Applied Sports Science newsletter – February 20, 2016

Seven tackles, one for a loss — a solid yet unspectacular stat line for an NFL outside linebacker.

That’s what Thomas Davis put up in Super Bowl 50. It will be easy for many people to forget all about it in the midst of stories about Cam Newton’s press conference and whether or not Peyton Manning will retire. But, we as sports fans need to preserve this moment. Thomas Davis is a miracle of modern medicine and without a doubt, the biggest rehabilitative success story in sports history.

I knew in the back of my mind that this was a make or break year for me, and getting an opportunity to play and play starter’s minutes in my third year. If you don’t produce, then they’re going to label you a bust and it’s hard to move past it. I knew it was crucial for me to take advantage. I said, “This is a big summer for me. I’ve got to make sure I’m ready. Limit my vacation time. Make sure I’m working and dedicating all my time, effort and energy to having a productive successful season.”
… I spent the majority of my summer in Oregon like I always do, working with our staff very closely—David Vanterpool, Nate Tibbetts and Jay Triano—and working with our head athletic trainer, Geoff Clark, and our health and player performance coach, Chris Stackpole. Because I would be getting more minutes, I knew I’d had have to withstand fighting through fatigue, being higher on the scouting report for defenses, being able to finish games stronger, being able to make shots in the fourth quarter.

… Runner’s World: Take us through your race a little bit. What happened and when did you feel like your body was starting to go south?

Shalane Flanagan: I got pretty dehydrated yesterday out on the course. I was feeling fantastic all the way up until the last (six-mile) loop. I started to get chills heading into that last loop. I didn’t say anything to Amy, but I thought, “Uh oh.” When you get chills like that, it’s the start of dehydration. I’d been taking all my fluids, but I could just tell that they weren’t really absorbing. I could feel them sitting in my stomach and sloshing. I am not really sure why I wasn’t absorbing them, but my chiropractor, who is a doctor and is pretty knowledgeable, said that it was a sign that my drink may have been too sweet.

Probably at mile 23, I was in a really bad place and typically people would stop and walk or drop out. But obviously I had something huge on the line, so I pushed through and pushed my body to a place I’ve never experienced. I was really dizzy, chills, ringing in my ears, couldn’t see straight.

… For someone who plays right out on the edge, Jackson does so with striking efficiency. He’s upped his minutes and responsibilities in Detroit, but in a comprehensive way that bodes extremely well for Jackson and the Pistons long-term. Every indicator is up: Jackson is shooting 44.2 percent overall, a notch above with his career rate of 43.5, but that understates the improvement. He’s doing so on 18.7 attempts per 36 minutes, by far a career-high. And 4.7 of those attempts are threes, which he’s making at a 37 percent clip.

Despite all his new duties as a scorer, Jackson has not forsaken the distributive part of his responsibilities. Jackson is getting more shots, but his assist percentage of 36.7 percent is also the highest of his career, and eighth in the NBA this season. Options for the Pistons almost always come out of the pick-and-roll he runs with Andre Drummond—the Pistons are far and away the league leaders in total pick-and-rolls run, and most of those are of the Jackson-Drummond variety. “I knew it was going to be that way when I was brought over,” Jackson says. “Coach called me and told me, everything was going to be dependent upon the pick-and-roll with Andre and myself.”

Could Nick Chubb be further along than first thought?

On Wednesday, head coach Kirby Smart told 680 The Fan that the star running back was progressing nicely, but was not ready to say when he might be able to come back.

While that’s no doubt the prudent thing to say, this video of Chubb captured and posted on Twitter would appear to suggest he may coming along faster than many might have imagined.

Purpose. The aims of this study were to 1) compare the metabolic power demand of straight-line and change of direction (COD) sprints including 45° or 90°-turns, and 2) examine the relation between estimated metabolic demands and muscular activity throughout the 3 phases of COD-sprints.

Methods. Twelve highly-trained soccer players performed one 25-m and three 20-m sprints, either in straight-line or with one 45º- or 90º-COD. Sprints were monitored with 2 synchronized 100-Hz laser guns to assess players’ velocities before, during and after the COD. Acceleration and deceleration were derived from changes in speed over time (Figure 1). Metabolic power was estimated based on di Prampero’s approach (2005). Electromyography amplitude (RMS) of 2 lower limb muscles was measured. The expected energy expenditure during time-adjusted straight-line sprints (matching COD sprints time) was also calculated.

Results. As shown in Figure 2, locomotor-dependant metabolic demand was largely lower with COD (90°, 142.1±15.0 J.kg-1) compared with time-adjusted (effect size, ES = -3.0; 193.2±18.7 J.kg-1) and non-adjusted straight-line sprints (ES = -1.7; 168.4±18.2 J.kg-1). Metabolic power requirement was angle-dependent, moderately lower for 90º-COD vs. 45º-COD sprint (ES = -1.0; 149.5±12.9 J.kg-1). Conversely, the RMS was slightly– (45°, ES = +0.5; +2.1%, 90% confidence limits (±3.6) for vastus lateralis muscle (VL)) to-largely (90°, ES = +1.6; +6.1 (3.3%) for VL) greater for COD-sprints. Metabolic power/RMS ratio was 2 to 4 times lower during deceleration than acceleration phases (Figure 7).

Conclusion. Present results show that COD-sprints are largely less metabolically demanding than linear sprints. This may be related to the very low metabolic demand associated with the deceleration phase during COD-sprints that may not be compensated by the increased requirement of the reacceleration phase. These results also highlight the dissociation between metabolic and muscle activity demands during COD-sprints, which questions the use of metabolic power as a single measure of running load in soccer.

“We are the toughest, hardest working athletes in the SEC” is scribed on the doors to every LSU athletic weight room. That is also the phrase that we said at the end of every single weight session with LSU men’s tennis from 2010-2012 during my time as a graduate assistant. I killed those guys. We lifted heavy, regularly had punishment runs and utilized Tiger Stadium in a way that no regular Joe Shmo fan can ever fathom. I regularly threw basic physiological principles out the window at the drop of a hat to teach a life lesson and create more mental toughness in the group. Anyone on that team can most definitely recall the infamous day in Tiger Stadium when I kicked one of the players out and ran the team for about an hour straight. It was about the culture and mentality more than it was about the physical development. I don’t regret a single moment. When I came there, they had missed the tournament the previous season for the first time in about a decade. When I left there after two seasons, they were nationally ranked. I’m not saying it was my genius that led them there. I am saying that what we did in the weight room played an integral part in creating the atmosphere that we wanted on the court.

They earn more in a week than most of us make in a year, with million pound mansions and celebrity lifestyles to match but you might be surprised to learn just how hard Premier League footballers have to train in order to fulfil their soccer dreams.

Let’s face it – you’ve got to be pretty fit to run after a ball for 90 minutes. Sports Illustrated magazine recently named Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo as the second fittest person in the world in its Fittest 50 list.

So how do coaches whip their players into shape and get them fit enough to play week in, week out at the highest level?

“I think that’s a huge mistake that a lot of those players make, but I’m sure they have their reasons for doing it,” Belichick said. “We’re training our players to play football, not to go through a bunch of those February drills. Yeah, our training is football intensive. We train them to get ready to play and ultimately that’s what they’re going to do. Maybe for some of those guys another activity in between or a pro day or whatever it is, but in the end, they’re going to make their career playing football. We already know that with our guys, and we don’t have to deal with any of that other stuff. We just train them for football. I think it’s huge.

“I think there are a lot of players and I think a lot of players learn from that, that they look at their rookie year and feel like, ‘I wasn’t really as physically as well prepared as maybe I was in college or what I will be in their succeeding years in the league,’ and train more for football and train less for the broad jump and three-cone drill and stuff like that. I think a lot of those guys hopefully learn that lesson and intensify their physical football training after they’ve had that year of, in a lot of cases, I would say non-football training or very limited training for actually football.”

A common misconception about sports is that there’s not much to it beyond the field of practice and play, that talent and coaching alone are what makes great teams excel.

UCF’s Sport and Exercise Science program, under the College of Education and Human Performance, has put in the time and hard work to change that notion. The program utilizes high-tech methods, such as GPS and ultrasound, to show athletes how to play harder, smarter and faster.

Most recently, the program was ranked sixth in the nation, out of 52 programs, by the National Academy of Kinesiology in September. The big factor that stood out was the program’s 100-percent graduate hire rate into tenure-track positions.

BACKGROUND:

The cardiac parameters, such as heart rate (HR) and heart rate variability (HRV), are very important physiological data for daily healthcare. Recently, the camera-based photoplethysmography techniques have been proposed for HR measurement. These techniques allow us to estimate the HR contactlessly with low-cost camera. However, the previous works showed limit success for estimating HRV because the R-R intervals, the primary data for HRV calculation, are sensitive to noise and artifacts.
METHODS:

This paper proposed a non-contact method to extract the blood volume pulse signal using a chrominance-based method followed by a proposed CWT-based denoising technique. The R-R intervals can then be obtained by finding the peaks in the denoised signal. In this paper, we taped 12 video clips using the frontal camera of a smart phone with different scenarios to make comparisons among our method and the other alternatives using the absolute errors between the estimated HRV metrics and the ones obtained by an ECG-accurate chest band.
RESULTS:

As shown in experiments, our algorithm can greatly reduce absolute errors of HRV metrics comparing with the related works using RGB color signals. The mean of absolute errors of HRV metrics from our method is only 3.53 ms for the static-subject video clips.
CONCLUSIONS:

The proposed camera-based method is able to produce reliable HRV metrics which are close to the ones measured by contact devices under different conditions. Thus, our method can be used for remote health monitoring in a convenient and comfortable way.

… A recent study showed that in early wearable app development, the lack of identifying the user scenarios resulted in too much focus on technology and neglecting the users. “In order to succeed in the technology market, you have to pair technology with a specific use case to trigger the adoption of the technology,” Al Baker, CEO of Reemo said. “You’ve really got to focus on who is going to get the most value out of your product today and then worry about becoming a platform alongside its growth.”

Adir Shiffman, Executive Chairman of Catapult, discusses wearable technology landscape in elite sport and how fan engagement can be built on an athlete welfare foundation.

…

In total, these three companies spent more than $1 billion to get into the fitness tracking game. But for analysts, the question is less why they’re going on this buying spree than why they waited so long.

“[Fitness apps] have become such a massive trend that unless you acquire some platform to show consumers that you have digital capabilities—whether it’s having an app or having a wearable or a smart shoe or a tracker—you get left behind,” said Aditya Kaul, London-based research director for the market intelligence company Tractica.

As big brands get into this game, consumers will likely see more cross-marketing, the probability that their personal data will be used to sell them gear, and less free access to the apps as compared to subscription memberships, industry observers say. That’s because the footwear companies face pressure to find new sources of revenue that can offset the costs of buying these apps.

LG Innotek, the components-making affiliate of LG Group, has come out with an ultra-thin sensor module for monitoring heart rate, blood oxygen, and stress levels.

The heart rate monitoring module packs a photodiode, LEDs, and its integrated circuit into a slim 1mm module, and according to the company utilises embedding technology from the PCB industry to reduce the size of the sensor module.

The module is also 30 percent more powerful, making accurate detection of biometric signals easier, and 20 percent more energy efficient compared with similar modules, the company said.

A few months ago we headed to Wembley to talk to members of the newly formed Mental Health Charter about the issues and how to eradicate them from the game.

With less than six months to go before the start of the 2016 Rio Summer Olympics, Brazil has become the focal point of the mosquito-borne Zika virus.

Here is what we know so far about the virus, and what preparations are being made to protect athletes ahead of the Games.

Take Home Message: Six weeks of a dynamic injury prevention warm-up program results in biomechanical improvements that last up to 6 months after stopping the program. It may be important to perform these programs continually or reinforce these programs every 6 months.

I was able to attend the Aspetar “Challenges in Football Injuries” that was held at Doha last week.

Below you will find some “take-home/conclusion/key messages” of presentations.

Background During top-level international athletics championships, muscle injuries are frequent.

Objective To analyse the incidence and characteristics of muscle injuries and hamstring muscle injuries (hamstring injuries) occurring during top-level international athletics championships.

Methods During 16 international championships held between 2007 and 2015, national medical team and local organising committee physicians reported daily all injuries on a standardised injury report form. Only muscle injuries (muscle tears and muscle cramps) and hamstring injuries have been analysed.

Results 40.9% of all recorded injuries (n=720) were muscle injuries, with 57.5% of them resulting in time loss. The overall incidence of muscle injuries was higher in male athletes than female athletes (51.9±6.0 vs 30.3±5.0 injuries per 1000 registered athletes, respectively; RR=1.71; 95% CI 1.45 to 2.01). Muscle injuries mainly affected the thigh (52.9%) and lower leg (20.1%), and were mostly caused by overuse with sudden onset (38.2%) and non-contact trauma (24.6%). Muscle injury risk varied according to the event groups. Hamstring injuries represented 17.1% of all injuries, with a higher risk in male compared to female athletes (22.4±3.4 vs 11.5±2.6 injuries per 1000 registered athletes, respectively; RR=1.94; 95% CI 1.42 to 2.66).

Conclusions During international athletics championships, muscle injury is the principal type of injury, and among those, the hamstring is the most commonly affected, with a two times higher risk in male than female athletes. Athletes in explosive power events, male athletes and older male athletes, in specific were more at risk of muscle injuries and hamstring injuries. Injury prevention strategies should be sex-specific.

Drinking plenty of fluids is essential to fitness and athletic performance. It can even help you lose weight. Not staying hydrated, on the other hand, can hinder your performance and negatively impact your health.

… Gatorade has been able “to far outdistance any emerging competitors” and “outpace newer sports drink brands that concentrate their efforts on price,” Nooyi said on the call. While up-and-coming sports drink startups are entering the market, Gatorade is confident in its hold on the category (it made up 77% of the sports drink market in 2014) and the brand’s continued growth and innovation.

One area Gatorade has not explored as much as its smaller competitors is using natural ingredients. Probiotics and plant-based proteins are appearing in sports drinks, which make the drinks more functional and appealing to health-conscious consumers.

Soccer (or ‘football’ as it’s known elsewhere) is the world’s most popular sport. Marijuana is the world’s most popular drug. You may think that this is the only thing they have in common. After all, in the high-powered world of soccer (particularly in Europe), players are far more likely to develop problems with either alcohol or performance enhancers. And marijuana neither causes health problems nor enhances performance. Or does it?

Last week, Mets pitcher Jenrry Mejía was banned for life from Major League Baseball after failing a third test for performance-enhancing drugs. Mejía had initially been suspended for 80 games last April, and then, shortly after returning to the team, was busted again last July, receiving a 162-game ban. He was still serving that suspension when he tested positive yet again, becoming the first major leaguer to receive a lifetime ban for PED use. We may never know the details of what caused Mejía to use steroids again knowing it would end his career if he got caught: He’s either declined to comment or maintained his innocence after each of his failed tests. (This time around, he reportedly did the latter, and said he’d appeal the decision.) Perhaps not surprisingly, questions immediately began to bubble up on Twitter, bulletin boards, and comments sections about whether Mejía might actually be addicted to steroids. Admittedly, the chatter was nothing more than uninformed speculation — but it made us wonder: Is such a thing even plausible?

… A new review paper (freely available online) in the journal Exercise Immunology Review, from Neil Walsh at the University of Bangor, along with Michael Gleeson of Loughborough University and colleagues, takes a stab at some of these issues.

The focus of the paper is determining the vitamin D sweet spot for athletes and military personnel in order to optimize immunity.

This study investigated whether a multi-dimensional assessment could assist with talent identification in junior Australian football (AF). Participants were recruited from an elite under 18 (U18) AF competition and classified into two groups; talent identified (State U18 Academy representatives; n = 42; 17.6 ± 0.4 y) and non-talent identified (non-State U18 Academy representatives; n = 42; 17.4 ± 0.5 y). Both groups completed a multi-dimensional assessment, which consisted of physical (standing height, dynamic vertical jump height and 20 m multistage fitness test), technical (kicking and handballing tests) and perceptual-cognitive (video decision-making task) performance outcome tests. A multivariate analysis of variance tested the main effect of status on the test criterions, whilst a receiver operating characteristic curve assessed the discrimination provided from the full assessment. The talent identified players outperformed their non-talent identified peers in each test (P < 0.05). The receiver operating characteristic curve reflected near perfect discrimination (AUC = 95.4%), correctly classifying 95% and 86% of the talent identified and non-talent identified participants, respectively. When compared to single assessment approaches, this multi-dimensional assessment reflects a more comprehensive means of talent identification in AF. This study further highlights the importance of assessing multi-dimensional performance qualities when identifying talented team sports.

Ask most scouts about bat speed and you’ll often get a succinct definition.

“It’s the time it takes for a hitter to go from the launch position to the contact point,” says Orioles Scouting Director Gary Rajsich.

“In its simplest form, it’s the velocity at which someone can get the bat head through the strike zone,” says Zack Minasian, Milwaukee’s Professional Scouting Director.

… A slight tweak on the previous OptaPro Forum, more prominence was given to poster presenters this year in that presenters were able to provide an interactive aspect to their work. These presentations, with their slightly relaxed and more conversational element, provided the foundations for in-depth, focused analytical discussion. Practical examples were shared and presenters were actively encouraged to outline tangible applications of their work.

The skill of how analytical work can be best presented within a football environment is, quite rightly, a frequently raised discussion point at the OptaPro Forum – perhaps most noticeably at the first Forum in 2014. The interactive format of these presentations combined with an open conversation between presenter and delegate certainly aided this, and this style of presenting data-led analysis brought the online community that step closer to fully understanding analysis within professional football.

… Leicester City are being lauded for upsetting the balance of power in the Premier League, but their story is nothing compared to Midtjylland who were on the verge of bankruptcy before betting mogul Matthew Benham bought a controlling stake in July 2014 and they won the Danish title immediately.

Benham also owns Brentford, where he met Rasmus Ankersen who worked with the club for his former company 21st Club — a London-based enterprise who use statistics, figures and algorithms to give football clubs an edge and are working with Premier League sides such as Arsenal, Crystal Palace, Southampton, Everton and Newcastle.

When Benham bought Midtjylland he installed Ankersen, formerly a promising youth player there before a knee injury ended his career at 19, as chairman and the pair discussed what a club would look like without eyes and ears. Turns out it looks pretty good. [commercial video autoplays]