Applied Sports Science newsletter – April 21, 2016

… “He understands that we have, first of all, his best interest at heart — his career,” Kerr said before the game. “We know that he had surgery on that ankle four years ago. He’s got a lot of basketball ahead of him, and there’s plenty of cases in the past where people played through stuff and it didn’t turn out so well.”

Kerr mentioned Grant Hill, who retired in 2013 after 18 enviable seasons, his full potential limited by chronic ankle problems.

“Whether that’s the same type of thing as this, I don’t really know,” Kerr said. “But I do know that we have to look after his health, because the competitor he is, he’s going to want to play.”

… “This is who I am,” she said. “I’m not hiding behind anything anymore. This is a part of my life. It’s a part of my DNA. … It’s bigger than me now. It’s bigger than me.”

A former Tennessee All-American, Olympic gold medalist and the No. 1 pick of the 1999 WNBA draft, Holdsclaw appears at William and Mary’s Commonwealth Auditorium on Thursday at 7 p.m. She will speak and screen the documentary about her battle with bipolar disorder, “Mind/Game: The Unquiet Journey of Chamique Holdsclaw.”

Envisioned and directed by Rick Goldsmith, a social-conscience documentarian, the film was two years in the making and will debut on Logo TV at 9 p.m. May 3. But the journey it entails has been far longer.

This year marks the 80th anniversary of when Hans Selye started research stress and coined the General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS) in a letter to the editor of Nature. GAS, often called the stress response, was taken by coaches as the basis of adaptation in training and the foundation of early periodization models. As Buddy Morris put it on our podcast last year, coaches are primarily in the business of stress management. But as science learns more about the complexities of stress, training methodology has not kept. Recently John Kiely posed the question: is training philosophy built upon an incomplete understanding of the nature of stress?

This study aimed to analyze changes of neuromuscular, physiological and perceptual markers for routine assessment of fatigue and recovery in high-resistance strength training. Fourteen male and nine female athletes participated in a six-day intensified strength training micro-cycle (STM) designed to purposefully overreach. Maximal dynamic strength (estimated one-repetition maximum [1RMest]; criterion measure of fatigue and recovery), maximal isometric strength (MVIC), countermovement jump (CMJ) height, multiple rebound jump (MRJ) height, jump efficiency (RSI), muscle contractile properties using tensiomyography including muscle displacement (Dm), delay time (Td), contraction time (Tc) and contraction velocity (V90), serum concentration of creatine kinase (CK), perceived muscle soreness (DOMS) and perceived recovery (PPC) and stress (MS) were measured pre and post the STM and after three days of recovery. After completing the STM, there were significant (p<0.05) performance decreases in 1RMest … Following three days of recovery, a significant return to baseline values could be observed in 1RMest (4.3+/-2.8, ES=0.12), CMJ (5.2+/-2.2, ES=0.28) and MRJ (4.9+/-3.8, ES=0.32), whereas RSI (-7.9+/-4.5, ES=-0.50), Dm (-14.7+/-4.8, ES=-0.61) and V90 (-15.3+/-4.7, ES=-0.66) remained significantly reduced. The STM also induced significant changes of large practical relevance in CK, DOMS, PPC and MS pre to post-training and after the recovery period. The markers Td and Tc remained unaffected throughout the STM. Moreover, the accuracy of selected markers for assessment of fatigue and recovery in relation to 1RMest derived from a contingency table was inadequate. Correlational analyses also revealed no significant relationships between changes in 1RMest and all analyzed markers. In conclusion, mean changes of performance markers and CK, DOMS, PPC and MS may be attributed to STM-induced fatigue and subsequent recovery. However, given the insufficient accuracy of markers for differentiation between fatigue and recovery, their potential applicability needs to be confirmed at the individual level.

Can happiness impact performance? Former Professional golfer and President of New Edge Performance, John Haime explains how putting enjoyment before achievement can maximise performance.

… Some great research in decision making tries to go beyond simple bias phenomenon and ask what underlying choice is being optimised by our cognitive architecture. This approach gives us the Simple Heuristics Which Make Us Smart of Gerd Gigerenzer (which Taleb definitely knows about since he was a visiting fellow in Gigerenzer’s lab), as well as work which shows that people estimate risks differently if they experience the outcomes rather than being told about them, work which shows that our perceptual-motor system (which is often characterised as an optimal decision maker) has the same amount of bias as our more cognitive decisions; and work which shows that other animals, with less cognitive/representational capacity, make analogues of many classic decision making errors. This is where the interesting work in decision making is happening, and it all very much takes account of the wider context of individual decisions. So saying that the entire field missed the point seems…odd.

Wisconsin-Whitewater is a Division III football powerhouse, and thanks to a new performance center, their facilities are now going to look the part as well.

A release from the University notes that the “project is a comprehensive renovation of the Perkins Stadium service building that will fulfill the needs of today’s student-athlete and help carry Warhawk Football into the next era.” The current facility is about 40 years old and has not undergone any significant renovations or additions.

Areas that the new facility will vastly improve upon include things as simple as air conditioning, and stretch all the way into treatment and rehab space for injuries and ventilation for the locker room.

The Milwaukee Common Council unanimously approved a zoning change necessary for Marquette University to proceed with its planned $120 million athletic performance research center.

Atlanta United unveiled its plans for a $60-million “world-class” training complex on Franklin Gateway in Cobb County on Monday. Team owner Arthur Blank said the complex, in combination with Mercedes-Benz Stadium, will make Atlanta the soccer capital of the southeast and nation.

Construction on the 30,000-square foot center will be completed by April 2017. The six fields — three grass and three artificial — are scheduled to be finished by January 2017. The team’s training camp for its inaugural season will start near the end of January. Because of the construction schedule, the team will likely attend MLS preseason training camps out of town until things are finished.

Super Bowl champions and Purdue football legends Bob Griese, Keena Turner, Drew Brees and Rosevelt Colvin had the attention of an estimated crowd of 300 inside Mollenkopf Athletic Center on Friday night.

But so did current players who have yet to experience the level of success those guys did as Boilermakers.

Guys like Jake Replogle, who talked about how much additional time football players spend making long treks from the parking lot to the football facilities, then having to go to Mackey Arena to see the medical staff, walk back uphill to catch the bus to class, ride it back and only then do you grab your pads and head to the practice fields, back in the direction you just came from.

Purdue’s Football Performance Complex will eliminate a lot of that lost time wandering to multiple locations for a common purpose.

… One way Clemson is figuratively building toward long-term success is by literally building a new football team center. Expected to open in February 2017, Clemson’s new complex attached to the existing indoor practice facility will centralize football team activities and give the Tigers another recruiting tool at their disposal.

Clemson has also been building for its basketball teams with the renovation of Littlejohn Coliseum. After a year of the men playing home games in Greenville and the women playing home games in Jervey Gym, Littlejohn is on track to reopen this fall.

We examined whether carbohydrate-protein ingestion influences muscle glycogen metabolism during short-term recovery from exhaustive treadmill running and subsequent exercise. Six endurance-trained individuals underwent two trials in a randomised double-blind design, each involving an initial run-to-exhaustion at 70% VO2max (Run-1) followed by 4-h recovery (REC) and subsequent run-to-exhaustion at 70% VO2max (Run-2). Carbohydrate-protein (CHO-P; 0.8 g carbohydrate·kg body mass [BM-1]·h-1 plus 0.4 g protein·kg BM-1·h-1) or isocaloric carbohydrate (CHO; 1.2 g carbohydrate·kg BM-1·h-1) beverages were ingested at 30-min intervals during recovery. Muscle biopsies were taken upon cessation of Run-1, post-recovery and fatigue in Run-2. Time-to-exhaustion in Run-1 was similar with CHO and CHO-P (81±17 and 84±19 min, respectively). Muscle glycogen concentrations were similar between treatments after Run-1 (99±3 mmol·kg dry mass [dm-1]). During REC, muscle glycogen concentrations increased to 252±45 mmol·kg dm-1 in CHO and 266±30 mmol·kg dm-1 in CHO-P (p= 0.44). Muscle glycogen degradation during Run-2 was similar between trials (3.3±1.4 versus 3.5±1.9 mmol·kg dm-1·min-1 in CHO and CHO-P, respectively) and no differences were observed at the respective points of exhaustion (93±21 versus 100±11 mmol·kg dm-1·min-1; CHO and CHO-P, respectively). Similarly, time-to-exhaustion was not different between treatments in Run-2 (51±13 and 49±15 min in CHO and CHO-P, respectively). Carbohydrate-protein ingestion equally accelerates muscle glycogen resynthesis during short-term recovery from exhaustive running as when 1.2 g carbohydrate·kg BM-1··h-1 are ingested. The addition of protein did not alter muscle glycogen utilisation or time to fatigue during repeated exhaustive running.

Canadian snowboarder Ross Rebagliati never expected to be a sporting pioneer, but he unwittingly became one when he won, lost, and regained his Olympic gold medal for men’s snowboarding at the 1998 Winter Games.

Rebagliati, an advocate of marijuana use, said he had stopped smoking 10 months before the Olympics but a small amount of Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) was discovered in a post-competition urine test—due to secondhand smoke, he said. He was stripped of his medal but won it back on appeal.

That medal is now sitting inside a trophy he won on the Gold Cup tour, but Rebagliati has moved on, launching a medical marijuana dispensary—Ross’ Gold, appropriately enough—where he lives in Kelowna, British Columbia, with his wife and three children.

Avery Bradley is not actually this good, but he is uniquely important to Boston’s specific collection of puzzle pieces. The Celtics’ Game 2 letdown in Atlanta laid it bare: For a team built on the synergy and ferocity of its depth, sometimes it only takes one injury for everything to crumble.

The relationship between team size and productivity is a question of broad relevance across economics, psychology, and management science. For complex tasks, however, where both the potential benefits and costs of coordinated work increase with the number of workers, neither theoretical arguments nor empirical evidence consistently favor larger vs. smaller teams. Experimental findings, meanwhile, have relied on small groups and highly stylized tasks, hence are hard to generalize to realistic settings. Here we narrow the gap between real-world task complexity and experimental control, reporting results from an online experiment in which 47 teams of size ranging from n = 1 to 32 collaborated on a realistic crisis mapping task. We find that individuals in teams exerted lower overall effort than independent workers, in part by allocating their effort to less demanding (and less productive) sub-tasks; however, we also find that individuals in teams collaborated more with increasing team size. Directly comparing these competing effects, we find that the largest teams outperformed an equivalent number of independent workers, suggesting that gains to collaboration dominated losses to effort. Importantly, these teams also performed comparably to a field deployment of crisis mappers, suggesting that experiments of the type described here can help solve practical problems as well as advancing the science of collective intelligence.