Applied Sports Science newsletter – October 5, 2016

The sold-out flight is already 90 minutes behind schedule by the time Galaxy forward Alan Gordon begins lugging his carry-on bag up the crowded aisle to seat 18C in coach on American Airlines Flight 2462 from Los Angeles to Dallas.

A dozen rows away, teammate Landon Donovan is wedged into a middle seat, wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap in a vain attempt to avoid recognition.

The Galaxy may be Major League Soccer’s premier franchise, one with a record five championships and a Hall of Fame roster of coaches and players. But on the 2 1/2-hour trip the Galaxy took Friday, the team endured the same kinds of delays, uncomfortable seats and crowded cabins that have made business travel more pain than pleasure.

“We’ve dealt with baggage delays. We’ve dealt with flight delays,” said Zack Murshedi, who handles the Galaxy’s travel arrangements. “We don’t get any special treatment.”

Two men influenced C.J. Miles’ offseason workout program.

One of those men, Miles said, will remain anonymous. The other was an old-school strength and conditioning coach. The two men helped Miles return to Bankers Life Fieldhouse last week for the Indiana Pacers’ training camp with a toned upper body, more strength in his legs and knowledge of how to perform better.

Miles explained that the first man, an NBA scout, gave him valuable information: The C.J. Miles scouting report.

That evaluation led Miles in June to contact Bob King, with whom he had never worked before. Miles and King – who is based in Dallas, Miles’ hometown – spent hours in the gym. They created their plan based on what the scouting report said were Miles’ weaknesses last season.

LeBron James was at his absolute best in last season’s NBA Finals. He averaged 29.7 points, 11.3 rebounds, 8.9 assists, 2.6 steals, and 2.3 blocks a game, becoming the first player in NBA history to lead both teams in all five statistical categories in a playoff series. His chase-down block of Andre Iguodala with less than two minutes remaining in Game 7 was an all-timer, and it required every bit of his speed, explosiveness, and leaping ability to pull off. LeBron didn’t look like a player who had lost a step in that moment, or one who was in the waning stages of his prime. He looked like someone still getting better.

… While there’s a need for larger scale, more thoroughly designed research, studies indicate that a yoga practice helps in treating depression and anxiety (in multiple meta-analyses), managing stress, and improving the well-being of cancer survivors. Research indicates that the practice helps young musicians find flow states, women over 55 experience transcendence of the ordinary, and ashram residents reach “a radical shift in consciousness of the type most people experience only when they are using psychoactive drugs.” Therein lies the exquisite difficulty of studying it: Asana, or the series of poses that you probably think of when you hear “yoga,” is a physical exercise, yes, but also a psychological and perceptual one, like its sibling, meditation. Almost all the researchers I talked to warned me that no one completely knows “how yoga works”: The expansive fruits of long-term practice are intensely subjective, and it’s rather difficult to design a study that gains access to another person’s phenomenology.

As Justin Williams went through his summer training, he carved out one day a week for a special workout. Like the skating and weightlifting he did for much of the summer, this involved a lot of sweating, but he had to go to a studio and was surrounded mostly by women.

“I do hot yoga,” he said. “It’s like a feeling of accomplishment when you get through a whole session. It just shows you don’t have to be 250 pounds and pure muscle to do this stuff. You see 130-pound girls doing stuff that’s, quite frankly, pretty amazing. It just goes to show you there’s different types of strength. It’s not all visual.”

Like a growing number of hockey players, Williams has added yoga to his offseason regimen, adapting to an NHL that he has seen shift away from strictly muscle. He admitted that he never thought he’d find himself in a yoga studio when he entered the NHL 16 years ago, but it has become more commonplace around hockey, with teams such as the Washington Capitals and their American Hockey League affiliate even having sessions during the season.

Manchester City defender Pablo Zabaleta has said that Pep Guardiola has banned cell phones in an effort to build team spirit at the club.

When he took over in July, Guardiola introduced new dietary rules for his players and banned unhealthy food such as pizza and chips.

The former Barcelona and Bayern Munich coach has also made his players eat together at the club’s Etihad Campus and has cut the internet completely to encourage the players to interact with each other.

The purpose of this study was to compare force– and power–time curve variables during jumping between Division I strength-matched male and female basketball athletes. Males (n?=?8) and females (n?=?8) were strength matched by testing a one-repetition maximum (1RM) back squat. 1RM back squat values were normalised to body mass in order to demonstrate that strength differences were a function of body mass alone. Subjects performed three countermovement jumps (CMJ) at maximal effort. Absolute and relative force– and power–time curve variables from the CMJs were analysed between males and females. Average force– and power–time curves were generated for all subjects. Jump height was significantly greater (p???.05) in males than females. Absolute force was higher in males during the concentric phase, but not significantly different (p???.05) when normalised to body mass. Significance was found in absolute concentric impulse between sexes, but not when analysed relative to body mass. Rate of force development, rate of power development, relative peak force, and work were not significantly different between sexes. Males had significantly greater impulse during the eccentric phase as well as peak power (PP) during the concentric phase of the CMJ than did females in both absolute and relative terms. It is concluded that sex differences are not a determining factor in measured force during a CMJ when normalised to body mass between strength-matched subjects. However, eccentric phase impulse and concentric phase PP appear to be influenced by sex differences independent of matching strength levels.

Sleep – the final frontier, or so it seems in digital health. While everybody needs sleep and plenty want to know more about how to do it the best they can, tools to improve sleep and, in turn, improve health have moved decidedly slower than other digital health innovations like activity trackers. But that’s changing, said a panel of sleep experts and sleep tracking device and app makers at Health 2.0.

“The power of the sleep message has been blunted for years, because we haven’t really had a metric,” said David Cloud, CEO of the National Sleep Foundation. “To the extent that we can measure sleep, we can drive behavior change, and with that, unlock the true power of sleep and its connection to health.”

After high school football star Kyler Williams died last month in a car crash, Razorbacks coach Bret Bielema retweeted a photo Williams had posted on Twitter three weeks earlier following a tour of Arkansas’ campus.

The photo showed Williams, a receiver from nearby Springdale High, and Bielema at Razorback Stadium. To his retweet, the coach added this message: “Prayers and thoughts to Kyler Williams & his family. Couldn’t help but stop & get my picture made with this big smile!”

Then he started worrying about what he’d done.

“I was just going to tweet out to him and his family, and I thought, ‘Did I just violate an NCAA rule?'” Bielema said, choking up. “It just made me sick. As a human being, you want to say, ‘Hey.'”

The accuracy in orientation tracking attainable by using inertial measurement units (IMU) when measuring human motion is still an open issue. This study presents a systematic quantification of the accuracy under static conditions and typical human dynamics, simulated by means of a robotic arm. Two sensor fusion algorithms, selected from the classes of the stochastic and complementary methods, are considered. The proposed protocol implements controlled and repeatable experimental conditions and validates accuracy for an extensive set of dynamic movements, that differ in frequency and amplitude of the movement. We found that dynamic performance of the tracking is only slightly dependent on the sensor fusion algorithm. Instead, it is dependent on the amplitude and frequency of the movement and a major contribution to the error derives from the orientation of the rotation axis w.r.t. the gravity vector. Absolute and relative errors upper bounds are found respectively in the range [0.7° ÷ 8.2°] and [1.0° ÷ 10.3°]. Alongside dynamic, static accuracy is thoroughly investigated, also with an emphasis on convergence behavior of the different algorithms. Reported results emphasize critical issues associated with the use of this technology and provide a baseline level of performance for the human motion related application. [full text]

… Ron Zernicke, ESSI co-director, said the reason why these areas of research were chosen was because of how important they are to the university and that UM has significant strength in each of those areas. He said they might be interested in expanding to other areas of research in the near future.

Zernicke said there is also substantial corporate interest in the program. More than 30 companies from various areas of data analytics attended a symposium last week, including Intel, Kellogg Co., Adidas AG, Gatorade and Nike Inc., to explore ways to work together on future products and research.

In addition to the $3.5 million seed funding, Zernicke said some individual faculty and groups already have some funding from various sources. There are plans to secure additional funding for research and corporate partnerships.

If you shatter a bone in the future, a 3D printer and some special ink could be your best medicine. Researchers have created what they call “hyperelastic bone” that can be manufactured on demand and works almost as well as the real thing, at least in monkeys and rats. Though not ready to be implanted in humans, bioengineers are optimistic that the material could be a much-needed leap forward in quickly mending injuries ranging from bones wracked by cancer to broken skulls.

“This is a neat way to overcome the challenges we face in generating bone replacements,” says Jos Malda, a biomaterials engineer from Utrecht University in the Netherlands who was not involved in the work. “The scaffold is simpler to make than others and it offers more benefits.”

Purpose: Increase in muscle force, endurance and flexibility is desired in elite athletes in order to improve performance and avoid injuries but often hindered by occurence of myofascial trigger points. Dry needling (DN) has been shown effective in eliminating myofascial trigger points.

Methods: This randomized controlled study in 30 elite youth soccer players of a professional soccer Bundesliga Club investigated the effects of four weekly sessions of DN plus water-pressure-massage on thigh muscle force and range-of-motion of hip flexion. A group receiving placebo-LASER plus water-pressure-massage and a group with no intervention served as controls. Data was collected at baseline (M1), treatment end (M2) and four-week follow-up (M3). Furthermore a 5-month muscle injury follow-up was performed.

Results: DN showed significant improvement of muscular endurance of knee extensors at M2 (p=0.039) and M3 (p=0.008) compared to M1 (M1:294.6+/-15.4nm/s, M2:311+/-25Nm/s; M3:316.0+/-28.6nm/s) and knee flexors at M2 compared to M1 (M1:163.5+/-10.9Nm/s, M2:188.5+/-16.3Nm/s) as well as hip flexion (M1:81.5+/-3.3[degrees], M2:89.8+/-2.8[degrees]; M3:91.8+/-3.8[degrees]). Compared to placebo (3.8+/-3.8[degrees]) and control (1.4+/-2.9[degrees]) DN (10.3+/-3.5[degrees]) showed a significant (p=0.01 and p=0.0002) effect at M3 compared to M1 on hip flexion; compared to non-treatment control (-10+/-11.9Nm) DN (5.2+/-10.2Nm) also significantly (p=0.049) improved maximum force of knee extensors at M3 compared to M1. During the rest of the season muscle injuries were less frequent in the DN group compared to control groups.

Conclusion: DN showed a significant effect on muscular endurance and hip flexion range-of-motion that persisted 4 weeks post-treatment. Compared to placebo it showed a significant effect on hip flexion that persisted 4 weeks post-treatment and compared to non-intervention control a significant effect on maximum force of knee extensors 4 weeks post-treatment in elite soccer players.

Atletico Madrid remain as tough as ever, but Guillem Balague looks at how Diego Simeone is adapting the way they play.

Why are some people more successful than others? Leaving aside luck, which equates to confessing that we don’t really know, there are really just two explanations: talent and effort. Talent concerns the abilities, skills, and expertise that determine what a person can do. Effort concerns the degree to which the person deploys their talents.

Clearly, some people are both talented and hard-working, but there is often a tension between the two. Talent can make people lazy because they need to rely less on hard work to achieve the same goal. Hard work helps people compensate for lower levels of talent, which is why it’s quite helpful to be aware of one’s limitations. (Of course, it is possible to lack both talent and effort, but then success will require a great deal of luck!)

But how much does talent actually matter? Nearly 20 years have passed since McKinsey introduced the idea of a war for talent, yet most organizations seem to struggle with their talent management practices. For example, a recent industry report by Deloitte based on over 2,500 leaders from 90 countries showed that most employers are ill-prepared to tackle key talent identification challenges.