Applied Sports Science newsletter – March 11, 2016

As he recounts one of the darker times of his baseball career, you can hear J.P. Arencibia’s voice shake.

The Philadelphia Phillies catcher joined Dean Blundell & Co. on Friday morning and spoke about his battle with anxiety, which he says began in 2013 during his last of four seasons with the Toronto Blue Jays.

“There are times that I just broke down,” Arencibia said on Sportsnet 590 The Fan.

Former NBA center Larry Sanders is one of the most misunderstood athletes in professional sports.

When he decided to leave the NBA at 26 years old, agreeing to a buyout that left the bulk of his recently-signed $44 million contract with the Milwaukee Bucks on the table, most people couldn’t comprehend his decision. Yes, he took a personal leave of absence after being suspended twice for violating the NBA’s anti-drug program, but why would a very talented player walk away from the NBA and all of the perks that come with that lifestyle? Fans were equally confused and disappointed, as Sanders had become an exciting, up-and-coming center in Milwaukee.

Anyone involved in athletics should know how performances improve systematically. I use “systematically” because sometimes a great performance will be attained without knowing why or having the ability to repeat the process. This article has two goals: modeling what it will take to improve the current world record and showing how coaches can develop better training programs using simple time and space. I have spent a year asking some direct questions and finding fewer answers and more questions in return. After several months of digging up details and historical data, I have a useful tool for others to follow.

… Coaches face the constant, uphill battle of trying to buy valuable headspace with their players. What we teach is in continual competition with school, social media, TV, video games, and more. Children are inundated with messages today more than ever before and the attention needed and retention required to learn and assimilate what we teach is in constant flux. We also run the danger of boring them if we talk too much.

Today’s athletes think in 140 character spurts. It is their language. They don’t even use the phone like it was used in the “olden days”! If you want to talk to a millennial, text him. He won’t answer his phone. He will text you in brief, to-the-point messages.

Smart coaches have figured out that if they can say what they mean in less time and words, they have a better chance at being heard and understood. If they want players to learn and apply the important technical and tactical principles of the game, they need to speak the language of the players.

Professional sportspeople (both players and officials) face unique challenges relative to their ability to achieve sufficient sleep (Sargent et al., 2014; Bergeron et al., 2015; Fullagar et al., 2015b; Juliff et al., 2015; Lastella et al., 2015a,b; Nédélec et al., 2015a; Thun et al., 2015). For example, inter- and intra-continental travel is common (McGuckin et al., 2014), with athletic performance often proximal to both departure and return travel (Reilly et al., 2005; Richmond et al., 2007; Pipe, 2011; Schwellnus et al., 2012). Alternating training and competition timings can be experienced by athletes, with morning, afternoon, and evening competition and training (Eagles et al., 2014; Meyer et al., 2014; Fullagar et al., 2016) often evident in a non-cyclical manner across a season (Fullagar et al., 2015b). On- and off-field competition demands can also impact sleep, especially during fixture congestion and ultra-competitive periods of the season (Murray et al., 2014; Carling et al., 2015; Dellal et al., 2015; Juliff et al., 2015), which are compounded by everyday life and family demands. Interestingly, individual athletes were shown to retire and wake earlier whilst obtaining less sleep (~ –0.5 h) than athletes from team sports (Lastella et al., 2015b). Whilst the night prior to (~ –0.9 h) and on the first evening of competition (~ –0.6 h) cyclists achieved less sleep than compared to pre-competition baseline values (~ 7.4 h; Lastella et al., 2015a). Such data (Lastella et al., 2015a,b) reinforces the need for individualized sleep maintenance/enhancement strategies within and between athletic disciplines (Fullagar and Bartlett, 2015) whilst indicating why sleep medications are utilized prior to and within competition phases. Some religions also face unique challenges, for example during Ramadan, training, nutritional, and prayer demands interact to negatively influence sleep (Roky et al., 2001; Reilly and Waterhouse, 2007; Zerguini et al., 2007; BaHammam et al., 2010; Chamari et al., 2016). Empirical data demonstrates Ramadan fasting reduces sleep duration [with (~ –1.13 h) and without napping (~ –1.29 h)] whilst delaying bedtime by ~1.32 h, when compared to non-fasting base-line control values (BaHammam et al., 2013). Indeed, Ramadan fasting was recently shown to double night awakenings (~2 vs. 4), increase light sleep (~2.5 h vs. ~1 h), reduce deep (~1.5 h vs. ~0.5 h), and rapid eye movement (~1.5 h vs. ~0.6 h) sleep, compared to baseline control values, respectively, within trained cyclists (Chamari et al., 2016). Therefore, achieving sufficient sleep for consecutive days is evidently challenging for athletes across the globe.

To address this challenge, three main intervention types have been explored/prescribed by sports medicine/science practitioners; pharmacological (Reilly et al., 2001), nutritional (Halson, 2008, 2014; Costello et al., 2014), and sleep hygiene (Fowler et al., 2015; Nédélec et al., 2015b). Pharmacological interventions are utilized despite the paucity of evidence regarding their efficacy relative to sleep within healthy populations (Paul et al., 2001, 2003, 2004a,b).

Last Saturday, I woke up with a sore throat. I had recently had a head cold, though, so I figured it was nothing to worry about. I popped some ibuprofen and completed a 14-mile training run as planned.

By 6:30 that night, I had spiked a high fever and my throat felt like I had swallowed embers. The next day, my doctor told me I had developed a nasty case of strep throat.

Should I have avoided exercising, even though I didn’t feel that bad?

As the Timbers embarked on the defense of their MLS title last Sunday, defeating Columbus 2–1, they had a 26-man roster—and a 20-member health-and-wellness team that includes massage therapists, dentists, chiropractors, yoga instructors, nutritionists, chefs and acupuncturists.

Nik Wald, the Timbers’ director of sports medicine, and Nick Milonas, director of sports science and a performance specialist at Exos, are key parts of the club’s data-driven approach to keeping players on the field. The system is aimed at finding a balance between conditioning and over-training. Portland coach Caleb Porter says Milonas helps him “confirm and correct” players’ weekly needs and develop more precise practices.

“Our goal from a physical standpoint is to keep everyone available first and foremost,” Milonas says. “If we can give Caleb and his coaches the ability to utilize the depth of the roster, that hopefully puts us in a good position during the season.”

This study investigated the test-retest reliability of physiological and performance responses to 120 min (90 min plus 30 min extra-time; ET) of the Soccer Match Simulation (SMS). Ten university-standard soccer players completed the SMS on two occasions under standardized conditions. Capillary and venous blood was taken pre-exercise, at half-time, at 90 and 120 min, with further capillary samples taken every 15 min throughout exercise. Core temperature (Tcore), physical (20-m and 15-m sprint speeds, and countermovement jump height), and technical (soccer dribbling) performance was also assessed during each trial. All variables except blood lactate demonstrated no systematic bias between trials (p > 0.05). During the last 15 min of ET, test-rest reliability (CV% and Pearson’s r, respectively) was moderate to strong for 20-m sprint speed (3.5%, 0.71), countermovement jump height (4.9%, 0.90), dribble speed (2.8%, 0.90) and blood glucose (7.1%, 0.93), and very strong for Tcore (1.2%, 0.99). Moderate reliability was demonstrated for 15-m sprint speed (4.6%, 0.36), dribble precision (11.5%, 0.30), plasma insulin (10.3%, 0.96), Creatine Kinase (CK; 28.1%, 0.38), interleukin-6 (24%, 0.99), non-esterified fatty acids (NEFA; 13.2%, 0.73), glycerol (12.5%, 0.86), and blood lactate (18.6%, 0.79). In the last 15 min of ET, concentrations of blood glucose and lactate, and sprint and jump performances were reduced while Tcore, NEFA, glycerol and CK concentrations were elevated (p < 0.05). The SMS is a reliable protocol for measuring responses across a full 120 min of soccer-specific exercise. Deleterious effects on performance and physiological responses occur during ET.

With more than a decade in the game, Brisbane based analytics company SMG Technologies is transforming the sports and fitness industries through software platforms that transcend athlete management systems.

One of the core products central to the company is their SportsMed Elite platform. Using predictive analysis, Sportsmed aims to help sporting organisations manage athletes better by aggregating new and pre-recorded medical, performance and behavioural data to build a complete ecosystem of an athlete or individual that can be recognised and read on one dashboard.

Intel said on Wednesday it bought Israel’s Replay Technologies, which developed a 3D video technology that has started to be used by U.S. professional sports broadcasters.

In a blog on its website, Intel did not disclose the purchase price but Israeli media said it was about $175 million.

Replay’s technology was used in the recent National Basketball Association All-Star Weekend, mainly giving fans a 360 degree view of the slam dunk contest.

Researchers at U of T Engineering have developed a new way of growing realistic human tissues outside the body. Their “person-on-a-chip” technology, called AngioChip, is a powerful platform for discovering and testing new drugs, and could eventually be used to repair or replace damaged organs.

Professor Milica Radisic (IBBME, ChemE), graduate student Boyang Zhang and their collaborators are among those research groups around the world racing to find ways to grow human tissues in the lab, under conditions that mimic a real person’s body. They have developed unique methods for manufacturing small, intricate scaffolds for individual cells to grow on. These artificial environments produce cells and tissues that resemble the real thing more closely than those grown lying flat in a petri dish.

Charlie Harris Jr.’s head hurts. His stomach, too.

Harris is a star basketball player at Hamady High in Flint. College coaches are interested. He’s a junior.

Charlie’s father, Charlie Sr., was also a basketball player and ran track at Hamady. His photo, in track uniform, is among those of the school’s greats that hang in the hall outside the gym.

Like father, like son. And like son, like father. Charlie Sr.’s head hurts, too. And his stomach. His eyes look glassy.

The Guyer Institute of Molecular Medicine is an Indianapolis anti-aging clinic where wealthy women go for Botox, fat-freezing and hormone replacement therapy. It is also where Peyton Manning went for treatment in 2011, as he tried to recover from neck surgery.

Rejuvenate You Wellness & Anti-Aging Center is a Bradenton, Fla. clinic that advertises weight-loss drugs, therapeutic facials, and hormone replacement therapy. The anti-aging doctor who runs it also has treated professional athletes including Green Bay Packers linebacker Mike Neal, Philadelphia Phillies first baseman Ryan Howard and Washington Nationals third baseman Ryan Zimmerman.

Manning, Neal, Howard and Zimmerman have something else in common: They were all accused of taking banned drugs in the Al Jazeera documentary “The Dark Side: The Secret World of Sports Doping.” All four have denied the claims, and the documentary’s main source, who was recorded without his knowledge, has recanted everything he said.

… The disparity between NBA data — even data across all male sports — and WNBA data is glaring. Data for the WNBA is relegated to basic information: points, rebounds, steals, assists, turnovers, blocks. While worthy of being noted, those are the most rudimentary numbers in our game.

Data helps drive conversations, strategy, decision making. But data on its own isn’t terribly interesting. It needs context. It needs a storyteller. Data helps tell the story of a player, a team, an entire career.

There’s a need to value data in the WNBA because there’s a need to value the stories of our league.

As work increasingly evolves from an individual to a team sport, hiring managers might take a lesson from one of the nation’s favorite job fairs: the NFL draft.

In a new study published online by the Journal of Applied Psychology, business researchers examined what factors coaches and managers took into account when deciding which players to draft and how much to pay them, plus how those factors predicted later performance.

They found that a player’s success hinged as much on his character — such as a willingness to work harder than necessary, make personal sacrifices that benefit the team and mentor new teammates — as his on-field statistics.