Applied Sports Science newsletter – June 14, 2017

Applied Sports Science news articles, blog posts and research papers for June 14, 2017

 

Mechanically speaking, Eagles’ Carson Wentz still a work in progress

ESPN NFL, Tim McManus from

Quarterbacks coach John DeFilippo analyzes every throw his Philadelphia Eagles QBs make, every day. Has for many years in this league. He says it has gotten to a point where, like a golf instructor knowing whether or not a quality shot is coming based on club positioning in the backswing, he can tell whether it’s going to be a good or bad throw before the ball even leaves their hands.

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A big part of his job is to refine the mechanics that he studies so intently to ensure the stroke is consistently pure. In that vein, he met with Carson Wentz at the end of his rookie year and gave him several things to work on over the course of the offseason to become a more sound passer.

“I never thought Carson had bad mechanics,” DeFilippo said on Monday, a day before the start of the Eagles’ mandatory minicamp. “There were certain things that we need to just tighten up a little bit.”

 

Christian Pulisic’s success could change how athletes are developed in the U.S.

Yahoo Sports, Dan Wetzel from

… He spurned the academy team of the Philadelphia Union, a unit consistently more talent-laden and successful than the PA Classics.

“When you are the best player on your team but your team is not as good, it means you handle the ball more, you have to do more to carry your team and in the process, you are developing your game,” says Richie Williams, an assistant coach with the U.S. men’s national team who coached Christian, then 15, at the U-17 residency program in Bradenton and in the 2015 U-17 World Cup. “If it is a loaded team, that same player might be identified as a role player and never develop those skills.”

American youth sports almost always push good players to the highest level of competition, thus surrounding them with the most amount of talent so they are most likely to win. Bigger is almost always considered the best route to development. It is the basic stable of all travel teams, high schools and NCAA programs.

 

The Ideal Modern Linebacker

The MMQB, Tim from

At first glance, Deion Jones is undersized and a bit of a lightweight to be a middle ’backer. But in the pass-happy NFL, his speed makes him the prototype for an evolving position

 

How Training Helps You Handle Pain

Runner's World, Sweat Science blog, Alex Hutchinson from

… There was no link between physical activity patterns and pain threshold, just as in the studies of athletes. In contrast, pain tolerance was higher in those with less sedentary time and/or more light physical activity—again, as expected from the athlete studies.

Surprisingly, there was no link between pain tolerance and moderate/vigorous physical activity. My guess is this might be simply because the people in the study did so little of it that there wasn’t enough data for patterns to register.

The big question is whether people with better pain tolerance are more likely to tolerate the occasional discomfort of being physically active, or whether people who are habitually active develop better pain tolerance. It’s an important question, because, for example, it has implications for the management of chronic pain through exercise.

 

Gimme a Break: How to Step Away From Running to Boost Performance

Runner's World (AU), Erin Strout from

… “I really only take one big break every year, in the second half of September after the outdoor track season is over,” [Rachel] Schneider says. “My coach and I agree to not talk for a few weeks. I go be a ‘normal person,’ relax, and have fun. It’s a complete mental and physical reset and makes me excited to start training again.”

Breaks come in various forms. Planned breaks, like the ones that Schneider enjoys, are the best kind. Unplanned breaks forced by injuries, illness, and other unforeseen circumstances are less desirable and sometimes preventable with strict adherence to the former variety. For elite athletes, the natural breaks come at the end of competitive seasons. For recreational runners, they can be planned after big goal races or times that are convenient for work and family.

“It’s kind of like a checkpoint, or a finish line of sorts,” says Kyle Merber, 26, a runner who recently placed third in a mile race, finishing in 3:54.67. “When you’re in the middle of training you can look to it and say, ‘All I have to do is survive another month.’ It makes it a little easier to wrap your mind around the training.”

 

Are Parents the X Factor in Player Development?

Dean Atkins, Coach Atkins blog from

Developing soccer players is the holy grail that every coach is working towards. As coaches, clubs and organisations work on player development models and sessions, they are continuously running up against a limited amount of contact time. There is a lot of discussion on whether 10,000 hours is the golden number and the type of practice that involves, but coaches can’t come close to being there for all 10,000 hours.

There are those that have the ability to be around for those hours though. There are those that can facilitate and support young players as they practice, develop and continue on their playing journey. The people with the most contact time aren’t the coaches, they’re the parents.

Soccer begins in the home at the very youngest ages but will continue to do so much further along than when little Johnny is kicking a ball around in the living room for the first time. Parents are crucial to player development, the X factor that can make all the difference. They’re there throughout the whole journey.

 

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Marathoners : Habit 1. Find Your Purpose

Runner's World, Brad Stulberg, Steve Magness from

… Habit 1. Find Your Purpose

A very well known sports-science theory says the brain shuts down the body long before it reaches its physical limits. But emerging science shows it may be possible to transcend this—if you stay inspired. For a recent study, researchers used brain scans to examine what happens when people are presented with threatening messages. In individuals who were asked to reflect deeply on their core values (e.g., to be a good spouse or parent, to have courage) prior to receiving such a message, their underlying neurology became more receptive: The test subjects’ brains moved the subjects toward the challenge instead of going into protection mode. In other words, the more we think about our deep-seated beliefs, the better we rise above shallow, in-the-moment concerns and disconnect from our body’s perceived limits.

 

NFL adds clinic for assistant coaches to offseason schedule

Sporting News, Alex Marvez from

NFL minicamps wrap up later this week, but the offseason will continue for a slew of young assistant coaches.

Sporting News has learned the league is launching a program aimed at assisting the development of those staffers through seminars conducted by veteran coaches.

The NFL Coaching Clinic will be held Friday through Sunday at New York Jets headquarters in Florham Park, N.J. Each team can send two assistants with between one-to-three years of experience.

 

A Kinetic Model Describing Injury-Burden in Team Sports | SpringerLink

Sports Medicine journal from

Background

Injuries in team sports are normally characterised by the incidence, severity, and location and type of injuries sustained: these measures, however, do not provide an insight into the variable injury-burden experienced during a season. Injury burden varies according to the team’s match and training loads, the rate at which injuries are sustained and the time taken for these injuries to resolve. At the present time, this time-based variation of injury burden has not been modelled.
Objectives

To develop a kinetic model describing the time-based injury burden experienced by teams in elite team sports and to demonstrate the model’s utility.
Methods

Rates of injury were quantified using a large eight-season database of rugby injuries (5253) and exposure (60,085 player-match-hours) in English professional rugby. Rates of recovery from injury were quantified using time-to-recovery analysis of the injuries.
Results

The kinetic model proposed for predicting a team’s time-based injury burden is based on a composite rate equation developed from the incidence of injury, a first-order rate of recovery from injury and the team’s playing load. The utility of the model was demonstrated by examining common scenarios encountered in elite rugby.
Conclusions

The kinetic model developed describes and predicts the variable injury-burden arising from match play during a season of rugby union based on the incidence of match injuries, the rate of recovery from injury and the playing load. The model is equally applicable to other team sports and other scenarios.

 

Soccer: NWSL changes game times in attempt to avoid heat for player safety

Excelle Sports, Nick Forrester from

The National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) announced new kickoff times for the remaining 23 games of the 2017 season to avoid high temperatures and humidity for safety.

The new schedule reduces the number of day-time games where heat and humidity are more prevalent. The league also is implementing increased measures for hydration breaks and new guidelines for extreme heat, including procedures for match delays.

 

Why Athletes Should Eat Local

Outside Online, Colette Harris from

Athletes constantly think about food—not just what they eat but also where that food comes from. Although eating local—consuming products grown within 50-to-100 miles of where they’re purchased—has long enjoyed popularity, eating native foods, or those indigenous to the area before transporting seeds and crops was possible, has only recently gained more traction. Doing so nearly guarantees that you get foods in their most nutrient-dense form and with higher levels of antioxidants, says Hilary McClafferty, co-director of fellowships in integrative medicine at the University of Arizona. Read on to learn how to create the perfect performance plate in every part of the country.

 

Without Kris Letang, the Penguins’ blue line rallies to beat unlikely odds

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Sam Werner from

… It’s a cliche to say every other player chips in a little bit when a star goes down with an injury, but that’s literally what the Penguins did. Without Letang in the lineup to eat up his customary 25-30 minutes a night, Mike Sullivan distributed the ice time remarkably evenly among the six regular defenseman.

All six played somewhere between 18:53 (Cole) and 21:49 (Brian Dumoulin) per night in these playoffs, making the Penguins by far the most balanced team in terms of ice time in the league.

“I think everyone kind of wrote us off when [Letang got hurt],” Cole said. “He was such a big part of our run last year, but everyone stuck together, everyone probably assumed a little larger role and elevated their game.”

 

3 Things Are Holding Back Your Analytics, and Technology Isn’t One of Them

Harvard Business Review, Todd Clark and Dan Wiesenfeld from

During the past decade, business analytics platforms have evolved from supporting IT and finance functions to enabling business users across the enterprise. But many firms find themselves struggling to take advantage of its promise. We’ve found three main obstacles to realizing analytics’ full value, and all of them are related to people, not technology: the organization’s structure, culture, and approach to problem solving.

Structure

Structurally, analytics departments can range between two opposite but equally challenging extremes. On the one hand are data science groups that are too independent of the business. These tend to produce impressive and complex models that prove few actionable insights.

 

Just How Dangerous IS the NFL vs. Other Sports?

NFL Injury Analytics from

… There is a wide-ranging belief that the NFL has the highest injury rates of the major North American sports, but by how much? Because game injury rates (rather than injury rates in practices) tend to be easier to calculate (and more available across studies) than those incorporating practices, we’ll focus exclusively on those.

We’ll need to introduce one concept to make the analyses below make sense: the idea of an “athlete-exposure” (AE). This is simply defined as 1 athlete participating in a practice or, in the case of this article, a game. Thus a single NFL game where every available player plays in the game would count for 92 athlete exposures – the 46 guys on the active game day roster on each of the two teams. All the injury rates below are presented per 1,000 AEs.

 

Adam Silver drafts guidelines penalizing teams resting ‘multiple starters on the same night’

Yahoo Sports, Kelly Dwyer from

… As, seemingly, will talk about how to handle dragging stars through 100-plus-game campaigns dotted with nearly nightly expectations of appointment viewing. NBA commissioner Adam Silver was recently asked by ESPN’s Marc Stein on his podcast if the league was ready to get heavy-handed with its policy, presuming that it could between bouts of collective bargaining with the players union:

“We’re not ready to go there yet,” said Silver. “We had a conference call with the competition committee earlier today, and as I had said the other day, where we’re heading is the adoption of a set of guidelines that will be in place for next season which will strongly recommend that the extent players are rested, they’re rested at home and not rest multiple starters on the same night.”

 

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