Applied Sports Science newsletter – October 29, 2016

… On the eve of his birthday, Wenger states that is not case, saying his passion for winning and perfecting his methods has yet to be weakened by age, though he acknowledges that being the oldest manager in the Premier League can make him an easier target for critics.

“I would prefer to be the youngest one in the league,” he told a news conference. “But it’s part of life. I believe you forget your age if you are in good health and all the rest, [if] inside you is a love for competition and a love to improve every day. That is the most important. After that, age is age. You have to live with that.

“It’s like [being] a former player. Once you hit a certain age, always when you have a bad game people think, ‘they have to go.’ That’s why the demands are even higher than before — because your age becomes a psychological excuse quickly to get rid of you.”

… Turner, who doesn’t turn 21 until March, is currently in a spot George once found himself. George had his experience being 20 years old, heading into his second NBA season after showing periodic flashes of excellence as a rookie, and he took a sizable step forward in his second campaign.

The second year for a transcendent player is certainly more important than the first. It’s when expectations genuinely begin to swarm the young talents. It’s when mistakes are highlighted and critiqued more than first-year hiccups. It’s when teammates, fan bases and the media begin to form more concrete views on these players.

“I’ve been around (Turner) every day,” new teammate Al Jefferson said. “He’s shown me that he’s a special kind of player and I think he has a bright future. He’s a humble kid and has the right attitude for a second-year player.”

Marcus Mariota’s production the past two weeks has him back on a path where he looks to be one of the league’s most promising young quarterbacks.

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In one department, the second-year Tennessee Titans signal-caller already ranks with the league’s best.

Mariota is really strong.

… Salazar shook off some cobwebs that had gathered during his recovery from a strained right forearm, suffered in Minnesota in early September. After he received a PRP injection (platelet rich plasma), he was shut down for 10 days. He then resumed playing catch and he felt a weird, somewhat painful sensation in his arm.

He thought his season was over.

“The doctor, he was clear with me,” Salazar said. “He told me that I would feel something in the beginning. Luckily, it got better and better.”

Ben Simmons watched the 76ers open their 2016-17 campaign without him. But the No. 1 overall pick hopes to make his NBA debut later this season.

While saying there is no timetable for a return from surgery to repair an acute Jones fracture in his right foot, Simmons insisted there has been no talk about shutting it down for his entire rookie season.

“No,” Simmons said flatly, when asked if anyone has advised him to sit out the season to let his foot recover. “There’s a lot of talk; somebody put that out there. But I will come back when I am ready.

Pep Guardiola has achieved everything that he has set himself in the world of football, as a player and coach. While it is hard for him to admit it openly, he breathes and transmits leadership and is an example for many in the sports industry due to his great charisma.

Talking with Guardiola about sport and education is a lesson in good management and coaching. Nothing in his way of acting is the result of chance, he is analytical and pragmatic, an icon, like Johan Cruyff in his time, and he has created a school of thought. In this interview, he tells us what sport has meant in his education, how it has shaped his character, how it has influenced his personality and his way of managing teams. And also how important it is for an athlete to think about their future while they are still active because the moments of glory will, sooner or later, be just a memory.

The U.S. Army and Tufts University are working together to learn more about how people think and respond under stress.

Their new cognitive sciences center officially opened Tuesday in Medford, Massachusetts. The research aims to help soldiers and civilian first responders, such as firefighters.

Scientists and engineers are figuring out how to measure, predict and enhance people’s cognitive capabilities, so they can better solve problems and remember information in high-stakes environments.

One of the greatest challenges faced by an athlete and coach is not necessarily among those they face on the sports field. Probably the biggest obstacle they have to overcome is ensuring the athlete is in the best possible condition to compete at the maximum level when it matters most. Getting the preparation right is the key to success and one of the most important factors is not falling into the trap of over-training. This is an issue that has been at the forefront of sport as the demands to be that bit stronger, run that bit faster or jump that bit higher are increasing all the time. In these circumstances, it is essential for an athlete to push themselves to the limit in training – but the key is knowing when you have reached the limit. This can often be the most difficult part of the process. Going just that little bit too far can undo much of the good work and bring on factors that are detrimental to an athlete’s performance. Factors such as physical fatigue, mental fatigue, muscle soreness, irritability and loss of appetite are common symptoms of over-training that can significantly affect performance, while one of the biggest and perhaps most disruptive consequences is that it can lead to injury and illness.

…

As I have grown as a coach I realize that the process of creating a better player, a better person or a better team should be enjoyed at every step. That is where the real joy is, the work, the problem solving and the construction of a solution is the tangible place where we can make a difference and enjoy making that difference.

Last winter at the USA Rugby National Development Summit I heard Wallabies coach Michael Cheika speak twice. In the first session he spoke about High Performance Coaching and one simple statement stood out to me “Better People make Better Players”. He addressed the holistic needs of his rugby athletes and if they are not getting better as people they will not get better as players. These are international athletes at the pinnacle of their sport, but the person is still the most important part.

This Panel will consist of four Experts who will assemble the best of the best from various fields within the Strength and Conditioning community to provide continuing education and the collective sharing of best practices to Members of the NBSCA. This collection of great mind swill allow the Strength and Conditioning Coaches of the NBA to be constantly at the forefront of advances in the field so as to optimize their impact on the NBA and its athletes.

In a small office on the ground floor of the Dolphins training facility, just adjacent to the weight room, you’ll find Wayne Diesel sitting behind his desk. Diesel is in his second season running the team’s sports science department and he very well could be as valuable as anyone in this organization.

The Dolphins, you see, are on a mission and Diesel – a man who has spent his professional life studying what makes athletes tick – is a vital part of that mission. The mission is really simple: Use every scientific resource available to help these players reach a level of peak performance and, in addition, use those resources to both prevent and rehabilitate injuries.

That’s what Diesel’s sports science department is all about. It is the realization of a vision by Owner Stephen Ross and Executive Vice President Mike Tannenbaum to literally take this franchise where it has never gone before. From nutrition to analytics to developing the most up-to-date training methods, it all under the sports science umbrella.

Take Home Message: A fatigue running protocol caused increases in forefoot push-off time in all participants, but caused increases in different foot regions based on arch height.

Interview with Dr. Steve Ingham … How has the GB setup changed from an athlete preparation perspective from your first Olympics in Sydney 2000, where Team GB finished 10th with 11 Golds, to Rio 2016 where we finished 2nd with 27 Golds?

Since the British Prime Minister announced ‘Raising the Game’ in 1996 on the back of a disastrous Olympic Games in 1996, exchequer funding and National Lottery money began to be fed through Uk Sport to National Governing Bodies. This allowed coaches and athletes in Britain to dedicate themselves fully to their sports. Immediately this gave a performance gain, through better training (I.e. They didn’t have to find time at either end of the day), better rest and recovery (I.e. They could fully recuperate between sessions rather than work) and for athletes to benefit from more in-depth and developing coaching. Applied sports science was only just getting its act together then. Collectively though this led to an increased improvement at the 2000 and 2004 Games, but was quickly followed by the announcement of the 2012 Games in London. This sharpened everyone’s focus on discovering and implementing winning methods and importantly, the people skills to deliver it.

… To combat the grind as best as possible, the Jets have implemented a few key changes to their routine after experimenting with sports science during an equally gruelling stretch late last season.

“We are now more focused on active recovery rather than pure days off,” Jets coach Paul Maurice said Wednesday. “We used a number of different things last year during a stretch of games every other night for a month and a half.”

Maurice said Dr. Craig Slaunwhite, the Jets’ director of fitness, has “a great amount of influence in what we do.”

… [Richard] Sherman wasn’t the only one drained from Sunday’s game. Safety Kelcie McCray played 108 snaps — 95 on defense and 13 more on special teams. Linebackers Wagner and K.J. Wright played 102 apiece. Earl Thomas played 99. And cornerback DeShawn Shead played 95.

It was a physically taxing game, and now the team has to fly across the country and face the New Orleans Saints in their next matchup.

That’s why Pete Carroll has his team focused on recovery.

That starts with sports science, the department headed by director of player health and performance Sam Ramsden.

Objectives

During maximal intensity leg cycling sprints, previous research has shown that central and peripheral fatigue development occurs with various ( < 30 s) short-duration recovery periods between sprints. The aim of the current study was to compare the development of neuromuscular fatigue during maximal intensity lower-body sprints interspersed with short and longer duration recovery periods.
Design

Crossover study.
Methods

Ten participants completed 10, 10 s sprints interspersed with either 30 or 180 s of recovery. Peak power outputs were measured for each sprint. Maximal force, voluntary activation (VA) and evoked contractile properties of the knee extensors were measured at pre-sprint 1, post-sprint 5 and post-sprint 10. Perceived pain was also measured immediately following each sprint.
Results

Peak power output was significantly lower by 16.1 ± 4.2% (p < 0.001) during sprint 10 with 30 compared to 180 s of recovery. Irrespective of recovery time, maximal force, VA and potentiated twitch force decreased by 26.7 ± 7.2% (p < 0.005), 5.8 ± 1.2% (p = 0.025), 38.7 ± 6.1% (p = 0.003) respectively, from pre-sprint 1 to post-sprint 10. MVC and PT decreased by 17 ± 4% (p<0.003) and 23 ± 9% (p<0.002) respectively, from pre-sprint 1 to post-sprint 5.
Conclusions

Although decreases in peak power and increases in perceived pain were greater when sprints were interspersed with 30 compared to 180 s of recovery, the development of neuromuscular fatigue of the knee extensors was similar. The results illustrate that peripheral fatigue developed early whereas central fatigue developed later in the sprint protocol, however the effect of recovery time on neuromuscular fatigue could be task specific.

It’s a Friday night under the bright lights of Art Wright Stadium. The hometown Wadsworth Grizzlies are facing conference opponent, the North Royalton Bears.

This season marks a series of firsts for the Grizzlies. They have a head coach in Justin Todd, who brings with him a background in sports and exercise science. He is focused on growing the Wadsworth football program which includes roughly 90 kids from 9th through 12th grade. Since his playing days, Todd acknowledges much has changed in regard to technique and player safety. “One of the things we do is we hit a lot less in practice. The fundamentals that we teach in terms of tackling are different than what I was taught 15, 16 years ago,” he said.

Also new this year, the next level in helmet technology. At the start of the season, twelve Wadsworth players were fitted for the Riddell InSite Impact Response System. The player unit consists of a 5-zone sensor pad that is fitted inside the helmet liner. The onboard electronics not only track where a hit occurs and measure its severity, but the system goes a step further. It also keeps track and alerts when an accumulation of multiple hits exceed a predetermined threshold.

In the future, your clothes will work for you. A team of scientists led out of the Georgia Institute of Technology has created a fabric that can gather energy from both sunlight and motion, then store it in embedded fibers.

The textile, described in Science Advances, could help pave the way for energy-harvesting clothes and new wearable devices.

When a player returns early and is re-injured, it is too simplistic to blame the coach for pushing a player to hurt. Bills head coach Rex Ryan faced that criticism when LeSean McCoy played through and aggravated a hamstring strain in a Dolphins loss on Sunday.

Mid-week, McCoy was originally declared with only muscle tightness that turned out to be “coach speak” for a mild to moderate strain per media reports. It would be easy for me to say “I told you so” after the Bills star RB left the game in the second half feeling pain after 8 carries for 11 yards. I did warn of ineffectiveness and aggravation but that is nothing the Bills medical staff would not be aware of and had considered. The offensive coordinator even said earlier this week, “I don’t want to do what we did last year. I don’t want him playing 85% re-injuring the hamstring and this thing lingering all year.”

Return-to-play decisions are not solely made by the team doctor or the head coach. Typically it needs to be a unanimous group decision between three parties: the medical staff, the team and the player. Any of the three has “veto power” and must share in the responsibility of all return-to-play scenarios.

Concussion guidelines published over the past decade — and laws in all states — now discourage youth athletes from returning to play if they display any signs of concussion after an injury. However, new research confirms athletes often head back into the game on the same day.

The research abstract, “Same‐Day Return to Play After Pediatric Athletes Sustain Concussions,” will be presented at the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) 2016 National Conference & Exhibition in San Francisco on Oct. 22.

Shane M. Miller, M.D., FAAP, a pediatric sports medicine specialist at Texas Scottish Rite Hospital for Children in Plano, Texas, noticed a significant number of his patients reported they returned to play after a concussion before being cleared by a medical professional, despite medical guidelines, state law and educational efforts. He and Meagan Sabatino, senior clinical research coordinator at the same hospital, analyzed records for 185 patients between the ages of 7 and 18 treated for concussion at a Texas pediatric sports clinic during a 10-month period in 2014. Nearly half (47 percent) of the athletes sustained a concussion while playing football; the next most common sport among concussion patients was soccer (16 percent).

ROLE: The associate director of sports medicine at the University of Minnesota Duluth, Suz Hoppe is entering her 13th season as the head athletic trainer for the Division I men’s ice hockey team. Her STORY: Helping student-athletes through an injury and getting them back on the ice require more than knowledge. She needs to earn their trust. LESSONS LEARNED: Hoppe knows the key to her profession is something you won’t find in an anatomy book.

Fellow former University of Arizona Wildcat and LeBron James trash-talker Stanley Johnson made waves this week after shoe-related injuries sidelined him for a preseason contest. We often take for granted the functional importance of in-game sneakers, focusing more on style (or lack thereof). From the alomst-knee-high KD 8 Elites to the thoroughly roasted low-top Curry 2s, all sneakers have a common goal: to protect the athlete wearing them. Bad things can happen when they don’t.

… in a gray zone marked by an absence of verifiable information, reporters will turn to speculation and informed guesses from medical professionals that are not treating the player(s) in question, no matter how fuzzy the answers they provide. Enter Dr. Armin Tehrany, an orthopedic surgeon who would very much like to be the first name plucked from a sports reporter’s Rolodex when they need to fill out some column inches.

Starting on May 4, Vocativ received more than 20 emails from Dr. Tehrany’s PR representatives, usually within hours of an injury becoming public knowledge. When Matt Harvey, Josh Hamilton, Dustin Ackley, Serena Williams, Jimmy Garoppolo, Steven Matz, Trevor Simien, Adrian Peterson, and more were sidelined with various knee and/or shoulder issues, it meant one thing: Vocativ (and in all likelihood, many other sports writers) could expect to receive yet another email announcing that Dr. Tehrany was available for a nice chat.

… The tent is now called the SidelinER, and it’s popping up on sidelines all over college football. It surrounds the trainer’s table behind the bench, with the opening 6 ½-feet tall so fans in the stands can still see over it. The key is the quick-spring mechanism that allows instant setup and collapsing as required.

More than 60 colleges around the country and the Buffalo Bills in the NFL are using them this season, with more having placed orders. That’s pretty remarkable, considering that at this time a year ago there was only one in existence.

Perhaps the most crucial information from recent science on concussions is how dangerous another concussion is if suffered shortly following the first.

In other words, it’s vitally important that a player with a possible concussion is removed from play.

U.S. Soccer, as part of its player health and safety program, has produced the four-minute “Recognize to Recover (R2R) presented by Thorne” concussion awareness video — a must-see for coaches and parents of soccer players.

Some people can’t stay awake in a morning without glugging down copious amounts of coffee, but for Leicester City’s Jamie Vardy, a cup of Nescafe isn’t enough.

The 28-year-old recently revealed he has Red Bull, coffee and even nicotine prior to training, while also admitting to drinking port to help him sleep before a game.

His use of stimulants and alcohol may seem at odds with the strict diets of many top players, but is he in fact gaining an advantage over his Premier League peers?

Water and sports drink are thought off as drinks with great hydration properties whereas caffeine containing beverages such as tea and coffee and alcohol containing beverages such as beer are thought of as dehydrating. But how do these drinks really stack up? The volume and composition of ingested drinks have a strong influence on how rapidly they will leave the stomach and are absorbed in the small intestine.

For those striving to build muscle, protein is essential. While this is obvious to many athletes and gym-goers, the biological and chemical processes between drinking a protein shake and getting “swole” may not be so clear–but we got you covered!

For athletes, caffeine is a proven performance enhancer. In their new book Caffeine for Sports Performance, sports dietitians Louise Burke and Ben Desbrow and exercise physiologist Lawrence Spriet address all-things-caffeine that an athlete might want to know. Here are just a few tidbits that I gleaned from this comprehensive resource. Perhaps the information will help you add a little bit of zip to your workouts.

There was a hint of a smile in D.C. United coach Ben Olsen’s voice over the phone as he recalled the bit of advice legendary playmaker Marco Etcheverry gave him as a player many years ago.

“Don’t think, just run,” El Diablo told the young Olsen.

It was the kind of lesson that only applies when playing with someone like Etcheverry, who worked magic on the ball for the dynastic United teams of the late 1990s. The Bolivian could deliver a perfect pass from anywhere on the pitch, capable of picking out a spot if you only trusted him to get it to you.

“It was some of the best advice he gave me,” Olsen told FourFourTwo this week. “If you were willing to do the work, he could deliver the ball.”

… Nebraska is the only Division I college athletic program that employs a sport analytics department spanning all sports. Headed by Tucker Zeleny, Nebraska’s full-time director of sports analytics and data analysis hired in 2015, the department is in charge of working with Nebraska’s 24 varsity sports teams to collect, analyze and summarize data for the coaches and staffs.
In the simplest terms, Zeleny and his team look at anything and everything that can help Nebraska win games including scouting, recruiting, health and nutrition, player exertion, injury prevention and more.

NBA rosters are now finalized.

What started at 600 players at the end of September has now been trimmed to 449.

The long process that began when teams put together their off-season plans in the spring will now be put on display as the NBA season kicks off.

The Vertical looks at how the NBA’s 30 teams put together their opening rosters

There was a time 10 years ago when it was considered normal to poison your neighbor’s cat if he (your neighbor) didn’t agree with you about statistics in baseball. It sounds absurd, but sabermetrics was the biggest issue in the 2006 mid-term elections. Activists outraged at the inclusion of VORP in school textbooks urged on massive book-burnings outside major league stadiums. The AL Central briefly seceded from the American League. Thousands of fans moved to Canada when they didn’t like the general manager their favorite team hired.

Ten years later, we live in a world scarcely imaginable to a loyal traditionalist of the time. The four teams in the two league championship series last week were all, according to an ESPN ranking of teams’ devotion to analytics in 2015, in the top two tiers of statheadiness. The Cubs and Indians, this year’s World Series entrants, were in the top tier, “All-In.” The Blue Jays and Dodgers were labeled “Believers,” and each team has only strengthened ts stathead credentials since then. (The Blue Jays, for instance, poached a president and general manager from that All-In Cleveland front office.) The front offices of all four LCS teams trace their lineage to the Big Four stathead fortresses of the late 2000s: The Dodgers’ top executives are descended from the Rays’ and A’s; the Cubs’ from the Red Sox’s; the Blue Jays’ from the Indians’; and the Indians from, well, the Indians’. Three of the four even hired employees right out from under me at Baseball Prospectus, where I was their editor. But no hard feelings.

This is not going to be some sort of victory lap, I promise.

… The top continental teams often run away with games, but they are also adept at closing matches down. They control the tempo of play in the way that no English team can. After Barca or Bayern take the lead, they usually just keep the ball. The opposition rarely gets a chance to mount a thrilling last-ditch offensive. Instead the game simply bleeds to an end. Nor do the best continental teams need to run much, because they often camp almost the entire game on the opposition’s half.

Yet a game against Barcelona, Madrid, Bayern, or indeed PSG or Juventus has its own kind of intensity: an intensity of concentration. If the weaker team makes one mistake — a ball given away, a midfielder out of position — the opponent will punish them. That means the underdog has to play 90 minutes with total concentration. This is mentally exhausting.

Intensity in the Premier League takes a more physical form. Games tend to be more box-to-box. Mid-ranking and bottom-of-the-table English teams make lots of mistakes, lose the ball often, and play many long passes, Dustin Boettger of the statistical database Global Soccer Network told Die Welt. That results in more tackles to win 50-50 balls. And players in the Premier League can go in almost as hard as they like, because English referees blow for fouls less than on the continent.

… “We’re going to pace ourselves by how we approach every single game,” Curry said. “Taking care of what we can control, so hopefully we’re in a situation where, at the end of the season, the last few (regular-season) games won’t matter as much to seeding and stuff like that.”

After Kerr took over the Warriors in May 2014, he pinpointed games that made sense to rest players. It didn’t take long for him to realize that forecasting so far ahead was counterproductive. Injuries, blowouts and rotation changes would negate Kerr’s plans.

J.J. Redick will be entering his 11th season in the NBA this week and for the first time he has noticed he is part of a small — and shrinking — club as a white American NBA player.

The NBA certainly has its long list of European players. But the Los Angeles Clippers starting guard says he recently noticed that there are not a lot of white Americans in the NBA anymore. As the team opens their season on Wednesday, Redick says it will be the first time in his NBA career that he will be the lone white American on his team in an African-American dominated league.

“This is the first year where I’m like, ‘You know what, there are not a lot of white guys in the NBA,’ ” Redick told The Undefeated. “I was looking at the free agent list of guys still out there. I saw Chris Kaman, Kirk Hinrich. Those guys have all been in the league since I’ve been in the league.

The National Basketball Association (NBA) announced today that a record 113 international players from a record 41 countries and territories are on opening night rosters for the 2016-17 season. This marks the third consecutive season that opening night rosters feature at least 100 international players and that all 30 teams have at least one international player.

Opening night rosters feature a record number of European (61), African (14) and Spanish (8) players. Canada has the most of any country for the third straight year with 11 NBA players. France comes in second for the third consecutive year with 10 NBA players. Brazil features a record-tying nine players, Australia features a record-tying eight players, while Croatia has a record-tying five NBA players.

… While traditional defensive stats are limited to steals, blocks and rebounds, real-time tracking data allows us to more closely study the huge majority of plays that don’t involve a change of possession. The NBA has been collecting such info at every game since 2013, and it provided it to the 210 students from across North America who participated in the league’s first hackathon, in New York in September. Among the five finalists in the competition, two teams used the material to devise important new ways of analyzing defensive versatility.

Chris Jenness and Michael Wheelock of Rockefeller University looked at how many NBA defenders were able to hold opponents across various positions to effective field goal percentages of two points or more below average (minimum: 300 shots, 82 at any given position). They found that 26 percent of players, such as Houston’s James Harden, can’t defend even one position well. On the other hand, just under 10 percent of defenders are proficient against opponents at three or more positions.

… How much you believe in the Toronto Raptors as a viable championship contender depends on your willingness to bring a knife to a gunfight. In an age when we have enough data to support much of what we see on the basketball court, where you stand on Toronto depends on your faith in the intangibles of chemistry and identity. More specifically, it depends on your faith in how much further good chemistry can take a team that is what it is.

The Kyle Lowry–DeRozan partnership has been fruitful for years, and last season, as the two jointly enjoyed their best campaigns as pros, they became one of the league’s best duos, period. It’s a relationship that has manifested beyond basketball, and the league has taken notice. Witnessing the connection up close in Rio over the summer, Kevin Durant texted former Thunder and current Raptors assistant coach Rex Kalamian, marvelling at their synchronicity. Kalamian paraphrased what Durant had told him to the Toronto Star: “Your two guys are the best. I’m jealous of their relationship, the way they get along with each other and the way they play together. The way they enjoy each other, it’s great.”