Applied Sports Science newsletter – February 9, 2017

… PS: Do you think a lot of runners don’t change up their training enough? It’s so easy to stick with what’s worked, because you have anecdotal proof that it’s the right option for you.

KM: Well something that happens a lot is — Dathan [Ritzenhein] is a good example; he was training with Brad Hudson for years. Then switched to Salazar and suddenly set the world on fire. It wasn’t the change in coach, it was the sudden small change in stimulus that allowed the years of work to manifest and to sink in. It’s easy to abandon ship for a new coach if you’re feeling stagnant but sometimes all it takes is just mixing things up within your current system.

PS: So how do you know when a change is necessary?

KM: I couldn’t write a textbook on it. You just need to feel it out. People are shocked at how slow we’ll [Kyle and his NJ-NY teammates] run our average runs. We rarely average under 7-minute miles on recovery days, and sometimes we are even north of eight minutes, because we work out pretty hard every other day.

Too good to be true? Spend some time with the Bucks’ rangy, risky project—he backs down KG but shoots like Steph, keeps the diet of an offensive lineman but lifts like a boss, all while determined to be MVP—and you’ll become a believer, too.

A recovery strategy vital to support both health and sport performance, during all stages of the training cycle is sleep. In this blog I outline the importance of sleep for athletes of all ages and calibres.

Young athletes

Sufficient sleep is especially important in young athletes for growth and development and in order to support adaptive changes stimulated by training and to prevent injury[1]. Amongst teenage athletes studies show that a lack of sleep is associated with higher incidence of injury[2]. This may be partly due to impaired proprioception associated with reduced sleep. Sleep is vital for consolidating neurological function and protein synthesis, for example in skeletal muscle and in the longer term bone mineral density[3]. Sleep and exercise are both stimuli for growth hormone release from the anterior pituitary, which mediates some of these adaptive effects[4].

Stanford’s football program does things differently. That statement could use some narrowing down, so how’s this: Stanford recruits and handles its quarterbacks differently from its peers. The Cardinal get them to stay.

A recent FOX Sports study found that a full 50 percent of the top 50 national quarterback recruits signed from 2011-14 transferred at least once over some point in their careers. At the way current trends are going, that number will likely rise as graduate transfers become more commonplace. The pattern is simple, and has likely touched a program near you: start early at your school of choice, or transfer to a program that will let you do it there.

At Stanford, the pattern is the exact opposite: sign and sit, wait and learn until your number is called.

… The Hockey Triad is comprised of the 3 most common preventable injuries in hockey. They are low back pain, groin strains, and hip pain. If you play hockey, or know someone who does, there is a pretty good chance that you have witnessed these injuries in some form. When we analyze a hockey player’s skating stride, it is no wonder why this is a common injury. Compensation at the low back to “get lower”, not having the strength to support the body on one leg causing grind on the hips, or constant abduction of the hips in the recovery phase of the stride will cause these issues.

Consider this – can a developing hockey player sustain the constant loading of their muscle tissues as a professional? These players are on the ice year-round, almost everyday of the week. When we factor in a love of the game, a desire to win, and the hard working attitude that hockey players pride themselves on, this can cause issues for players down the road. Players will start to have a break down in mechanics, which can be amplified in their fatigued state.

A good night’s sleep is about way more than just clocking seven to nine hours in bed each night. And now, experts in sleep medicine and other health care fields have issued new metrics that spell out exactly what high-quality slumber means.

The National Sleep Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy group, for the first time defined key indicators of good sleep quality in a recent report:

Being asleep for at least 85 percent of the time you spend in bed;

The brain is an expensive organ: while it only represents 2.5% of total body mass it accounts for 20% of the energy expenditure in our body. In particular, neurons consume high amounts of energy when they communicate to one another during the process known as synaptic transmission, in which a neuron releases neurotransmitters that will be received and “understood” by the next neuron. Synaptic transmission is continuously taking place and therefore the brain is never in a fully “resting” state; on the contrary, it undergoes rapid and intense changes in activity, requiring increased amounts of energy in more active regions to maintain function. To get an idea on how intense can be the activation of certain regions in the brain during cognitive function, a spectacular example can be observed in the recordings of neuronal activity in zebrafish brains by the Ahrens’ lab at Janelia Research Campus: visualizing at least 80% of the neurons of the brain in action we can see the “electrical storm” of swimming zebrafish “thinking”!

… Welcome to the bleeding edge of the NBA’s 30-team wrestling match to find a competitive edge, where a hot new frontier is the use of virtual reality to get into the heads of NBA players as never before.

A Stanford study found that sawing down a virtual tree can cause people to use 20 percent less paper in real life. Another study found that football players improved decision-making by as much as 30 percent and sliced almost a full second off their decision time after they used virtual reality to simulate defensive coverages.

Can it apply to basketball? The Wizards intend to be at the forefront of finding out.

… What exactly does the Moxy Monitor do?

The Moxy measures muscle oxygen saturation (SmO2) and total hemoglobin concentration (THb) in the muscles of athletes while they train or perform their sport.

Why is it beneficial to measure muscle oxygen saturation levels during performance training?

These parameters let trainers see exactly what’s going on in the muscles in real time. They use this information to determine which physiologic system is limiting the athlete’s performance, assess the level of recovery of various systems, and guide training to stress a particular system in a controlled fashion. This allows them to target training to be more effective with less unnecessary stress on the athlete.

Sony has unveiled a sensor that could bring some impressive camera tricks to your next smartphone. The 3-layer CMOS sensor does super slow motion at up to 1,000 fps in full HD (1,920 x 1,080), around eight times faster than any other chip. That’s possible thanks to a 2-layer sensor married with high speed DRAM that can buffer images extremely rapidly. Specifically, it can capture 19.3-megapixel images in just 1/120th of a second, “four times faster than conventional products,” Sony says.

That kind of readout speed reduces “focal plane distortion,” also known as rolling shutter. On CMOS-equipped cameras, including smartphones and DSLRs, the top of the an image is read before than the bottom, causing vertical lines to tilt on fast moving objects. As Sony shows in a test image (below) a faster 1/120th second readout speed significantly reduces that effect. The result will be better photos of moving objects and reduced wobbly “jello” video.

Soccer is the most popular sport in the world, with 265 million male and female players (4% of the world’s population), and the game’s injuries are associated with a whopping estimated annual cost of US $30 billion per year. Soccer is the third-most played team sport in the US, behind only basketball and baseball/softball. Growth of the game has been steady in the US, rising from 13 million Americans in 2009 to 18 million Americans in 2012; 78% of players are younger than 18 years. In the 1990s, soccer was recognized as the fastest-growing college and high school sport in the US.

Growth has been highest among young women since the US women’s soccer team won the World Cup in 1991, 1999, and 2015. In the US, 35% of soccer players are women, one of the highest percentages of female participation in the sport in the world. Female participation in US high school soccer has risen by more than 177% since 1990.

Background:

Laboratory-based experiments demonstrate that fatigue may contribute to lower extremity injury (LEI). Few studies have examined the timing of LEIs during competition and practice, specifically in high school athletes across multiple sports, to consider the possible relationship between fatigue and LEIs during sport events.
Hypothesis:

The purpose of this study was to describe the timing of LEIs in high school athletes within games and practices across multiple sports, with a hypothesis that more and severe injuries occur later in games and practices.
Study Design:

Descriptive epidemiologic study.
Level of Evidence:

Level 4.
Methods:

Using the National High School RIO (Reporting Information Online) sport injury surveillance system, LEI severity and time of occurrence data during practice and competition were extracted for 9 high school sports.
Results:

During the school years 2005-2006 through 2013-2014, 16,967,702 athlete exposures and 19,676 total LEIs were examined. In all sports surveyed, there was a higher LEI rate, relative risk for LEI, and LEI requiring surgery during competition than practice. During practice, the majority of LEIs occurred over an hour into practice in all sports. In quarter-based competition, more LEIs occurred in the second (31% to 32%) and third quarters (30% to 35%) than in the first (11% to 15%) and fourth quarters (22% to 26%). In games with halves, the majority (53% to 66%) of LEIs occurred in the second half. The greater severity LEIs tended to occur earlier in games.
Conclusion:

Fatigue may play a role in the predominance of injuries in the second half of games, though various factors may be involved. Greater severity of injuries earlier in games may be because of higher energy injuries when athletes are not fatigued.
Clinical Relevance:

These findings can help prepare sports medicine personnel and guide further related research to prevent LEIs.

Hailed as the King of grains, quinoa doesn’t need more hype to cement its position as a superfood in the American supermarket. But now scientists have a hold of quinoa’s real identity—and what underlies the grain’s nutritious profile —thanks to its newly-sequenced genome.

“There are a lot of things that can be done to improve quinoa. And understanding the genome of it is the first step,” says Mark Tester, the leader of an international team that just published the first genome sequence of quinoa in Nature.

Predictive models deployed in the real world may assign incorrect labels to instances with high confidence. Such errors or unknown unknowns are rooted in model incompleteness, and typically arise because of the mismatch between training data and the cases encountered at test time. As the models are blind to such errors, input from an oracle is needed to identify these failures. In this paper, we formulate and address the problem of informed discovery of unknown unknowns of any given predictive model where unknown unknowns occur due to systematic biases in the training data. We propose a model-agnostic methodology which uses feedback from an oracle to both identify unknown unknowns and to intelligently guide the discovery. We employ a two-phase approach which first organizes the data into multiple partitions based on the feature similarity of instances and the confidence scores assigned by the predictive model, and then utilizes an explore-exploit strategy for discovering unknown unknowns across these partitions. We demonstrate the efficacy of our framework by varying the underlying causes of unknown unknowns across various applications. To the best of our knowledge, this paper presents the first algorithmic approach to the problem of discovering unknown unknowns of predictive models.

When scientists first read out the human genome 15 years ago, there were high hopes that we’d soon understand how traits like height are inherited. It hasn’t been easy. A huge effort to find height-related genes so far only explains a fraction of this trait.

Now scientists say they’ve made some more headway. And the effort is not just useful for understanding how genes determine height, but how they’re involved in driving many other human traits.