Applied Sports Science newsletter – June 24, 2016

Applied Sports Science news articles, blog posts and research papers for June 24, 2016

 

Flacco: Mental hurdle toughest part of ACL recovery – NFL.com

NFL.com, Kevin Patra from June 21, 2016

Joe Flacco’s recovery from an ACL tear is one of the least-talked about major injuries this offseason.

Perhaps it’s because he’s not a running quarterback, so we take it for granted that he’ll be the same when he returns. Perhaps it’s because there are many other questions about the Baltimore Ravens — injuries or otherwise. Whatever the reason, we’ve written and discussed little about the quarterback of a perennial AFC power returning from a major knee injury.

Flacco continues to rehab in anticipation of training camp. He’s running and cutting on the knee, but hasn’t thrown with velocity much in his comeback. At the end of minicamp, Flacco told the team’s official website that the mental aspect of getting hit might be the most difficult hurdle in the process.

 

Meet the Sports Psychologist Training the Minds of the NBA’s Top Draft Prospects | VICE Sports

VICE Sports from June 23, 2016

… Brown won’t be the only lottery pick during Thursday’s draft to benefit from Betchart’s coaching. The 38-year-old helped likely top pick Ben Simmons stay grounded during his maelstrom year at LSU, and advised Kentucky freshman Skal Labissiere on how to endure the pressures of life in Big Blue Nation. [Graham] Betchart’s client base extends well beyond the 2016 draft; he has worked with scores of NBA stars, including Aaron Gordon, Zach LaVine, Marcus Smart, Stanley Johnson, and Andre Drummond. Betchart has also helped Andrew Wiggins and Karl-Anthony Towns, which means that if Simmons is indeed the top pick, Betchart will have trained the past three No. 1s.

“A lot of my work involves planting the seed in these guys’ heads, and then being available the moment they reach out,” he says. “It is not normalized for young men to reach out and be vulnerable, so I just want to be there when they are ready.”

“Graham does a great job of keeping it simple,” says Gordon, who first began training with Betchart as a freshman in high school. “He can turn very complex ideas into one or two sentences that you can take with you for weeks.”

 

Texans treat their new sports science department as a closely guarded secret

ESPN, Houston Texans Blog from June 23, 2016

… In April the Texans joined the ranks of NFL teams embracing this kind of data. General manager Rick Smith created a sports science department, led by Erik Korem, who was previously the University of Kentucky’s High Performance coordinator. The titles are relatively new, even 10 years ago you’d never see teams creating such positions. The the work is also new. With it, the Texans are hoping to give themselves an extra edge, an edge they’re hoping others won’t find.

“It is new and it’s emerging,” Smith said. “And the fact that we have spent a considerable amount of time, effort, energy and resources on it, yeah, some of it is proprietary.”

Secrecy and paranoia are common in the NFL at most levels of their operation, but that’s amplified with the Texans where sports science is involved. Having acquiesced to a few media requests for Korem last week, Smith made clear his own personal parameters.

 

Andy Barr: Blood biomarker analysis, injury prevention

SI.com, Brian T. Dessart from June 22, 2016

For many professional athletes, the letter D is key. While you may be thinking defense, deke, double double or draw, this variation of D lives within an athlete’s body and can dictate performance. Enter the universe of vitamin D.

“Vitamin D is very important and you might see very low levels in players—often seen in basketball players, due to the components [of] ethnicity, but also due to the lack of exposure of being outside,” says co-founder of Total Performance, Andy Barr. “You need vitamin D for all sorts of functions throughout the body, from muscle function to bone support.”

 

Sports Technology Symposium – FCB

FC Barcelona from June 22, 2016

The first Sport Technology Symposium, hosted by FC Barcelona on Thursday 19 November 2015, was a huge success, where total of 320 professionals from all around the world were able to enjoy talks by representatives of the business and digital departments of different clubs and North American sports franchises. … The next Sports Technology Symposium will be held on 10 and 11 November, 2016

 

Microfluidics-Based Pressure Sensor Takes Loads, Bends

EE Times from June 23, 2016

Researchers from the National University of Singapore have devised a thin and flexible pressure sensor that not only measures compressive loads from a very wide range (2 kPa to 400 kPa) but can also distinguish bending or stretching loads.

The passive sensor consists of 80?m thin ‘S’-shaped microfluidics connecting a central circular pocket, 5mm in diameter, with two side circular regions (2.5mm in diameter), all filled with the eutectic fluid metal GaIn (eGaIn). Molded out of soft silicone rubber bonded to a PET film with two strips of screen-printed silver electrodes running through the side circular regions, the sensor is both rugged and flexible. The use of an electrically conductive liquid metal means the sensor won’t suffer from cracking or material fatigue.

 

Mapping current research trends on neuromuscular risk factors of non-contact ACL injury – Physical Therapy in Sport

Physical Therapy in Sport from June 14, 2016

The aim of this systematic review was (i) to identify neuromuscular markers that have been predictive of a primary non-contact ACL injury, (ii) to assess whether proposed risk factors have been supported or refuted in the literature from cohort and case-control studies, and (iii) to reflect on the body of research that aims at developing field based tools to assess risk through an association with these risk factors. Electronic searches were undertaken, of PubMed, SCOPUS, Web of Science, CINAHL and SPORTDiscus examining neuromuscular risk factors associated with ACL injury published between January 1990 and July 2015. The evidence supporting neuromuscular risk factors of ACL injury is limited where only 4 prospective cohort studies were found. Three of which looked into muscular capacity and one looked into muscular activation patterns but none of the studies found strong evidence of how muscular capacity or muscular activation deficits are a risk factor for a primary non-contact ACL injury. A number of factors associated to neural control and muscular capacity have been suggested to be related to non-contact ACL injury risk but the level of evidence supporting these risk factors remains often elusive, leaving researchers and practitioners uncertain when developing evidence-based injury prevention programs.

 

Return to Sport and BMI are Associated with Quality of Life After an ACL Reconstruction (Sports Med Res)

Sports Medicine Research: In the Lab & In the Field from June 15, 2016

Take Home Message: Lower overall quality of life after an anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) reconstruction was associated with higher body mass index (BMI) and not returning to sport.

 

What Should Athletes do to Minimize Risk of Reinjury After ACL Reconstruction Surgery? (Sports Med Res)

Sports Medicine Research: In the Lab & In the Field from June 13, 2016

Take Home Message: Athletes who wait at least 9 months after an anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction and/or regain quadriceps strength compared with the uninjured limb may be at lower risk for reinjury than those who fail to meet these criteria.

 

Association between Lower Extremity Muscle Strength and Noncontact ACL Injuries. – PubMed – NCBI

Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise from June 20, 2016

PURPOSE:

To prospectively investigate the association between isolated and functional lower extremity muscle strength, and the risk for non-contact ACL injury in Norwegian female elite handball and football players.
METHODS:

From 2007 through 2015, premier league players participated in strength testing and were prospectively followed for ACL injury risk. At baseline, we recorded player demographics, playing and ACL injury history, and measured peak concentric isokinetic quadriceps and hamstrings torques (60°/s), HQ-ratio, isometric hip abduction strength and 1RM in a seated leg press. We followed a pre-defined statistical protocol where we generated 5 separate logistic regression models, one for each of the proposed strength risk factors and adjusted for confounding factors. New ACL injury was the outcome, using the leg as the unit of analysis.
RESULTS:

A total of 57 (6.6%) out of 867 players (age: 21±4 yrs; height: 170±6 cm; body mass: 66±8 kg) suffered from a non-contact ACL injury after baseline testing (1.8±1.8 yrs). The OR of sustaining a new injury among those with an ACL injury history was 3.1 (95% CI 1.6 to 6.1). None of the 5 strength variables selected were statistically associated with an increased risk of ACL rupture when adjusted for sport, dominant leg, ACL injury history, and height.
CONCLUSION:

Peak lower extremity strength was not associated with an increased ACL injury risk among female elite handball and football players. Hence, peak strength, as measured in the present study, cannot be used to screen elite female athletes to predict injury risk.

 

Is ‘when we eat’ as important as ‘what we eat’?

King's College London from June 22, 2016

In a review of research on the effect of meal patterns on health, the few studies available suggest that eating irregularly is linked to a higher risk of metabolic syndrome (high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes and obesity). The limited evidence highlights the need for larger scale studies to better understand the impact of chrono-nutrition on public health, argue the authors of two new papers, particularly with the rise in shift workers and ‘social jetlag’ where many of us live by social clocks rather than our internal body clocks.

Our current lifestyle has become demanding and more irregular. Food consumption patterns have changed markedly over the past decades: more meals are skipped, consumed outside the family home, on-the-go, later in the day, and more irregularly. Two papers published in the Proceedings of the Nutrition Society explore the implications for health from different eating habits, reviewing the evidence from a number of dietary studies as well as global differences in eating habits.

 

Kevin Currell: How to eat like a Champion

English Institute of Sport from June 20, 2016

Olympians eat and drink approximately 8,000 times throughout every four year Olympic cycle. Every single one of these influences the biochemistry of the body, sometimes to a large degree, sometimes only subtly.

However, each one of these alterations on biochemistry will lead to an effect on the athlete’s health, or fine tune the adaptation to training or enhance performance.

Our job as Performance Nutritionists is to Unleash the Power of Food so that we can shift those biochemical changes in the direction which enhances performance.

 

How Analytics Can Help Identify NBA Draft Steals and Busts | VICE Sports

VICE Sports from June 23, 2016

The NBA Draft is truly a lottery, and not just in how the first few picks are awarded. Teams are making multi-million dollar bets on players—often teenagers—whom they hope will one day become high-quality pros. The hurdles and pitfalls are numerous, but the potential rewards are huge.

Teams have invested in an array of approaches for evaluating draft prospects, including old-fashioned scouting; extensive background checks; personal workouts and interviews; medical exams; drills and exercises intended to predict susceptibility to injury; and yes, statistical analysis.

While there are an array of superb statistical approaches available for analyzing the contributions of players already in the NBA, the tools for evaluating prospects are less robust, despite the efforts of several smart independent analysts and the first-rate minds employed by actual teams.

 

No 1st-round pick no problem for Penguins

TribLIVE Mobile from June 22, 2016

… a draft class without a buzz-worthy name is not necessarily doomed to disappoint. Research on several decades of draft results and how players ultimately fared relative to their selection spot has revealed that in the NHL there’s less value in late first-round picks and more promise in the latter four of the seven rounds.

“By the 30th pick, you’re under a 40 percent chance of turning into an NHL player, and this is by my really modest definition of an NHL player, meaning you play in 100 NHL games,” said TSN analytics experts Scott Cullen. “The difference in value between having (that) first- and a second-round pick or two seconds is not massive, so it’s not as though you write off this year’s draft and think there’s no chance. It’d be nice for the Penguins if they had more than five picks, but such is the nature of winning the Stanley Cup.”

 

Uneven impact: Billy Beane’s tangled legacy

Fansided, Matt Verderame from June 07, 2016

… “He’s the first one (hiring intellectuals) to my knowledge,” San Francisco Chronicle and A’s beat writer Susan Slusser said. “There were a lot of people using metrics before and at the same time as Beane but he’s always been outside the box in hiring.”

This is probably the area where Beane had the biggest influence on the industry, but he had a surprisingly simple reason for choosing to go Ivy League instead of American League.

“My own self-preservation,” he states half-jokingly. “First of all, I felt in my situation I represented a certain portion of the business as an ex-player and I had a viewpoint from that end. Being around Sandy (Alderson), you realize being smart works in any business. I wanted to surround myself with people who complimented my strengths and filled in my weaknesses. All business should be a meritocracy and running a team is far different than playing it. … If I’m going to pat myself on the back for anything, it is hiring guys smarter than me. Hopefully it has provided a chance for guys who didn’t play the game, including females. That’s the great thing about the sport, we have gotten smarter in many cases with people who have not played. That was not the case 20 years ago.”

 

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