Applied Sports Science newsletter – September 4, 2017

Applied Sports Science news articles, blog posts and research papers for September 4, 2017

 

The Hidden Secrets of Federer’s Game

TennisReporters.net, Kamakshi Tandon from

… “Federer takes almost every ball on the rise, which takes time from you, especially if you try to come in,” he said. “And the other thing is, he can position his feet the same way for down the line, for crosscourt, and for a lob. So that gives me no chance to read where he’s going, where with most other players, I can — based on how they position their feet on the court — if they’re leaning into the ball, if they’re leaning back.

“Federer and Rafa [Nadal], those are the two where I have a lot of difficulty to anticipate where the ball is going, but Federer even more.”

Like his feet, Federer’s hands don’t give much away, with the same swing, a little flick can send the ball almost anywhere on the court. “His wrist is just so creative,” said Zverev. “He can do so many things with his wrist, even when he’s off-balance.”

 

How the NBA Failed Royce White

Longreads, Sam Riches from

… White has generalized anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder, a fact that came to light during his college season, when he brought it up, unprovoked, in an interview after a game. Soon after that, in the eyes of many, including the press, it became the easy way define him. It was a label that stuck. Then the rumours began. He’s afraid of flying. He’s lazy. Uncommitted. A wasted draft pick. This was his reward for honesty.

While this was happening, White was asking for his contract to be ratified to include a mental health protocol. He wanted protections, he wanted to feel safe and he wanted professionals making his mental health decisions, his own doctor, not someone in the front office of the Rockets, not a graduate of a business school. The Rockets agree to some contractual amendments but White is told his performance will dictate further accommodations. Until he proves himself as a commodity, this argument implies, the discussion is moot.

White’s anxiety manifests in multiple ways. It can affect his sleeping patterns, his appetite, his ability to be social. His anxious episodes can swallow minutes, or days, or weeks. They can arrive in waves or slowly build into a flood of thoughts that can’t be held, that thrive on fear, that drown out everything else. The panic attacks, White says, feel like death.

 

Among American Tennis’s Sudden Wave of Promising Teen-Agers, CiCi Bellis Stands Out

The New Yorker, Gerald Marzorati from

Eighty-twenty, yeah,” CiCi Bellis said. Then she paused, and sent her eyes skyward, pondering; a smile broadened across her seemingly untroubled face. Bellis smiles more than most professional tennis players. “Or maybe seventy-thirty. Yeah, seventy-thirty.” She’d just finished a two-hour morning session on Practice Court 6 at the U.S. Open, and we were talking about how she practices. The ratio under discussion was practicing strengths to practicing weaknesses. “Yeah, there are coaches who really want to work a lot more on what needs work,” she said. “But that wouldn’t work for me. I mean, in a match, it’s about your strengths, right? And when you practice your strengths, you feel positive.” I mentioned that she had been smiling throughout the session. She smiled again. “I love to practice,” she said.

Catherine Cartin Bellis, who prefers CiCi, is eighteen years old, the youngest player among the top fifty on the women’s tour. (Her ranking, going into the Open, was No. 36.) The women’s game is a very different one—more powerful, breakneck, demanding—than it was in 1979, when Tracy Austin won the Open three months from her seventeenth birthday. The body you need to compete now takes years to develop. Bellis is listed at five feet seven inches, and a hundred and twenty pounds. As we talked in the so-called players garden, a walled-off patio in the shadow of Arthur Ashe Stadium, Maria Sharapova stood nearby, chatting with an agent. The physical difference was striking. Bellis said that she spends a lot of time in the gym, and that she enjoys that, too. The strengths that I watched her practice—her ground strokes, especially her forehand, and particularly her inside-out forehand—offered proof of what every good tennis coach believes to be true, even if evidence can be hard to find: power is not so much the result of size or even strength but of technique, timing, and racquet-head speed. Bellis crushes the ball, and that, along with her quickness, court sense, and cloud-free attitude, has made her a standout among, suddenly, a batch of promising American teens.

 

Vladimir Guerrero Jr. keeps proving why he’s worth the hype

Sportsnet.ca, Arden Zwelling from

… Apparently, word has gotten out. Word that Guerrero is one of the best prospects — and many would drop the “one of” part — in all of baseball. Word that he’s batting .325/.427/.486 with at least a hit or a walk in 101 of his 115 games this season. Word that there’s something behind all the hype around Guerrero, something that doesn’t come around too often.

Maybe no one has seen that play out quite like Bo Bichette, the 19-year-old shortstop who has fielded beside and hit ahead of Guerrero all season, from mid-A Lansing to high-A Dunedin. Bichette says Guerrero’s combination of bat speed and hand-eye coordination is unlike anything he’s ever seen.

“He’s the most talented player I’ve ever played with — like, not even close,” Bichette says. “There’s just no one like him.”

 

EXOS Acquires D1 Sports Medicine To Extend Physical Therapy Services

Forbes, Darren Heitner from

Human performance leader EXOS will today announce its acquisition of D1 Sports Medicine, a company that partners with top sports medicine orthopedists to offer athletes physical therapy services and help them rehabilitate and return from injury. Physical therapy has always been an important component of the services provided by EXOS to athletes, and the acquisition will accelerate the company’s ability to scale its offerings beyond the most elite athletes in the NFL and other professional sports leagues.

EXOS will immediately incorporate existing D1 Sports Medicine locations and will now be serving more than 70 locations that are already partnered with health care systems to serve local communities across the U.S. The company envisions a serious increase in revenue opportunities will result as a consequence of the purchase, but it also comes with additional costs.

 

Mindfulness would be good for you. If it weren’t so selfish.

The Washington Post, Thomas Joiner from

… I was dismayed when mindfulness began to encroach on my field: psychology, and specifically the treatment of suicidal behavior. A psychiatrist colleague’s proposal for a book on bipolar disorder prompted a pre-publication reviewer to request “less lithium, more mindfulness” — even though less lithium can lead to more death by suicide in patients with bipolar disorder.

Of course, we’re all intrigued by interventions that show promise over the standard treatment, especially for the most difficult cases. But I wanted to know whether mindfulness had merit. So I soon found myself immersed in the literature and practice — sitting shoes-off in a circle, focused on the coolness of my breath as it hit the back of my throat.

What we might call authentic mindfulness, I found, is a noble and potentially useful idea. But true mindfulness is being usurped by an imposter, and the imposter is loud and strutting enough that it has replaced the original in many people’s understanding of what mindfulness is. This ersatz version provides a vehicle for solipsism and an excuse for self-indulgence. It trumpets its own glories, promising health and spiritual purity with trendiness thrown in for the bargain. And yet it misunderstands human nature, while containing none of the nobility, humility or utility of the true original. Even the best-designed, most robust research on mindfulness has been overhyped.

 

Interview with Fergus Connolly

Mladen Jovanovic, Complementary Training from

Mladen: There seems to be this dichotomy of physical preparation in team sports: either you go powerlifting/weightlifting style (in the States) or rehab/functional style (European soccer). What is your opinion regarding this and what should we do to cross the chasm?

Fergus: It’s like anything in life, the more extreme and fundamentalist the stance, the less sensible they usually are and the less adaptable they are. I think both mindsets are prehistoric to be very frank since neither is game focused. They are in some sense a legacy of Olympic coaches overly influencing training of team sports.
The single biggest impediment with, to use your term, physical preparation, is that, there is a completely unfounded belief fitness wins games. No it doesn’t. You need a ‘functional minimum’ of fitness to win games, but it’s not as important as some try to make you believe. Fitness is a factor. In Game Changer I speak about what I refer to as the 4 Coactives. Technical, Tactical, Physical and Psychological. These are NOT independent pieces, but elements that must be trained simultaneously as coactive. You cannot isolate them.

 

Ivan Lendl, Open Champion, Pushes the Benefits of Group Training

The New York Times, Cindy Shmerler from

Patrick Kypson knows the precise punishment — including how many steps on the VersaClimber, an extreme aerobic exercise machine — he must endure for every transgression he commits during a practice session with Ivan Lendl, the three-time United States Open champion who helps oversee Kypson’s development as a tennis player.

“Oh, yeah, if we throw a racket, it’s 5,000 steps,” said Kypson, 18, one of five junior players who have been training together for about two years in an experimental program supervised by Lendl and backed by the United States Tennis Association. “If we wear our hat backwards, it’s 3,000 steps. And it’s 1,000 steps for every minute we’re late to practice.”

Lendl, who also coaches the world No. 2, Andy Murray, does not ask anything of his young players that he would not endure himself. He stages his own VersaClimber competitions against the group’s fitness trainer, Jez Green, and routinely cycles extra miles before dawn, even when he is exhausted.

“He’s a freak,” Kypson said. “That’s why we’re so lucky to be working with him.”

 

Bierhoff: Why Germany treats players like ‘independent entrepreneurs’

Training Ground Guru, Simon Austin from

Germany team manager Oliver Bierhoff says modern players are ‘independent entrepreneurs’ who will not accept the ‘command and control’ style of leadership.

Bierhoff, who has been in post since 2004, said the days of strict hierarchies and players having to blindly follow orders have long gone.

“The new generation does not just want to execute, they want to shape things themselves, understand them and tackle challenges,” he told Adidas’s Gameplan A.

 

Breaking the grass ceiling: why the Bundesliga is the go-to league for England’s frustrated youngsters

bundesliga.com from

The German top-flight’s reputation as a breeding ground for the brightest and best the young generation has to offer is well documented. But up till now, it has been largely confined to developing homegrown talent with Borussia Dortmund’s USA star Christian Pulisic a notable exception to the rule.

bundesliga.com looks at why the Bundesliga is now becoming the destination of choice for English youngsters seeking to take their fledgling careers to the next level.

 

Why we fail and how we stand up afterwards | Katherine Milkman | TEDxPenn

YouTube, TEDxTalks from

Katherine Milkman has become successful figuring out what exactly makes all of us fail. More particularly, she looks at what produces self-control failures — such as undersaving for retirement, exercising too little, or eating too much junk food — and how to reduce these failures. Want to motivate your employees or customers? Milkman, who identified and coined the term “the fresh start effect”, studies how to design interventions that can do just that.

 

Unleashed

SSRN, Cass R. Sunstein from

Significant social change often comes from the unleashing of hidden preferences; it also comes from the construction of novel preferences. Under the pressure of social norms, people sometimes falsify their preferences. They do not feel free to say or do as they wish. Once norms are weakened or revised, through private efforts or law, it becomes possible to discover preexisting preferences. Because those preferences existed but were concealed, large-scale movements are both possible and exceedingly difficult to predict; they are often startling. But revisions of norms can also construct rather than uncover preferences. Once norms are altered, again through private efforts or law, people come to hold preferences that they did not hold before. Nothing has been unleashed. These points bear on the rise and fall (and rise again, and fall again) of discrimination on the basis of sex and race (and also religion and ethnicity). They also help illuminate the dynamics of social cascades and the effects of social norms on diverse practices and developments, including smoking, drinking, police brutality, protest activity, veganism, drug use, crime, white nationalism, “ethnification,” considerateness, and the public expression of religious beliefs.

 

Why Energy-Harvesting Clothes Will Be Such a Huge Deal

NBC News, MACH, Matthew Hutson from

Clothing today is mostly about covering up. In the future, it might also be about powering up — literally.

Researchers across the country are working to develop fabrics that harvest energy from your body movements and use it to provide a bit of extra juice for your cellphone or a fitness tracker — or maybe to change the color or pattern of the fabric itself. “Something that’s kind of snazzy,” says Dr. Cary Pint, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee and a leading researcher in the field.

One group of researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas has developed an energy-harvesting yarn made of carbon nanotubes, hollow cylinders 10,000 times thinner than a human hair. The tubes are bound into larger yarns and twisted so much that they coil. Experiments show that when these tightly coiled “twistron” yarns are placed side by side and then stretched, they generate a tiny electrical current.

 

What’s Up Those Baseball Sleeves? Lots Of Data, And Privacy Concerns

NPR, Tom Goldman from

In a stats-driven sport like baseball, it seems we know everything there is to know about a player. From batting average to a pitcher’s power finesse ratio.

Measuring a player’s ability isn’t limited to his or her skill. There’s also a wealth of information in an athlete’s body.

Wearables that track bio-information have become more prevalent in elite sports, and potentially important to player development and health. How that growing glut of information is used — by the companies that gather it and the teams that use it — remains a concern. [audio, 4:10]

 

Exclusive: See the top NCAA apparel deals for 2017-18 (Database)

Portland Business Journal, Clare Duffy from

… “There seem to be fewer schools who are just saying, ‘Let’s go out and see who’s going to give us the most money.’ These two deals are really kind of trendsetting, true partnerships as opposed to just taking the cash.”

The Business Journal has maintained a database of NCAA deals with sportswear companies since 2013. According to the Business Journal’s analysis, Under Armour, Adidas and Nike last year pumped more than $300 million into college athletics, a number that the companies are on track to top this year.

CRIA’s Jensen, along with undergraduate research assistant Tyler Wisniewski, analyzed the deals to determine how much each university should be getting from its apparel contract, and thus which deals end up being good for the university and which are steals for the companies.

The analysis found that each school’s enrollment (ergo, its alumni base), the number of times its basketball team had an NCAA-tournament appearance and the size of its football stadium or football attendance were the greatest determinants of the apparel deal values.

 

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