Applied Sports Science newsletter – June 3, 2016

Detox mode this past off-season started for Jose Bautista the moment he returned home following the Toronto Blue Jays’ elimination in the American League Championship Series.

To fight the inflammation that had accumulated in his body over the course of a long year, he shifted his diet, cutting out all red meat, pork and red wine. Not a bite, or a drop, all winter. His mother, Sandra, regularly asked him why he was shunning the foods he so loved. But this was method, not madness. Every single thing he put in his body was meticulously planned in order to generate a calculated effect.

“Body management is what I call it,” Bautista says by his locker one afternoon, making his way through an omelette and some vegetables, a banana, a teaspoon of nut butter and a cup of turmeric tea.

Aaron Rodgers used to call it his “80/20 Rule.”

With an admitted sweet tooth (Girl Scout cookies have been a lifelong favorite) and a weakness for a couple of his favorite Southern California haunts — In-N-Out Burger (his order: “Double Double, animal style”) and Claire’s bakery and café in Solano Beach — the Green Bay Packers quarterback’s nutrition used to be a simple equation.

Make sure 80 percent of what you eat is healthy, and enjoy the other 20 percent.

It’s not easy to find true power forwards in the draft. Many have tried and the success of Cam Neely and Milan Lucic has teams salivating at any kid with size, snarl and skill. But getting the right combination of those three is difficult. That’s why Max Jones will be in high demand at the draft this summer.

Jones, a 6-foot-3, 201-pound left winger with the OHL’s London Knights, had interviews scheduled with 27 teams at the NHL’s draft combine in Buffalo this week – so yeah, interest is high. And why wouldn’t it be? As a rookie OHLer, Jones pumped in 28 goals and racked up 106 PIM in 65 games. He walked top-10 defenseman Jakob Chychrun for a nasty goal against Sarnia and he’s an athletic freak.

Sometimes his physicality goes too far and Jones was tagged with a 12-game suspension during the playoffs, but he didn’t sulk.

… Some great stuff in the blog this week (Subscribe here). First a paper by Rich Willy et al. comparing patellofemoral and Achilles loads in overground and treadmill running – brings up some interesting questions for running rehab among Achilles patients. Then we have a huge review of exercise and aging effects on tendon. Although their focus on normal tendon some messages there for loading tendinopathic tendon.

Teachers intuitively know that neither their nor their students’ learning is steady and constant, the same day in and day out and moment to moment, consistent from topic to topic. Rather, we all have good and bad days; moments of excitement, engagement, and inspiration and moments of disappointment, disengagement, and frustration; afternoons just before vacation and mornings just after; some skills and topics that we find interesting and some that we don’t. These differences influence how children learn and how teachers teach; they even affect what students know at a given time. In short, learning is dynamic, social, and context dependent because emotions are, and emotions form a critical piece of how, what, when, and why people think, remember, and learn.

Browns safety Jordan Poyer and his teammates begin every morning at the training facility logging into a wall-mounted iPad that requests information about their previous night’s rest.

The wellness initiative, which coincidentally started a few months after the release of late-night carousing quarterback Johnny Manziel, surveys players about their sleep patterns in an effort to maximize performance. It’s the brainchild of the Browns’ new strength and conditioning chief Adam Beard.

“We punch in our code and we put in how much sleep we got, the quality of sleep, our energy level, our mood level and how much soreness we have,” Poyer said.

In a quest to improve the Browns’ fitness, Beard wants to be everywhere for his players. Even in their dreams.

… Understanding how to deal with sleep during days off is not simple. Just because a player spends all day in bed, for example, doesn’t mean they’ll wind up well rested. And equally, because they spend some time out after dark, doesn’t mean they can’t be at peak come game time. But what you can’t measure, you can’t manage and monitoring sleep patterns can be tough to do accurately.

Does your comfort zone consist of cruising from squat rack to bench press and back again? While your heart may be pounding after a heavy set of strength training, a lack of endurance can hamper overall performance. It’s the reason you look good in front of the mirror, but are blue in the face five minutes into five-a-side.

Stamina plays a major part in allowing you to hit your weight loss goals, perform on the sports field and take on new fitness challenges – completing your first 10K, for example. But adding a stamina string to your fitness bow isn’t easy. It requires mental strength to rival anything you achieve under a barbell.

Whether you’re dealing with excruciating DOMS after your first cardio session, or summoning the energy for a lung-busting kick for the line as an endurance pro, a strong mind is critical, explains footballing star and New Balance athlete Aaron Ramsey.

‘You will suffer injuries and need to stay mentally strong – that is key, especially in the bad times,’ he says. ‘When your body is saying no, it’s your strength of mind that drags you through. I was a good long- and middle-distance runner as a kid, and endurance is something I excel at.

PURPOSE: Deficits in hip abductor strength have been linked to increased risk of lower-extremity injury. We aimed to prospectively determine whether preseason hip abductor strength predicts future lateral non-contact ankle sprains in competitive athletes.
METHODS: Prior to the start of the sports season, isometric hip abductor strength was assessed bilaterally in competitive soccer players (210 males) using a hand-held dynamometer. During the sport seasons, lateral ankle sprain status was recorded, and injured athletes were further classified based on the mechanism of injury (non-contact vs. contact). Postseason, a logistic model was constructed to determine whether baseline hip abductor strength predicted future lateral non-contact ankle sprains. A receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was constructed for hip abductor strength to determine the clinical cut-off value that distinguished between a high-risk and low-risk outcome.
RESULTS: A total of 25 lateral non-contact ankle sprains were confirmed for an overall annual incidence of 11.9%. Baseline hip abductor strength was significantly lower in injured athletes compared to non-injured athletes (35.7 ± 5.6 vs. 39.5 ± 6.6 %BW, p = 0.008). Logistic regression indicated impaired hip abductor strength increased future injury risk [OR = 1.10 (95% CI: 1.02, 1.18), p = 0.010]. The clinical cutoff to define high risk was established as hip abductor strength ? 33.8 %BW. Using this cutoff, athletes classified as high risk have their probability of injury increase from 11.9% to 26.7%; whereas; athletes classified as low risk have their probability of injury decrease from 11.9% to 8.0%.
CONCLUSIONS: Impaired isometric hip abductor strength predisposes competitive male soccer players to lateral non-contact ankle sprains. Screening procedures should consider evaluating isometric hip abductor strength (specifically for high-level male athletes participating in soccer) as preseason hip abductor predicts future lateral non-contact ankle sprains.

Back in December we wrote about the algorithm we devised for identifying defensive matchups at every moment of an NBA game. We can leverage this algorithm to paint a detailed picture of defensive performance in an individual game using what we call ”the matchup box score”. In the matchup box score we compute and display ”points against” for each matchup, a quantity that tallies how many points a player on one team scored against a player on the opposing team over the course of a game. For each possession where a player scores, those points get distributed proportionally across the defenders on the court based on the fraction of time they spent guarding the scorer.

Nebraska Director of Player Personnel Ryan Gunderson breaks down how to craft the best highlight videos – and some snags to avoid.

A disorganised system will be prone to stagnation, have limited user adoption and dissolve into chaos! Do you have a Taxonomy?

If a taxonomy is formed at the outset of an information management project, a foundation can be defined that will enable the organisation to expand and evolve their system as demands change.

We each know that focus is the most effective way to work, but hearing the mantra to focus doesn’t help narrow our scope. What’s the best way to focus? Start with the premise that everything is noise and then work to find the exceptionally valuable or important things for each day and for each project. That’s the thesis of a book called Essentialism.

Defaulting to the idea that everything as noise simplifies decision-making about time allocation. In many areas of our life, we classify noise unconsciously. Archiving email spam, filtering out irrelevant boarding announcements at airports, and driving by habit. How can we replicate the same idea at work? By asking, is this noise? Is this among my top 3 priorities? Will this effort be exceptionally valuable?

… Here is my attempt to correct the major misconceptions surrounding basketball analytics.

1. Basketball analytics begin with an understanding of and feel for the game.

The NHL draft combine has two main components: the physical testing, most of which will happen this Saturday, and the interview portion. The latter is spread out over a few days this week, with all 30 teams interviewing a range of players from the 114 invited by Central Scouting. So what happens in those interviews? I had the good fortune to find out this year, as one franchise let me sit in on a block of interviews. Here’s how it went down.