Applied Sports Science newsletter – June 4, 2016

… Adams, 22, has been a paladin in the paint for the Thunder in these playoffs, but the nobility of making and rejecting shots and pulling down rebounds is possibly the only thing to have escaped his grasp. Adams’s teammate, forward Nick Collison, said that as they walked through the lobby, Adams turned to him and said: “This is weird. Everyone is watching us.”

Collison added, “He’s handling it well, but I think he just doesn’t understand the whole star culture we have over here.”

… On the strong side, the picture seems clearer, with third-year linebacker Devon Kennard the clear projected starter … as long as he stays healthy. But that last part is critical and uncertain enough to throw even that part of the Giants’ linebacker plan into question.

Kennard has missed 11 games over his first two NFL seasons due to a variety of foot and leg injuries. There is legitimate concern in the Giants’ braintrust about Kennard’s ability to stay healthy, and some concern that the injuries he’s already had may have deprived him of the explosive ability he showed in his 2014 rookie season. And if that’s the case, they have a problem, because Kennard at his best offers something the Giants don’t have anywhere else in their linebacker corps.

Jameis Winston looked at his fellow Pro Bowlers with a tinge of envy. It’s not that he didn’t believe he should be playing among the NFL’s best in the game — the Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback passed for 4,042 yards, the third-most by a rookie in league history — but Winston took note of the physiques of some of his peers such as Russell Wilson and Julio Jones.

The 6-foot-4, Winston, who weighed in the “upper 240s,” flew back to Tampa determined to elevate his game and transform his body. But he wasn’t motivated purely by an aesthetic desire to improve his physique. The 22-year-old Winston was determined, just weeks after his first NFL season, to avoid the dreaded sophomore slump.

“I heard from around the league that most rookies that come in, if they have a great year, they don’t have a plan for the offseason,” Winston said. “I had never handled an actual offseason before.”

… So how good is Murphy, really? How did he get this way? And how long will it last?

You want answers, not hedges. Here’s mine: Since he and Mets hitting coach Kevin Long radically changed his approach, Murphy has turned himself into a new and far better hitter. He’s probably now a .300 to .320 hitter with 20-to-25-homer power and, because he likes to whack away rather than draw walks, a knack for collecting 90 or more RBI. The Nats, who thought they had bought a nice No. 2 or 6 hitter, probably just got a quality No. 4 or 5 hitter who usually would cost more than $100 million.

Why be so bold? Couldn’t this guy just be hot and lucky? Maybe. The sample size for New Murph is still small enough that he could regress. But that data is no longer as small as many think. Go back further, to the time when his revised hitting approach started to show results: early August of last year.

The place smelled of rebuilding — cut lumber and sawdust, the electrical scent of power tools. The former N.H.L. enforcer Stephen Peat, 36, stood with his father, Walter, inside a maze of studded walls that formed the shell of their new house. It was being built to replace the home that Stephen burned down last year.

It was here in the back of the garage, Stephen said, where he left the blowtorch unattended. It was up there, in the bedroom above, Walter said, where he was startled awake and escaped down the stairs.

Within minutes, the two-story house on a suburban corner, bought years ago with money Stephen made mostly for beating up opponents in the N.H.L., was engulfed in flames that lit the black sky and pulled neighbors from their homes. Days later, Stephen Peat was arrested and charged with arson.

… Resilience is a person’s capacity for stress-related growth, and there are two key aspects to resilience. The first is durability or hardiness – effectively managing life’s everyday stressors and challenges, such as running out of a meeting at the last minute to pick up your child from daycare or surviving the long TSA lines at the airport without flipping out. The second is bouncing back – the capacity to effectively recover and grow from big life adversities, like death or divorce. Sheryl Sandberg focused on the bounce back aspect of resilience in her commencement speech, but it’s just as critical to develop resilience for life’s every day hassles.

Your resilience muscles get built when you focus on specific skills in the following three categories…

… Daniel Kahneman, psychologist and Nobel laureate, tells a similar story about a man enraptured by a symphony recording that is ruined by a hideous screech — a scratch on the vinyl — in the final moments.

“But the experience was not actually ruined,” writes Kahneman, “only the memory of it.” After all, both concerts were almost complete when interrupted. The lived experience had been unblemished until the final moments. The remembered experience was awful.

When we recall things — a concert, a holiday, a bout of flu — we do not play out the recollection minute by minute like a movie in our minds. Instead, we tell ourselves a little story about what happened. And these stories have their own logic in which the order of events makes a difference.

What made Mozart great? Or Bobby Fischer? Or Serena Williams?

The answer sits somewhere on the scales of human achievement. On one side: natural talent. On the other: hard work. Many would argue that success hangs in some delicate balance between them. But not Anders Ericsson.

Ericsson has spent decades studying the power of practice, and in his new book, Peak: Secrets From The New Science Of Expertise, co-authored with Robert Pool, he argues that “talent” is often a story we tell ourselves to justify our own failure or to protect children from the possibility of failure.

The sports world is driven by larger-than-life personalities, which is fitting, since today’s athletes are bigger, faster, stronger and more dynamic than ever before. However, the evolution of modern icons wouldn’t be possible without the specialization and personalization of sports science—which has allowed athletes to develop in ways that weren’t possible even a couple of decades ago.

These days, training isn’t just specialized by sport or position but by an individual’s specific biochemical makeup. The goal: Play harder, faster and longer with fewer injuries. Here’s how sports science is changing the game.

BASKETBALL PLAYERS ACHIEVE EXCELLENCE BY FITNESS LEVELS, SPORT-SPECIFIC SKILLS, AND DECISION MAKING. IN THIS ARTICLE, THE AUTHORS PRESENT A STRENGTH AND NEUROMUSCULAR POWER TRAINING METHODOLOGY, WHICH INTEGRATES THE LATEST SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE ON STRENGTH TRAINING, SUGGESTS A PRACTICAL, INTEGRATIVE, SPECIFICITY-BASED METHODOLOGY COVERING PLAYER DEVELOPMENT FROM THE WEIGHT ROOM TO THE COURT, AND INVOLVES ALL THE STAFF MEMBERS AROUND THE BASKETBALL PLAYER TO OPTIMIZE HIS/HER PREPARATION.

The same brain circuits that are activated by eating chocolate and winning money are activated when teenagers see large numbers of “likes” on their own photos or the photos of peers in a social network, according to a first-of-its-kind UCLA study that scanned teens’ brains while using social media.

The 32 teenagers, ages 13-18, were told they were participating in a small social network similar to the popular photo-sharing app, Instagram. In an experiment at UCLA’s Ahmanson–Lovelace Brain Mapping Center, the researchers showed them 148 photographs on a computer screen for 12 minutes, including 40 photos that each teenager submitted, and analyzed their brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI. Each photo also displayed the number of likes it had supposedly received from other teenage participants — in reality, the number of likes was assigned by the researchers. (At the end of the procedure, the participants were told that the researchers decided on the number of likes a photo received.)

“When the teens saw their own photos with a large number of likes, we saw activity across a wide variety of regions in the brain,” said lead author Lauren Sherman, a researcher in the brain mapping center and the UCLA branch of the Children’s Digital Media Center, Los Angeles.

The popular gene-editing technique can deliver a step-by-step account of how a single-cell embryo becomes a trillion-cell animal.

Qualcomm has announced a new Snapdragon processor at Computex as the chipmaker aims to extend its presence in the wearables market. The Snapdragon Wear 1100 complements the Snapdragon Wear 2100 announced a few months ago; while that processor was designed for smartwatches, the 1100 is intended for use in simpler “targeted-function” devices with less functionality like fitness trackers, smart headsets, and location-aware gadgets for kids and the elderly.

The Dallas Cowboys are using new technology called High and Tight to reduce fumbles by their running backs. The football has a sensor inside it, and when the ball is in contact with the runner’s body at the proper angle, the ball emits a whistle. No whistle, no good.

… We all have experience with things like ergonomic chairs: seats that are designed with the human body in mind. The designer of an ergonomic chair has to have a solid working knowledge of the human body and how it operates in order to build a chair that will be comfortable, supportive, and appealing to sit in.

The same is true of the technological tools we use: the people who design them have to have a solid working knowledge of the human brain in order to build an app—or a website, or a software program—that feels “comfortable” for the brain to use, that doesn’t cause undue confusion or strain.

And yet many of the technological tools seem to be designed by someone who doesn’t understand much about the brain and how it operates.

As bicycle lanes weave past Kitsilano Beach and yoga studios in Vancouver, B.C., those lanes also flow right past the headquarters of Lululemon and the highly restricted laboratory dubbed Whitespace.

In March, the Canadian apparel company allowed Sports Illustrated into the 10,000-square-foot research lab to see the high-tech process that creates fit-focused apparel for consumers and elite athletes—Lululemon has Olympians and NHL players, to name a few, on its “ambassador” list.

“Our job is to turn five to 10 years of research—and some pretty complex stuff—into a very succinct package of information,” says Dr. Tom Waller, senior vice president, Whitespace. “The toys, the tools we have, most of them exist somewhere in the world. What we’ve done uniquely is bring them all together.”

Last night, the Golden State Warriors beat the Oklahoma City Thunder, securing a spot in the NBA finals that begin on Thursday. As usual, TV crews and photographers had their lenses trained on every basket in the 96-88 game, but broadcasters also drew on a relatively new piece of technology to help document the action.

Through a partnership with Intel, the NBA has been using 3D video to create 360-degree replays of slam dunks and other show-stopping plays. It’s the NBA version of the red carpet Glam Cam.

“What they have is dozens of high definition cameras all around the court,” communication professor John Carroll told Here & Now‘s Meghna Chakrabarti. “They take the video of the action from all those different angles. Intel has the technological capability to stitch them all together.” [audio, 5:01]

… One of the biggest issues we currently have within this industry is that we are trying to provide a simple solution to a complex problem. Injuries are rarely caused by one specific risk factor or problem. The realization that humans are complex and that human response and human failure is just as complex and involves the degradation of multiple factors must not be overlooked. As much as we may want there to be a simple and straightforward answer and solution there needs to be a level of complexity that factors in the uniqueness of humankind.

I was recently at a conference where I heard a practitioner present and discuss the fact he predicted 99 injuries the previous year with a team saving them many millions of dollars. 10 years ago I would have thought “wow, that is amazing”, I need to be able to leverage this and see how they are doing it. Today, I ask a very different question based on the learning and education I have been provided by the other fantastic sport & data science professionals I work with everyday. The first thing that popped into my mind that day was, if you predicted them, how do you know? If they didn’t happen, how do you know they would have? It seems simple but honestly how do we know prediction works, it relies on an event to actually happen and for us to showcase that we knew about it beforehand.

Secondly, if you did indeed predict these events, how many times did you predict events that did not occur.

… Zika fears have prompted all kinds of extreme pronouncements about the games. A Canadian law professor, writing in the Harvard Public Health Review, called for moving or delaying the Rio Olympics this year because of the risks the virus poses. Some athletes, including the world’s third-ranked golfer, Rory McIlroy, have even said they’re considering dropping out of the games because of Zika.

But this is all very likely misguided. According to the best available evidence, the chance of any visitor to Brazil catching Zika at this year’s Summer Olympics is extremely low. And it’s not even the infectious disease most likely to be an issue at these games. As Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said on May 26, “There is no public health reason to cancel or delay the Olympics.” Here’s why.

When Cubs left fielder Kyle Schwarber collided with Dexter Fowler last month and was carted off the field with a torn left ACL, it was a reminder of one of sports most painful truths.

“It’s a cruel, cruel game sometimes,” manager Joe Maddon said afterward.

There was another reminder this spring when Illinois wide receiver Mikey Dudek tore his right ACL for the second-straight season during spring practices. Shortly after, running back Dre Brown tore his left ACL, also suffering the same injury that will sideline him for a second-straight season.

“The game sometimes can be cruel,” Illini coach Lovie Smith said, echoing Maddon.

Nine-time bouldering national champion Alex Puccio shares her secrets on bouncing back to compete at the GoPro Mountain Games

Overuse injury is a ‘training load error’ Inappropriately high training loads cause overuse injuries. However, it has recently been proposed that overuse injuries should be considered in terms of both ‘overloading’ and ‘underloading’. The rationale is that increased injury risk is associated with ‘spikes’ in workload (ie, overloading) and low chronic workloads (ie, underloading), which may leave an athlete predisposed to a ‘spike’ in workload. Given that workload is both modifiable and controllable, it has been suggested that ‘overuse injuries’ be considered as ‘training load errors’.

Who ‘owns’ the injury? Anecdotally, strength and conditioning staff are viewed as the practitioners who ‘break’ the athlete, while medical staff ‘fix’ them. Conversely, conditioning staff may indeed decrease the probability of athletes sustaining an injury by increasing chronic workloads, whereas medical staff may inadvertently increase injury risk by reducing workloads. Given that all coaching staff as well as the performance team (eg, strength and conditioning, sport scientists and physiotherapists) are involved to varying degrees in the training process, an effective solution needs to be multidisciplinary in nature. Periods of underloading and overloading can occur anywhere.

Running is often recommended as a way to increase physical activity, given its purported health benefits. However, running is associated with high rates of musculoskeletal injury. Both range of motion (ROM) and muscular weakness have been suggested as potential risk factors for running injury.

BACKGROUND:

Literature suggests that dietary intake of elite athletes may differ between training and competition days. In addition, despite the importance of nutrition in sports and the popularity of basketball, studies on the diet of basketball players are scarce. Therefore, the aim of the present study was to assess dietary intake and diet quality in training and competition days in a team of elite basketball players receiving daily professional nutritional counseling.
METHODS:

One elite basketball team (15 players) participating in Euroleague volunteered for the study. The team employed a certified dietitian, responsible for providing individualized nutritional evaluation and counseling, dietary planning and supervision of the diet of all the players. Dietary intake was assessed using 24-h recalls and the Healthy Eating Index (HEI) was then calculated.
RESULTS:

All players exhibited adequate (i.e., >80) HEI score [raw and adjusted for energy intake (EI)], on both training and competition days. Although daily energy, carbohydrate and protein intakes were greater during training compared to competition days [26 (21.7, 26.4) vs. 19.5 (19.3, 22.1) MJ, 7.6±1.5 vs. 6.8±0.9 g/kg of body weight (BW) and 2.6±0.6 vs. 2.2±0.2 g/kg BW, respectively; all p<0.05], HEI score (raw and adjusted for EI) was lower in training compared to competition days [92.9 (82.1, 93.2) vs. 94.0 (94.0, 94.0) and 89.7 (88.4, 89.7) vs. 92.7 (91.7, 92.8), respectively; all p?0.001] due to lower total grains, whole grains and total vegetables' consumption and greater saturated fats consumption (p<0.05).
CONCLUSIONS:

Elite basketball players receiving daily nutritional counseling by certified sports dietitians exhibit adequate diet quality, with the highest possible observed during competition days.

We’re all on the search for methods to safely and legally enhance our athletic performance. It’s the nature of an athlete. There are many obvious short cuts, but they will ultimately do more harm than good. One often overlooked way to improve your ability to recover, burn fat, increase muscle mass, improve quality of sleep, and ease joint pain, is to manage your body’s pH levels.

… Bryan Miller, former strength and conditioning coach at Oregon State (now at Navy), faced a more unusual challenge. In Corvallis, temps didn’t rise into the upper 80s until August, so acclimatizing players to the effects of strong heat is not an option.

Still, he and his coaches provide constant education surrounding hydration to athletes. The message is consistent and they back it with action.

“We have water and Gatorade in the locker rooms in dispensers,” he says. “When the athletes come in to the workout, they each have their items they are supposed to consume out of the refrigerator. Sometimes, that’s not just hydration, it’s pre-workout calories. Bagels and cream cheese, things like that.”

Slowing the release of sugar, as well as preventing extreme spikes by selecting the right foods, is the first step in achieving optimal health. Controlling lifestyle factors like stress, sleep, and exercise can also have a significant impact on blood sugar regulation.

Here are three nutrients known to help with blood sugar balance.

1. Cinnamon

The issue of designing new interactive interfaces with machine learning systems that best serve our needs and help us build and maintain trust is a central issue in AI. Read one researcher’s take on this topic.

As a sizeable number of underclassmen continue to go undrafted each year, Bret Bielema has brought up the idea of letting them return to school. Nick Saban has another idea.

At the SEC spring meetings on Tuesday, Saban said he’s part of a committee working with the NFL on the idea of “Junior Day” combine on campuses in the spring after their second year. The grades that underclassmen can currently get from the NFL are only based on film, and the results can be inaccurate.

… The NFL could have the technological capabilities to make a sideline look like a Blade Runner reboot. But it already has a mountain of data?—?it’s just that the mountain is largely inaccessible. In an effort to facilitate progress, league officials in Boca Raton pitched the NFL’s latest data technology: a system that would allow franchises to view player-tracking data for all 32 teams. If implemented, the technology would enable clubs to monitor every movement on the field for the first time, yielding raw data on player performance. For example: A team concerned about a slow cornerback could actually find out how much slower he is than Antonio Brown, who, according to data shared on a 2015 Thursday Night Football broadcast, posted a maximum speed of 21.8 mph during the season.

The proposal for teams to have access to all raw player-tracking data did not make it past the league’s Competition Committee, a group of team executives, owners, and coaches, according to an NFL official. Certain coaches griped about what might happen if other teams or the public had access to this data, and the committee told team representatives that it was too much, too soon, preventing the matter from reaching the teams for a vote at the March meeting.

“In other industries it is crazy to think you are going to limit innovation just to protect the people who aren’t ready,” said Brian Kopp, president of North America for Catapult Sports, which says it has deals with 19 NFL teams to provide practice data, but not game data. “Let’s make it all equally competitive, which is: You don’t figure it out, you start losing and you lose your job.”

… A few years ago, social scientists Matthew Salganik, Duncan Watts and Peter Dodds sought to answer the question of why cultural success is so unpredictable. They created an artificial music market on an actual website, which they called the Music Lab. The site offered people an opportunity to hear 48 unknown songs by unknown bands.

The experimenters randomly sorted half of about 14,000 site visitors into an “independent judgment” group, in which they were invited to listen to brief excerpts, to rate songs and to decide whether to download them. For 7,000 or so visitors, Salganik and his co-authors could get a clear sense of what people really liked best. The other 7,000 visitors were sorted into a “social influence” group, which was exactly the same except in just one respect: They could see how many times each song had been downloaded by other participants.

Here’s the ingenious part of the experiment: People in the social influence group were also randomly assigned to one of eight subgroups, in which they could see only the number of downloads in their own subgroup. In those different subgroups, it is inevitable that as a result of random factors, different songs would attract different initial numbers of downloads.

In my last post on this topic, I put on my hard hat & set about ‘mining’ my 20,000+ training files from all levels of triathlete, from novice to pro, to answer the question – which is more important, volume or intensity?

You can read that post here, but in summary – volume is winning by a nose. However, the real leader is a metric that combines the 2 together into a cumulative ‘training stress score’, i.e. the question is not so much volume OR intensity, but rather, what combination of volume AND intensity?

You might be thinking, well, with the introduction of a metric that brings together volume & intensity, (i.e. TSS) – problem solved! But, not so fast!

… Consider this stat: this year’s playoffs have already included more made three-pointers for all teams than the entire 2015 postseason (1,424 to 1,421; 8.99 per game compared to 8.79). What’s more, imagine if Curry hadn’t missed six games with those right ankle and knee injuries in the first two rounds. Yet for all the credit the Warriors receive as the leaders of this movement, general manager Bob Myers believes the change was sparked before his group came together.

“I think San Antonio was the innovator as far as the spacing and shooting, what they did a few years ago, putting as many shooters out there as they good, and playing (Boris) Diaw at that stretch (power forward) position and then seeing how hard it is to defend that,” Myers told USA TODAY Sports on Wednesday. “And then for us, like any team, you recognize the threat of shooting and the fact that I think every team has discovered that you’re shooting from somewhere where you get one and a half the amount of points. That has a great value, and if you can find people who can do it…”