Applied Sports Science newsletter – April 26, 2016

Pat Davison meets Riyad Mahrez ahead of the Super Sunday clash between Leicester and West Ham – and discovers that one of the Premier League’s best players still approaches each game as if he’s playing on the streets…

At the end of every single Tottenham Hotspur training session, Mauricio Pochettino goes to an office at the club’s state-of-the-art base in Enfield, wanting to make sure he can really believe what he is seeing.

The Argentine manager spends about half-an-hour with his analysts, scrutinising the squad’s minutely tracked physical performance stats that come in from GPS vests and other technological innovations. If any of the players drop below the demanded levels, they are told in fairly severe terms and dropped, often with an icy tone that is very different to that given off by the likeable figure Pochettino cuts in his press conferences.

Right now, those figures are not ­dropping. Many are actually ­improving. The whole team are running more, building up steam, coming for Leicester City like an express train.

In hockey, a sport whose arena sound systems blare “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting” and “No More Mr. Nice Guy,” a competitive edge may be found in a lullaby.

Like other major professional teams, N.H.L. franchises are paying closer attention to the quality and quantity of their players’ sleep across a grueling 82-game schedule. It is particularly demanding for some Western Conference teams, which can log upward of 50,000 miles in the air each season.

“Over all, there is growing interest in sleep from teams across all the leagues as proper sleep is frequently sacrificed and overlooked,” said Cheri Mah, a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco. “However, it can have a significant impact on peak performance and overall health. In my opinion, it is one of the most untapped areas of sports performance.”

Manchester United’s Tony Strudwick leads an all-star panel in providing the most current research on soccer. Soccer Science features the world’s leading experts in soccer history, biomechanics, physiology, psychology, skill acquisition, coaching, tactical approaches, and performance and match analysis.

Paper book available in June 2016.

The aim of the present study was to examine the reliability of a novel multi-direction repeated sprint ability (RSA) test [RSM; 10 × (6 × 5-m)] compared with a RSA with one change of direction [10 × (2 × 15-m)], and the relationship of the RSM and RSA with Yo-Yo intermittent recovery test level 1 (Yo-Yo IR1) and jump performances [squat jump (SJ) and counter-movement-jump (CMJ)]. Thirty-six (male, n = 14, female n = 22) young basketball players (age 16.0 ± 0.9 yrs) performed the RSM, RSA, Yo-Yo IR1, SJ, and CMJ, and were re-tested only for RSM and RSA after 1 week. The absolute error of reliability (standard error of the measurement) was lower than 0.212 and 0.617-s for the time variables of the RSA and RSM test, respectively. Performance in the RSA and RSM test significantly correlated with CMJ and SJ. The best time, worst time, and total time of the RSA and RSM test were negatively correlated with Yo-Yo IR1 distance. Based on these findings, consistent with previously published studies, it was concluded that the novel RSM test was valid and reliable.

Large-scale organizational change has always been difficult, and there’s no shortage of research showing that a majority of transformations continue to fail. Today’s dynamic environment adds an extra level of urgency and complexity. Companies must increasingly react to sudden shifts in the marketplace, to other external shocks, and to the imperatives of new business models. The stakes are higher than ever.

So what’s to be done? In both research and practice, we find that transformations stand the best chance of success when they focus on four key actions to change mind-sets and behavior: fostering understanding and conviction, reinforcing changes through formal mechanisms, developing talent and skills, and role modeling.

The answer to the question ‘When does the future begin?’ – which, by the way, is not right now – matters because humans are attuned to focus on the ‘right now’ situation. This is not a flaw. Failure to focus on the opportunities and obstacles in the moment can be dangerous. From an evolutionary perspective, humans around today all descended from ancestors who paid attention in the moment, and hence, didn’t become meals for any predator straying into their path while pondering future goals.

At the same time, the future is often on our minds. Much of everyday life has meaning in large part because of what the present implies for the self one might become. Homework is meaningful as a step toward a future self, otherwise it would be mostly a chore to be shirked. Getting good grades, staying healthy, or saving for retirement typically require acting in the present and continuing to act over time. What we need to keep going in the face of adversity is to make the future self feel it is in the here-and-now, connected rather than irrelevant to the present self, permitting us to keep going in the face of adversity.

In a series of experiments and in a school-based brief intervention, my lab has shown that our sense of where the future begins can, in fact, be altered to enhance what we call ‘identity-based motivation’.

Huddersfield Town have a new sports science specialist, Dr John Iga, on board.

A former head of sports science at the Football Association, the 36-year-old will become the Championship club’s newly-created head of performance services.

Research shows that the appropriate integration of resistance training into the endurance athlete’s training can result in significantly better performance when compared to classic endurance training plans that focus only on aerobic endurance.

The United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded HRL Laboratories LLC (Malibu, Calif.) a $4.3 million contract to develop vibration- and shock-tolerant inertial sensor technology.

The Atlas project is attempting to meet future system accuracy needs without using GPS.

Military missions typically rely on global positioning by satellite (GPS) for positioning, location and timing information. GPS can provide sub-meter accuracy in optimal conditions but signals can be lost due to natural interference, or malicious jamming.

The Atlas project will combine a MEMS Coriolis vibratory gyroscope (CVG) sensor with an atomically-stable frequency reference to exploit the intrinsic accuracy of the atomic hyperfine transition frequency.

The wearables market is still relatively early in its evolution, as far as clinically validated technologies are concerned. But the ambitions for this space only seem to be limited by the imagination of developers balanced by the practical realities of cost and production capabilities. Entrepreneurs who come into healthcare from other industries also offer a unique perspective of what’s needed and how they can deliver it.

For BeBop Sensors CEO Keith McMillen, the music business isn’t as far away from producing fabrics embedded with sensors as it sounds. McMillen shared his thoughts in a phone interview after the company filed an amended Form D filing on the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s website showing it has raised a little less than $1 million in the past year, totaling more than $4.4 million to date.

… “First of all, what do we mean by burnout?” asks Connolly.

“When I hear discussion about hip surgeries or groin surgeries for young players referring to those as burnout, that’s inaccurate. That’s not burnout. Those are overuse injuries. An overuse injury is physical abuse of an athlete.

“Burnout is fatigue-related, and usually a psycho-physiological fatigue. I don’t have numbers for this, and the numbers aren’t readily available, but you hear anecdotally of managers, inheriting a team, and finding out straightaway the number of surgeries needed in the squad are in double digits, and his league preparations are disrupted from the start. If this is the case then that’s abuse of inter-county players through poor training programmes — but it’s not burnout.

The former Broncos’ quarterback and other retired and active NFL players believe Cannabidiol, or CBD, a nonpsychoactive compound in cannabis, could be an alternative to potent painkillers used by players in the league.

Inside a buzzing arena, Chris Carr left his seat in pursuit of a noise closer to silence. He entered the Indiana Pacers’ locker room inside the Air Canada Centre last week with less than six minutes left in Game 1 of the team’s first-round playoff series against the Toronto Raptors. Carr was in the room alone.

He muted the TV to not let the broadcasters distract or influence him. He opened his Spalding NBA leather notepad portfolio. With a pen, Carr, the Pacers’ performance psychologist, took notes on his white legal pad. He wanted to study the team’s body language, actions and performance at the most critical time.

Carr watches the team unlike anyone else in the Pacers’ organization.

“I look for things like, do players stay relaxed or do they get tight?” Carr said two weeks ago as the Pacers began preparations for the postseason. “I can see that. Do they communicate? Do their heads drop? Do they maintain a brisk pace? Do they maintain a state of alertness?”

Intuition in data science is a funny thing.

On one hand, the whole point of data science is to avoid relying on the highest paid person’s opinion (HIPPO).

On the other hand, data scientists are prized for product sense, skepticism, and other attributes that sound a lot like intuition.

So what gives? Should data scientists rely on intuition? Or should they channel their inner Spock and strive to insist that logic trumps emotion?