Applied Sports Science newsletter – October 7, 2016

… And there’s no sign of any of this letting up; his gravitational force is still as strong as ever. He’s paired with five different teammates (Jose Calderon and Monta Ellis in 2013-14, J.J. Barea in 2014-15, and Raymond Felton, Deron Williams, and Barea again in 2015-16) over the past three seasons in pick-and-roll combinations that yielded at least 1.10 points per possession, according to data gleaned from the NBA’s SportVU cameras. His post-ups are still among the most productive in the NBA as well: the Mavs scored 1.13 points per possession on Nowitzki post-ups last season, per the SportVU data, third best among players with at least 250 post-ups. They were at 1.15 points per possession in 2014-15 and 1.21 in 2013-14; each of those figures was the best in the league.

Make no mistake about what motivates Tim Hardaway Jr.

By all accounts from Hawks coaches and players, the shooting guard had a “magnificent” summer in preparation for the upcoming NBA season. Was it something from the end of last season that was the impetus to spend, by his estimation, 90 percent of the offseason in the gym and weight room in Atlanta? Oh, no.

Hardaway once again returns to the very beginning of his tenure with the Hawks. After being acquired in a draft-night trade with the Knicks last year, the former first-round pick did not play in 31 of the team’s first 35 games. That included two stints in the NBA Development League. That was not going to happen again.

Background

Coaches, sport scientists, clinicians and medical personnel face a constant challenge to prescribe sufficient training load to produce training adaption while minimising fatigue, performance inhibition and risk of injury/illness.
Objective

The aim of this review was to investigate the relationship between injury and illness and longitudinal training load and fatigue markers in sporting populations.
Methods

Systematic searches of the Web of Science and PubMed online databases to August 2015 were conducted for articles reporting relationships between training load/fatigue measures and injury/illness in athlete populations.
Results

From the initial 5943 articles identified, 2863 duplicates were removed, followed by a further 2833 articles from title and abstract selection. Manual searching of the reference lists of the remaining 247 articles, together with use of the Google Scholar ‘cited by’ tool, yielded 205 extra articles deemed worthy of assessment. Sixty-eight studies were subsequently selected for inclusion in this study, of which 45 investigated injury only, 17 investigated illness only, and 6 investigated both injury and illness. This systematic review highlighted a number of key findings, including disparity within the literature regarding the use of various terminologies such as training load, fatigue, injury and illness. Athletes are at an increased risk of injury/illness at key stages in their training and competition, including periods of training load intensification and periods of accumulated training loads.
Conclusions

Further investigation of individual athlete characteristics is required due to their impact on internal training load and, therefore, susceptibility to injury/illness.

The idea that we learn more effectively when we’re taught via our preferred “learning style” – such as through pictures, written words, or by sound – is popular with students and teachers alike. A recent survey found that 93 per cent of British teachers believe in the idea. But time and again laboratory tests have failed to find support for the concept of learning styles. In fact, the most effective learning modality usually depends on the nature of the material to be learned. So why does the myth of learning styles refuse to die? A new study in the British Journal of Psychology uncovers a compelling reason – when learning via what we think is our preferred style, it feels as though we have learned more effectively, even though we haven’t.

The Division I Student-Athlete Advisory Committee has worked diligently to ensure college athletes’ time is properly balanced among academics, athletics and other educational pursuits. … “Getting time management re-established is big,” Connor Donnelly, co-vice chair and student-athlete on the golf team at Sacred Heart University, said. “We hope we can get some wins at Convention. We want to continue to move forward and keep our voice as strong as possible

Debate continues over whether visual working memory has a single, fixed capacity. Empirically, performance in working memory tasks worsens as the complexity of stimuli increases. However, there exist two explanations for this result. One proposal is that visual working memory is capable of holding fewer complex stimuli. The alternative proposal is that visual working memory can store 3–4 items, irrespective of their complexity. According to this fixed-capacity explanation, performance is worse for complex items because discrimination between complex items is more difficult than discrimination between simple items. These so-called comparison errors are more likely with complex items, and when left unaccounted for, lead to an underestimate of the capacity of working memory. Previous attempts at resolving this debate have relied on clever empirical manipulations of the similarity between stimuli. However, such approaches change the task that is given to the participant, and so may also change the way that participants use their memory. Here, we use a standard change detection task, but use a measurement model to estimate both the capacity of memory, and the probability of comparison errors. We apply the model to two change detection experiments in which we varied the complexity of the stimuli that participants must remember. Critically, we found that capacity estimates, and not comparison error estimates, varied depending upon stimulus complexity. Our results suggest that the number of items that can be stored is dependent on the complexity of the stimuli.

Josh Pastner often compares rebuilding Georgia Tech’s men’s basketball team to starting a company.

To that end, he said he has reached out to several businessmen who started their own companies and who are either associated are or graduated from Georgia Tech, Memphis, where coached before Tech, or Arizona, where he played and became an assistant coach, soliciting advice on establishing a culture that will lead to sustained success in Atlanta.

“…How you want things done – and the things that you feel that are important to you for success – you have to start on that from the beginning,” Pastner said.

… when I see the Lakers adding these types of positions to their training and analytics staffs it signals they are taking more steps to invest in player development. And, maybe more importantly, doing so in ways which they have not in the recent past.

This is important for a variety of reasons. One, it shows that the organization, even during a time where their on-court record isn’t expected to be great, they are putting money and resources into the team. Some teams pull back spending during lean times (the Lakers even did this during the 2011 lockout). But more than that, they are investing in the well-being and development of the players in ways which show an emphasis of pushing the organization forward into the information/analytics era.

… in a few minutes Curry highlights the key features of learning up, and in the process demolishes several myths about warming up.

Myth #1: The goal of a warmup is to get comfortable

Reality: Curry’s goal isn’t to get comfortable — it’s the opposite. He takes on a series of difficult tasks designed to test him, to put him on the learning edge, making mistakes and fixing them. By being uncomfortable now, he prepares himself to be comfortable later.

… are interval workouts really better than the alternative, or are they just different?

To answer that question, you have to think carefully about how you compare different workouts, to ensure that you’re pitting apples against apples. In a comparison of interval and continuous workouts, should the workouts last the same amount of time? Cover the same distance? Require the same amount of effort?

None of these comparisons is perfect, because the workouts are inherently different. Interval workouts are, by their nature, shorter and more intense. That’s the fundamental trade-off they offer: work harder, and your workout can be over much sooner, while still providing the same benefit as a longer workout.

Scotland’s children’s commissioner has called for regulation to stop the exploitation of children by professional football clubs.

Tam Baillie said a “wait and see” approach was no longer appropriate.

His comments follow the decision by Celtic to feature 13-year-old Karamoko Dembele in its under-20 side against Hearts on Monday.

… In general, athletes who play contact sports including football, soccer, basketball, rugby and lacrosse have a higher risk of getting MRSA. However, gymnasts, wrestlers and powerlifters are also vulnerable to infection because their skin comes in direct contact with shared equipment such as mats and knee wraps. In fact, athletes who use shared equipment in the weight room are also at risk, especially if that equipment isn’t properly cleaned after each use.

When MRSA infections first appear, they resemble pimples and are red and swollen. They might have pus and drainage and can be painful. Because of these early symptoms, MRSA is often confused with spider or insect bites. Don’t take a chance – if you have any of these signs or there is anything suspicious looking on your skin, talk to your school’s athletic trainer or your physician right away. MRSA is treatable, but a delay in treatment can lead to more infections, pneumonia, other serious, long-term illnesses and even death.

Coaches barely need to spell it out any more. After almost any injury, “the player will have a MRI on Monday” is as standard as “without express, written consent” in the terms we hear each and every week.

But why? Why has the MRI become a standard test when in most cases it’s not necessary?

Navarro Bowman was sent for a MRI on Monday to confirm the diagnosis of a ruptured Achilles tendon. An Achilles rupture is devastating, but also one of the easiest things to test for.

Eric Tulsky knows better than anyone that hockey is a complex sport.

The 10 skaters on the ice – 10 different variables, from a mathematical perspective – are constantly interacting with each other in fluid and unpredictable ways, and the identities of those variables are oft-changing as players shuffle on and off the bench. For most of its existence, those dynamics have limited the scope of statistics for hockey.

But the hockey analytics movement has begun at full blast in the 21st century, and Tulsky, one year into his full-time employment as the Carolina Hurricanes’ data analyst, now finds himself at the movement’s forefront.

“If you have a game that’s already solved, it’s not a fun game to analyze – nobody wants to do tic-tac-toe analysis,” Tulsky said. “Being in a field that’s hard to analyze means that there’s a lot of places … we can still explore.”

We have a high-five stat,” Suns coach Earl Watson told NBA.com. “This is true. So we want to keep track of how many high-fives we get per game to each other.”

There is actually science behind it.

Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at Cal-Berkeley, documented all the fist bumps, embraces and high fives in one game for each NBA team in 2015. He found the teams that embrace the most were the most successful: Those teams helped each other more on defense, set more screens and played more cohesively on offense.