Applied Sports Science newsletter – September 28, 2016

… Bosh had been symptom-free for the past several months. But the salient issue has less to do with Bosh’s physical condition, and more to do with the rights of an individual rather than the team to determine how much risk is too much.

Bosh knows he has, or has had, episodes of clotting. But he believes that he can continue playing, with some adjustments, having found players in other sports whose careers continued despite being diagnosed with clots. He is saying, basically: it’s my life, and I want to keep playing. Which is an understandable position to take.

Although his workload is expected to be monitored throughout the preseason, Anthony Davis said he participated in every drill during Saturday’s opening day of training camp except conditioning work near the end of the two-hour session.

It was Davis’ first full-scaled work with his teammates since he underwent a surgical procedure in March to fix a stress reaction problem in his left knee cap. Davis also suffered a torn labrum last season, but he did not require surgery on his left shoulder.

”I feel great and I’m just happy to be out there,” Davis said. ”I love the game so much that it started to be frustrating when I couldn’t play or they pull you out. The main goal is to be ready for October 26 (opener against Denver).

Bournemouth manager Eddie Howe rejects the idea that British managers are being denied opportunities in the Premier League, and believes all managers need to prove they are good enough to manage at the top level.

Use it or lose it, triathletes.

Muscles don’t have long-term memory for exercises like running, biking and swimming, a new study suggests. The old adage that once you’ve been in shape, it’s easier to get fit again could be a myth, at least for endurance athletes, researchers in Sweden report September 22 in PLOS Genetics.

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“We really challenged the statement that your muscles can remember previous training,” says Maléne Lindholm of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. But even if muscles forget endurance exercise, the researchers say, other parts of the body may remember, and that could make retraining easier for people who’ve been in shape before.

We say “Good luck!” to people we wish well. And many of us have our own good luck charms and rituals. But does any of it make a difference? Do we REALLY make our own luck? Our Cover Story is reported by Susan Spencer of “48 Hours.”

… Sport England’s most recent “Active People Survey” highlighted that childhood participation in athletics and distance running has become increasingly popular in England. Although this growth in participation is promising for England Athletics, the number of athletes taking part in the sport declines after puberty. This issue is not exclusive to distance running, with poor retention rates being reported within most organised sport, both team and individual.

However, England Athletics has recently spent valuable effort researching the factors that may cause this issue. One possible cause of this dropout is that these athletes may be training too hard too soon, thereby damaging their long-term development and negatively influencing their motivation to continue in the sport.

This is often recognised as overtraining, yet precisely how common it is among young distance runners and the potential causes is still not clear.

Currently, runners mostly use pace to determine intensity, and they commonly measure that with GPS units. But these units have a margin of error of about 5 percent, which can be significant. Also, on varied terrain or during interval training, pace is less accurate as a measure of training stress. Power is much better at defining intensity on varied terrain and during intervals.

Although it might be tempting to focus on power as the most important metric there is for running, keep in mind that it’s the fastest athlete who wins the race, not the athlete who produces the most power. So pace is still the most important metric, but power has now greatly enhanced pace as a metric, by giving athletes a speed per watt. Let me explain.

… Speed, strength and power however are the most physically fatiguing training activities we can perform, they have some of the shortest residuals (perhaps only a few days), and they are the most stressful to the joints- particularly if one is carrying knocks from the previous game.

When faced by these problems too many players and coaches do away with these training modalities altogether. This is a big mistake in my opinion. Use it or lose it: though there is some carryover between training abilities, if you aren’t training speed, strength or power directly during the season, these qualities will likely be lost.

Instead a better solution is to keep these elements in the training programme year round, but modify them in a manner which allows for training to be done but at a lower then normal cost to fatigue and joint stress. Here are 3 tips I return to again and again during my in-season programming for high intensity abilities.

VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland has developed a mobile app and thumb-size device that help to prevent cerebral infarctions at an early stage, during asymptomatic atrial fibrillation. The mobile device, which detects arrhythmia (irregular heartbeat) has been tested with excellent results for around two years in real-life conditions in cooperation with Turku University Central Hospital.

Tools have been used for millions of years to augment the capabilities of the human body, allowing us to accomplish tasks that would otherwise be difficult or impossible. Powered exoskeletons and other assistive devices are sophisticated modern tools that have restored bipedal locomotion in individuals with paraplegia and have endowed unimpaired individuals with superhuman strength. Despite these successes, designing assistive devices that reduce energy consumption during running remains a substantial challenge, in part because these devices disrupt the dynamics of a complex, finely tuned biological system. Furthermore, designers have hitherto relied primarily on experiments, which cannot report muscle-level energy consumption and are fraught with practical challenges. In this study, we use OpenSim to generate muscle-driven simulations of 10 human subjects running at 2 and 5 m/s. We then add ideal, massless assistive devices to our simulations and examine the predicted changes in muscle recruitment patterns and metabolic power consumption. Our simulations suggest that an assistive device should not necessarily apply the net joint moment generated by muscles during unassisted running, and an assistive device can reduce the activity of muscles that do not cross the assisted joint. Our results corroborate and suggest biomechanical explanations for similar effects observed by experimentalists, and can be used to form hypotheses for future experimental studies. The models, simulations, and software used in this study are freely available at simtk.org and can provide insight into assistive device design that complements experimental approaches.

Ajax’s 5-0 cup victory against fellow Dutch premier division side Willem II on September 21 saw a first in football: the official world debut for a video assistant referee in a competitive game.

Sitting in a van with six TV screens inside the stadium, the assistant quickly proved his effectiveness. He recommended by headset to the on-pitch referee that his initial decision to give Willem II midfielder Anouar Kali a yellow card for kicking an Ajax player’s ankle was too lenient, and Kali was dismissed a few seconds later.

While video refereeing is already routinely used to review decisions in sports like rugby and hockey, football has been late to the party. Ahead of the Ajax-Willem II game it was trialled first in a friendly between Italy and France earlier in September, successfully resolving claims in respect of a yellow card and a penalty.

In the previous blog “How common are illnesses amongst athletes? “we saw that a large number of athletes are affected by illness. The prevention of illness is a key component in athlete health management. Illness prevention strategies are not only important to optimise uninterrupted training, but also to reduce the risk of illness that can prevent participation in important competitions. Furthermore, illness prevention can also reduce the risk of medical complications during exercise. Illness prevention programs in Olympic teams have been shown to increase the sporting success of the athlete and the team. Although there is no single method that completely eliminates the risk of illness in athletes, there are several effective behavioural, nutritional and training strategies that can lower exposure to pathogens and limit the extent of exercise-induced immune system depression, thereby reducing the risk of illness. Some of the more important behavioural, lifestyle and medical strategies are described in this blog. A separate blog Strategies to reduce illness risk in athletes Part 2 focusses on the training, psychological stress management and nutritional strategies to limit infection risk.

A variety of behavioural, lifestyle and medical intervention strategies have been advocated (1, 2) to reduce the risk of illness in the athlete. These include advice to athletes, measures taken by medical staff, and the athlete support team.

How many of you use averages in order to inform your decisions? I know I do; as an athlete I focused on finding out what the average performance was at major championships to achieve certain placings, so that I could use that information in order to create my own individual goals. As a sports scientist, I use averages a lot – typically I tend to compare the average improvement in one group with the average improvement of another. But is the average actually a useful metric, or is it overused?

Bacteria, animals, languages, cancers: all of these things can evolve, which we know from the work of legions of scientists. You could argue that science itself also evolves. Researchers vary in their methods and attitudes, in ways that affect their success, and they pass those traits to the students they train. Over time, the very culture of science is sculpted by natural selection—and according to Paul Smaldino and Richard McElreath, it is headed in an unenviable direction.

The problem, as others have noted, is that what is good for individual scientists is not necessarily what is good for science as a whole. A scientist’s career currently depends on publishing as many papers as possible in the most prestigious possible journals. More than any other metric, that’s what gets them prestige, grants, and jobs.

Now, imagine you’re a researcher who wants to game this system. Here’s what you do. Run many small and statistically weak studies. Tweak your methods on the fly to ensure positive results. If you get negative results, sweep them under the rug. Never try to check old results; only pursue new and exciting ones. These are not just flights of fancy. We know that such practices abound.

This summer, even for the hedonistic consumption of the Premier League, was unprecedented. Spending topped one billion pounds, with Manchester United breaking the World transfer record, in the region of £95million for Frenchman Paul Pogba. Many within the football world were left dismayed that United payed so much for the Juventus player who the left the club for nothing in 2012. More disheartening for fans is the reputed 30% or if we conservatively round this down, the £20million fee super-agent Mino Raiola will collect.

Whilst football agents, the games infamous middle men, have been around since the early 1960’s, the term super-agent is only a recent arrival into the lexicon of association football. As money has flowed into the game, a powerful few have amassed enough resources to move from mere Agents to the grander media christened term ‘Super-Agents’. Empirically of course it is difficult to typologise super-agents given the somewhat blurred boundaries, but we are told they are the most powerful men in football, not mangers, players, leaders of the games governing bodies, but agents.

However, what are we to make of super-agents and their networked world. Are they to be demonised as neo-liberal capitalists, fuelled by finance and commerce at odds with the cultural meaning of football as social institutions, or do they play a pivotal role in the production process, using there connected worlds to produce a global game.