Applied Sports Science newsletter – April 20, 2016

Tony Romo is having no issues throwing a football less than six weeks after undergoing shoulder surgery.

Romo spoke with reporters Saturday at an All Pro Dad event at AT&T Stadium, saying: “I’ve been throwing fully here for a good week-and-a-half, two weeks. It’s been good. Everything is going great.”

We. We. We. Time and again, as Jordy Nelson discussed his comeback on Monday, he opted for the collective instead of the individual. Apparently, it takes a village to raise a wide receiver from a torn anterior cruciate ligament.

“We’re right where we want to be,” the Green Bay Packers Pro Bowl wideout said after fully participating in the first official workout of the team’s offseason program.

Self-regulation reflects an individual’s efforts to bring behavior and thinking into line with often consciously desired goals. During endurance activity, self-regulation requires an athlete to balance their speed or power output appropriately to achieve an optimal level of performance. Considering that both behavior and thinking are core elements of self-regulation, this article provides a cognitive perspective on the processes required for effective pace-regulation during endurance performance. We also integrate this viewpoint with physiological and performance outcomes during activity. As such, evidence is presented to suggest that what an athlete thinks about has an important influence on effort perceptions, physiological outcomes, and, consequently, endurance performance. This article also provides an account of how an athlete might control their cognition and focus attention during an endurance event. We propose that effective cognitive control during performance requires both proactive, goal-driven processes and reactive, stimulus-driven processes. In addition, the role of metacognition – or thinking about thinking – in pace-regulation will also be considered. Metacognition is an essential component of self-regulation and its primary functions are to monitor and control the thoughts and actions required for task completion. To illustrate these processes in action, a metacognitive framework of attentional focus and cognitive control is applied to an endurance performance setting: specifically, Bradley Wiggins’ successful 2015 Hour record attempt in cycling. Finally, future perspectives will consider the potentially deleterious effects of the sustained cognitive effort and self-control required during prolonged and strenuous endurance tasks.

Runners always seem to be looking for newer and better ways to train. You want to keep your bodies guessing about what you’re going to do next, to never get complacent, and to add benefits like endurance, strength, and speed in any way you can. With all the different workouts for any given distance, have you ever thought about extending your training cycle beyond seven days?

Most runners understand the science behind getting in different quality runs each week. Any long distance race training plan worth it’s salt will have speed work, long runs, tempo, and a cross-training or strength day. Why try to cram all of those “essential” workouts into seven days? Think of what could happen if you added just two more days to your training cycle.

… In the 12 months leading up to this past weekend, Lionel Messi, Luis Suarez and Neymar played a combined 16,058 minutes of football for club and country. That is substantially more than other top European sides. Compare it to the four Champions League semifinalists: it’s 18 percent more than Bayern’s front three (I looked at the three most frequently used attacking players), 42 percent more than Manchester City’s, 57 percent more than Real Madrid’s and 63 percent more than Atletico Madrid’s.

There are obvious reasons for the discrepancy. Other than Messi last fall, Barcelona’s front three have been fairly healthy all year, especially when compared to their brethren at Man City and Real Madrid. And other managers have shown a much greater propensity for squad rotation than Enrique has: between them, Suarez, Messi and Neymar have been substituted just four times this year.

BACKGROUND:

Understanding kinematic and kinetic changes with fatigue during running is important to assess changes that may influence performance and injury. The aim of this systematic review was to identify, critique and summarise literature about the effects of fatigue on kinematics and kinetics during a fatiguing overground run and present the reported influence on performance and injury.
METHODS:

An electronic search was conducted of MEDLINE, SPORTDiscus, CINAHL and PubMed databases. Two reviewers assessed articles for inclusion, and evaluated the quality of articles included using a modified version of the Downs and Black Quality Index.
RESULTS:

A total of twelve articles were identified for review. The mean quality assessment score was seven out of a possible 12. Kinematic and kinetic changes reported to affect performance included decreased speed, step or stride frequency and length, increased trunk flexion, lower leg position at heel strike, and mediolateral acceleration, changes in hip and knee ranges, and decreased stride regularity, heel lift, maximum knee rotation and backward ankle velocity. Alterations reported to increase risk of injury included decreased step frequency, increased upper body rotation and lower leg position at heel strike, and decreased knee flexion during stance. Reduced risk of injury has been linked to decreased step length and hip ranges, and increased trunk flexion.
CONCLUSIONS:

This review found limited evidence regarding changes in kinematic and kinetic during a fatiguing run in relation to performance and injury. Higher quality studies are warranted, with a larger sample of homogenous runners, and type of run carefully selected to provide quality information for runners, coaches and clinicians.

… Whilst products like the Fitbit and what are used professionally on the surface are measuring the same thing and do so using the same basic sensors, i.e. accelerometers, each product is driven by its different market segment and achieves its goals through different design decisions. Understanding these, leads to making better decisions when choosing what is the best tool for a particular application.

Lab based technologies (ambulatory or xed) have a signi cantly higher cost, both the capital required to purchase and the more hidden cost, that of having a user suitably experienced to use it. Thus they are suited to high accuracy studies of not too many participants. Commercial wearables on the other hand are at least an order of magnitude cheaper to purchase and can be used widely. They represent an opportunity to do larger scale studies of more participants and don’t require a sophisticated operator. These products, driven by the desire for social engagement (consumers like this interaction and are more likely to continue to use and purchase in the future) over data aggregation opportunities across whole communities. Therefore commercially popular devices can possibly be an option for researchers to consider using.

Vital signs are key indicators of health. But tracking some of these signals, such as the body’s core temperature, can require invasive tactics—which is especially problematic for active or injured patients. Almost anyone, however, can swallow a pill.

That’s what Giovanni Traverso, a gastroenterologist and biomedical engineer at Harvard Medical School, and Al Swiston, a biomaterials scientist at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, realized when they met at a work event in 2012. At the time, Traverso was working on ingestible devices and Swiston on vital-sign monitoring—so they decided to join forces to create what Traverso calls “an ingestible stethoscope.”

“It’s basically a really tiny microphone that is able to listen just like the doctor would,” says Swiston.

What’s next in the revolution of the immersive sports experience? NBA Commissioner Emeritus David Stern leads a panel of experts including Brad Allen, NextVR, Derek Belch, STRIVR Labs, Michael Davies, Fox Sports and Miheer Walavalkar, LiveLike VR, to discuss the next big thing in sports and virtual reality.

A few days ago I got an email from a journalist asking about the Starshot project. Of course he was looking for my much-more famous namesake Pete Worden, but I’ve been fascinated by the effort too. Its whole foundation is that we’ll soon be able to miniaturize space probes down to a few grams and have them function on tiny amounts of power. Over the past few years I’ve come to realize that’s the future of computing.

Imagine having a self-contained system that costs a few cents, is only a couple of millimeters wide, with a self-contained battery, processor, and basic CCD image sensor. Using modern deep learning techniques, you could train it to recognize crop pests or diseases on leaves and then scatter a few thousand across a field. Or sprinkle them through a jungle to help spot endangered wildlife. They could be spread over our bridges to spot corrosion before it gets started, or for any of the Semantic Sensor uses I’ve talked about before.

I know how useful these systems will be once they exist, but there are some major engineering challenges to solve before we get there. That’s why I’m excited to be going to the Embedded Vision Summit in a couple of weeks. Jeff Bier has gathered together a fantastic group of developers and industry leaders who are working on making this future happen. We’ll also have a strong presence from the TensorFlow team, to show how important embedded devices are to us. Jeff Dean will be keynoting and I’ll be discussing the nitty-gritty of using the framework on tiny devices.

This paper addresses if and how a periodic health examination to screen for risk factors for injury can be used to mitigate injury risk. The key question asked is whether it is possible to use screening tests to identify who is at risk for a sports injury—in order to address the deficit through a targeted intervention programme. The paper demonstrates that to validate a screening test to predict and prevent sports injuries, at least 3 steps are needed. First, a strong relationship needs to be demonstrated in prospective studies between a marker from a screening test and injury risk (step 1). Second, the test properties need to be examined in relevant populations, using appropriate statistical tools (step 2). Unfortunately, there is currently no example of a screening test for sports injuries with adequate test properties. Given the nature of potential screening tests (where test performance is usually measured on a continuous scale from low to high), substantial overlap is to be expected between players with high and low risk of injury. Therefore, although there are a number of tests demonstrating a statistically significant association with injury risk, and therefore help the understanding of causative factors, such tests are unlikely to be able to predict injury with sufficient accuracy. The final step needed is to document that an intervention programme targeting athletes identified as being at high risk through a screening programme is more beneficial than the same intervention programme given to all athletes (step 3). To date, there is no intervention study providing support for screening for injury risk.

As a high school track star, Lamar Letts took his health for granted. His diet was high in sugar, he says, and late-??night junk food binges were common. But while he knew he was eating poorly, he never truly con­sid­ered the food he was putting into his body until his senior year, when he was diag­nosed with myocarditis, an inflam­ma­tion of the heart muscle. The con­di­tion con­fined him to many months of bed rest and forced him to end his promising track career. And when he finally returned to the gym to resume light work­outs, he had an epiphany.

“As I started to get back into fit­ness, I imme­di­ately real­ized that I didn’t need or want the extra sugar that was in the food I was eating,” recalls Letts, DMSB’17, now a fourth-??year busi­ness major at North­eastern Uni­ver­sity. “I started to dilute tra­di­tional sports drinks with water, but it became very tedious.”

This, he says, moti­vated him to create his own sports drink, a healthier option for the serious ath­lete. With the help of a food sci­en­tist and a U.S. man­u­fac­turer, he even­tu­ally designed Hylux, what he calls the “health­iest and most prac­tical sports drink on the market.”

Kobe Bryant’s 30,699th and final field goal came from 19 feet with 31 seconds left against the Utah Jazz. During his 20 years with the Lakers, he fired up more than 30,000 shots, including the regular season and playoffs.

Take a tour of key shots over his 20-year career, or explore the makes and misses over his long career on your own. [interactive data visualization]

… While the rest of the league is warming up a few weeks into the 2016 season, Atlanta United is similarly gearing up for 2017. Sitting at a long conference table inside of the headquarters last month, United technical director Carlos Bocanegra, the former U.S. men’s national team captain, motioned around the room and the offices outside the door when he spoke to how the team is advancing in its preparations.

For the 3rd successive year, we will be running the KDD workshop on Large-Scale Sports Analytics.

The objective of this workshop is to bring together researchers and analysts from academia and industry who work in sports analytics, data mining and machine learning. We hope to enable meaningful discussions about state-of-the-art in sports analytics research, and how it might be improved upon.

Sunday, August 14, in San Francisco.