Applied Sports Science newsletter – September 8, 2017

… At 37 years old and about to begin his 15th NFL season, Palmer believes his right (throwing) arm has never felt this fresh in a Week 1 in his career, he told ESPN.

The rest paid off. Coach Bruce Arians’ game plan for Palmer worked. The quarterback didn’t start throwing until two weeks into OTAs and had days off throughout training camp. The goal was to preserve Palmer’s arm during the offseason so it won’t fatigue as quickly during the regular season. He’ll also continue to have Wednesdays off, a strategy the Cardinals implemented midway through last season.

The recipe, Palmer said, was “perfect.”

… “I said eventually: ‘I’m going to beat somebody and them I’m going to beat two people in a row,’” Stephens said after Tuesday’s quarter-final upset of the No16 seed, Anastasija Sevastova. “And then did I think it was going to be the next week? No. I just stayed positive. And then, yeah, look, there, semi-final, semi-final, semi-final. I couldn’t really ask for a better way to come back.”

Positivity was the hallmark of the first coming of Stephens, who first cracked the top 100 with a precocious third-round run at the 2011 US Open and was still a teenager when she first made the second week of a grand slam one year later at Flushing Meadows, featuring heavily in the advance promotion of the season-ending grand slam.

… There were few, if any at all, who predicted it, and certainly none who went on record. But no one who worked with Kane during his loan spells, first at Orient and latterly in the Championship at Millwall, was in any way cynical about the significance of the talent in front of them.

Speak to those who witnessed his rise and it’s easy to get lost among the platitudes for the young Kane. He was a professional certainly, with a winning and willing attitude; he integrated well; his movement, touch and finish were all excellent and of undoubted Premier League quality.

Such was his work ethic that most days after training at Orient he would return to Tottenham and put in more hours with the coaching staff at his parent club. The O’s agreed that since Spurs’ under-21s weren’t playing in league competition, their loanee could return to north London when they weren’t involved in a game and play there.

UCLA study finds that few teens do well with less than seven hours a night; more than 11 hours is sub-optimal too

Practicing makes players better at football. That’s obvious.

It also wears down their bodies, makes them susceptible to injuries and limits their availability, which ultimately matters more than anything. Tyler Williams, the Los Angeles Rams’ sports science coordinator, operates within those margins, continually pursuing the perfect balance between preparation and availability.

“You want to flirt above and below that line,” Williams said. “You don’t want to go too far below where you’re underprepared, or too far above where you’re overworked.”

… One of the of the most compelling explanations of what drives success in the NFL and elsewhere comes from University of Pennsylvania psychologist Angela Duckworth. Duckworth’s own research on “grit”—passion and perseverance for long-term goals—has earned her a spot on the The New York Times’ Bestseller List, and, among other honors, a MacArthur ‘Genius Grant.’

Part of her journey to understand grit included spending time with Seattle Seahawks Super Bowl champion coach Pete Carroll. Though the effervescent Carroll is a perfect foil to the publically dour Belichick, it’s easy to see how both coaches personify key components of grit. It might not be a coincidence that one of them has coached in three of the last four Super Bowls, including against each other in Super Bowl XLIX.

We asked Duckworth about the role of grit in the NFL and what she learned working with Carroll.

This study assessed the effectiveness of water immersion to the shoulders in enhancing blood lactate removal during active and passive recovery after short-duration high-intensity exercise. Seventeen cyclists underwent active water- and land-based recoveries and passive water and land-based recoveries. The recovery conditions lasted 31 minutes each and started after the identification of each cyclist’s blood lactate accumulation peak, induced by a 30-second all-out sprint on a cycle ergometer. Active recoveries were performed on a cycle ergometer at 70% of the oxygen consumption corresponding to the lactate threshold (the control for the intensity was oxygen consumption), while passive recoveries were performed with subjects at rest and seated on the cycle ergometer. Blood lactate concentration was measured 8 times during each recovery condition and lactate clearance was modeled over a negative exponential function using non-linear regression. Actual active recovery intensity was compared to the target intensity (one sample t-test) and passive recovery intensities were compared between environments (paired sample t-tests). Non-linear regression parameters (coefficients of the exponential decay of lactate; predicted resting lactates; predicted delta decreases in lactate) were compared between environments (linear mixed model analyses for repeated measures) separately for the active and passive recovery modes. Active recovery intensities did not differ significantly from the target oxygen consumption, whereas passive recovery resulted in a slightly lower oxygen consumption when performed while immersed in water rather than on land. The exponential decay of blood lactate was not significantly different in water- or land-based recoveries in either active or passive recovery conditions. In conclusion, water immersion at 29°C would not appear to be an effective practice for improving post-exercise lactate removal in either the active or passive recovery modes.

PURPOSE:

This study examined whether donning lower body garments fitted with cooled phase change material (PCM) would enhance recovery after a soccer match.
METHODS:

In a randomized, crossover design, eleven elite-soccer players from the reserve squad of a team in the 2nd highest league in England wore PCM cooled to 15°C (PCMcold) or left at ambient temperature (PCMamb; sham control) for 3 h after a soccer match. To assess recovery, countermovement jump (CMJ) height, maximal isometric voluntary contraction (MIVC), muscle soreness (MS), and the adapted Brief Assessment of Mood Questionnaire (BAM+) were measured before, 12, 36 and 60 h after each match. Pre and post intervention, a belief questionnaire (BFQ) was completed to determine perceived effectiveness of each garment.
RESULTS:

Results are comparisons between the two conditions at each time point post-match. MIVC at 36 h post was greater with PCMcold vs. PCMwarm (P =0.005; ES=1.59; 95% CI=3.9 to 17.1%). MIVC also tended to be higher at 60 h post (P =0.051; ES=0.85; 95% CI= -0.4 to 11.1%). MS was 26.5% lower in PCMcold vs. PCMwarm at 36 h (P =0.02; ES=1.7; 95% CI= -50.4 mm to -16.1 mm) and 24.3% lower at 60 h (P =0.039; ES=1.1; 95% CI= -26.9 mm to -0.874 mm). There were no between condition differences in post-match CMJ height or BAM+ (P >0.05). The BFQ revealed that players felt the PCMcold was more effective than the PCMamb after the intervention (P =0.004).
CONCLUSIONS:

PCM cooling garments provide a practical means of delivering prolonged post-exercise cooling and thereby accelerating recovery in elite soccer players.

Consider looking at a photograph of a chair. We humans have the remarkable capacity of inferring properties about the 3D shape of the chair from this single photograph even if we might not have seen such a chair ever before. A more representative example of our experience though is being in the same physical space as the chair and accumulating information from various viewpoints around it to build up our hypothesis of the chair’s 3D shape. How do we solve this complex 2D to 3D inference task? What kind of cues do we use? How do we seamlessly integrate information from just a few views to build up a holistic 3D model of the scene?

Zebra Technologies and Wilson Sporting Goods announced Thursday that every NFL game football this season would have an embedded RFID tag to track location, speed and rotation metrics. Though some data points will be exclusive to teams, other statistics will be included in television broadcasts and potentially tabulated in NFL.com leaderboards.

This technology was deployed only in preseason and Thursday Night Football games last year, but the pilot was deemed a success, leading to the program’s expansion this season. Zebra’s RFID tags on each player’s shoulder pads, which log movement for everyone on the field, are entering their fourth season of use. The RFID — radio-frequency identification — tags on the footballs will capture data points 25 times per second, double the rate of the player trackers because the ball will often travel at least twice as fast as anyone can run.

“We’ve worked really hard on mining what we think is some interesting data that will lead to interesting storytelling and documentation throughout the season, many of which really hasn’t been on the air thus far,” ESPN Monday Night Football producer Jay Rothman said on a conference call last week.

Premiership Rugby is undergoing a technological revolution and it is changing the way coaches prepare training sessions and how they analyse player performance.

Business Insider visited Harlequins Rugby Club during a pre-season training session at Surrey Sports Park in Guildford. We were given a glimpse of how Harlequins coaches use performance tracking tech to ensure players are prepared for the 2017-2018 Premiership season.

Most athletes understand the importance of protein, carbohydrates and fat in their diet. However, a compound that is often overlooked is dietary fiber. Fiber is a key nutrient in maintaining a healthy diet and GI system.

Fiber can be beneficial to endurance athletes in a variety of ways, but should be approached differently than other nutrients. Let’s take a look at what fiber is, and how athletes can utilize it in their daily diet and during training.

Between skyrocketing costs, sport specialization and coaches needing training, youth sports is in the midst of a crisis, according to new data published Wednesday by the Sports & Fitness Industry Association and the Aspen Institute.

Athletic participation for kids ages 6 through 12 is down almost 8 percent over the last decade, according to SFIA and Aspen data, and children from low-income households are half as likely to play one day’s worth of team sports than children from households earning at least $100,000.

“Sports in America have separated into sport-haves and have-nots,” said Tom Farrey, executive director of Aspen’s Sports & Society program. The group released its research at its annual Project Play Summit on Wednesday in Washington. “All that matters is if kids come from a family that has resources. If you don’t have money, it’s hard to play.”

The Splash Brothers, Steph Curry, and Klay Thompson, are great shooters but they are not streak shooters. Only rarely do they show signs of a hot hand. This counter-intuitive result is based on an empirical analysis of field goal and free throw data from the 82 regular season games and 17 post season games played by the Golden State Warriors in 2016–2017. Inspired by the iconic but flawed 1985 hot-hand study by Thomas Gilovich, Robert Vallone and Amos Tversky, as well as Josh Miller and Adam Sanjurjo’s 2015 fascinating correction to that study, we continue the dialog about how humans misperceive randomness, and we show how modern data science can improve on traditional statistical analysis in sports and in finance.

… There is a new generation of football analysts whose attempts to predict outcomes have been tested on betting markets and then sold to clubs. Analysts like Rory Campbell, founder of C&N Sporting Risk, for whom the difficulty of analysing and predicting football only makes it more attractive.

Campbell was at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in Boston earlier this year, listening to a discussion of golf analytics. “Someone said that golf is the sport most suited to analytics,” Campbell recalls to The Independent. “And I thought what that meant is that it is the easiest to solve, in terms of helping you get to the right answer.”

Football, with far more variables than golf, is the opposite. “Football is hard,” Campbell says. “But saying that it is not suited is missing the point. In my mind, hard is good. Because there is the most opportunity to gain a competitive advantage if you use it right. This is why poker players make more money than chess players. Because in chess the best player almost always wins, and in poker there’s variance and luck, and that’s a good thing.”