Applied Sports Science newsletter – April 25, 2016

A little before 5 a.m. each day, in a small village in western Kenya, one of the world’s most talented marathoners rolls out of bed, slowly shakes the sleep from his eyes and gets ready to run—fast.

By the time Eliud Kipchoge breaks into stride at 5:50 a.m., the sun has yet to rise over the dusty, ochre-red roads of Kaptagat. At least a dozen others run with him, hoping if they do what he does, then maybe—just maybe—they can become what he is: a champion.

Lehigh University isn’t exactly a breeding ground for NBA talent. Then again, 5-foot-2, 108-lb. high school freshmen generally don’t get blue chip college recruiters buzzing, let alone Division 1 basketball programs.

But the journey of Canton, Ohio, native C.J. McCollum from small-school collegiate phenom to budding NBA superstar is hardly conventional.

… Next week, the Buckeyes will take a crack at breaking their own 12-year-old record for players selected from a single school in a single year (14) in a seven-round draft. They have an outside shot, too, at Miami’s record for first-round picks in a single draft (six, also set in 2004). Among the group, there are fifth-year seniors, true seniors and redshirt juniors, guys who went through the more traditional college-to-the-pros process.

But the core of the Buckeyes’ blue-chip haul lies in the 2013 recruiting class, of which Bosa and Lee are a part. And like Meyer did, those two eventually get to what’s at the heart of what took them from Point A (high school recruit) to Point B (NFL prospect) so quickly.

“Winner/loser day!!!” Lee bellowed, imitating strength coach and Meyer confidant Mickey Marotti. “You gotta bring your ‘A’ game.”

Subjectively, vision is a rich sensory experience. But psychologists know it’s an experience built out of surprisingly little information: Our eyes’ ability to perceive details isn’t infinite, and even if it were, we couldn’t pay attention to everything at once. So how do we make the leap? According to a new opinion in Trends in Cognitive Science, we do it with averages and statistical ensembles.

There are countless experiments that demonstrate what we see is not the same as what’s in front of us. There’s inattentional blindness, in which we fail to even register usual objects passing through a scene. There’s also the fact that, shown a picture of a picket fence with the points cut off and then asked to draw what was in the picture, most people will still draw in the points. Somehow, our brains remove some things from our conscious perception, while filling absent details in others.

Can economic principles inform player management?

Cost-benefit analysis is a term often heard in the world of economics. Businesses seek to maximise profits by comparing the costs and benefits of a proposed venture. Cost-benefit analysis is a valuable analytical technique that can also inform decisions in the clinical sports medicine setting. Specifically, cost-benefit analysis provides a useful framework to quantify the relationship between the ‘benefit’ of improved performance from a given training load, and the associated ‘cost’ of increased injury risk.

Driving east along Highway 401 from this handsome old city of 366,000, tracing another Thames upriver, leads to Toronto in about two hours. Head west, through a landscape of flat, featureless farmland, and the Detroit skyline appears in even less time.

The remaining 28 N.H.L. franchises, scattered in cities across North America, scarcely seem farther away for the teenagers playing here for the London Knights, a junior team in the Ontario Hockey League that is a leading incubator for pro prospects.

“It’s no secret what London does here,” said 18-year-old Max Jones, a rugged 6-foot-3 forward from Rochester, Mich., and one of three Knights ranked among the top 15 North American skaters last week by N.H.L. Central Scouting, a department that rates prospects for the draft.

At the 2016 Science and Triathlon Conference, held at the National Institute of Sport and Physical Education in France, French sports scientist Romauld Lepers spoke about how mental fatigue affects performance.

He focused heavily on professor Samuele Marcora’s psychobiological model of fatigue. “Marcora says that we stop or slow down when we have either exerted the maximum effort we are willing to exert for success – in other words, lack of motivation limits us – or we believe we have exerted our maximal possible effort – in other words, our perception of effort limits us,” explained Lepers. This conflicts with the classic physiological model of fatigue that says you begin to work back through the gears when either lactic acid rises or you run out of glycogen (energy).

In just our fourth session together, Steve was already beginning to sound discouraged. It was Thursday of the first week of an experiment that I had expected to last for two or three months, but from what Steve was telling me, it might not make much sense to go on. “There appears to be a limit for me somewhere around eight or nine digits,” he told me, his words captured by the tape recorder that ran throughout each of our sessions. “With nine digits especially, it’s very difficult to get regardless of what pattern I use—you know, my own kind of strategies. It really doesn’t matter what I use—it seems very difficult to get.”

Steve, an undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon University, where I was teaching at the time, had been hired to come in several times a week and work on a simple task: memorizing strings of numbers. I would read him a series of digits at a rate of about one per second—“Seven … four … zero … one … one … nine …” and so on—and Steve would try to remember them all and repeat them back to me once I was done. One goal was simply to see how much Steve could improve with practice. Now, after four of the hour-long sessions, he could reliably recall seven-digit strings—the length of a local phone number—and he usually got the eight-digit strings right, but nine digits was hit or miss, and he had never managed to remember a 10-digit string at all. And at this point, given his frustrating experience over the first few sessions, he was pretty sure that he wasn’t going to get any better.

What Steve didn’t know—but I did—was that pretty much all of psychological science at the time indicated that he was right.

Kieran Gibbs says that sports science has changed the face of football.

The defender has been at Arsenal for more than a decade and has seen how the game has progressed on and off the pitch.

“I think it [sport science] has changed dramatically over the last couple of years,” Gibbs told Arsenal Player. “You can see all the changes in the training ground and the big impact it has had on all the clubs over the world.

Thousands of people graced the streets of London to run the annual marathon on Sunday, April 23. Runners spent weeks and months physically training alongside a carefully crafted diet plan to get them in top shape ahead of the big day.

With any marathon or long distance not only is physical preparation important but it is also crucial to prepare mentally for the gruelling number of miles. Because running a marathon is not just about the body – the mind also matters quite a bit as well.

Training your mind for a marathon might sound a bit odd, but preparing mentally is really no different to preparing physically. Just as you would prepare your body, it’s equally important to prepare your mind for the inevitable mental challenges.

The purpose of this article is to provide a framework for developing a sports nutrition education program in a collegiate athletic department. A review of literature on student-athlete nutrition behaviors is combined with practical suggestions from personnel who wrote a sports nutrition curriculum at a large Midwestern university. There are 2 primary implications for practice. First, maintaining a written curriculum and conducting periodic evaluation are fundamental aspects of sports nutrition education programs. Second, better documentation of program outcomes is needed to establish best practices in collegiate sports nutrition education and demonstrate the value of full-time sports registered dietitians.

While traditional approaches to dietary analysis in athletes have focused on total daily energy and macronutrient intake, it is now thought that daily distribution of these parameters can also influence training adaptations. Using seven-day food diaries, we quantified the total daily macronutrient intake and distribution in elite youth soccer players from the English Premier League in U18 (n=13), U15/16 (n=25) and U13/14 squads (n=21). Total energy (43.1±10.3, 32.6±7.9, 28.1±6.8 kcal·kg-1·day-1), CHO (6±1.2, 4.7±1.4, 3.2±1.3 g·kg-1·day-1) and fat (1.3±0.5, 0.9±0.3, 0.9±0.3 g·kg-1·day-1) intake exhibited hierarchical differences (PU15/16>U18. Additionally, CHO intake in U18s was lower (P<0.05) at breakfast, dinner and snacks when compared with both squads but no differences were apparent at lunch. Furthermore, the U15/16s reported lower relative daily protein intake than the U13/14s and U18s (1.6±0.3 vs. 2.2±0.5, 2.0±0.3 g·kg-1). A skewed distribution (P lunch (~0.5 g·kg-1) > breakfast (~0.3 g·kg-1). We conclude elite youth soccer players do not meet current CHO guidelines. Although daily protein targets are achieved, we report a skewed daily distribution in all ages such that dinner>lunch>breakfast. Our data suggest that dietary advice for elite youth players should focus on both total daily macronutrient intake and optimal daily distribution patterns.

While many of us have heard of omega-3-fatty acids being great for heart health, more and more research is demonstrating omega-3s benefits for athletic purposes as well. What are some of those benefits, and how do you increase your omega-3 consumption? Read on to find out.

One of the biggest athletic benefits of consuming a diet higher in omega-3s is a quicker recovery time. Most athletes like to “feel the burn” to some extent, but no one likes being sore for too long. Omega-3s help fight inflammation, which can help decrease muscle soreness after a workout. Not only does the decrease in inflammation help with decreasing muscle soreness, but it also helps improve tissue repair, another important aspect of recovery.

Athletes need protein to maximize performance—that much we all know. But when it comes to the specific types to consume, how much to consume, and when to consume them, things are less clear-cut to athletes.

The use of dietary protein for performance gains has an interesting and controversial history. From early gym lore suggesting athletes take in as much as possible to the protein dissuasion that occasionally surfaced in the 1990s and early 2000s, few nutrients have been accompanied by such mixed messages.

The truth lies somewhere in the middle and evolves as we discover more about the role of protein.

IN 2015, the Sonoma Stompers, the team with one of the lowest payrolls in the Pacific Association, a professional baseball league near San Francisco, did something desperate: It handed its baseball-operations department to a couple of stat-savvy writers with no baseball-management experience, Ben Lindbergh and me.

We are devotees of the statistical school known as Sabermetrics, a word coined by Bill James and made mainstream by “Moneyball.” In short, number crunching. What we lacked in experience we made up for with a long paper trail of claims about how baseball teams should be run.

Theo Fightmaster, the Stompers general manager, hired us. In spring training, he introduced Ben, a writer for the website FiveThirtyEight, and me as “experts in statistical analysis.” We addressed the players and laid out our goals for the season: to lead the league in the first half, and in the second half, to go undefeated.