Applied Sports Science newsletter – June 9, 2016

… With Nagbe quickly rising in the USMNT ranks, it’s a good time to take a look at who Nagbe is and the difficult path that ultimately brought him to the national team.

Nagbe was born in Monrovia, Liberia in 1990 in the middle of a civil war. He spent the first five months of his life in the war-torn country, before his mother, Somah, fearing for the safety of her two young children, managed to escape to Sierra Leone. From there, the family rejoined Nagbe’s father, Joe, in Europe where he was playing professional soccer.

At the highest level, modern soccer has a lot in common with the German autobahn. The speed of the game has no limits, and players are like the latest sports cars: faster, sleeker and more powerful than ever. The movement in soccer—end-to-end attacking, relentless defensive pressure—can be constant. And yet there remain players, goalkeepers, who impose calm. In 2016, no one on the planet balances order and chaos better than Germany’s Manuel Neuer, who is redefining his position in a way that hasn’t been done for decades.

“I’m a little bit risky, but [I represent] security and protection, and you have to give your teammates that feeling as well,” says Neuer. “I’m a guy who likes to drive a car quite fast—but I wear a seat belt at the same time. So you have this balance. Maybe you can compare it.”

Eddie Howe’s AFC Bournemouth impressed in their first season in the Premier League,and one of their distinguishing attributes that helped them to finish 16th was their workrate.

At the forefront of their playing intensity was Andrew Surman. The midfielder led the league for distance covered by a player, 460 kilometres across the season.

In baseball, batters dive out of the way to avoid being clipped by a pitch. In basketball, the smallest jostle can lead to a free throw. But hockey is a little different: It is one sport in which players go out of their way to be struck by a projectile that can travel at speeds exceeding 100 miles per hour.

Forward Nick Bonino of the Pittsburgh Penguins has the welts to prove it. In Game 3 of the Stanley Cup finals against the San Jose Sharks, he blocked four shots, including one from Brent Burns, one of the N.H.L’s hardest shooters, that hit him squarely in the stomach. Bonino was delighted with his gut-pummeling stop.

“Those are the fun ones to block,” he said stoically on Sunday.

Objectives To design a rating of perceived exertion (RPE) scale using facial expressions and assessed the validity of the scale for both children and young adults.

Design

Pearson moment–product correlation analysis was used to assess the correlation among heart rate (HR), RPE and pedaling workload.
Methods

Fifteen children and 15 young adults participated in the study. Each participant randomly performed 5 pedaling tests with one repetition based on their submaximal acceptable workloads. Under each load condition, participants pedaled on a cycle ergometer for 10?min; subsequently, participants completed Borg category ratio (CR10) or facial RPE (FRPE) scale assessments. Participants’ heart rates (HR) were used to compare their scores on the Borg CR10 and Facial RPE scales.
Results

The results show that both Borg CR10 and FRPE scales reflected different pedaling workload levels. For young adults, HR positively correlated with both RPE scores under the various workload levels (r?=?0.989 and 0.977, all p?<?0.005); for children, only FRPE scores were positively correlated with HR (r?=?0.908, p?<?0.05). In other words, FRPE scores effectively reflected the HR of children, whereas Borg CR10 scores did not.
Conclusions

The children may not understand words as effectively as young adults did, however, they understand facial expressions. The FRPE scale proposed in this study may be available in some special cases because it can assess those who cannot comprehend the written words used for the scale.

… There also is a level of confidence in the actual fitness testing. The U.S. national program puts a premium on strength training, which not only prepares players for the combine but helps develop them into bigger, stronger players.

“I went into the program as a 160-pound kid and left there right around 195,” said Matthew Tkachuk, who played for the U.S. NTDP from 2013-15 before spending this past season with the London Knights. “They did a lot for me.”

Darryl Nelson, the strength and conditioning coach for the national development team, said players are in the weight room four times a week in the spring and summer gradually reducing that to two weeks during the heart of the season.

During aerobic exercise, most of the energy your muscle cells need is supplied by the mitochondria, a cellular component often referred to as the “powerhouse” of the cell. That’s why one of the key benefits of training is that you develop more and better-functioning mitochondria to fuel your efforts.

At last week’s American College of Sports Medicine annual meeting, one of the most interesting sessions I went to focused on how mitochondria respond to training. The central question posed in a talk by David Bishop, of Victoria University in Australia, was: Is there an optimal training stimulus to trigger the formation of new and more powerful mitochondria? (The slides from the presentation are available here.)

As Bishop and his colleagues explained in a review a few years ago, there are two linked questions. First, how much new mitochondria can your cells grow? And second, how efficiently can each unit of mitochondria supply the energy needed for muscular contractions?

The experiment might have backfired with any other group: A decorated former player-turned-coach asked a team of world-class athletes to share candid feedback about each other through peer reviews.

U.S. women’s volleyball coach Karch Kiraly would have considered scrapping the idea altogether had his players said no way. Instead, they embraced it, and discovered their teammates’ words made them better as individuals and as a whole. Now, the Americans are heading into this summer’s Rio Olympics in search of that elusive gold medal with a stronger sense of what makes each one of them so valuable.

Rachael Adams hadn’t known her teammates so respected her competitive fire and energy.

… Brooke Macnamara and her colleagues scoured the literature available up to 2014, and they found relevant findings from 34 published and unpublished studies, involving the practice habits and performance levels of 2765 athletes across various sports including football, volleyball, hockey, swimming and running.

They found that at the elite level, amount of practice was not related to performance (in statistical terms it explained less than one per cent of variance in performance). This makes intuitive sense – most professional athletes in the top echelons of their sport practice exhaustively through their careers. Instead of amount of practice time, what likely separates them are physiological differences influenced by their genetic makeup, as well as complex psychological factors, such as their personality and confidence. Also, competition experience and time spent in play activities might also be relevant, the researchers suggested

Iceland travel to Euro 2016 as the smallest nation ever to reach a major tournament – not bad going for a lump of volcanic rock halfway to the Arctic with a population the size of Lewisham. This is the tale of their stunning journey

Sensifree Ltd. (Cupertino, Calif.) a developer of an RF-based low power biomedical sensor, has completed a $5 million round of Series A financing.

Sensifree was founded in 2012 and claims to have developed a contact free, electromagnetic sensor that accurately collect a range of continuous biometric data without the need to touch the human body.

Today Withings released their WiFi scale, the Withings Body Cardio along with the new Withings Body scale (sans-Cardio). Like all past Withings scales, these units connects via WiFi to your home network (after Bluetooth Smart configuration with your phone). However, it kicks things up a notch in the data stats department by adding in a number of additional metrics beyond just weight and body fat. These new metrics being: water mass, bone mass, and the mysterious sounding Pulse Wave Velocity on the Body Cardio scale.

This is all in addition to the existing standing heart rate value they’ve had on their higher end scales before (kept on the Body Cardio, but not base Body scale). However, in addition to these new features, they also removed a couple of things: room temperature and CO2 measurement. Apparently the company agreed with folks that these had practically no real-world value.

Plus, there’s some cool tricks up the scale’s sleeve when it comes to floor surfaces.

Maria Sharapova’s two-year suspension announced Wednesday by the International Tennis Federation was half the maximum she could have received, but stands as the most serious imposed on a top tennis player in the decade-plus that the sport has been governed by the World Anti-Doping Agency code.

That is a shallow pool. Relatively few tennis players of any stature have been sanctioned for performance-enhancing drugs as opposed to the occasional bad decision about cocaine.

Those who predicted star treatment for Sharapova may have been right, although not in the way they envisioned.

What do you get when an NFL franchise pairs a football traditionalist with the man who has a legitimate claim to King of the Statheads? If this spring has been any indication, something that looks a lot like civil war.

In January, the Browns made a move that attracted a lot of attention and raised more than a few eyebrows: They hired a longtime baseball executive to shape their strategy. But this wasn’t just any baseball guy, of course; this was Paul DePodesta, of Moneyball fame (he’s the person around whom Peter Brand, the plucky, number-crunching nerd played by Jonah Hill in the movie adaptation of Michael Lewis’s 2003 book, is based), who worked for the Dodgers, Padres, and Mets after he left the A’s in ’04. DePodesta and Oakland boss Billy Beane didn’t invent sabermetrics, but they were the ones who popularized its applications, radicalizing the way MLB front offices valued players, thought about roster construction, and considered strategy.

The Browns clearly hoped DePodesta, who was named chief strategy officer, might be able to bring a similar force of raw statistical analysis to football, a sport that has lagged behind both baseball and basketball in incorporating advanced statistics into decision-making. And, for a time, it seemed to be working: In March, after the team signed Robert Griffin III, newly hired head coach Hue Jackson praised DePodesta and spoke of the harmony of their approaches.

… The pursuit of the perfect lineup probably dates back to James Naismith, but it has accelerated in recent years, aided by an inventive professor, a star pupil and a homemade website that touched all 82 games.