Applied Sports Science newsletter – November 28, 2016

… You have to stand next to Torres to get the humor. At 6-foot-2, Torres’ fire-hydrant physique makes him massive by soccer standards. He’s the man you want sprinting into a defense to take on a charging middle linebacker. Amid a room full of athletes trained to run for 90 minutes, he looks out of place. This man should be playing another type of football.

That he’s become the glue guy of the Sounders’ locker room is a paradox. By looks, his game should be intimidation. Instead, his prodding of Roldan and rookie Jordan Morris to dance after Seattle victories has made him the darling of Sounders social media.

After receiving a platelet-rich plasma injection in his sore left knee that will keep him sidelined for a minimum of two weeks, Los Angeles Lakers starting point guard D’Angelo Russell said he was remaining patient and cautious about eventually returning to the lineup.

“I definitely don’t want to force anything,” Russell said Saturday at the Lakers’ training facility in his first public comments since the injection. “I feel like I’ve got to be 100 percent perfect before I step back on the floor.”

The annual MLS player combine is basically a giant soccer mash-up. About 70 players from all over the country are thrown together and play a series of games over several days in the hope of being drafted by an MLS team. Making a positive impression while playing with unfamiliar teammates can be difficult, especially if a player doesn’t occupy one of the glamour positions.

Yet during the 2015 edition, a gangly, 6-foot-7 defender by the name of Axel Sjoberg caught the eye of Colorado Rapids manager Pablo Mastroeni. It wasn’t just Sjoberg’s frame, positioning and communication skills that got him noticed. When an opposing forward would put his arm on Sjoberg’s chest in a bid to gain leverage, the big Swede would immediately knock it down, and win that battle for leverage himself.

Mastroeni said during a conference call with reporters that “all these little minute details of his defending were really interesting to me,” but Sjoberg’s memory is of a “hectic experience.” He recalled going down to Florida 10 days before the combine in a bid to get acclimated.

Last season’s Pro Bowl wasn’t the first time Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Jameis Winston encountered Seattle Seahawks counterpart Russell Wilson, nor was it the first time Winston gleaned some advice from the Super Bowl-winning quarterback.

Winston and Wilson actually talked on the phone the night before Winston played in the BCS National Championship after the 2013 season. The two were connected by Trevor Moawad, a mental-conditioning consultant for Wilson who also worked with Winston at Florida State. The two young quarterbacks face off against each other Sunday when the Seahawks travel to Tampa to play the Bucs at 4:05 p.m. ET.

“They spoke for 15 or 20 minutes,” said Moawad, who, in addition to working with Florida State, helped both players before the draft. “I just shot Russell a note and just said, ‘Hey, we’re playing Auburn in the national championship tomorrow. Do you have some time to jump on the phone with Jameis and just share some insights on a game of this significance, knowing that you played some big games?’”

After living in the United States for most of the past four years, Rudy Gobert knows the rules of American football well enough to sit down and enjoy a little Thanksgiving pigskin. But perhaps if he had played the game as a child, it might have benefited him on the basketball court when it comes time to catch a pass in traffic.

“It came naturally for me from playing other sports, catching the ball, football, baseball, stuff like that,” said Jazz forward Trey Lyles, who at 6-foot-10 is just a few inches shorter than Gobert, but undoubtedly more comfortable catching passes. “Growing up in France, I don’t know if he ever played that stuff.”

So to the extent the Jazz’s success is in Gobert’s hands, his teammates want to make those hands better.

I once watched Michael Irvin teach the mechanics of a hard break on an NFL.com pre-draft special. His two pupils: A.J. Green and Greg Little.

Irvin explained that the two most important components of the hard break—the style of break often used on outs, curls, and comebacks—were the plant step and sitting down into the change of direction.

The plant step is a long step designed to serve as the brakes for the stem. Irvin said most young receivers don’t trust the strength of their legs to execute a single plant step.

He encourages them not to succumb to that fear. Not only is leg is strong enough to make it, but it’s also vital to learn how to come to an immediate stop with one step. Otherwise, multiple steps into a break give the opponent time to recover.

… Emery spent the summer signing new players, such as the Belgium full-back Thomas Meunier and his former Sevilla midfielder Grzegorz Krychowiak. But while the names of Neymar and Cristiano Ronaldo figured in practically every French transfer update, no real replacement of Ibrahimovic’s quality arrived.

Yet Emery aspires to the one quality that saw the Swede triumph in the French League: an unconditional will to win. He repeats the mantra “winning mentality” so frequently throughout the interview you might think he reads self-help books to prepare for his task. In fact, he does not only read, but actually wrote about it himself, in a book called Mentalidad Ganadora: El Metodo Emery (Winning mentality: the Emery method) in 2012.

“I wrote it when I was in Valencia. Back then we played the Champions League and finished third or so in La Liga, but I had never won anything important when I wrote that book,” Emery remembers. “It was very risky and quite courageous to write a book about winning when I was still to win my first title. But for me the one who possesses a winning mentality isn’t necessarily the one who wins in the end, but the one who wants to win the most.”

Colorado-based triathlon coach Alan Couzens has a love-hate relationship with the rise of heart-rate variability tracking, or the ability to measure the variation between one’s heart beats. HRV unlocks high-level information about how well an athlete is recovering, as well as how ready they might be for their next big workout. But the problem is, while the tech to measure HRV has gotten simple and inexpensive—an app linked to your phone’s camera is all you need, although you can use a heart rate chest strap for more accurate results—analyzing the data is still complicated and requires patience and understanding.

TrainingPeaks recently implemented the ability to link your account with a number of heart rate variability apps. This functionality provides you with a new dimension to the load metrics already provided, by giving you a real-time window into how your body is handling the training load.

Heart rate variability (HRV) refers to the difference in time interval between heart beats. While we might assume that if our resting heart rate is 60 beats per minute, our heart is beating rhythmically every second. The reality is that, in a healthy athlete, there is actually quite a bit of variability in the time between beats.

Over the last few days I attended the Sports & Data Conference held in UCD. I will do a bigger round-up piece but just something short to start.

The very first talk was Nick Wilkeman of the IRFU. Nick spoke mainly from a skill acquisition point of view but it left me with a lot of questions performance analysts should consider. He spoke about “Performance being a temporary change in behavior, while learning is a more permanent change.”

It’s not to say either is bad, there is a likely a time and a place for both but as analysts what are the majority of feedback sessions aimed at? Performance or Learning. Should the session look exactly the same even if the desired intention is different? I’m not sure as an industry we do enough to address these types of questions. What would a performance feedback session look like compared to a learning session? In your club what would you say the majority of sessions are most like?

When running, how often you think about technique? In our bid to run faster and longer, it’s often technique that takes a back seat. And yet improvements in this area are proven to boost your running efficiency and reduce your rate of injury. The good news is, it’s never been easier to get the lowdown on your running tekkers, with high-end technology now making its way to the high street. ProFeet in west London are the proud owners of a brand new 3D Motion Lab, which looks at your running form in forensic detail. They’re the first running store in the UK to have one, so MR thought it only right we come down and check it out…

After providing a few cursory details – height, weight, age – the assessment begins. It’s refreshingly simple. No need to put on hundreds of motion sensors; your movements are instead captured on a depth-sensitive camera, so all you need to do is run for one minute on the treadmill.

Muscle injuries are among the most common injuries in sport and continue to be a major concern because of training and competition time loss, challenging decision making regarding treatment and return to sport, and a relatively high recurrence rate. An adequate classification of muscle injury is essential for a full understanding of the injury and to optimize its management and return-to-play process. The ongoing failure to establish a classification system with broad acceptance has resulted from factors such as limited clinical applicability, and the inclusion of subjective findings and ambiguous terminology. The purpose of this article was to describe a classification system for muscle injuries with easy clinical application, adequate grouping of injuries with similar functional impairment, and potential prognostic value. This evidence-informed and expert consensus-based classification system for muscle injuries is based on a four-letter initialism system: MLG-R, respectively referring to the mechanism of injury (M), location of injury (L), grading of severity (G), and number of muscle re-injuries (R). The goal of the classification is to enhance communication between healthcare and sports-related professionals and facilitate rehabilitation and return-to-play decision making.

It’s been 18 years since Bernie Zeledon injured his knee while playing soccer with his kids. His doctor recommended surgery, but Zeledon didn’t want to risk infection or face a long recovery. So, he put up with the pain, took ibuprofen several times a week, and walked around “like a little old man.”

But in July, Zeledon, now 60, read about a new clinic in Charlotte, iOrthoBiologix. It offers non-surgical therapies for joint pain, including injections of platelet-rich plasma, derived from a person’s own blood to promote healing of tendon and muscle injuries and arthritis.

Zeledon knew the treatment was popular with professional athletes, such as Tiger Woods, Kobe Bryant and Peyton Manning. So, he called for a free consultation.

Two days later, Dr. Jason Tucker treated both his knees on the same day. And two weeks later, the swelling around Zeledon’s knees was down, he walked steadily with braces, and felt no pain.

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/living/health-family/karen-garloch/article116997008.html#storylink=cpy

After the Nets lost their second game in two days last week, Kenny Atkinson, the team’s first-year coach, met with his staff in a small room next to the visiting locker room at Staples Center. The primary topic of conversation: What did they want to do with the players the next day?

Atkinson went around the room, and he could sense that everyone felt the same way.

“You know what?” he asked. “They don’t need to see us, and they don’t need to hear from us.”

Everyone needed a break — from the rigors of the N.B.A. schedule, from the mounting losses, from the growing reality of a long and difficult season ahead.

After years of ill-advised trades and excessive spending, the Nets are relying on Atkinson, 49, and Sean Marks, the team’s new general manager, to rebuild the team from the ground up. This is not a short-term project. This is an overhaul that will require prudence and patience, qualities too often in short supply in the N.B.A.

As a sports owner or director of a team it is crucial to know the purpose of our organisation. Are we there to make a profit, or are we there to win trophies? The ideal answer would of course be both but whilst everyone could be profitable, by definition not everyone can be a winner.

The theory of behind how these two forces interact in sport has long been established. Academic research reflecting on the nature of North American and European sport- and our own experience with clubs – has outlined the competing camps of profit-maximisation vs utility-maximisation (i.e. winning trophies). In a nutshell the theory tells us pursuing profit in a utility environment means you get left behind; pursuing utility will ultimately be unsustainable for most people.

Clearly the question is: how can this theory help us in practice?