Applied Sports Science newsletter – February 27, 2016

… A certain proclivity for personal development has made Redick a more complete player, and thus one who deserved more minutes. He didn’t crack the rotation in Orlando until he shook his rep for rec league defense, and he wouldn’t be nearly as effective a shooter if he didn’t have a counter for every hard closeout. For most guys who make it to the NBA, the end of their prime means the end of their career. Not only has Redick managed to stave off the end of his prime; by improving every season, he is somehow still defining his own ceiling.

There was no confetti, no major media outlets or even a team announcement, but last Friday former lottery pick Xavier Henry made his season debut for the Santa Cruz Warriors nearly 15 months after rupturing his left Achilles tendon.

This has been a long time coming for Henry, who has been tested mentally over the past few seasons following major injuries to both of his legs. Toward the end of the 2013-14 campaign with the Los Angeles Lakers, he was experiencing right knee pain and doctors eventually found some cartilage abnormality. He sat out the rest of the year and took a trip across the pond to receive the renowned Regenokine surgery in hopes to resolve the knee issues.

Henry came back strong. Then in November of 2014, he ruptured his left Achilles, and the long and cumbersome road to recovery was initiated. Fortunately for him, he had a future Hall of Famer in his corner to guide him through the highs and lows.

Regardless of your circumstances, your attitude is always a choice. You have to look at the positives in every situation. While recovering from an injury comes with its own set of challenges, I have chosen to focus on all of the positives in my situation. And there are many.

I had surgery about five weeks ago on the fifth metatarsal of my right foot. That same day, the Cavaliers, my team for the last year and a half, traded me to the Magic. I was waived by the Magic shortly after. It was a whirlwind.

A diving save in soccer is a picture-perfect moment: a gymnastic display of quick reflexes, a gutsy leap with outstretched arms and unfurled fingers. For U.S. women’s national team goalkeeper Hope Solo, preparing for that instant begins not on a grassy surface but a reflective one.

“I put tape on a mirror, and I look and make sure that my head and chest ?are always still when? I’m moving,” says the 34-year-old Solo. “You don’t want to be going up and down, because either you can’t see the ball or you’ll be too late. It’s about being steady and balanced.”

Since 2013, Solo has worked with Ben Dragavon, who doubles? as the goalkeeper coach and the head strength- and-conditioning coach for Solo’s Seattle Reign FC of the National Women’s Soccer League. He’s also a certified specialist ?in Muscle Activation Technique (MAT), which seeks to optimize muscle contraction to provide stability and increase range of motion. Solo says the technique has helped her better control her center? of gravity.

Coming off his worst game of the season — a 12-point, six-turnover debacle on 5-for-18 shooting in a loss to the Detroit Pistons — LeBron James vowed that his body is not breaking down as the season drags on into the post All-Star, pre-playoffs dog days.

In fact, James said he’s better off this season at 31 years old than he was last season, when he missed a career-high 13 games, including a two-week hiatus to rest.

“It’s how my body was feeling,” James said Wednesday after the Cleveland Cavaliers held shootaround in preparation for a 114-103 win over the Charlotte Hornets. “Last year I was banged up. It’s not a mindset, it’s just reality. This year I feel 10 times better than I did last year. So that’s the mindset.”

In our hyper-connected, 24/7 world, many of us are losing sleep — literally. Our own survey of more than 180 business leaders found that four out of 10 (43%) say they do not get enough sleep at least four nights a week. Such sleep deficiencies can undermine important forms of leadership behavior and eventually hurt financial performance. This article will explore the link between sleep and leadership before discussing solutions that can improve both individual well-being and organizational efficiency and effectiveness.

… Walk into any college or professional team’s training room and you’ll likely see dozens of recovery modalities. From ice baths to sauna’s to compression sleeves that fill with air to any number of zapping, shocking, sounding machines that are all aimed at doing something for recovery. Add in the massage, chiro, adjustments, PT, and whatever else people do now a days and you have a venerable army of ways to get ready to perform.

Am I saying that all of these modalities are useless? Absolutely not. They have a time and a place. I’ve discussed periodizing recovery modalities before, but this post isn’t about that. This blog is about the idea of creating dependency.

The point is that if you use adjustments, massage, ice baths, or whatever else, you need to prevent the athlete from NEEDING them to perform.

Player Development Project Magazine Editor, Dave Wright was fortunate enough go behind the scenes at Liverpool FC Academy with U21 Manager Mick Beale. Following on from our 2015 interview, Dave gets Mick’s views on developing better people and watches the U21’s train prior to their match against Middlesborough.

The most valuable problems may be the unsolvable ones.

The engineering school at Northwestern University is using the power of problems without clear solutions to prepare freshmen for the ups and downs of college and careers. Aware that some of its academically successful students arrive on campus without ever having failed at anything, the university requires all new engineering majors to take an unusual course featuring challenges they often can’t meet: Working in teams, they must design and build devices to help individuals with disabilities perform simple daily tasks.

Some of the challenges: Equip a stroke survivor to crochet with one hand or a partially paralyzed shooting victim to don tight support stockings. Make workout gear or bottle openers for people with only one working arm. The budget: $100 for each four-student team.

Solving these problems isn’t necessarily impossible, but there can be many solutions and in some cases no solutions at all. Tackling such tasks is an important life skill that is applicable to anyone. It can teach resilience and, when people fail, humility.

A poor night’s sleep is enough to put anyone in a bad mood, and although scientists have long suspected a link between mood and sleep, the molecular basis of this connection remained a mystery. Now, new research has found several rare genetic mutations on the same gene that definitively connect the two.

… What is “quantity of quality” with regards to being strong for an o-lineman? First, you choose quality strength exercises (ie: front squat, sumo dead lift, incline bench) Then, you make sure the exercises are done with quality technique so that all the benefits of the exercise are realized (ie: targeting proper muscle groups, improving mobility, causing no harm). Lastly, you incorporate a periodized macrocycle which determines the quantity (volume and intensity) of the quality exercises chosen.

The original title of this post was ‘Impress your Coach’ but I thought it was more appropriate to call it ‘Getting Better at Getting Better’.

You see, almost everyone in your Sport is improving. You need to accelerate your improvement. You need to get better at getting better.

… Fit For 90 has been a huge success among the teams that have used it. The most notable stories of success include the U.S. Women’s National Team winning the Women’s World Cup, the New York Red Bulls winning the MLS Supporters Shield for the best team over the course of the season, the National Women’s Soccer League Chicago Red Stars making it to the league semi-final, and Duke University Women’s Soccer making it to the NCAA finals.

Copenhagen-based Motosumo has spent the last three years developing “gait analysis” systems based on body mounted sensors coupled with its own algorithm to model motion physics. It’s then been applying this tech to professional sports, physiotherapy, and athletics.

However, the startup now wants to bring its wares to the consumer market with fitness and sports tracking apps that operate sans any external sensors or gadgets. Instead, its tech will rely solely on the array of ‘inertial’ sensors that can typically be found on a modern smartphone.

“The fitness trend appears to be gadgets, gadgets, gadgets… Many of these are great, but it leaves a big group of everyday athletes without the option to train more intelligently with the advanced analysis offered by separate motion sensors,” Kresten Juel Jensen, co-founder and CEO of Motosumo, tells me.

… genetic testing is gaining popularity in sports and beyond. Some Olympic coaches and athletes are already using it to optimize training in advance of the international sports competitions in Rio this summer. Other elite athletes, including pro-level players, are using the testing themselves.
Read

One genetics analysis leader – 23andMe – has already received FDA approval for a direct-to-consumer test – called the Personal Genome Service – that uses saliva and costs $199. Mail it back in and you get over 60, data-loaded, personalized genetic reports. “Spit kits” are gaining traction with consumers.

The system used by pioneering elite athletes is made by a company called Athletigen. It analyzes an athlete’s DNA to assess genetic markers relating to athletic traits such as power, endurance, metabolism, injury protection, as well as nutrition and sports psychology. The Athletigen report is then used by athlete and coach to optimize training, according to the company which recently landed $1.55 million in funding.

Battery life issues, limited wireless technology range and the weight of sensors inhibited the use of wearable technologies to track elite athletes.

But in the past few years, smart watches, heart rate monitors, glucose level recorders and items as small as an ear piece have begun to transform how top athletes are trained, said Mounir Zok, a senior sports technologist at the Colorado Springs-based U.S. Olympic Committee.

“Today we are at a sweet spot,” he said. “Whereby measuring performance is not an issue anymore.”

We live in a world where the combination of Moore’s Law and Metcalfe’s Law heralds a data revolution. The billions of smartphone and broadband users today already generate massive quantities of data. And cheap sensors in Internet of Things (IoT) devices and new 5G networks optimized for machine-to-machine (M2M) mean that this first wave of users will soon be joined by tens of billions of machines.

Beste Yuksel could soon put a lot of piano teachers out of work.

The Ph.D candidate at Tufts University in Massachusetts has created a tool that helps students learn the instrument faster and with more accuracy than they would under the watchful eye of a traditional teacher, or while practicing on their own. Called BACh, for Brain Automated Chorales (and an obvious nod to one of history’s most prolific composers), the system has one major advantage over human teachers: It can read your brain.
Beste Yuksel

“BACh is an example of where we hope the future of brain-computer interfaces go,” Yuksel says. Before pursuing her Ph.D at Tufts, she first got two master’s degrees, one in computer science and the other in neuroscience. Now she’s interested in where those two topics intersect. “My hope is that brain-computer interfaces are used by everybody every day, and that it helps their quality of life,” she says.

The BACh system measures something called “cognitive load,” which is a fancy term for how much mental exertion is required to learn something new.

A golfer stands in the dreaded sand trap, carefully considering how to balance his weight as he eyes the ball. He takes a few practice swings. If he swings too deeply, he’ll hit the ground and lose another stroke. It’s a tough shot, but he swings without hesitation. Embedded in his club are microelectromechanical system (MEMS) devices—tiny machines with elements about the thickness of a human hair. These devices aren’t going to swing the club for him, but he’s been using them to analyze his swing and practice this shot. Maybe this time he’ll make it.

The wild popularity of smartphones and wearables has been driving down the cost of MEMS devices, including accelerometers, gyroscopes, magnetometers, and pressure sensors. These minuscule chips help to count steps, track calories burned, and monitor heart rate. Such data are useful, sure, but while these devices may nudge users to be more active, they don’t actually improve a swing, a punch, or a kick. To do so means moving sensors off the wrist and into sports gear—and that’s quickly happening. Indeed, you can now buy sensor-based equipment that can boost your performance, not only for golf but also for tennis, baseball, boxing, and soccer.

Background

The physical impacts of elite sport participation have been well documented; however, there is comparatively less research on the mental health and psychological wellbeing of elite athletes.
Objective

This review appraises the evidence base regarding the mental health and wellbeing of elite-level athletes, including the incidence and/or nature of mental ill-health and substance use.
Methods

A systematic search of the PubMed, EMBASE, SPORTDiscus, PsycINFO, Cochrane and Google Scholar databases, up to and including May 2015, was conducted.
Results

The search yielded a total of 2279 records. Following double screening, 60 studies were included. The findings suggested that elite athletes experience a broadly comparable risk of high-prevalence mental disorders (i.e. anxiety, depression) relative to the general population. Evidence regarding other mental health domains (i.e. eating disorders, substance use, stress and coping) is less consistent. These results are prefaced, however, by the outcome of the quality assessment of the included studies, which demonstrated that relatively few studies (25 %) were well reported or methodologically rigorous. Furthermore, there is a lack of intervention-based research on this topic.
Conclusion

The evidence base regarding the mental health and wellbeing of elite athletes is limited by a paucity of high-quality, systematic studies. Nonetheless, the research demonstrates that this population is vulnerable to a range of mental health problems (including substance misuse), which may be related to both sporting factors (e.g. injury, overtraining and burnout) and non-sporting factors. More high-quality epidemiological and intervention studies are needed to inform optimal strategies to identify and respond to player mental health needs.

Purpose: This study aimed to determine whether limbs with a history of anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury reconstructed from the semitendinosus display different biceps femoris long head (BFlh) architecture and eccentric strength, assessed during the Nordic hamstring exercise, compared with the contralateral uninjured limb.

Methods: The architectural characteristics of the BFlh were assessed at rest and at 25% of a maximal voluntary isometric contraction (MVIC) in the control group (n = 52) and in the group who had previous ACL injury (n = 15) using two-dimensional ultrasonography. Eccentric knee flexor strength was assessed during the Nordic hamstring exercise.

Results: Fascicle length was shorter (P = 0.001; d range, 0.90–1.31) and pennation angle (P range, 0.001–0.006; d range, 0.87–0.93) was greater in the BFlh of the ACL-injured limb compared with those in the contralateral uninjured limb at rest and during a 25% MVIC. Eccentric strength was lower in the ACL-injured limb when compared with the contralateral uninjured limb. Fascicle length, MVIC, and eccentric strength were not different between the left and right limb in the control group.

Conclusions: Limbs with a history of ACL injury reconstructed from the semitendinosus have shorter fascicles and greater pennation angles in the BFlh compared with those of the contralateral uninjured side. Eccentric strength during the Nordic hamstring exercise of the ACL-injured limb is significantly lower than that of the contralateral side. These findings have implications for ACL rehabilitation and hamstring injury prevention practices, which should consider altered architectural characteristics.

Though the heart’s left ventricle in NBA players is proportional to a player’s size, the aortic root does not continue to increase proportionately with height, which could pose a serious health risk, according to a vital study published in Wednesday’s inaugural edition of JAMA Cardiology.

In the process of the study, researchers produced data that can be “incorporated into clinical assessments for the primary prevention of cardiac emergencies,” according to the study.

“We’ve been able to create a database for every cardiac dimension that we follow clinically,” Dr. David J. Engel, the study’s lead author and cardiologist at New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center, said

… The number of women in coaching roles and in athletic director positions has increased in recent years, but men still overwhelmingly dominate the field in the top athletic training jobs. In the years since Manning’s alleged incident, the number of women holding head athletic trainer positions at Division I schools grew only 2.6 percent. At present, women hold roughly 17.5 percent of Division I head athletic trainer positions, according to a 2014 study conducted by the group Women in Collegiate Sport (WCS).

So what is keeping women out of these roles? Is it systemic gender discrimination, or something else? More importantly, do women in athletic training roles have a glass ceiling?

It wasn’t the report about his fingers being blown off. It was the picture of his confidential medical chart sent to almost 4 million Twitter followers that prompted New York Giants linebacker Jason Pierre-Paul to sue ESPN and reporter Adam Schefter for invasion of privacy.

Citing state privacy laws, Pierre-Paul asked a Miami-Dade County Circuit Court to award him at least $15,000 in damages over the report that followed his Fourth of July fireworks accident. The lawsuit filed on Wednesday also left open the possibility of punitive damages.

The suit concedes that the injury to an NFL star was a matter of public interest, a legal standard that limits his right to a privacy claim. However, it contends that the photo of his actual medical chart describing the injury to three fingers on his right hand was not.

Want something that can give you an extra 10-20 days high intensity training a year?

… Assuming an organization’s KPIs are valid metrics to be looking at in the first place, reporting is important! An organization must know what is going on first. However, the more important question is, why is this happening? Did our injury rates go down because of the strength and conditioning program? Or was it because of the pre-hab the athletic trainers have implemented? Or maybe it was because of the high tech turf we installed in the practice facility.

Tottenham’s pressing game has been cunningly adjusted by Pochettino and the manager’s deployment of Eric Dier as a central midfielder who can drop into the backline has been key their success.

I’m a longtime fan of the Montreal Canadiens. I still remember their last Stanley Cup championship in 1993. I was just a kid back then, but I still have vivid memories of goalie Patrick Roy winking at the Los Angeles Kings’ Tomas Sandstrom after making an impressive save!

However, the Habs — as the Canadiens are affectionately known — have not been doing so great this year. In fact, they have lost so many games that Head Coach Michel Therrien’s job might very well be in jeopardy. This got me thinking: Does firing a coach during the season actually help a team improve their record? I decided to find out for myself.

The Vertical Front-Office Insider Bobby Marks, a 20-year executive with the Nets, examines the weekly thought processes of NBA teams and offers a behind-the-scenes look at the everyday grind of putting a team together.

With the trade deadline over, The Vertical looks at how teams are preparing for the rest of the season.

The Red Sox aren’t retreating from analytics. To the contrary, the team is expanding its commitment to that aspect of its front office.

One day after Red Sox principal owner (and Globe owner) John Henry suggested that his team had “perhaps overly relied on numbers” amidst the stumble to three last-place finishes in four years, it quickly became apparent that his statement was not meant to imply a diminished belief in the value of being at the forefront of statistical analysis.

Based on their actions, the Red Sox remain as committed to the pursuit of competitive advantages through statistical analysis as they’ve been since Henry’s group gained control of the team in 2002. There has been no drawback in the resources committed by the team to quantitative analysis.

This repository contains data and code offering a demo of the NBA Expected Possession Value model presented in the paper “A Multiresolution Stochastic Process Model for Predicting NBA Possession Outcomes.”

The main document that introduces and illustrates the code/data is EPV_demo.pdf. The source .tex for the tutorial file EPV_demo.pdf can be built from EPV_demo.Rnw using RStudio.

… Two things that increase the chance of injury: explosive athleticism and physical contact. Somehow, Golden State has figured out how to win without much of either.

Fact: The more explosive an athlete, the more likely he’ll damage his body. Steph, Klay Thompson, Draymond Green are athletic, but not super explosive like Russell Westbrook or Jimmy Butler. They’ll beat you with quickness, both physically and mentally, not just up and down the court but in all directions, at all speeds; arms and legs flying everywhere, without relentless physical force, without explosive power, especially on jumping and landing. Result: less trauma to joints and muscles, fewer injuries.

Their bodies also benefit from their style of play: more spacing on the court, more perimeter shooting, that extra pass to spread out the floor, the wide-open layup as everyone else rushes to the perimeter. Result: less physical contact, fewer injuries.