Applied Sports Science newsletter – March 21, 2016

The basketball locker room in the gymnasium at Princeton has no blackboard, no water fountain, and, in fact, no lockers. Up on the main floor, things go along in the same vein. Collapsible grandstands pull out of the walls and crowd up to the edge of the court. Jolly alumni sometimes wander in just before a game begins, sit down on the players’ bench, and are permitted to stay there. The players themselves are a little slow getting started each year, because if they try to do some practicing on their own during the autumn they find the gymnasium full of graduate students who know their rights and won’t move over. When a fellow does get some action, it can be dangerous. The gym is so poorly designed that a scrimmaging player can be knocked down one of two flights of concrete stairs. It hardly seems possible, but at the moment this scandalous milieu includes William Warren Bradley, who is the best amateur basketball player in the United States and among the best players, amateur or professional, in the history of the sport.

Bill Bradley is what college students nowadays call a superstar, and the thing that distinguishes him from other such paragons is not so much that he has happened into the Ivy League as that he is a superstar at all. For one thing, he has overcome the disadvantage of wealth. A great basketball player, almost by definition, is someone who has grown up in a constricted world, not for lack of vision or ambition but for lack of money; his environment has been limited to home; gym, and playground, and it has forced upon him, as a developing basketball player, the discipline of having nothing else to do. Bradley must surely be the only great basketball player who wintered regularly in Palm Beach until he was thirteen years old.

After a loss and two draws to start its league campaign, United rued its low fitness levels partially caused by a preseason cut short.

Jaromir Jagr on trying something new: “I realize, if I start something else, first of all, you’re not going to be good at it. You don’t know what you’re doing. You’ll have to learn from the bottom. So, for me, it’s going to be a lot tougher than to keep playing hockey. I might as well keep playing.”

… Tulane University law student Suzanne Byrne was still in high school when she started helping her father help their hometown Vancouver Canucks find a way to make the team’s notoriously nasty, cross-continent travel less tiring for the players. Her father is Pat Byrne, a.k.a. the Sleep Doctor. He’s co-founder of Fatigue Science, a company that assesses and mitigates fatigue-related risk for industries and particularly their employees. He’s also a pal of Jets general manager Kevin Cheveldayoff.

“I was with the Canucks for seven years,” Pat told me after Suzanne connected us. “And Chevy kept wanting me to work with him.”

But at that time, the Canucks had locked up the exclusive NHL rights to what Fatigue Science had to offer.

What they had to offer was something else exclusive: U.S. military sleep technology they had purchased the commercial rights to, which enabled them to predict fatigue based on people’s sleep patterns. Fatigue Science married that with other sleep-measuring technology aimed at helping industries such as air, rail and mining reduce the risk of accidents. The bonus was helping professional sports organizations, from the NFL to the NBA, predict the effects of sleep loss on player performance.

If you don’t think the act of stacking and shuffling a set of cups could boggle your mind, watch the video below. In it, neuroscientist David Eagleman introduces 10-year-old Austin Naber – a world record-holding, champion cup stacker. Naber moves the cups around at a blistering pace and when Eagleman has a go at keeping up with him, the difference in skill and speed becomes immediately apparent.

“He smoked me,” Eagleman admits. “But the bigger point is that when I’m doing it, it’s my first time cup stacking. It’s all conscious for me, I’m burning a lot of energy trying to figure out the rules; how the cups balance.”

Both Eagleman and Naber had their brain activity monitored via an electroencephalogram (EEG). The difference was stark. Eagleman’s brain was firing on all cylinders, but Naber’s barely flinched – despite the pace at which he was moving. [video, 4:26]

Environmental “interventions” can boost intelligence — but only temporarily, thanks to the so-called fadeout effect, a new study suggests.

From the world s reigning expert on expertisecomes a powerful new approach to mastering almost any skill.

Have you ever wanted to learn a language or pick up an instrument, only to become too daunted by the task at hand? Expert performance guru Anders Ericsson has made a career studyingchess champions, violin virtuosos, star athletes, and memory mavens. Peak condenses three decades of original research to introduce an incredibly powerful approach to learning that is fundamentally different from the way people traditionally think about acquiring a skill.

… a company called Halo Neuroscience is selling a tDCS product called Halo Sport. The San Francisco-based firm claims that its “neuropriming” headset “accelerates gains in strength, explosiveness, and dexterity”. Is Halo Neuroscience justified in making this claim and will we see tDCS used in sports in the future?

How could it work?

Any time a person wants to make a movement, the brain sends a command to the muscles and reads information from the senses about the state of the body and the success or failure of that movement. As we practise a skill, the brain makes and strengthens connections across a wide network of brain areas. And when we make that skilled movement the motor network becomes active, and signals are sent to the muscles via the primary motor cortex, which is the region targeted by Halo Sport.

On a rainy Thursday morning a few weeks ago, a dozen NFL hopefuls took over Proactive, a rooftop gym in Santa Ana, Calif.

By the door, a series of palm-sized devices—black in color and oval in shape, giving them a profile reminiscent of the long-departed Motorola Pebl phone—charged in pods. Piled next to them were several pairs of stretchy black shorts and long-sleeved shirts. Used together, the items become Athos, a wearable technology system that measures the electrical signals generated by muscles to instruct the wearer how to improve his or her workout technique.

The football players warmed up by jogging on treadmills and rolling out their hamstrings with hard cylinders of foam. Then the men took off their T-shirts and tank tops and replaced them with the snug, wetsuit-like Athos gear. The black compression apparel, studded with gray plastic panels for embedded “biosignal” sensors, would be their uniform for the weeks leading up to the NFL scouting combine in Indianapolis. There, the hopefuls would run through a battery of tests to show off their physical and mental prowess to the league’s brass.

… On Monday, during a congressional roundtable of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Jeff Miller, the same NFL executive that first massaged Borland’s narrative, became the first pro football official to acknowledge a link between the sport and CTE. Pushed to respond to a question the connection by Representative Jan Schakowsky, Miller affirmed, “The answer to that question is certainly yes.”

In the past, NFL officials have preferred to stay vague about its concussion problem and its associations with CTE. The league has been critiqued for sponsoring research that would downplay the concussion risks and attacking those who would argue otherwise.

However, following remarks on Monday by neuropathologist Ann McKee, one of those previously maligned researchers, that cited the extensive study of the brains of former players, Miller conceded that the link was there. Lest anyone unduly charge him with a change of heart, Miller followed, “But there’s also a number of questions that come with that.”

Few studies have explored the frequency and impact of lower extremity injuries, such as those to the knee, among professional baseball players. The purpose of this study was to detail the epidemiology of knee injuries in Major League Baseball (MLB) and Minor League Baseball (MiLB) players during the 2011-2014 seasons. It was hypothesized that knee injuries are a common occurrence in these athletes, and represent a significant source of time away from play.

The MLB Health and Injury Tracking System database was searched to identify all patients diagnosed with knee injuries during the 2011-2014 seasons. All injuries that occurred during the preseason, regular season, and postseason that resulted in time away from play were included. Injury data analyzed included total number of knee injuries, specific diagnoses, injury mechanisms, locations, player positions, and time lost. Descriptive statistics were conducted and injury rates per athlete-exposures were calculated. During the 2011-2014 seasons, a total of 2171 knee injuries occurred in MLB and MiLB players, representing 6.5% of all injuries in professional baseball. The knee injury rate across both the MLB and MiLB was 1.2 per 1000 athlete-exposures. The mean number of days missed per injury across both leagues was 16.2 with a total of 30,449 days of missed play amongst all athletes over the 4 seasons. Injuries to the knee were the fifth most common cause of missed time in all of baseball, and the fourth most common reason for missed games in the MLB alone. Approximately 12% of all injuries required surgical intervention. The most common mechanism of injury was noncontact (44%), and base runners were injured more frequently than any other position (24%). The infield (30%) and home plate (23%) were the most common locations in which injuries occurred. These data can be utilized for targeted injury prevention initiatives.

Background: The Vestibular/Ocular Motor Screening (VOMS) is a newly developed screening tool that evaluates vestibular and ocular motor symptom (eg, headache, dizziness, nausea, fogginess) provocation after a sport-related concussion. Baseline data on the VOMS are needed to extend the application of this measure to broad age groups and to document normal variations in performance.

Purpose: The primary purpose of this study was to examine the internal consistency of the VOMS in a large sample of healthy, nonconcussed collegiate athletes. The secondary purpose was to investigate the effects of patient sex and history of motion sickness, migraines, and concussions on baseline VOMS scores.

Study Design: Cohort study; Level of evidence, 2.

Methods: A total of 263 National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I athletes (mean ± SD age, 19.85 ± 1.35 years) completed self-reported demographic and medical history at preseason physical examinations and baseline screening. Internal consistency of the VOMS was assessed with Cronbach ?. A series of univariate nonparametric tests (?2 with odds ratios [ORs] and 95% CIs) were used to examine the associations among medical history risk factors and VOMS clinical cutoff scores (score of ?2 for any individual VOMS symptom, near point of convergence [NPC] distance of ?5 cm), with higher scores representing greater symptom provocation.

Results: Internal consistency of the VOMS was high (Cronbach ? = .97), and 89% of athletes scored below cutoff levels (ie, 11% false-positive rate). Female athletes (OR, 2.99 [95% CI, 1.34-6.70]; P = .006) and those with a personal history of motion sickness (OR, 7.73 [95% CI, 1.94-30.75]; P = .009) were more likely to have ?1 VOMS scores above cutoff levels. No risk factors were associated with increased odds of an abnormal NPC distance.

Conclusion: The VOMS possesses internal consistency and an acceptable false-positive rate among healthy Division I collegiate student-athletes. Female sex and a history of motion sickness were risk factors for VOMS scores above clinical cutoff levels among healthy collegiate student-athletes. Results support a comprehensive baseline evaluation approach that includes an assessment of premorbid vestibular and oculomotor symptoms.

Separating fact from fiction will be one of the main challenges for the food industry when it assesses personalised nutrition from the wealth of research that looks into gene-diet interactions.

Aging runners diagnosed with high blood pressure often resist taking medication, out of pride or fear of side effects.

But sports cardiologist Paul Thompson has a strategy for overcoming that resistance. “I tell them there’s a drug I can give them that may have some exercise benefits, that some people believe improves performance,” says Thompson, chief of cardiology at Hartford Hospital in Connecticut.

Thompson is quick to add that there’s no hard evidence for the performance-enhancing benefits of ACE inhibitors or ARBs, two classes of high-blood-pressure medication. But for many hypertensive runners under his care, lack of proof doesn’t matter: The mere possibility of a competitive edge is enough to persuade them to follow medical recommendations and take a pill.

Traditional NBA player evaluation metrics are based on scoring differential or some pace-adjusted linear combination of box score statistics like points, rebounds, assists, etc. These measures treat performances with the outcome of the game still in question (e.g. tie score with five minutes left) in exactly the same way as they treat performances with the outcome virtually decided (e.g. when one team leads by 30 points with one minute left). Because they ignore the context in which players perform, these measures can result in misleading estimates of how players help their teams win. We instead use a win probability framework for evaluating the impact NBA players have on their teams’ chances of winning. We propose a Bayesian linear regression model to estimate an individual player’s impact, after controlling for the other players on the court. We introduce several posterior summaries to derive rank-orderings of players within their team and across the league. This allows us to identify highly paid players with low impact relative to their teammates, as well as players whose high impact is not captured by existing metrics.