Applied Sports Science newsletter – March 8, 2016

… “Jordan has to live his life,” said [Landon] Donovan, who sent Morris a post-decision e-mail expressing admiration for how he had handled the hoopla. “Everybody can have their opinions on what he should do and what he should be, he’s the one who’s living his life day to day. I want Jordan to succeed. … I want him to be a superstar and help us win a World Cup just like everybody else. But more than that, I want Jordan to be happy and have a good life.

“If people can take both into account, it’s OK to be excited and want the next superstar.”

Dynamic balance is an integral component in screening lower extremity injury risk. Previous research has identified the need to create sport and competition level specific dynamic balance injury cut points. The purpose of this study was to determine if dynamic balance differences exist, utilizing the Lower Quarter Y-Balance Test (YBT-LQ), across varying competition levels (middle school, high school, college and professional) in basketball players. Subjects were participating at the middle school (MS; n=88), high school (HS; n=105), college (COL; n=46), and professional levels (PRO; n=41). Statistical analysis was completed with a series of ANOVA tests. Tukey post-hoc tests were utilized to identify specific group-to-group differences if statistical significance (p<0.05) was observed. Effect Size Indices (ESI) was also calculated to provide an estimate of the clinical relevance. In the anterior reach, HS basketball players performed statistically better than the MS and COL (p<0.01, ESI = 0.58) athletes and all of these groups performed better than the PRO basketball players (p<0.01, ESI =1.72). For the posteromedial, posterolateral reach directions and the composite score, the HS, COL and PRO basketball players were not significantly different from each other, however the HS group did reach further than the MS group (p<0.01-0.02, ESI = 0.40-0.55). PRO basketball players exhibited a lower asymmetrical total score compared to MS, HS and COL players (p<0.01-0.02, ESI = 0.52-0.68). Different competition levels displayed varying dynamic balance strategies. Creating basketball competition levels normative values for dynamic balance could help define injury risk cut points.

Tim Rich visits the junior club that’s developed Rashford, Morrison and Blackett, who have gone on to play at Old Trafford, to uncover the secret to their success.

… Pragmatism is alive and well in the Premier League. Managers such as Tony Pulis and Sam Allardyce immediately spring to mind and, although the football played by their sides is not always pretty, the two managers largely achieve what they set out to do: take struggling Premier League sides of inferior quality and make them harder to beat.

Pulis and Allardyce, for all their virtues, are almost diametrically opposed to the likes of Guardiola and Martínez: men who strive for total perfection as they attempt to turn football into something approaching a form of art.

… The assumption is that there is a painful but necessary opposition between something called “readiness skills” and a healthy, balanced childhood. Nothing could be further than the truth.

Where young children are concerned, there is no tradeoff between work and play. In fact, it’s naive to assume that meaningful learning is actually happening in high-pressure, worksheet-laden classrooms where teachers tightly control the content and pacing of instruction.

Decades of research suggest the opposite: Children are little learning machines, true, but they gain all the complex skills in crucial cognitive zones in joyful classrooms full of informal conversation and playful exploration. Playful does not mean unstructured — the classroom shouldn’t be a free-for-all playpen — but marching to a timesheet ignores innate curiosities and capacities children need to be successful in the later years.

The evaluation of rate of force development during rapid contractions has recently become quite popular for characterising explosive strength of athletes, elderly individuals and patients. The main aims of this narrative review are to describe the neuromuscular determinants of rate of force development and to discuss various methodological considerations inherent to its evaluation for research and clinical purposes. Rate of force development (1) seems to be mainly determined by the capacity to produce maximal voluntary activation in the early phase of an explosive contraction (first 50-75 ms), particularly as a result of increased motor unit discharge rate; (2) can be improved by both explosive-type and heavy-resistance strength training in different subject populations, mainly through an improvement in rapid muscle activation; (3) is quite difficult to evaluate in a valid and reliable way. Therefore, we provide evidence-based practical recommendations for rational quantification of rate of force development in both laboratory and clinical settings.

Will consumer wearable technology ever be adopted or accepted by the medical community? Patients and practitioners regularly use digital technology (e.g., thermometers and glucose monitors) to identify and discuss symptoms. In addition, a third of general practitioners in the United Kingdom report that patients arrive with suggestions for treatment based on online search results [1]. However, consumer health wearables are predicted to become the next “Dr Google.” One in six (15%) consumers in the United States currently uses wearable technology, including smartwatches or fitness bands. While 19 million fitness devices are likely to be sold this year, that number is predicted to grow to 110 million in 2018 [2]. As the line between consumer health wearables and medical devices begins to blur, it is now possible for a single wearable device to monitor a range of medical risk factors (Fig 1). Potentially, these devices could give patients direct access to personal analytics that can contribute to their health, facilitate preventive care, and aid in the management of ongoing illness. However, how this new wearable technology might best serve medicine remains unclear.

The Skyforce debuted VERT, a wearable athletic measurement technology, on Friday night. The new technology is the first in what will likely be a line of D-League tests set on tracking player performance.

Youth doesn’t mean invincibility, especially when it comes to athletics. In fact, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, young athletes account for 7 million sports- and recreation-related injuries each year. A recent article in Stanford Medicine News highlights two Stanford Children’s Health programs designed to help prevent these injuries: the newly developed Young Athletes Academy and the Pediatric Motion and Sports Performance Lab.

There are some things you wouldn’t wish upon even your worst enemy. Stepping on Legos being no such exception. The mind bending pain of a bare foot pressing down on a Lego is one of the worst known to humanity, but how does something so innocent looking create such an intense feeling? We’re talking nociception today folks, and the chemistry of how these little two gram blocks pack enough punch to send you into orbit.

OBJECTIVE:

The aim of this study is to investigate if changes in perceived stress and recovery over the course of a season are risk factors for acute and overuse injuries.
DESIGN:

A prospective nonexperimental cohort design.
SETTING:

Data were gathered at the SportsFieldLab Groningen and at the facilities of the participating teams.
PARTICIPANTS:

Eighty-six male and female basketball, volleyball, and korfball players aged 21.9 ± 3.5 years.
INTERVENTIONS:

In this 10-month observational study, the independent variables are the changes in perceived stress and recovery.
MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES:

The Recovery-Stress Questionnaire for Athletes (RESTQ-Sport) was filled out every 3 weeks throughout the season to assess changes in perceived stress and recovery. Acute and overuse injuries were registered by the teams’ physical therapists. Odds ratios and 95% confidence intervals were calculated.
RESULTS:

During one season, 66 acute and 62 overuse injuries were registered. Multinomial regression analysis showed that perceived General Recovery, shown in the scales Social Recovery and General Well-Being, decreased in the 6-week period before an acute injury (OR 0.59 and 0.61, respectively, P ? 0.05) compared with healthy periods. Risk of overuse injuries increased when perceived Sport Recovery, shown in the Personal Accomplishment scale, decreased in the 3-week period before the injury (OR 0.59, P ? 0.05) compared with healthy periods.
CONCLUSIONS:

Therefore, decreased perceived recovery can indicate an increased injury risk. General Recovery affects acute injury risk and Sport Recovery affects the risk of an overuse injury. Monitoring perceived recovery over the course of a season could give guidance for recovery enhancing practices to prevent injuries.

Protein remains a popular nutrient among consumers. Its association with physical fitness, satiety and as a key component in a nutritious diet is driving consumers to seek it in a variety of product applications. The product development efforts have led to a broadening in the use of animal-based proteins and to innovation around the use of plant proteins. As the market continues to evolve it is becoming apparent it may be large enough to accommodate a variety of protein sources and plant proteins are emerging as a competitive ingredient.

“Plant protein is definitely trending for a variety of reasons,” said Tom Vierhile, innovation insights director for Canadean, Fairport, N.Y. “For one, animal-based protein is coming under increasing fire, with the World Health Organization issuing its recent warning that processed meat causes cancer and upping the projected risk of processed meat.

Michael Schuckers doesn’t consider himself a die-hard hockey fan, yet all he seems to think about in his spare time is that frozen rubber disk and what happens to it in every moment of every NHL game.

That’s to be expected for someone in the vanguard of hockey analytics. Schuckers, a statistics professor at St. Lawrence University, has been crunching hockey numbers in his office for more than a decade.

The best-selling book Moneyball by Michael Lewis changed the way people thought about sport, particularly for those owners, managers, and players with the biggest vested interests. Lewis’s book helped bring about a revolution in which player performance was measured and assessed using an evidence-based approach rather than a tradition dominated by anecdote and intuition.

Since then, sports scientists have attempted to replicate the success of this approach in sports such as basketball, soccer, American football, and so on. This science is driven by the relatively new ability to gather vast amounts of data about the players and the play while the game is in progress.

However, in many of these sports, the capacity to gather data has not been matched by an ability to process it in meaningful ways. So an interesting question is what challenges sports sciences face in crunching this data effectively. What are the open questions in this rapidly evolving field?

Today we get an answer thanks to the work of Joachim Gudmundsson and Michael Horton at the University of Sydney in Australia, who have reviewed this field and listed the outstanding challenges that researchers face in making analytics meaningful.

The Italian soccer club AS Roma has won six out of its last seven games, a result that has thrilled fans.

One reason for the winning streak, according to Chris Pallotta, an investment officer at Raptor Capital Management, is the club’s relationship with a San Francisco-based analytics startup called Tag.bio.

Spun out of the University of California San Francisco, which is the UC system’s health sciences school, and founded by two amateur soccer players, Tag.bio has created software that helps AS Roma scout players, group players and analyze before a game how the opposing team is expected to perform.