Applied Sports Science newsletter – July 29, 2016

Applied Sports Science news articles, blog posts and research papers for July 29, 2016

 

Tennis – 2020 Tokyo Games for Roger Federer? Why not?

ESPN Tennis, Peter Bodo from July 27, 2016

It turns out Rio de Janeiro won’t be a terminal destination for Roger Federer. The upcoming Olympics were where the 34-year-old all-time men’s Grand Slam singles champ was destined to go out in a blaze of glory — or a tailspin.

But Rio has become just another station that Federer bypasses without pause as he continues his unique journey in tennis, the terminus still unknown. That much was clear in the undertone of the announcement Federer posted the other day, declaring that he was skipping the Olympic Games and pulling the plug on the rest of the 2016 year.

Instead, he will focus on “extensive rehabilitation” of his surgically repaired left knee.

 

Baseball Therapy: Growing Zobrists

Baseball Prospectus, Russell A. Carleton from July 26, 2016

… The thing about an octopus bullpen is that it means that there are only a couple roster spots left for substitute position players. Four and even three-man benches are common. And that has another important effect on the makeup of a roster. Because there’s little room to carry both a dedicated backup middle infielder and a dedicated backup corner infielder. The fourth outfielder had better be able to hack it in all three spots out there. Or maybe the utility infielder is also willing to grab an outfielder’s glove and do his best out there.

Or maybe the regular position players need to be willing to move around a little bit. At the end of last season, I took a look at how many of these multi-position regulars there were in baseball. In 2015, 18 players played at least 81 games and played in at least five games at four different positions, and eight of them added a fifth position to their resume. We’ve gone beyond the days of the utility infielder who was the shortstop who had enough bat to fit on a bench and more than enough glove to fake it at second and third. Teams are starting to recognize that having a player (or five) around who can shift around makes things more interesting for the manager. I’ve estimated that the “Zobrist Effect” could actually be worth a half a win or so in the right circumstances. But first, you need a Ben Zobrist.

 

Relationships Between Training Load Indicators and Training Outcomes in Professional Soccer | SpringerLink

Sports Medicine from July 26, 2016

Background

In professional senior soccer, training load monitoring is used to ensure an optimal workload to maximize physical fitness and prevent injury or illness. However, to date, different training load indicators are used without a clear link to training outcomes.
Objective

The aim of this systematic review was to identify the state of knowledge with respect to the relationship between training load indicators and training outcomes in terms of physical fitness, injury, and illness.
Methods

A systematic search was conducted in four electronic databases (CINAHL, PubMed, SPORTDiscus, and Web of Science). Training load was defined as the amount of stress over a minimum of two training sessions or matches, quantified in either external (e.g., duration, distance covered) or internal load (e.g., heart rate [HR]), to obtain a training outcome over time.
Results

A total of 6492 records were retrieved, of which 3304 were duplicates. After screening the titles, abstracts and full texts, we identified 12 full-text articles that matched our inclusion criteria. One of these articles was identified through additional sources. All of these articles used correlations to examine the relationship between load indicators and training outcomes. For pre-season, training time spent at high intensity (i.e., >90 % of maximal HR) was linked to positive changes in aerobic fitness. Exposure time in terms of accumulated training, match or combined training, and match time showed both positive and negative relationships with changes in fitness over a season. Muscular perceived exertion may indicate negative changes in physical fitness. Additionally, it appeared that training at high intensity may involve a higher injury risk. Detailed external load indicators, using electronic performance and tracking systems, are relatively unexamined. In addition, most research focused on the relationship between training load indicators and changes in physical fitness, but less on injury and illness.
Conclusion

HR indicators showed relationships with positive changes in physical fitness during pre-season. In addition, exposure time appeared to be related to positive and negative changes in physical fitness. Despite the availability of more detailed training load indicators nowadays, the evidence about the usefulness in relation to training outcomes is rare. Future research should implement continuous monitoring of training load, combined with the individual characteristics, to further examine their relationship with physical fitness, injury, and illness.

 

Conehead: Athletes are people, not machines

Dirt Mountainbike from July 28, 2016

High Performance Manager Darren Roberts on why he needs to listen to athletes and to not just look at the stats.

Athletes can seem like straightforward characters to deal with, all they want to do is ‘win’… right? The reality of course is far more complex, just like the athletes themselves are far more complex. As a ‘performance’ guy it’s easy for me to lose myself in the continual physical progression of the athletes as I strive to continually make them faster, fitter, stronger, more powerful. This in itself is not as straightforward as it sounds. Performance is small things done well over time, the ordinary done extraordinarily well to try and improve capacity and the athletes ability to tolerate their sport. As the benefits aren’t immediately obvious, it’s important to assess, monitor and re-assess where the athlete is at, to show improvement. That’s OK, and ultimately necessary, but it’s easy to lose yourself in this process as a coach. The numbers can become king as the pursuit of physical improvement takes over as the sole outcome, which is completely understandable as a ‘performance’ practitioner, it’s what we’re paid to do.

In my experience the more you treat an athlete like a set of key performance indicators, data points and soft tissues to be manipulated with adaptations, the more you will be a limiting factor to their performance. Athletes are, obviously, people… so treat them exactly like that, as a person.

 

Overtraining Is Killing Your Kids Athletic Development

Dr. John Rusin The Strength DOC blog, Greg Schaible from July 25, 2016

… Athletes and kids need to learn how to compete, handing out participation trophies certainly does not create an environment of competition. However, games and weekend tournaments are not the only way you teach a kid how to compete and become better athletes. In fact, the younger the age, the less high stakes competition is actually necessary.

To understand this better you first need to have a working knowledge of how one develops any set of skills. Any skill or movement the body learns will go through 3 stages of learning. These stages are:

  • The Cognitive Stage – the individual develops a basic understanding of skill through trial and error.
  • The Associative Stage – the individual begins to understand the “how to” or “what to do” for a particular task from previous experiences.
  • The Autonomous Stage – the skill is automatic and can be performed in any environment.
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    SOCCER BOOK REVIEW: SOCCER SCIENCE

    GoalNation from July 27, 2016

    Tony Strudwick, Head of Performance, at Manchester United storied soccer club in Manchester, England is well known for his modern and innovative approach to developing professional soccer players and spent more than two years working on this amazing collection of information on the science of soccer. The book propels the game of soccer to new heights with valuable and useable information on how to help develop players. Soccer Science — is just that, a book brimming with scientific information which can make a difference in the development of youth as well as professional soccer players.

    “My favorite part of working on the book Soccer Science was trying to bring the coaching information alive, especially on the principals of play,” said Tony Strudwick in an exclusive interview. “The book is loaded with key tips for developing players. I would like the book to achieve a global reach.”

     

    How to Tell if You’re Sleep Deprived — and What to Do

    Cleveland Clinic, HealthEssentials from July 27, 2016

    Everyone has some nights when they toss and turn, struggling to fall sleep — and stay asleep. But if you find yourself regularly relying on energy drinks or coffee to get through the day, you might be one of the many adults in the U.S. with sleep problems.

    You don’t have to have sleep apnea or narcolepsy to find your days disrupted by sleep loss. Daily worries, heartburn, and even hormonal shifts are a few reasons you might find yourself staring at the ceiling at 1 a.m.

    And those lattes that got you through the day? They also may be the reason you are up at night. It takes time for your body to fully metabolize caffeine — which many people do not realize can take even longer as you get older.

    But whatever the reasons, sleep deprivation can chip away at your mental and physical health. To deal with it, first you need to get a sense of your true sleep needs.

     

    Human Enhancement

    Pew Research Center from July 26, 2016

    … Both advocates for and opponents of human enhancement spin a number of possible scenarios. Some talk about what might be called “humanity plus” – people who are still recognizably human, but much smarter, stronger and healthier. Others speak of “post-humanity,” and predict that dramatic advances in genetic engineering and machine technology may ultimately allow people to become conscious machines – not recognizably human, at least on the outside.

    This enhancement revolution, if and when it comes, may well be prompted by ongoing efforts to aid people with disabilities and heal the sick. Indeed, science is already making rapid progress in new restorative and therapeutic technologies that could, in theory, have implications for human enhancement.

    It seems that each week or so, the headlines herald a new medical or scientific breakthrough. In the last few years, for instance, researchers have implanted artificial retinas to give blind patients partial sight. Other scientists successfully linked a paralyzed man’s brain to a computer chip, which helped restore partial movement of previously non-responsive limbs. Still others have created synthetic blood substitutes, which could soon be used in human patients.

     

    Machine Vision’s Achilles’ Heel Revealed by Google Brain Researchers

    MIT Technology Review from July 22, 2016

    One of the most spectacular advances in modern science has been the rise of machine vision. In just a few years, a new generation of machine learning techniques has changed the way computers see.

    Machines now outperform humans in face recognition and object recognition and are in the process of revolutionizing numerous vision-based tasks such as driving, security monitoring, and so on. Machine vision is now superhuman.

    But a problem is emerging. Machine vision researchers have begun to notice some worrying shortcomings of their new charges. It turns out machine vision algorithms have an Achilles’ heel that allows them to be tricked by images modified in ways that would be trivial for a human to spot.

     

    Faculty Summit 2016 – Cameras everywhere! Video Analytics at Scale

    YouTube, Microsoft Research from July 22, 2016

    Cameras are becoming increasingly ubiquitous. They are deployed for a wide variety of commercial & surveillance purposes by private enterprises and governments. Collectively analyzing videos produced by cameras (e.g., city-wide or enterprise-wide or in a datacenter) is a grand research challenge with great commercial importance. Large scale video analytics – on real-time videos and off stored videos – represents an exciting frontier for big data systems and networks. What should large-scale video analytics systems look like? What are the challenges and opportunities for vision algorithms at scale? What are the privacy implications of video analyses?

     

    Can Body Tracking Tech Find The Next Steph Curry?

    Popular Science from July 26, 2016

    … [Brian] Kopp says that the college market has been a key driver of Catapult’s growth for the past year and a half. Much of that boom has to do with the fact that, unlike in the pros, the chips can be worn during actual games (due to existing regulations). Catapult used to work with single teams within universities, but they’ve only recently begun to instead strike contracts with entire athletic departments.

    The difference between pro, college, and high school usage of the technology can be vast. All of the available data is essentially the same — there are a few variants of the product — but smaller colleges and high schools, with lesser chances of their prospects going pro, are more concerned with injury prevention than maximizing efficiency.

    The chips can act to ensure ethical standards, confirming that student athletes aren’t overworked. Only 10 high school programs have taken on Catapult products thus far, but forecasts suggest that number could increase fivefold by the fall.

     

    ACL Surgery Trends, 2007 to 2014

    OrthoBuzz from July 19, 2016

    In a population-based epidemiological study published in the July 6, 2016 Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery, Tibor et al. found that from 2007 to 2014:

  • Many ACL-reconstruction surgeons changed from a transtibial approach to either an anteromedial portal or lateral approach for femoral-tunnel drilling.
  • Most did not substantially change the types of grafts they used.
  • Many eschewed first-generation bioabsorbable implants in favor of biocomposite fixation devices.
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    After ACL Surgery…Close Enough? NO WAY! (Sports Med Res)

    Sports Medicine Research: In the Lab & In the Field from July 20, 2016

    Take Home Message: Patients should attain all objective criteria goals prior to returning to sport. A professional athlete who fails to meet functional criteria for return-to-sport or who has a low hamstring:quadriceps ratio is at greater risk for an anterior cruciate ligament graft rupture.

     

    Sports performance following ACL reconstruction

    BMJ Blogs: BJSM blog, Mick Hughes from July 27, 2016

    I’ve written about ACL injury in the past: at-risk age groups, risk factors, when it is safe to return to sport following ACL surgery and ACL prevention programs – to name a few (read past posts on my blog). For my guest spot in this BJSM blog, I turn my attention to sport performances upon return to sport.

    Reports suggest that within 1-2 years following ACL reconstruction 80% of people will return to some form of sport, 65% will return to the same sporting level, and 55% will return to competitive sports (1). That’s all well and good, but the question I am interested in is: Are the return to sport statistics the same at the elite level, and importantly for the fans, will the athlete ever be the same again when he or she gets back on the sporting field?

     

    Rise of Data Analytics in Football: The rise and rise of Leicester City

    Outside of the Boot, Jack Coles from July 22, 2016

    Because of the threat of the competition, much data analysis remains unseen and undisclosed in the football industry. But data analytics’ best story may not be very thinly veiled after all. If Gabriel Marcotti is correct in his informal study about managers who apply their data analytics teams work in the Premier League, then Claudio Ranieri (or his predecessor, Nigel Pearson) has (or had) to be one of those two men. How else does a man fired from the Greek national team for losing 0-1 at home to the Faroe Islands in the UEFA Euro 2016 qualifying win the Premier League with a team who Stefan Szymanski (co-author of Soccernomics) estimated, ‘the wage budget for Leicester in the current season [2015-2016] would have ranked them about 12th in the Premier League’?

    To what level did Ranieri use information from the data analytics team at Leicester? At the very least, ceding some control to Leicester’s staff over tactical systems, and at the most being simply a well-liked figurehead and spokesperson for the side during their remarkable year. There is a strong amount of evidence that the 2015-2016 title victory for Leicester City owes a huge amount of credit to their data analysis team, and as yet this has been largely unmentioned. The term Moneyball is on the tip of our tongues. So many things went right for Leicester in the 2015-2016 season, but their striking tactical set-up really illustrated that their departure from conventional football could have been led by data analytics.

     

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