Applied Sports Science newsletter – June 10, 2016

Entering through a doorway at the back of her family’s ranch house on a dusty Las Vegas street, Vashti Cunningham walks through the kitchen and dutifully drops into a chair in the dining room. She is an 18-year-old senior at Bishop Gorman High, 1 1/4 inches more than six feet tall (and possibly still creeping north), thin as a sapling. Classes are done for the day, but practice has yet to begin and after that, church services and homework. First, she will squeeze in the latest in a series of interviews that accompany her status as a presumptive Olympian, with a Narrative Hook. She sits upright, as graceful in repose as her quarterback father and ballerina mother. A visiting reporter suggests that it would be O.K. to take off her backpack. Vashti blinks, opens her eyes wide and exhales, smiling—at last, a moment of rest. “Oh, yeah,” she says, and slowly extracts herself from the backpack and falls into the chair. “Better.”

Every day now is a blur, accelerating as the calendar surges toward summer. Vashti (pronounced VASH-tie)—the second of five children of groundbreaking NFL quarterback Randall Cunningham and his wife, Felicity deJager, a native of South Africa and former professional ballet dancer—won the high jump at the U.S. indoor championships on March 12 with a clearance of 6’6 1/4″, a world junior record and higher than any American woman has jumped (indoors or outdoors) in three years.

Over the past two decades, a footballing revolution has swept through the streets of Spain. In a bid to shed their inferiority complex and reach the summit of international football, the Spanish Football Federation set about refining their country’s philosophy, recalibrating their academies; instructing them to become more specialised, more nuanced. From behind the curtain, the mad Spanish scientists emerged with a conveyor belt of the technically proficient at their mercy.

Over the coming years, as their new crop of players matured, the fortunes of their national team flourished in tandem. They transcended their perennial failings to finally become winners. An overnight sensation almost 20 years in the making, Spanish football suddenly represented the pinnacle of international football in both style and substance, as they vanquished their foes with their evolving, idiosyncratic brand of tiki-taka. “Why don’t we play like Spain?” lamented a chorus of rivalling countries.

Fast forward to the current day and the Spanish have gotten used to winning. Though their national team’s frailties were inexplicably exposed at the 2014 World Cup, the future remains bright.

… ESPN: In your teens, you spent three years at Manchester United. What did you learn there alongside players such as Paul Scholes and Ryan Giggs?

PP: With them you train to the end, up to perfection, because Paul Scholes — despite his age — was still there at the end of practice, hitting long passes, shots. He didn’t miss one. When you’re there, you have to adapt fast. I like that — always challenges.

ESPN: Aged 19, you told Sir Alex Ferguson you were leaving United for Juventus. Did that take courage?

PP: He’s a coach I respect a lot. But he’s a human. I’m someone who says what he thinks. Whether it’s Ferguson or [President Barack] Obama, I’ll tell him. Ferguson came to my place. We talked. It did make me think. He wanted to keep me, but I’d made my decision to leave.

Gavin came to Fortius after undergoing surgery for a stress fracture in his leg. Fortius was able to form an integrated team around Gavin’s treatment including physiotherapy, hydrotherapy, massage therapy, and strength & conditioning departments, as well as our lab for physiological and performance testing services. This true integration of treatment and programming from our internal team, as well as integration with Volleyball Canada’s external team support staff, lead to a well-rounded holistic return to play experience that we are happy to hear Gavin enjoyed & valued.

… Many things go into the mix, scientists say – logical reasoning, bias, trial-and-error and irrelevant information all can affect our choices when we are weighing the value of one thing over another. We often learn by reinforcement and rewards, but how does that work?

Can we look at the process within our brains to get a better grasp of how people learn and make choices?

The National Science Foundation has awarded University of Delaware neuroscientist Timothy Vickery a $449,999, three-year grant to support such a study. Vickery and his lab will have a close look at neural signals and what they tell us about the decision-making process.

Hue Jackson admitted Tuesday that he’s ticked off his sports science guys with the number of practices with pads he has planned for training camp.

“Honestly, they got kind of mad at me,” he said after the first mandatory minicamp practice Tuesday. “I’ll be very honest with you. We had a very candid conversation where they said, ‘Hue, you might want to double check your padded days schedule.’ I told them, ‘No.’ I know how to take care of a football team. I get a feel for when the guys, when we’re pushing them a little too far and we need to reel it in.”

Jackson stressed that only pad-crunching practices will get his team ready for the season. It’s a departure from the relatively light camps of the past few seasons, where there hasn’t been much tackling. Club Browns, if you will.

… How you would you say what you do now relates to the Ironman competition?

JA: Well, what I do for a living is prepare players, train players to, you know, if you look at Kyle Lowry, who’s playing a lot of minutes, I mean my job is to get him ready to perform at a high level. So it’s all about preparation. It’s all about his basketball skills, his strength, conditioning, his nutrition. So, when you train a basketball player at our company, Impact, in general, we train basketball players. So, we train DeMarcus Cousins, Kevin Garnett. We’ve trained Billups his whole career, you know, guys like that. Lowry, Porzingis, Myles Turner, those types of guys and we also train all the way down to kids. So, what we do for a living and what we do at Impact is create the training program that really makes people the best they can be. So, if you relate that to what I do, obviously when you train for an Ironman or train for a triathlon, it’s 100 percent about preparation. So, I have to eat right. I have to train hard. I have to lift waits properly. I have to take care of myself. See the physical therapist to make sure I’m loose and flexible, you know, free of ailments. So, basically, it’s just really the same thing that I expect my guys to do, I do myself. It’s real helpful to me also from a knowledge standpoint, I know what it feels like when your body’s dead. I know what it feels like when your nutrition isn’t good and you just don’t feel good. I know what it feels like when you have an injury and you’re trying to work through it. So, relating that to what we do at Impact and what I do with these NBA guys is a very direct correlation. Not to mention, it kind of, obviously I’ve been doing this for 20 years, so my credibility of a basketball trainer isn’t really in question with we had 12 first round picks alone last year in the draft.

“Sometimes you hate to see the offseason come to an end, but I can’t be happier with a group than these men. I’d be remiss – I have so many people to thank just to get to this point: obviously, we’ve got a long way to go, but I go back to my hiring from Dee and Jimmy (Haslam), Sashi (Brown) and Paul (DePodesta) and the environment that we’ve been trying to create; obviously the coaching staff, the staff that I was able to hire to come here and assist me and help our organization to become better; then (director of high performance) Adam Beard and his staff, they’ve done a tremendous job of preparing our players and getting them out here in shape and able to go as hard as we ask our players to go. Adam is a great find. To everybody else within our organization, just the support they’ve given me, just up to this point, has been outstanding. Now, like I said, we haven’t played a football game or anything like that, but you have to lay the right foundation and I think it has been laid. When I talk about our players, obviously, I’m really excited about so many of our players and just the potential that’s there. I say potential because you don’t know yet until you really play football what they can be and what they will be as a football team. I know our guys are working hard to become the best team that we can. I couldn’t have asked for a better group or for a better opportunity for myself. The guys have done extremely well.”

For the majority of incoming freshmen, their first experience of college football will be the summer workouts, with a strength coach they likely haven’t seen since their last visit. But LSU’s Tommy Moffitt says it has to start before then.

LSU’s summer conditioning has just begun, and while on 104.5 ESPN Baton Rouge, Moffitt talked about giving workout information to recruits after they sign. In most cases, he can tell what kind of shape the player will show up in based on what he does in the spring.

“With the stroke of the pen, they go from being a high school football player to basically being a collegiate football player overnight,” he said. “The good ones take it seriously in their training. They call me. They ask questions. Some of these guys have called and asked questions, sent me texts or videos. That’s important. You get to find out real quick who is serious about their preparation and who isn’t.

The influence of preparation time on ankle joint biomechanics during highly dynamic movements is largely unknown. The aim of this study was to evaluate the impact of limited preparation time on ankle joint loading during highly dynamic run-and-cut movements. Thirteen male basketball players performed 45°-sidestep-cutting and 180°-turning manoeuvres in reaction to light signals which appeared during the approach run. Both movements were executed under (1) an easy condition, in which the light signal appeared very early, (2) a medium condition and (3) a hard condition with very little time to prepare the movements. Maximum ankle inversion angles, moments and velocities during ground contact, as well as EMG signals of three lower extremity muscles, were analysed. In 180°-turning movements, reduced preparation time led to significantly increased maximum ankle inversion velocities. Muscular activation levels, however, did not change. Increased inversion velocities, without accompanying changes in muscular activation, may have the potential to destabilise the ankle joint when less preparation time is available. This may result in a higher injury risk during turning movements and should therefore be considered in ankle injury research and the aetiology of ankle sprains.

PURPOSE:

Muscle fatigue has been identified as a risk factor for spontaneous muscle injuries in sport. However, few studies have investigated the accumulated effects of muscle fatigue on human muscle contractile properties. This study aimed to determine whether repeated bouts of exercise inducing acute fatigue leads to longer-term fatigue-related changes in muscle contractile properties.
METHODS:

Maximum voluntary contraction (MVC), electromyographic (EMG) and mechanomyographic (MMG) measures were recorded in the biceps brachii of 11 participants for 13 days, before and after a maximally fatiguing exercise protocol. The exercise protocol involved participants repetitively lifting a weight (concentric contractions only) equal to 40 % MVC, until failure.
RESULTS:

A significant (p < 0.05) acute pre- to post-exercise decline of biceps brachii MVC and median power frequency (MPF) was observed each day, whilst no difference existed between pre-exercise MVC or MPF values on subsequent days (days 2-13). However, decreases in number of lift repetitions and in pre-exercise MMG values of muscle belly displacement, contraction velocity and half-relaxation velocity were observed through to day 13.
CONCLUSIONS:

Whilst MVC and MPF measures resolved by the following day’s test session, MMG measures indicated an ongoing decrement in muscle performance through days 2-13 consistent with the decline in lift repetitions observed. These results suggest that MMG may be more sensitive in detecting accumulated muscle fatigue than the ‘gold standard’ measures of MVC/MPF. Considering that muscle fatigue leads to injury, the on-going monitoring of MMG derived contractile properties of muscles in athletes may aid in the prediction of fatigued-induced muscle injury.

… almost all the community now seems to target the development of more complex pipelines (that most likely cannot be reproduced based on the elements presented in the paper) which in most of the cases have almost no theoretical reasoning behind that can add 0,1% of performance on a given benchmark. Is this the objective of academic research? Putting in place highly complex engineering models that simply explore computing power and massive annotated data?

… After ACL reconstruction (ACLR) the typical goal is to return to sport (RTS) as quickly as possible, preferably performing at the same level as preinjury yet protected from re-rupture. After an ACLR, 81% of patients return to any kind of sport, 65% return to their pre-injury level of sports participation and only 55% return to competitive sports. Also, after RTS the risk of re-injury (graft rupture) ranges from 6% to 25% whereas the risk of contralateral ACL injury ranges from 2% to 20.5%.

Many RTS criteria have been suggested, some based on the time from ACLR as the only criterion for RTS, others advocating combining time with subjective and objective criteria. The most commonly described tests are isokinetic strength tests, functional tests, clinical assessment and related subjective questionnaires. The decision as to whether or not an athlete is ready to return to sport after ACL reconstruction is dif?cult as the commonly used RTS criteria have not been validated.

Clinicians face return-to-play (RTP) decisions on a daily basis, and a lot of discussions revolve around which criteria are most helpful for decision-making. The models around RTP have a strong focus on biological and physiological aspects (tissue healing and body function), and recently started to integrate psychological aspects (biopsychosocial models).1 These models individualise RTP, by considering athlete-related factors, but fail to consider the myriad extrinsic parameters that influence and modify RTP issues. Here, the Strategic Assessment of Risk and Risk Tolerance model,2 which organises the available information into factors that determine participation risk and introduces a further layer (step 3=risk tolerance modifiers) to account for these other factors, can help the decisionmaker/s.

Looking at the broader picture of RTP, we see that decision-making processes are the end result of a series of steps, starting from injury occurrence. To provide an optimal path to RTP, these steps must be defined and their execution mastered, often in complex multistakeholder environments typical of elite sports. We believe that we can learn from management principles to implement better RTP approaches.

… So, what does [Eric] Joyce look at when bringing a player on to the roster?

“When making a decision on any player, all we try to do is look at every angle to get a fuller picture. Nonetheless, I’ve gone on record to say this in the past: if the stats and the scouts are in a dead heat, and all else is equal, scouts always win the day. Always. Nothing can replace the feel of a good scout.”

He continues, “There are three major characteristics we look for in every player we try to acquire. They are: Skating, Hockey IQ and Compete. It doesn’t matter if you’re the most skilled player on our team, or a grinder, you have to be able to compete in the NHL, and competing in the NHL means having grit.”