Applied Sports Science newsletter – March 26, 2016

Leicester’s lone goal against Crystal Palace illustrates what the team does so well, particularly the movement by Vardy and his teammates that creates disarray among opposing defenses. In this case, it allowed Danny Drinkwater to play an incisive first-time pass that proved Palace’s undoing. This week, George John joins Bobby Warshaw and George Quraishi to talk about how Leicester managed to do one of the hardest things in soccer—score a goal when 11 players are behind the ball. [audio, 23:47]

… “Most days on game days, I’ll come in by myself in the morning,” said Stauskas. “Sometimes I’ll work with the coaches, just getting shots up and whatnot, and then sometimes I have a guy who lives with me who’s a manager-slash-workout guy that I like to work with, and I’ve worked with him since I was at Michigan.”

This “manager-slash-workout guy” is Nick Berlage. Although Berlage never suited up in uniform for the Wolverines, he proved his value to the program as one of head coach John Beilein’s student managers. In that capacity, he came in contact with a stable of future pros.

“He kind of specialized in skill development,” Stauskas said of the role Berlage assumed in Ann Arbor.

Offensive line is a position of constant growth. John Jerry is a seven year NFL veteran offensive guard that has made tremendous growth in a short period of time. With a few adjustments, strength training and verbal cues, you can see the steps he’s made towards improving his game.

The 2015-16 season will go down as a lost season for the New Orleans Pelicans as the team was overwhelmed by injuries from the start. Five Pelicans players have already been ruled out for the season, including the face of the franchise Anthony Davis. The three-time All-Star will undergo two surgeries in the coming days to address two reoccurring issues.

The primary concern is Davis’ knee. Davis revealed he is slated to undergo a procedure to address tendinosis in his left knee. Tendinosis is a degenerative condition and different from the more familiar tendinitis. Tendinitis occurs when a tendon becomes inflamed and is considered an acute injury. Depending on the location, tendinitis can often be treated with rest, practice modification, and anti-inflammatory medication.

Blake Griffin is definitely out against the Golden State Warriors in Wednesday’s biggest game. It will be the 40th game he misses this season, but Los Angeles Clippers coach Doc Rivers says Griffin’s return is getting closer.

Rivers told the media that he believes that Griffin will return from his fractured hand before the playoffs start. There has been little in the way of other updates, aside from watching the evolution of Griffin’s cast and the little he’s been able to do at practice while waiting on the bones to heal.

Griffin also had a quadriceps strain, but that has healed concurrently to the hand fracture. Griffin has been seen doing cardio and some limited basketball activities in practice with no apparent signs that the quad is an issue still.

Sure, you could stick with your old routine. Or you could break out of your rut with the help of experts and elite athletes.

Short answer: NO and most likely we never will. Sport Science is an art with simple data to correlate; there are no fixed answers. That’s why you’ve got a job. You can combine “x” amount of variables by athlete, group of athletes, sports, gender and present a formula that YOU BELIEVE works best for your players. In reality, there is no wrong or right answers as long as you come up with logic in your thinking. Like anything in life, if you show results then people will think that you have the right combination of test, training, load, game speed and recovery. In reality, let’s be honest, there are few people that claim they’ve got injury prediction algorithms. As a professional I have to say, people want to hear what they want. The clever minds that I know we have in our field, understand that it takes more than just formulas and equations to predict injuries. Therefore, if you want to be commercially guided then you know which sport Science Company you need to listen.

A few weeks ago we attended the Training load 2016 conference in Qatar hosted by the Aspire Academy and based on some comments and private discussions we’ve got some questions and discussions for others to comment on and enrich the current applied science knowledge.

I spoke a little bit about the consequences of safety from a baseball training side in a previous blog post, but there’s another side of this paradigm, which is a little counterintuitive – it’s possible that baseball training methods geared towards “safety” and “injury prevention” are indeed actually causing more injuries.

As Rutgers football begins spring practice this week, new head football coach Chris Ash inherits a program that has finished in fourth place or lower in the East division of the Big Ten conference- including one bowl win in the last four seasons- all amidst numerous off the field issues. So in his effort to change the culture at Rutgers, Ash-who has spent the last two seasons as Urban Meyer’s defensive coordinator at Ohio State-has already implemented some of the on the “on edge” coaching methodology that Meyer has used with his programs since his days at the University of Florida. Mike Kuchar, the co-founder of XandOLabs.com, spent time with Coach Ash this winter talking about his plan to change the culture in Piscataway.

An Inside Marquette Basketball feature that takes a look at how Director of Sports Performance Todd Smith utilizes technology to effectively train MU basketball players.

… “It’s a hard problem. There’s a reason there aren’t a lot of insights out there,” he said. “We announced a partnership with IBM. We have got so much data from our users and working with the Watson team, we’re hoping to cull interesting insights for each one of us. That’s where goals come into play, each of us has different goals around what we’re trying to do. We can align goals to what you really do and then bring back those insights.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to test the concurrent validity of data from two different global positioning system (GPS) units for obtaining mechanical properties during sprint acceleration using a field method recently validated by Samozino et al. Methods: Thirty-two athletes performed maximal straight-line sprints, and their running speed was simultaneously measured by GPS units (sampling rate: 20 Hz or 5 Hz) and either a radar or laser device (devices taken as references). Lower limb mechanical properties of sprint acceleration (theoretical maximal force, F0; theoretical maximal speed, V0; maximal power, Pmax) were derived from a modeling of the speed-time curves using an exponential function in both measurements. Comparisons of mechanical properties from 20 Hz and 5 Hz GPS units with those from reference devices were performed for 80 and 62 trials, respectively. Results: The percentage bias showed a wide range of over or underestimation for both systems (?7.9–9.7% and ?5.1–2.9% for 20 Hz and 5 Hz GPS), while the ranges of its 90% confidence limits for 20 Hz GPS were markedly smaller than those for 5 Hz GPS. These results were supported by the correlation analyses. Conclusions: Overall, the concurrent validity for all variables derived from 20 Hz GPS measurements was better than that obtained from the 5 Hz GPS units. However, in the current state of GPS devices accuracy for speed-time measurements over a maximal sprint acceleration, we recommend that radar, laser devices and timing gates remain the reference methods for implementing Samozino et al.’s computations.

What’s the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning? Some people spend a few minutes measuring their HRV with the HRV4Training app (I explain why later in this post). If you’re one of these people, we have great news: You can now auto-sync your HRV4Training data and analyze it on the SportTracks Health page!

If you’re not familiar with using HRV data to enhance your training, here’s a quick explanation: It’s the practice of using a specific kind of heart rate data to determine how well your body has recovered from your last workout. This information can be used to predict what level of intensity your next workout should be to achieve optimal results. This is why bleary-eyed athletes fire up the HRV4training app before they even set foot out of bed.

… At least two exhibitors were selling three-dimensional scanners that let exercisers track their body measurements with a computer-generated avatar. One, Styku, started marketing the product for use in clothing alterations but realized that fitness had bigger possibilities, Chief Operating Officer Jason Delevan said.

The system, which uses infrared light and the Microsoft Kinect motion sensor originally intended for Xbox video games, includes body-fat and body-shape analysis, fat-loss calculations and caloric expenditure.

“We’re becoming such a data-driven society,” said Delevan, whose company is based in Los Angeles. “Fitness is being gameified.”

At the University of Maryland, athletic interns walk around with iPads; every player on the University of Michigan’s men’s basketball team has their own iPod touch; in Iowa, wearables track athletes’ micro-movements and total work output. The secret to March Madness dominance? Technology.

“We want to be ahead of the curve in terms of technology and training methods,” says Jon Sanderson, C.S.C.S., the head strength and conditioning coach at the University of Michigan. “We don’t want to be stuck a decade ago in terms of technology, so we’re always looking for the next good thing.”

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Below, top strength and conditioning coaches share the tools they use to stay at the top of their games.

Football is the most popular sport in the world and is played at an amateur or recreational level by almost 300 million people. While football can be considered a healthy leisure activity, as a contact team sport, it also entails a certain risk of injury. The medical treatment of football related injuries can have a significant socio-economic impact in terms of related healthcare costs1.

In 1994, FIFA founded its Medical Assessment and Research Centre (F-MARC) to create and disseminate scientific knowledge on various medical topics in football, to reduce football injuries and thus to promote football as a health-enhancing leisure activity2.

This paper presents the theoretical background, the development, scientific evaluation, implementation and dissemination strategies of FIFA’s injury prevention programme (‘FIFA 11+’) in order to provide a model of how an international sports governing body can make its sport safer.

One of the nation’s foremost sports orthopedic surgeons said Wednesday night in Orlando that the best medicine to help prevent youth sports injuries is to avoid playing year-round and not to specialize in one sport.

And don’t approach a child’s athletic pursuits like he is a miniature version of Tom Brady or LeBron James.

“Don’t treat 6- and 7-year-old kids like they’re professional athletes,” Dr. James Andrews told an audience of about 100 at Florida Hospital Orlando. “They’re not ready for that level of high-intensity training.”

Boston Children’s Hospital researchers have been working to develop a better way to treat ACL injuries and have launched a clinical trial to study their new technique.

Go behind the scenes with Dr. Martha Murray, the innovator who’s developed a game-changing new way to approach ACL tears, and Corey Peak, the first person to have Bridge-Enhanced ACL Repair (BEAR) — the surgery Murray developed.

Anterior cruciate ligament surgery, a scourge of athletes of every age and competition level, appears on the cusp of becoming significantly less onerous, results from an experimental surgery trial at Boston Children’s Hospital now show.

During the past year, 10 adult patients have undergone a procedure known as “Bridge Enhanced ACL Repair,” which allows doctors to use a sponge soaked with the patient’s blood to repair a torn ACL rather replacing it with a tendon from another part of the patient’s body. According to the surgeons overseeing the study, every patient’s ACL is now every bit as strong as a traditionally replaced ACL at a similar stage of rehabilitation.

“I didn’t think we would see all of them perform this way,” said Dr. Martha Murray, who first began performing the procedures on pigs. “I thought maybe we would get seven out of 10.”

… Longtime P.C. head trainer John Rock gave us insight on how P.C.’s training and coaching staff break down the season into three stages, and how they value the importance of proper nutrition for the Friars to pull through an exhausting season:

There are different phases to the year. From July to August, from a strength and conditioning standpoint, we go heavy with strength training. When we start school in September, we stay in a stay in a fairly heavy lifting routine three days a week. All of our programs are individually diagrammed for each of the basketball players.

Once the practice season start in October, we cut back from a little bit on the time. As the seasons goes on, it’s really more of a maintenance type of program from a strength and conditioning standpoint. If you talk to Cooley, he will say there are three seasons that we have: Our non-conference season, our conference season, and our tournament season. Two-thirds of our season is over and we’re not getting ready for the most important one. He has a real good feel for where the guys are physically, mentally and emotionally. Certainly in September and in October when we get into the official practices, and then in November, when they’re putting in new plays, new offenses and defenses, we practice longer. Once the season begins in the middle of November, you’ll start to see the practice times decrease.

For USC’s basketball team, success has not been sweet. It tastes a little earthy and a tad gritty — a bit like eating dirt, some players say.

Turns out, success tastes like beet juice.

Since the season started, the Trojans have chugged beet juice before workouts, vigorous practices and games.

… With personal genetic testing becoming a reality in the last decade, the information wrapped inside the human genome is becoming uncovered. The vast array of genetic applications range from screening for heritable diseases, testing for lifespan, and discovering genealogy. Genetic test results have also been inappropriately utilized in assessing the talent of youth athletes.

There are reports of parents using genetic testing (3) to guide their children into certain sports or disciplines based on results. Lessons learned from others in the sports genetics industry, and from published scientific findings (4, 5, 6, 7, 8) substantiate that using genetic data as a decision-maker for determining a child’s future sport is an improper use of genetic information.

In past years when I’ve attended the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, I invariably write a critique – sometimes scathing – that is born out of frustration with NHL teams not seeming to pay enough attention to analytics.

As a refreshing change, then, I emerged from this year’s conference feeling much more positive about the direction that hockey analytics appears to be headed.

Start with the attendees. At this year’s conference, 17 NHL teams were represented by someone from hockey operations.

When it comes to March Madness, Cathy Goldstein, M.D., M.S., might have an edge over her fellow bracketologists.

The neurologist at the U-M Sleep Disorders Center is combining her basketball fandom and sleep science expertise as she makes her round-by-round selections this season. Below, she explains how circadian rhythm plays into her picks.

At Stanford University, a rat faces a choice. If it presses one lever, it gets a fixed amount of sugar liquid. If it presses a second lever, it usually gets less but occasionally wins a sweet bonanza. This choice between a safe bet and a risky gamble is one of life’s most recurring and most important. It affects whether an animal gets a meal or a teenager drunkenly climbs behind a wheel, whether an entrepreneur rakes in the cash or a global financial system collapses. And, if the Stanford rats are any indicator, it’s a choice whose outcome can be predicted and controlled.

By studying the brains of these rodents, Kelly Zalocusky from Stanford University has identified a specific group of neurons that are involved in risky decision-making. Their activity reveals whether a rat is about to make a safe choice or take a punt on a bigger payoff. And by silencing these neurons at the right time, Zalocusky’s team, led by Karl Deisseroth, could instantly (and temporarily) convert the risk-taking rodents into risk-avoiders.

Four members of Congress have asked the NFL for documents and information about why it tried to intervene in the selection of a Boston University researcher to lead a major study on football and brain disease, according to a letter obtained by Outside the Lines.

The letter, which was sent Wednesday to commissioner Roger Goodell, includes new information showing how the NFL engaged in a monthslong campaign to derail the selection of Dr. Robert Stern, a longtime critic, and replace him with researchers affiliated with the league.