Applied Sports Science newsletter – March 6, 2017

Tommy John surgery might not need to be the answer for pitchers who blow out their elbows. That’s what Garrett Richards is hoping.

The righty who might be the Los Angeles Angels’ top starter made his first start this spring on Sunday, earning high-fives from his teammates after sailing through a scoreless first inning against Cincinnati. The Reds touched him up for four singles and three runs in the second.

“I felt totally fine,” Richards said.

Richards may be the most prominent pitcher to opt against Tommy John surgery.

… Jozy Altidore has been through it all by this stage in his career, from World Cup mixed zones to the pressure cooker of big-time European club ball. He’s not generally known for giving lengthy or headline-ready soundbites, usually preferring to focus on the job at hand.

This week he stepped outside of that reputation, and by doing so has done the entire US soccer community an enormous favor.

In recognition of Black History Month, MLS invited Altidore, USWNT standout Lynn Williams, New York Times writer Greg Howard, and FC Harlem (a youth club developing players in the urban heart of New York City) founder Irv Smalls to take part in a frank, intimate conversation about race and the black experience in American soccer. Pundit Kevin Brown served as moderator, and the league’s website shared the round table chat as a 40-minute video released on Tuesday.

The use of electromyography (EMG) is widely recognised as a valuable tool for enhancing the understanding of performance drivers and potential injury risk in sprinting. The timings of muscle activations relative to running gait cycle phases and the technology used to obtain muscle activation data during sprinting are of particular interest to scientists and coaches. This review examined the main muscles being analysed by surface EMG (sEMG), their activations and timing, and the technologies used to gather sEMG during sprinting. Electronic databases were searched using ‘Electromyography’ OR ‘EMG’ AND ‘running’ OR ‘sprinting’. Based on inclusion criteria, 18 articles were selected for review. While sEMG is widely used in biomechanics, relatively few studies have used sEMG in sprinting due to system constraints. The results demonstrated a focus on the leg muscles, with over 70% of the muscles analysed in the upper leg. This is consistent with the use of tethered and data logging EMG systems and many sprints being performed on treadmills. Through the recent advances in wireless EMG technology, an increase in the studies on high velocity movements such as sprinting is expected and this should allow practitioners to perform the analysis in an ecologically valid environment.

Background

A variety of recovery strategies are used by athletes, although there is currently no research that investigates perceptions and usage of recovery by different competition levels of team sport athletes.
Methods

The recovery techniques used by team sport athletes of different competition levels was investigated by survey. Specifically this study investigated if, when, why and how the following recovery strategies were used: active land-based recovery (ALB), active water-based recovery (AWB), stretching (STR), cold water immersion (CWI) and contrast water therapy (CWT).
Results

Three hundred and thirty-one athletes were surveyed. Fifty-seven percent were found to utilise one or more recovery strategies. Stretching was rated the most effective recovery strategy (4.4/5) with ALB considered the least effective by its users (3.6/5). The water immersion strategies were considered effective/ineffective mainly due to psychological reasons; in contrast STR and ALB were considered to be effective/ineffective mainly due to physical reasons.
Conclusions

This study demonstrates that athletes may not be aware of the specific effects that a recovery strategy has upon their physical recovery and thus athlete and coach recovery education is encouraged. This study also provides new information on the prevalence of different recovery strategies and contextual information that may be useful to inform best practice among coaches and athletes. [full text]

Purpose:

The principle aim of the study was to assess the validity of measuring locomotor activities and PlayerLoad using Real-Time (RT) data collection during soccer training.
Methods:

Twenty-nine (n=29) English soccer players participated. Each player wore the same MEMS device (S5, Optimeye, CatapultSports, Melbourne, Australia) during twenty-one training sessions (n= 331 data sets) in the 2015/2016 and 2016/2017 season. A Real-Time receiver (TRX, Catapultsports, Melbourne, Australia) was used to collect the locomotor activities and PlayerLoad data in RT and compared with the post-event downloaded (PED) data. PlayerLoad and locomotor activities (total distance covered, TDC; total high speed running distance covered, >5.5m/s, HSR; total sprinting distance covered, >7m/s, SP; maximum velocity, VEL) were analysed.
Results:

Correlations were near perfect for all variables analysed (r=0.98-1.00), with a varied level of noise between RT and PED also (0.3-9.7% CV).
Conclusions:

Locomotor activities and PlayerLoad can be used both RT and PED concurrently to quantify a players physical output during a training session. Caution should be taken with higher velocity based locomotor activities during RT compared to PED.

I recently strained my rotator cuff, and I blame a pair of Olympic swimmers and Cirque du Soleil for the pain. I have been inspired of late by several sports-comeback heroes in their mid- to late 30s: Tom Brady leading the Patriots to an improbable Super Bowl win; Roger Federer overcoming Rafael Nadal in a decisive fifth set in the Australian Open to secure his 18th Grand Slam title. Others have remained dominant well into their 30s — Serena Williams won her 23rd Grand Slam singles championship at 35, also at the Australian Open, defeating her 36-year-old sister in the final.

Here’s the thing: We actually shouldn’t be so surprised. When athletes train consistently, recover smartly and get a little lucky, there’s no physiological reason their bodies should fall off a cliff in their 30s.

My curiosity was piqued last summer during the Rio Olympics, when I saw this headline: “Michael Phelps Faces His Toughest Challenger Yet — Age.” Old Man Phelps was 31.

I was spending a lot of time talking about aging athletes with Michael Joyner, a physiologist at the Mayo Clinic, and we were both struck by the coverage of Olympic athletes beyond their 20s. You’d have thought Phelps needed a walker to get poolside, not that he would win enough gold to forge a breastplate.

… Michigan’s Nerd in Chief — who attends many UM games — said he realized with growing horror that the fans had surrendered control of their cell phones to an outside party by downloading an app.

And that is one of the biggest issues facing those charged with keeping companies and governments safe from cyber attacks: The biggest threat may be the employee at the keyboard — or the innocent fan with a cell phone.

In science fiction, the promise or threat of artificial intelligence is tied to humans’ relationship to conscious machines. Whether it’s Terminators or Cylons or servants like the “Star Trek” computer or the Star Wars droids, machines warrant the name AI when they become sentient—or at least self-aware enough to act with expertise, not to mention volition and surprise.

What to make, then, of the explosion of supposed-AI in media, industry, and technology? In some cases, the AI designation might be warranted, even if with some aspiration. Autonomous vehicles, for example, don’t quite measure up to R2D2 (or Hal), but they do deploy a combination of sensors, data, and computation to perform the complex work of driving. But in most cases, the systems making claims to artificial intelligence aren’t sentient, self-aware, volitional, or even surprising. They’re just software.

Athletes who feel anxious over symptoms of an illness before a high-stakes competition are five times more likely to suffer injury during the competition, according to a new study by an international team of researchers led by Linköping University in Sweden.

“Elite athletes know their own bodies extremely well. If an athlete becomes anxious about injury or illness, this is a reliable indicator of the degree of seriousness. We have seen this also in previous studies. An athlete cannot lie to himself or herself,” says researcher Toomas Timpka of the Athletic Research Center, Department of Medicine and Health Sciences at Linköping University.

Objective To systematically review the literature to identify risk factors for calf strain injury, and to direct future research into calf muscle injuries.

Design Systematic review

Data sources Database searches conducted for Medline, CINAHL, EMBASE, AMED, AUSPORT, SportDiscus, PEDro and Cochrane Library. Manual reference checks, ahead of press searches, citation tracking. From inception to June 2016.

Eligibility criteria for selecting studies Studies evaluating and presenting data related to intrinsic or extrinsic risk factors for sustaining future calf injury.

Results Ten studies were obtained for review. Subjects across football, Australian football, rugby union, basketball and triathlon were reported on, representing 5397 athletes and 518 calf/ lower leg muscle injuries. Best evidence synthesis highlights chronological age and previous history of calf strain are the strongest risk factors for future calf muscle injury. Previous lower limb injuries (hamstring, quadriceps, adductor, knee) show some limited evidence for an association. Numerous factors lack evidence of an association, including height, weight, gender and side dominance.

Summary/conclusion Increasing age and previous calf strain injury are the most predictive of future calf injury. The overall paucity of evidence and the trend for studies of a high risk of bias show that further research needs to be undertaken.

From stem cells to genomics, HSS research plays a critical role in the field of musculoskeletal medicine. Our physicians and scientists made many breakthrough discoveries over the past year. All are aimed at improving patients’ quality of life.

With a new year upon us, Lionel Ivashkiv, MD, HSS Chief Scientific Officer, and his team of researchers share the latest on current research and what lies ahead for the long-term advancement of musculoskeletal medicine.

We take you now to a moist, crisp spot at the very front of the Rangers battle to create a competitive edge on the field.

It is called: “The produce aisle.”

That is not a euphemism. It is an actual produce aisle of a local grocery store, piled high with heads of cauliflower, bunches of broccoli and spears of asparagus. In the midst of this vegetable cornucopia Stephanie Fernandes, wearing a Rangers’ “Train to Reign” hoodie, is discussing with a handful of players, mostly from the minor leagues, optimal leafy-green intake to boost workout recovery. A few moments later, she will do a dissertation on juices and a virtual power point on pasta.

The shopping trip is just one step in the Rangers’ attempt to optimize nutrition to enhance performance. Just as teams have taken a deeper interest in analyzing statistics, teams are diving into sports science for an edge. Many clubs, the Rangers included, have conducted studies on fatigue and maximizing the benefits of “efficient” sleeping.

Training for the NFL is no small task, a process that requires dozens of workouts and massive amounts of food. Our NFL Combine trainees just finished their eight week program, and now it’s time to prove themselves as contenders at the next level. In order to get to this point, however, they endured 88 grueling workouts and ate 3,000-6,000 calories a day. Think you could eat 6,000 calories a day? See for yourself.

Sometime soon, there is going to be a new version of Wins Above Replacement available, and its goal, aside from encapsulating a player’s value into one tidy number, is simple: Don’t be scary. The plan does not involve dumbing down the metric that serves as the flashpoint between those who yearn for a catch-all and those who lament it. On the contrary, as with almost everything it does, Major League Baseball Advanced Media wants to make it so smart people can’t help but like it.

… There is a sense we are still looking for the next Herbert Chapman, Sir Matt Busby, Bill Shankly, Don Revie or Brian Clough who can pick up a struggling club and almost by force of personality transform them into champions.

But football has moved on. The gulf between rich and poor is greater than it has ever been. As Arsène Wenger acknowledged last week when he said he would not be able to cope in non-league football, the challenges at a small club operating on a shoestring are very different from those among the Champions League elite, in terms of tactics, fitness, finance and psychology. Football is more impatient now than at any point in its past. With a modern mentality, it is entirely possible that none of Chapman, Busby, Shankly, Revie or Clough (at either Derby County or Nottingham Forest) would have remained in the job long enough to win his first title.

The idea that there is not a one-size-fits-all-manager applies to clubs at different stages of the cycle of development as well as to different sizes of club.