Applied Sports Science newsletter – February 25, 2016

… Last season Messi, Suárez and Neymar scored 122 goals between them. This season they have raced to 91 already. Few expect Arsenal to neutralise them. Indeed, if you stuck £100 on Barcelona to score at the Emirates on Tuesday night, you would win only £11 off the bookies if they succeeded.

Understandably many eyes will be on Messi because, well, he’s Messi. Suárez will get plenty of attention too, given he has scored 41 goals this season. Yet it would be a gross mistake to ignore the third member of the triumvirate, Neymar, who has lifted his game on to an even higher plane this season.

As evidence has mounted that distance running is not just a natural human activity enjoyed by millions, but one that played a key role in evolution, a puzzle has emerged.

Why, if humans are so well adapted to running long distances, do runners get hurt so often?

A study out of Harvard Medical School and the National Running Center at Harvard-affiliated Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital provides a puzzle piece, linking injury to the pounding runners’ bones take with each step. The work, led by Professor of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation Irene Davis, found that a group of runners who had never been hurt landed each footfall more softly than a group who had been injured badly enough to seek medical attention.

The NFL combine is an age-old tradition that some teams value more than others. Generally, there is little that a coach can learn about a player that has not already been showcased over the course of their college career.

This week, National Football Scouting, Inc., the company that runs the combine has pulled together a committee of personnel surrounding the NFL to review the combine as an institution. The committee, helped along by the NFL operations department, will seek to answer the question of whether the combine is outdated. They will then look for ways to improve upon the pre-existing format, and whether to do away with things like 40-yard dash times and vertical jump heights, in favor of more technologically advanced tools.

… Developed in 2010 by San Millán and colleague John Hill, DO, a professor in the Department of Family Medicine, MuscleSound uses ultrasound technology to provide—for the first time ever—real-time, non-invasive measurements of glycogen levels in muscle tissue. Previously, the only way to measure such levels was via a painful muscle biopsy or a costly and complicated MRI.

With this new technology, a technician moves a painless probe across large muscles in the leg or arm, emitting sound waves that bounce off the water that inevitably accompanies glycogen, indicating its presence. On a nearby computer screen, an image of the muscle appears: Dark regions indicate glycogen-loaded muscles; white spots signal a shortfall. Within 15 seconds, a computer algorithm spits out a glycogen score, from zero to 90, which doctors or coaches can use to guide advice.

Hill and San Millán invented and patented the technology in 2010 and now market it under the name MuscleSound. Today, a few NCAA teams, including the University of Colorado Buffaloes, the Dallas Mavericks professional basketball team, and the Colorado Rockies professional baseball team use it.

Moxy was the first muscle oxygen monitor developed specifically for athletes. Originally conceived as a possible solution for medical applications like Acute Compartment Syndrome, Peripheral Arterial Disease and Heart Failure, it has been on the market for over two years supporting trainers and athletes globally in their quest to improve sports performance. We’re starting to see competitive devices enter the market; a welcome sign of the market recognizing the usefulness of the technology for athletes. However, it does start to bring up questions about differences between these devices and the quality of their respective muscle oxygen metrics.

The purpose of this blog post is to provide information on which aspects of a muscle oxygen monitor’s measurement capability are critical to consider for all serious coaches and athletes who are trying to understand physiologic limiters and compensators through real-time, physiologic-based training.

… Hockey players require a combination of strength, speed, agility, balance, power, and endurance to function and compete at an optimal level on the ice. These athletes are constantly cutting, accelerating, and decelerating with intense, short bursts of speed. They check their opponents into the boards, yet somehow find a way to quickly recover from hit after hit. A hockey player’s ability to perform these routine actions comes from the development of the various muscles they use while skating, particularly their glutes, quadriceps, hamstrings, and core.

Injury Prevention Specialist Dennis Borg explains, “The gluteal muscle complex is very important for hockey players, as it’s primarily responsible for their movement on the ice. Additionally, to be in top cardiovascular shape, it is important for athletes to participate in other sports in addition to hockey.”

If you work a 9-to-5 desk job, you can probably get away with eating leftover pizza and break room bagels whenever you damn well please. If your job is running around on a five-time MLS Cup-winning soccer team, you’re going to have to hold the schmear. Such is life for the stars of the LA Galaxy.

“I have a diagram of what I need to eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner,” forward Gyasi Zardes said of his diet. The LA County native rattled off a typical day for me as we stood in the Galaxy practice field parking lot.

“Usually, [you] wake up, you have breakfast, you have a protein shake,” Zardes said. “Then you train, have a protein shake, then you have lunch at the stadium, which is provided for us. Then in the afternoon you have a little snack, then you have dinner. You make sure you have protein, your grains, your vegetables, and fruit as well. Then that’s your dinner, and you have a snack before you go to bed. I like to have a protein shake.”

Baseball is full of narratives fans and writers can just make up, and no one can easily fact-check them. I don’t think the people making up the narratives do it intentionally, but they see a few facts fitting their preconceived notions and use confirmation bias to solidify their point every time they see another example.

One such example is about certain pitchers breaking down as the season goes on. The discussion’s main focus usually centers on rookies and other young pitchers being unable to carry a full-season workload. Another example is the theory I heard recently is that smaller pitchers wear down more quickly. When looking at pitchers’ first- and second-half splits, sometimes a pitcher performs worse, but most of the time there is no change.

John Henry has asserted time and time again that his Red Sox have not had success, when they’ve had success, thanks solely to their cutting-edge use of analytics. To Henry, the Boston teams that won World Series titles in 2004, 2007 and 2013 did so for reasons far less complex than the installation of Bill James and a number of his disciples in their front office.

“A lot of our advantage was purely financial,” Henry said. “We were never as far toward analytics as people thought we were.”

Soccer, the most watched sport in the world, is a dynamic game where a team’s success relies on both team strategy and individual player contributions. Passing is a cardinal soccer skill and a key factor in strategy development; it helps the team to keep the ball in its possession, move it across the field, and outmaneuver the opposing team in order to score a goal. From a defensive perspective, however, it is just as important to stop passes from happening, thereby disrupting the opposing team’s flow of play. Our main contribution utilizes this fundamental observation to define and learn a spatial map of each team’s defensive weaknesses and strengths. Moreover, as a byproduct of this approach we also obtain a team specific offensive control surface, which describes a team’s ability to retain possession in different regions of the field. Our results can be used to distinguish between different defensive strategies, such as pressing high up the field or sitting back, as well as specific player contributions and the impact of a manager.

At ESPN, they recently wrapped up their prospects week. I thought I’d zag from that zig, however, and instead wrote a piece for Insider about 30-year-olds and how they’ll age. Using some research from Jeff Zimmerman on aging by player type, I tried to spot some 30-year-olds who are about to go into the tank, and some that might age better than we expect.

But while working on the piece, I asked Zimmerman to update the research on player-type aging, starting in 2005. That’s the year baseball stiffened their steroid policy. Here’s something strange: in this, what we might call the “post-PED era,” it appears as though certain player types have begun aging in an entirely different way.

In a sport where one goal being scored is the most common result, luck is undeniably going to be a huge factor in influencing results. There are a few different ways of looking into how much look is involved in football. PDO is widely used in the football analytics community to determine whether an individual team is over or under performing by looking at how frequently shots on target are being scored/saved. I’m going to look into a method that was suggested by Tom Tango that has been adapted to work out how much variance you would expect in a completely random league, and how much variance actually occurs. I’m going to follow on from analysis by Julian Ryan who wrote this piece on Harvard Sports Analysis.

This technique has been used before by James Grayson and Martin Eastwood in order to find the amount of luck involved in win% for Premier League and La Liga seasons. Both Martin and James found that the % of skill in points for a given season is about 60-65%. Instead of looking into the variance of win%, I’m going to venture into the variance in scoring and conceding goals and see if there’s much or a difference between win% and goalscoring in the Premier League.

… As we rapidly approach the NFL Scouting Combine — where players will be poked, prodded, scrutinized, and examined down to their cuticles — we see just how obsessive the NFL gets about figuring out every facet of the players they may be investing millions of dollars in, by selecting to their team in April. We’ve all heard of the 40-yard dash, but the NFL measures player arm length and hand size as well, and there is a massive systemic bias against players with small paws.

But is this a fair prejudice to have? The Seattle Seahawks hit big on wide receiver Tyler Lockett in last year’s draft, despite his having 8 3/8-inch hands. That didn’t stop him from catching a solid 51 of 68 targets (75.0 percent Catch Rate) for 664 yards and 6 touchdowns in his rookie year. Our own Brandon Gdula looked at body size for receivers to see whether this was predictive of success, and the expectation was proven correct. I was inspired to do this similar study to his, just with receivers’ hands as our subject.

Each time your foot strikes the ground on a run, your body claims something valuable that few species can – free energy from the arch in your foot.

A recent study published in Scientific Reports examined the role of the human arch while running. The authors wanted to see how energy is stored in the arch each time your foot hits the ground, and more specifically, how much is lost if you restrict the arch with orthotics. They discovered that blocking arch compression by even a small amount causes your energy efficiency during a run to decrease by up to six percent.

They also note that the energy you get from your arch is “free.” Instead of requiring muscles to expand and contract for forward momentum, the arch uses the ground to compress like a spring, according to study co-author Jonas Rubenson. The tension and release of the tendons provide a mini-boost to propel you forward, kind of like a pogo stick.

As diagnostic tests rely on ever-tinier amounts of blood, some scientists are striking a note of caution. As it turns out, not all drops of blood are identical.

Bioengineers at Rice University recently found that different drops from single fingerpricks on multiple subjects varied substantially on results for basic health measures like hemoglobin, white blood cell counts and platelet counts.