evident across all skeletal parameters ([F(16, 91) = 0.182, p = 0.031; Wilks’ [LAMBDA] = 0.969]). Asymmetries between limbs were significantly larger in the more experienced players than less experienced players for tibial mass (p = 0.50), total cross-sectional area (p = 0.53) and stress-strain indices (p = 0.42). No significant asymmetry was evident for total volumetric density. More experienced players also exhibited greater lower-body tibial mass (p = 1.22), volumetric density (p = 0.79), cross-sectional area (p = 0.21), stress-strain indices (p = 0.69), fracture loads (p = 0.57), muscle mass and cross-sectional area (p = 0.68) than less experienced players.

Conclusion: Asymmetries were evident in athletes as a product of limb function over time. Chronic exposure to routine high-impact, gravitational loads afforded to the support limb preferentially improved bone mass and structure (cross-sectional area and cortex thickness) as potent contributors to bone strength relative to the high-magnitude, muscular loads predominantly afforded to the kicking limb.