Applied Sports Science newsletter – May 5, 2017

Ball State basketball coach James Whitford was caught off guard last summer when a maintenance worker at Worthen Arena let him know one of his players was there shooting every morning, sometimes before 6.

That player was Franko House, a rising senior and two-time captain for the Cardinals. House and his fiancee, Morgan Jantzi, had just had a son, Carter, and the new father was rising to feed his son and then going about his business in order to have some downtime after team workouts later in the day.

House now will attempt to make the transition from the hardwood to playing tight end in the NFL after signing with the Bears as an undrafted free agent. Is there a better name for a tight end than Franko House?

… When you consider positional flexibility, on-court energy and how he can directly impact the final score of a game when it matters most, Green is the best defender Adams has ever seen.

“He’s probably the top of that list,” Adams tells Bleacher Report. “As far as a player of that size and versatility that he exhibits—and the results that he gets—I’d be hard-pressed to find anyone.”

Adams credits Green’s court vision and his ability to not just adapt but straight up anticipate how a play is going to develop. “Draymond has the capacity to see the pictures of the game very early,” Adams says. “When you do that, your movements can be very decisive.”

… The athletes and their coaches have played an integral role in defining the training programs that have gotten them to where they are today. Dr. Brad Wilkins, a physiologist and the director of Nike Explore Team Generation Research in the Nike Sport Research Lab, and Dr. Brett Kirby, researcher and lead physiologist of the Nike Sport Research Lab, were brought on to oversee the day-to-day science behind Breaking2. “As elite athletes, they have incredible, well established training programs that are working,” says Wilkins. “Our goal has been to work with the runners and their coaches to provide analysis and feedback.” Here’s why this coming together of worlds has the potential to make the sub-two-hour-marathon dream a reality.

… And so over the next few years—and somewhere between 200-250 hours of shooting instruction with Stutz—the Welty boys’ shots underwent complete overhauls. Stutz says Ryan was so weak, at first, “that his shot was like someone trying to launch a medicine ball, bringing it all the way back over his right shoulder.” They focused on a form where the feet align on “railroad tracks to the rim,” and the armpit, elbow and wrist are all at 90-degree angles—or what Stutz calls “carrying the pizza,” because it can look like a pizzeria server bringing out a fresh pie.

They tried to eliminate any of Welty’s wasted movement between catch and shot—no tuck, no dip—and succeeded in halving his release time from the 1.0-1.2 second range, when he started, to the 0.5-0.6 range now. When they were finished, Welty’s form bore some resemblance to one of the NBA’s shooting stars. Not the Warriors’ Stephen Curry, whom Stutz believes is a master of shooting the wrong way, but one of Curry’s teammates. “You’ve seen Klay Thompson’s shot—that’s honestly, the most perfect form you can have, because he doesn’t bring the ball down at all,” Welty says. “So we tried to replicate that.”

… MSU’s football players understand the problem — pluralize that if you’d like — on and off the field. The contrast between previous years and this last year put their issues in plain sight.

This isn’t about struggles at quarterback or the absence of a pass rush. Those things matter. The Spartans can’t win big again without fixing those areas. But the difference between 3-9 and 7-5 last season was something deeper and more revealing of disease at the core of the program. The culture wasn’t strong enough to withstand limitation and adversity. Just a year earlier, MSU made the College Football Playoff despite limitations and adversity.

“You could definitely tell the difference in leadership between the two years,” Dowell said.

Social networks are key tools in the daily lives of most Americans: We use Twitter to get breaking news, LinkedIn to search for jobs and Facebook to connect with friends. But what if social networks could help you be more physically fit?

That’s what Greg Ver Steeg and his research team started wondering when a 2007 study suggested that obesity might be contagious.

“If we can ask whether bad things like obesity can be contagious, can we ask the same questions about good traits, like physical fitness? Is it just a matter of designing the right social network and incentives?” asked Ver Steeg, a research assistant professor in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering’s Information Sciences Institute and Department of Computer Science.

… Portugal’s Primeira Liga is small – in scale and economics – when compared with England or Germany’s top leagues. In order to compete with Europe’s big clubs, S.L. Benfica must play smart. This is the basis of de Oliveira’s strategy.

By developing its own star players, S.L. Benfica wins domestic titles and acts as a feeder club for major clubs. This approach is more cost-effective than simply buying talent, and it creates a revenue stream. In the past six years, the Lisbon club has sold 13 big names for a combined total of £270 million.

But the ability to do this relies on youth players developing without injury – which is where the tech comes in. “The challenge today in sports science is to use data modelling to allow us to make better decisions,” de Oliveira says.

… Ventures like Project Baseline open up new opportunities in health care, both for the researchers working with big data and for consumers who want more sophisticated ways to track their health.

This allows us to start asking questions like: “How should we modify our behavior based on real-time interactions? Is there something relatively painless that anyone can do to alter their risk for particular medical problems? What can make us a healthy society that may be easier or more effective than the current recommendations?”

A research team from three different institutions joined forces to devise a technique to wirelessly power ingestible electronics, which could then remain inside the body indefinitely.

We have recently covered five of the latest breakthroughs in drug delivery systems. However promising and beneficial, all these medical devices need a source of power to operate. Which, from inside the body, finding power is easier said than done. Often outfitted with a battery, these electronics can only work for limited periods of time.

An MIT research team, via multiple joint initiatives, has been working on new ways to power millimeter-sized ingestible electronics.

We present the first real-time method to capture the full global 3D skeletal pose of a human in a stable, temporally consistent manner using a single RGB camera. Our method combines a new convolutional neural network (CNN) based pose regressor with kinematic skeleton fitting. Our novel fully-convolutional pose formulation regresses 2D and 3D joint positions jointly in real time and does not require tightly cropped input frames. A real-time kinematic skeleton fitting method uses the CNN output to yield temporally stable 3D global pose reconstructions on the basis of a coherent kinematic skeleton. This makes our approach the first monocular RGB method usable in real-time applications such as 3D character control—thus far, the only monocular methods for such applications employed specialized RGB-D cameras. Our method’s accuracy is quantitatively on par with the best offline 3D monocular RGB pose estimation methods. Our results are qualitatively comparable to, and sometimes better than, results from monocular RGB-D approaches, such as the Kinect. However, we show that our approach is more broadly applicable than RGB-D solutions, i.e. it works for outdoor scenes, community videos, and low quality commodity RGB cameras.

Motion ability is one of the most important human properties, including gait as a basis of human transitional movement. Gait, as a biometric for recognizing human identities, can be non-intrusively captured signals using wearable or portable smart devices. In this study gait patterns is collected using a wireless platform of two sensors located at chest and right ankle of the subjects. Then the raw data has undergone some preprocessing methods and segmented into 5 seconds windows. Some time and frequency domain features is extracted and the performance evaluated by 5 different classifiers. Decision Tree (with all features) and K-Nearest Neighbors (with 10 selected features) classifiers reached 99.4% and 100% respectively.

As electronics become increasingly pervasive in our lives – from smart phones to wearable sensors – so too does the ever rising amount of electronic waste they create. A United Nations Environment Program report found that almost 50 million tons of electronic waste were thrown out in 2017—more than 20 percent higher than waste in 2015.
Flexible, biodegradable semiconductor on a human hair

Troubled by this mounting waste, Stanford engineer Zhenan Bao and her team are rethinking electronics. “In my group, we have been trying to mimic the function of human skin to think about how to develop future electronic devices,” Bao said. She described how skin is stretchable, self-healable and also biodegradable – an attractive list of characteristics for electronics. “We have achieved the first two [flexible and self-healing], so the biodegradability was something we wanted to tackle.”

… The technique, called vagus-nerve stimulation, has been used since the 1990s to treat epilepsy, and since the early 2000s to treat depression. But Katrin, a 70-year-old fitness instructor in Amsterdam, who asked that her name be changed for this story, uses it to control rheumatoid arthritis, an autoimmune disorder that results in the destruction of cartilage around joints and other tissues. A clinical trial in which she enrolled five years ago is the first of its kind in humans, and it represents the culmination of two decades of research looking into the connection between the nervous and immune systems.

For Kevin Tracey, a neurosurgeon at the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research in Manhasset, New York, the vagus nerve is a major component of that connection, and he says that electrical stimulation could represent a better way to treat autoimmune diseases, such as lupus, Crohn’s disease and more.

Background

Neuromuscular electrical stimulation (NMES) is commonly used to activate skeletal muscles and reverse muscle atrophy in clinical populations. Clinical recommendations for NMES suggest the use of short pulse widths (100–200 μs) and low-to-moderate pulse frequencies (30–50 Hz). However, this type of NMES causes rapid muscle fatigue due to the (non-physiological) high stimulation intensities and non-orderly recruitment of motor units. The use of both wide pulse widths (1000 μs) and tendon vibration might optimize motor unit activation through spinal reflex pathways and thus delay the onset of muscle fatigue, increasing muscle force and mass. Thus, the objective of this study was to examine the acute effects of patellar tendon vibration superimposed onto wide-pulse width (1000 μs) knee extensor electrical stimulation (NMES, 30 Hz) on peak muscle force, total impulse before “muscle fatigue”, and the post-exercise recovery of muscle function.
Methods

Tendon vibration (Vib), NMES (STIM) or NMES superimposed onto vibration (STIM + Vib) were applied in separate sessions to 16 healthy adults. Total torque-time integral (TTI), maximal voluntary contraction torque (MVIC) and indirect measures of muscle damage were tested before, immediately after, 1 h and 48 h after each stimulus.
Results

TTI increased (145.0 ± 127.7%) in STIM only for “positive responders” to the tendon vibration (8/16 subjects), but decreased in “negative responders” (−43.5 ± 25.7%). MVIC (−8.7%) and rectus femoris electromyography (RF EMG) (−16.7%) decreased after STIM (group effect) for at least 1 h, but not after STIM + Vib. No changes were detected in indirect markers of muscle damage in any condition.
Conclusions

Tendon vibration superimposed onto wide-pulse width NMES increased TTI only in 8 of 16 subjects, but reduced voluntary force loss (fatigue) ubiquitously. Negative responders to tendon vibration may derive greater benefit from wide-pulse width NMES alone. [full text]

As Premier League footballer Aaron Lennon is treated for a stress-related illness, registered psychologist Bradley Busch of InnerDrive talks to Telegraph Men about the wide-ranging mental health challenges faced by high-profile footballers.

Footballers do not have perfect lives

“All of us are on a spectrum of physical and mental health and there are certain things about the life of an elite footballer than might trigger problems. One of them is the perception that footballers have a perfect life. If everyone looks at you and sees you have perfect health and lots of money, people assume you must be happy all the time. That is just not the case. Wealth does not insulate any footballer from mental health problems like anxiety, depression and addiction. Just as a percentage of bankers, lawyers and teachers have mental health issues, it should be perfectly expected that at least the same percentage of footballers will face the same challenges.