Applied Sports Science newsletter – May 23, 2016

Manchester United sent in the Marines to help Marcus Rashford and Co become first-team material.

Members of the elite commando force were drafted in to help the Reds youngsters deal with pressure situations and hone their clinical mentality.

… According to a source close to the situation, once the veteran center became a part of the in-season “Jen Swanson program,’’ there wasn’t enough focus on the strength aspect of his game.

The source said Noah would have a good offseason with his own trainers, but once he rejoined the Bulls in training camp the focus was more on stretching rather than maintaining his strength. [highlights video autoplays]

While waiting in the post-practice layup line Friday, Steven Adams fidgeted with the space between his right thumb and index finger. Wednesday night at Oracle Arena, Adams’ massive mitt was again tightly wrapped in white tape.

The thumb injury is a carry-over from the Thunder-Spurs series, but the Western Conference Finals has brought its own set of Adams ailments. First, there was a bloody nose in Thunder-Warriors Game 1. Then, Adams was slow to get up twice during the first half of Game 2.

The first time it was his lower back. The second time it was his lower … area.

“It was painful, mate,” Adams said describing his off day. “A painful one … lying there just trying to recover.”

Rafael Nadal will turn 30 next month. His hair is thinning. He has been a professional tennis player for 15 years—stressful years with lots of running, pain in his knees and wrist, and recently, crippling episodes of on-court anxiety. At times during matches, he was so overcome by nerves that he couldn’t catch his breath. He lost control of his forehand, the shot that defines him. Last year, Nadal looked like he might be finished. This year he does not.

Former Boston Celtics All-Star Kevin Garnett turned 40 on Thursday. Earlier this week, current Celtics All-Star Isaiah Thomas reaffirmed that he desires to play until the same age.

Following his exit interview with the Celtics earlier this month, Thomas detailed how he’s prepared to change his diet in hopes of prolonging his NBA career. During his media tour at the draft lottery on Tuesday night, Thomas repeated that desire and also detailed some other areas of his game he plans to work on this offseason.

“I’m not that old, but the greatest players, the best players always took care of their bodies the best,” the 27-year-old Thomas said after his exit interview. “You look at older guys like Ray Allen. Not to go that far to take care of my body — because he’s a little crazy with that — but I just want to play at a high level for a long time.

The ability to repeatedly perform sprints has traditionally been viewed as a key performance measure in team-sports and the relationship between ‘repeated-sprint ability’ (RSA) and performance has been explored extensively. However, when reviewing the repeated-sprint profile of team-sports match-play it appears that the occurrence of repeated-sprint bouts is sparse, indicating that RSA is not as important to performance as commonly believed. Repeated-sprints are, however, a potent and time-efficient training strategy, effective in developing acceleration, speed, explosive leg-power, aerobic power and high-intensity running performance – all of which are crucial to team-sport performance. As such, we propose that repeated-sprint exercise in team-sports should be viewed as an independent variable (e.g., a means of developing fitness) as opposed to a dependent variable (e.g., a means of assessing fitness/performance).

You can tap into the same neural circuitry that makes you fixate on the negative in order to turn your mistakes in your favor.

… Senses, reflexes and learning mechanisms – this is what we start with, and it is quite a lot, when you think about it. If we lacked any of these capabilities at birth, we would probably have trouble surviving.

But here is what we are not born with: information, data, rules, software, knowledge, lexicons, representations, algorithms, programs, models, memories, images, processors, subroutines, encoders, decoders, symbols, or buffers – design elements that allow digital computers to behave somewhat intelligently. Not only are we not born with such things, we also don’t develop them – ever.

The manager of English Premier League side Tottenham Hotspur, Mauricio Pochettino, recently visited Aspire Academy along with some of his coaching staff and his son.

Aspire Academy staff conducted the tour and presented an overview of the facilities’ history and the significant progress it has achieved in the fields of sports education and sports science.

With the quarterfinals of the men’s hockey world championship set to begin here and in Moscow on Thursday, eight teams are still in pursuit of gold. But only one has a chance to become the first country to earn triple gold.

Having claimed the under-18 and under-20 world championships this year, Finland is in a position to sweep this year’s events with a win at the men’s level this weekend.

Finnish hockey officials credit a change in the coaching philosophy of their development program for players ages 15 to 20.

… Just Fly Sports: What are the most common weak-links that you see, concerning ability to display speed in the majority of your athletes? What is a go-to system you utilize to correct this?

Matt Gifford: I would break this up into two classes: the “the gifted elites” and the “average Joey’s.” The “gifted” athletes naturally have higher RFD abilities. In this class it is common to see mobility issues in the ankle, hip and upper torso. The lack of range of motion reduces their ability to create space or length and unfortunately creates more compression globally. This hinders their ability to attain certain positions that would help them improve force and display optimal technique. Unfortunately, the lack of mobility (and reciprocally stability) will also eventually result in sub optimal recovery and likely eventually lead to injury.

To further add, the more elite athlete usually needs a lesson on patience when it comes to the art of sprinting.

Basketball fever is in full swing. With the NBA playoffs taking over our television screens, we can’t help but notice how seriously fit and toned these pro athletes are. But what does it take to be in that kind of shape? You can follow your fave pro athletes on Instagram for some major fitspiration or you can try out a new basketball-inspired workout, but to really start training like the pros, we had to bring in the people who, you know, actually train the pros.

St. Vincent Sports Performance employees Lindsay Langford and Dr. Chris Carr serve as the Indiana Pacers’ nutritionist and sport and performance psychologist, respectively. And they’re giving us all the details on how to eat and train like real athletic pros.

In a major loss to the sugar industry, the Food and Drug Administration on Friday ordered food companies to disclose the amount of added sugar in all packaged foods.

Until now, the agency required companies to list only the total amount of sugar in each product, with no distinction between naturally occurring sugars from fruit, for example, and sugar added in the form of high-fructose corn syrup or other flavorings.

Public health advocates cheered the new label, but the Sugar Association blasted it, arguing that it’s not fair to focus on one ingredient rather than looking at the overall nutritional value of processed food.

The night before the 2008 MLS SuperDraft, the San Jose Earthquakes then-head coach Frank Yallop and general manager John Doyle were holed up in an old, brick warehouse in Oakland, hidden beneath the shadow of an overpass. These are the inauspicious headquarters of Match Analysis, a leading company in the field of data analysis in soccer.

Although the Earthquakes are not commonly lauded as a tactically progressive MLS side, there was once a time when they were at the forefront of statistical analysis in soccer. Even to this day, the club remains among the growing wave of organizations using data analytics to inform their decisions on and off the pitch.

The next frontier of football analytics just landed at 32 NFL teams’ headquarters.

The league recently delivered data collected by Zebra Technologies’ radio-frequency identification (RFID) system over the course of last season to teams, according to sources. Every player had chips placed in their shoulder pads to track their location during games.

Teams only received data for their own players, according to a source.