Applied Sports Science newsletter – April 30, 2016

… What Drummond has, and others near-300 pounders lack, is freakish athleticism that allows him to reach towering heights faster than anybody. But that’s only the beginning of it. More to the point: What Drummond has worked to develop — including terrific reaction time and elite neuroprocessing — might be the most mechanically perfect body in the NBA.

And the science proves it.

… It wasn’t supposed to be this way for Buxton. For all the talk about baseball being a game of failure, prolonged struggles like this aren’t easy for anyone, let alone a player so incomparably talented that Baseball America ranked him the top prospect in the sport in 2014, ahead of Carlos Correa, Kris Bryant, and Noah Syndergaard. But, right now, this is Buxton’s reality.

“It’s a tough game, man,” Buxton told VICE Sports at his locker before the game on Sunday afternoon. “I don’t pay too much attention to what goes on on social media or what people say. I just focus on what I can do and what I’m here to do.” Which, lest we forget, is hit: Buxton was called up to the majors with great fanfare last June, at the age of 21, more or less to be the savior of a Twins franchise that found itself muddling through a division dominated by the Royals. At the time, they were neither good enough to contend with the eventual world champs nor bad enough to conduct a full teardown and rebuild; the idea was that Buxton could be the difference. Those weren’t fair expectations in the least, but the Twins weren’t in the mood to worry much about that.

… Brad Stevens still hasn’t won a single NBA playoff series, yet he is already regarded as a coach whisperer, a superior tactician with the unruffled demeanor of a grizzled graybeard. He has drawn multiple comparisons to the gold standard of NBA coaching, Gregg Popovich of the Spurs, who playfully suggests Stevens could pass for a senior in high school.

In a league in which most coaches are bit players, a key question emerges: How has Brad Stevens emerged as one of the NBA’s most valued talents?

U.S. women’s soccer star Julie Johnston joins Lunch Break and discusses how she is preparing for her first Olympics in Rio this summer.

… How does a player who drew a predraft comparison to Luc Richard Mbah a Moute and Gerald Wallace as a best-case scenario become one of the most accurate shooters in the league, overall and from long range?

Enter Spurs shooting coach Chip Engelland.

His reputation as the league’s premier “shot doctor” borders on legendary. Portland Trail Blazers assistant general manager Bill Branch, a scout for the Denver Nuggets when Engelland was the team’s director of player development from 2003 to 2005, had an up-close look at the master’s techniques.

I just gave the first interview on our coach education process here at Sparta, mentioning the 3 areas of competency we seek to objectively develop with each of our staff; tactical, technical, and emotional intelligence. I am not sure if this topic was the intention of the sports technology writer, or if the topic just shifted in this direction by my comment early in the discussion,”The field of sports performance and strength & conditioning was better off 10 years ago.” This comment was in reference to the technology growth in sports without the accompanying growth of emotional intelligence by coaches and sports personnel. Unfortunately, the value of technical expertise is overshadowing the tactical and emotional abilities needed for athlete and organizational success. This hyper-focus on technology is taking away from the emphasis that used to be placed on the relationship development. It is these relationships with athletes and personnel that determine your role within the team culture, and the efficacy of your career.

NBA coaching legend, 5x NBA champion and 3x NBA coach of the year, goes through the philosophy system basics of his San Antonio Spurs. A must watch for all basketball enthusiasts!

Interview with Tony Strudwick, Head of Performance at Manchester United FC.

Listen to a discussion on selling sports science to coaches, training athletes not spreadsheets, being a better practitioner, reducing noise for the self-managing athlete, managing transitions of managers, and the next big thing.

In a space that once served as the Peterson Gym concession stand, Zylan Cheatham, clad only in shorts and sneakers, looks infinitely more like The Six Million Dollar Man than San Diego State power forward.

Affixed to Cheatham’s body are 75 reflective markers positioned to work in tandem with 16 infrared cameras. Part of a 3D motion capture system common to all video games, the cameras will catalog Cheatham’s every move as he performs four sports-specific tasks measuring not only forces acting upon the body, but also serving to identify precursors to potential injury.

Over the course of the next 60 minutes, the cameras will generate more than 19,000 images of Cheatham’s movements as he squats, hops, jumps and undergoes balance testing atop a series of five force plates, each costing approximately $15,000.

This is the science of sports biomechanics, or the physics of sports. A collaboration between academics and athletics, the idea to turn a former hot dog stand into a rehabilitation biomechanics lab was hatched last spring when Sara Gombatto, an assistant professor in the university’s Doctor of Physical Therapy program, met with Tom Abdenour, SDSU’s head athletic trainer.

If you were reading a health or medical journal, you might suspect the acronym SIT had something to do with obesity and sedentary lifestyles. It doesn’t, at least not directly. SIT stands for “Sprint Interval Training,” and it’s become a hot topic in discussions of efficient exercise and healthier lifestyles.

Interest in SIT reached a new high this week with publication of the latest study by Martin Gibala, Ph.D., an expert in muscle metabolism, and colleagues from McMaster University. The new paper received additional coverage in the New York Times.

Gibala has been at the forefront of SIT investigations for the last decade. (SIT is also known as High Intensity Training, HIT, and High Intensity Interval Training, HIIT.) His new paper, published by PLOS One, has a says-it-all title: “Twelve Weeks of Sprint Interval Training Improves Indices of Cardiometabolic Health Similar to Traditional Endurance Training despite a Five-Fold Lower Exercise Volume and Time Commitment.”

Kitman Labs, Silicon Valley’s leading sports science technology company, today announced that The South African Rugby Union (SARU), the governing body for rugby in South Africa has partnered with Kitman Labs to use its cloud-based data collection and analytics tools to turn data into real-time actionable insights to reduce player injuries and optimize athlete performance.

Sports have come a long way since the days of Rocky Balboa drinking raw eggs, chasing chickens and punching huge pieces of beef in a meat locker.

Advances in nutrition and exercise science have created the strongest, fastest, best-rested athletes in history. Increasingly, technology is playing a role in helping athletes to fine-tune their performance. Mirroring the move away from paper in other workplaces, digital playbooks have gradually replaced bulky binders in locker rooms. Teams are equipping their players with wearable devices that provide insights into their health and performance. And teams are poring over advanced data analytics in search of a competitive edge.

Sports teams will always be only as good as their players, but technology is helping to make those players better. As teams explore these advances, they need to deploy foundational technologies such as networking, storage, power and cooling and security to support them.

Most of us have non-optimal blood glucose regulation today.
The impact? Reduced performance, and reduced longevity. We wrongly assume that it’s only diabetics that are exposed to these issues. This episode explores using continuous glucose monitoring and other tech to optimize blood sugar through the eyes of a diabetic self-experimenter. [audio, 1:17:55]

When the weather outside is scorching and you’re feeling weak and fatigued, what you need might not be more water, but more salt.

“The biggest problem that we see with athletes all the time is people drinking too much, not people drinking not enough,” says Andy Blow, cofounder of Precision Hydration, a U.K.-based company which advises athletes on the amount of electrolytes they need to be consuming along with that water. “Hyponatremia—when you dilute your blood sodium levels—that’s the real issue.” (Hyponatremia is a potentially life-threatening condition that can cause fatigue, cramping, nausea, seizures, and coma.)

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have developed an incredible light, flexible, and fast new type of transistor that could very well power the future of wearable technology.

This transistor operates at a record 38 gigahertz, with simulations showing that it could reach speeds of as much as 110 gigahertz. This puts them on part with even some of the fastest computers.

Trail runners, basketball players and high-heel aficionados have something in common: increased risk for ankle sprains and related injuries. That’s because uneven surfaces (characteristic of trail running and high heels) and lateral movement (basketball) are common ankle-injury culprits.

But they’re not the only ones, says Lee Firestone, a marathoner, District-based podiatrist and sports-medicine specialist at Foot and Ankle Specialists of the Mid-Atlantic. Foot type, inadequate shoes, excessive range of motion, obesity and lack of core strength also contribute to problematic ankles.

When our core muscles are weak — particularly the gluteal muscles — we internally rotate legs and feet, or pronate, Firestone says. This is even more likely for people with weak or low arches. Pronation puts us at risk for posterior tibial tendon dysfunction – the tearing or partial tearing of the tendon on the inside of the ankle. It’s not technically a sprain, but that’s what many laymen call it.

It has been more than 15 years since To Err Is Human, the landmark report by the Institute of Medicine (IOM), revealed the substantial morbidity and mortality related to medical errors in the United States. Two recent developments have refocused policy makers on getting patient safety right. The first are data suggesting that deaths associated with medical errors may exceed 400,000 annually, although this number is controversial, with questions about the degree to which medical errors truly caused each of these deaths and how many deaths were attributable to a medical error when death was inevitable. Regardless, medical error is likely a major cause of death and disability in the United States. The second is the Affordable Care Act, which has, through programs like Value-Based Purchasing and Hospital-Acquired Conditions penalties, made patient safety a financial priority for hospitals. While greater focus on safety is a welcome development, there is little reason to believe that added attention alone will lead to safer care. Why? Because the health care industry lacks valid patient safety measures, which are fundamental to improvement. Without these measures, the key ingredient in these efforts is missing: systematic, real-time data on adverse events with timely feedback to clinicians and health care organizations. Without effective measurement and reporting, progress in patient safety will be arduous and slow.

Whether meaningful progress has occurred within patient safety is controversial. The Obama Administration’s internal evaluations suggest modest improvement on a subset of patient safety measures. Despite some questions about these findings, mostly due to a lack of a valid approach to measurement and evaluation, there is no disagreement that policy makers should do more to improve safety measurement.

A new survey has revealed the scope of mental health problems in professional soccer: one in three players has reported symptoms of depression. DW spoke to a former footballer who is now committed to tackling the stigma surrounding mental illness.

A relatively new KT strategy to support EIP is the use of a knowledge broker. A knowledge broker is an intermediary who bridges the gap between evidence and practice and functions as a catalyst to link researchers, clinicians, and decision makers to facilitate co-creation or synthesis, translation, dissemination, and implementation of evidence to change practice. Essentially, the knowledge broker’s main roles are to act as an: 1) information manager 2) linking agent 3) capacity builder 4) facilitator and 5) evaluator … An example of the KB role in successfully transforming knowledge to “make it more useable” is the Achilles Tendinopathy Toolkit (http://physicaltherapy.med.ubc.ca/physical-therapy-knowledge-broker/tendinopathy-toolkit/). Co-created with research and clinical experts, and recently updated to include new literature, the toolkit includes: (1) a summary of the evidence, clinical implications and ‘take home messages’ for nonpharmacologic interventions such as manual therapy, exercise, low level laser therapy, orthotics, shock wave, ultrasound, taping etc; (2) an algorithm to guide the sequence of interventions; (3) and appendices including (a) exercise programmes (b) low level laser dosage calculation (c) tabulated details for each article reviewed and (d) a review of common medical interventions. It has been accessed over 85,000 times by therapists throughout the world.

Objective To systematically review the evidence base related to hamstring strength and flexibility in previously injured hamstrings.

Design Systematic review and meta-analysis.

Data sources A systematic literature search was conducted of PubMed, CINAHL, SPORTDiscus, Cochrane Library, Web of Science and EMBASE from inception to August 2015.

Inclusion criteria Full-text English articles which included studies which assessed at least one measure of hamstring strength or flexibility in men and women with prior hamstring strain injury within 24?months of the testing date.

Results Twenty-eight studies were included in the review. Previously injured legs demonstrated deficits across several variables. Lower isometric strength was found <7?days postinjury (d=?1.72), but this did not persist beyond 7?days after injury. The passive straight leg raise was restricted at multiple time points after injury (<10?days, d=?1.12; 10–20?days, d=?0.74; 20–30?days, d=?0.40), but not after 40–50?days postinjury. Deficits remained after return to play in isokinetically measured concentric (60°/s, d=?0.33) and Nordic eccentric knee flexor strength (d=?0.39). The conventional hamstring to quadricep strength ratios were also reduced well after return to play (60:60°/s, d=?0.32; 240:240°/s, d=?0.43) and functional (30:240°/s, d=?0.88), but these effects were inconsistent across measurement methods.

Conclusions After hamstring strain, acute isometric and passive straight leg raise deficits resolve within 20–50?days. Deficits in eccentric and concentric strength and strength ratios persist after return to play, but this effect was inconsistent across measurement methods. Flexibility and isometric strength should be monitored throughout rehabilitation, but dynamic strength should be assessed at and following return to play.

… On crossing the finish line, the temptation to go straight to bed or head to the pub for a few beers and a slap up meal will be strong. But while it is important to enjoy your achievement and indulge in a treat or two, a few nutrition tips will go a long way in helping you to feel less sore and move more freely in the days after the marathon.

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If you’re anything like me, you’re not the best at keeping track of the food you eat and the effects that food could have on your health. After all, sometimes it’s hard to imagine what the food we’re eating actually does to the body, making it easier to just eat what takes less time to make. One company, however, hopes to change that.

That company is Taav Tech, and it has come up with a device called Modus. Modus is basically a portable nutrition scale that connects to your phone and helps you understand what you’re eating and what that means for your health. It helps you quickly and easily track your calorie intake, without having to constantly go over labels on the packaging for the food you buy.

Generations of mothers have taught their children to eat slowly and chew food thoroughly. As it turns out, moms aren’t only trying to prevent stomachaches, indigestion, and choking. They’re also encouraging healthy eating habits from a young age.

Healthy eating isn’t just about what you eat. It’s about how you eat. Wolfing down food, a common practice in our fast-paced, technological society, doesn’t just take away from the enjoyment of food. It can lead to a host of problems, including obesity and diabetes.

It is the position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (Academy), Dietitians of Canada (DC) and the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) that the performance of, and recovery from, sporting activities are enhanced by well-chosen nutrition strategies. These organizations provide guidelines for the appropriate type, amount, and timing of intake of food, fluids, and supplements to promote optimal health and performance across different scenarios of training and competitive sport. This position paper was prepared for members of the Academy, DC and ACSM, other professional associations, government agencies, industry, and the public. It outlines the Academy’s, DC’s and ACSM’s stance on nutrition factors that have been determined to influence athletic performance and emerging trends in the field of sports nutrition. Athletes should be referred to a registered dietitian nutritionist for a personalized nutrition plan. In the United States and in Canada, the Certified Specialist in Sports Dietetics is a registered dietitian nutritionist and a credentialed sports nutrition expert.

It’s Monday morning and Tim Crawford is sitting in his office mulling over the New England Revolution’s weekend match. But he’s not just relaxing, relishing in a win or heartbroken by a loss. He’s busy preparing a report that will help his coaching staff evaluate the team’s most recent performance.

It’s one of two such reports that he will produce over the course of the week, with the other one detailing the Revolution’s upcoming opponent tendencies.

He will then discuss the content of those reports with team president Brian Bilello, general manager Michael Burns and the Revolution coaching staff, including head coach Jay Heaps.

When monumental change occurs in organized football, the handful of smart teams that catch on fast tend to dominate the era. It happened when the forward pass was legalized 100-plus years ago, and it happened when the salary cap arrived two decades ago. The franchises that settle on a vision, exploit it, and win a championship or two are football’s equivalent of the companies that realized the internet was here to stay or that people should talk in movies.

Now, the league is undergoing another seismic shift thanks to the modern draft rules. Five years ago, when the NFL and its players struck a new collective bargaining agreement, few realized that limiting rookie salaries would spark such drastic change. The tweak was supposed to save owners some money and restore some sanity to a sport in which a rookie like 2010 top pick Sam Bradford — before he was perpetually upset about everything — could get a six-year deal worth around $78 million. One year later, no. 1 overall pick Cam Newton got a total of $22 million over four years, but the influx of stars on cheap contracts did far more than put cash back into rich guys’ pockets: It changed teams’ approach to the draft and free agency, and in so doing changed the sport. Every serial Super Bowl contender since has employed the same formula: hit on a cluster of affordable draft picks, extend the absolute superstars, and let everyone else walk.

From NFL front offices to fan message boards, the amount of time spent arguing over which players teams should draft is mind-boggling. Ahead of the 2016 draft — which begins tonight — the prospect-focused site WalterFootball.com, for example, has compiled 315 mock drafts from across the internet. And apparently it’s been a slow year; in 2013, it collected 618.

Such obsessive study would be unnecessary if the right answers were obvious. They rarely are. So some observers have called the draft a “crapshoot,” but things are more complicated than that, too. There’s plenty of data to suggest that the draft acts like an efficient market and that when a player is picked speaks volumes about what kind of career he will have. We studied it ourselves, looking for evidence that teams know what they’re doing. But every step of the way, we also found reasons to believe that many of the measures used to quantify a draft pick’s success contain flaws — some relating to draft position itself — that may be unavoidable for now.

For our draft research, we used information from Pro-Football-Reference.com for players who were drafted in 1990 or later, made the NFL1 and retired before 2013.2 First, we looked at the most basic measure of NFL success — the average length of a player’s career — based on the round in which he was drafted.3

… I believe with utter certainty that stats and data will play a huge role in the future of the sport. This is despite knowing that my certitude makes me sound like a bit of a loon to parties that approach this subject with some skepticism.

Today I’m going to explain why I carry this certainty about the future, but it requires the audience to shed one big misconception most people seem to carry about the game.

… In this most important of seasons Aston Villa has imploded – and the club now faces a postmortem of epic proportions which is likely to be a long, complex and fractious affair. Already, the ramifications of relegation are confronting Villa – the club has announced that 500 jobs will be lost as the result of relegation.

The Aston Villa story though was supposed to have been so different, yet its ultimate outcome reveals a great deal about how not to run a football club in the 21st century.