Applied Sports Science newsletter – September 12, 2017

Football star Ryan Jensen said that a sleep apnea diagnosis “saved my career,” after he could not understand why he was losing his strength and never feeling rested even after being in bed for over 8 hours a night.

The Baltimore Ravens offensive lineman told ABC News that three years ago his football future was in doubt after he was cut from the team.

“I’d lost a bunch of weight. I lost a bunch of strength,” Jensen said. “I wasn’t playing well. I was getting beat a lot.”

He added that around the same time that he was cut from the Ravens’ roster, his father mentioned that he had noticed a change in his behavior.

In a narrow sense, the recent announcement that New York Mets captain David Wright needed surgery — thus ending his latest rehab stint — was just another line item in what was already an absurdly injury-wrecked, grossly disappointing Mets season.

Wright’s setback, however, was more a symbolic blow for the Mets than anything else. The once-great third baseman hadn’t played a game since May 2016 and turns 35 in December, so he probably wasn’t going to add much production on the field, at least not anytime soon. But Wright is also the top position player in franchise history according to wins above replacement (WAR),1 and the Mets’ second-best player ever, period (behind Tom Seaver). He’s just the fourth captain in club history and was once on the shortlist of the most popular players in the game.

As difficult as it is to remember now, a healthy Wright was among baseball’s upper echelon of players for a very long time. He was also easily on track to become a Hall of Famer — the rare member to spend his entire career with the Mets, who have a tendency to either pick up HOFers mid-career or jettison them too soon.2 This is not how the future was supposed to look for both Wright and the Mets.

Real Madrid forward Gareth Bale has said he had to take “a lot of painkillers” to be able to play last season and admits he should not have been so hasty in trying to come back from injury.

Bale has been plagued by fitness problems during his four years in Spain and underwent an ankle operation last November which sidelined him for three months. Ten games into his return to action, he suffered a calf tear during a match against Barcelona in April that kept him out for another six weeks.

The Wales international declared himself fit in the week ahead of the Champions League final in his hometown of Cardiff, where he appeared for the final 13 minutes of Madrid’s 4-1 win over Juventus.

… EJ: I love coaching. I’d been lucky enough to become an acting principal at the age of 32. They put in a permanent principal and I went to the chairman and said, ‘look, I’ve got a choice here. I can either coach or stay in education.’ He said, ‘Go and coach.’ He obviously didn’t think I was a very good principal so it wasn’t much of a choice for me!

When you stop playing the next best thing is to coach. I was coached by one of the best ever in Bob Dwyer and I learnt a lot from him.

The FA is backing Gareth Southgate’s attempt to improve the mental strength of England’s players by hiring a full-time psychologist. Southgate has been using consultants from Lane4 on an ad hoc basis since becoming England manager last October, but wants a permanent appointment to help him prepare his players for next summer’s World Cup finals in Russia.

The FA has begun the process of recruiting a head of team and people development, whose time will be split between St George’s Park and Wembley. The successful candidate will assemble a group of four or five psychologists to support all the England teams. Consultants from Lane4 will continue to be used in the meantime and may be invited to apply for the new roles.

Southgate’s emphasis on sports psychology represents a step change for the England management, who have previously been slow to embrace its benefits. Steve Peters, the psychiatrist, travelled with England to the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 European Championship but was only available to individual players upon request, rather than being given specific responsibilities, and never addressed the squad as a whole. Several FA figures felt at the time that Dr Peters was merely tolerated by Roy Hodgson, the then manager, to reduce pressure to accept a permanent appointment. Dr Peters has not been used since England’s defeat by Iceland in the last 16 in France.

What got me were the tennis balls.

I wasn’t surprised that The Hill wore me down, elevated my heart rate and tightened my cute little quad muscles like cement. But the climbing was over now. All that remained was a little game of pitch and catch. Ray Wright, the 49ers’ head strength and conditioning coach, stood at the top of the The Hill with a bucket of tennis balls. I waited at the bottom, where the earth was nice and flat. “Just catch each ball and drop it on the ground,” he said. “You ready?”

I was ready.

Oops, not ready. Wright didn’t roll ground balls. He fired one-hoppers in rapid succession, dragging me left and right. And I was so tired from the workout he had just put me through, my legs so resembling canned cranberry sauce, that even basic hand-eye coordination deserted me. I think I caught three of 20 balls.

… Elite athletes prepare their bodies for competition through repeated cycles of training and recovery. Many aspects of their daily routine from training, eating and sleeping will impact on redox status i.e. the production of RONS (reactive oxygen and nitrogen species), the intake of antioxidant nutrients, and the up regulation of various antioxidant and repair enzymes. One of the fundamental features of adaptation to training (aerobic, anaerobic, resistance, yoga, concurrent) is the production of RONS with the translation of redox genes and the accompanying synthesis of antioxidant enzymes and associated cytoprotective proteins.

However, too much training, or a gross imbalance between the stimulus (training load) and recovery (rest and diet), can significantly upset redox balance and push the athlete into a fatigued, maladapted state with underperformance. Such a state may result in injury if prolonged or the spike in RONS is considerable and significant overload occurs. That said, we do want to disrupt redox balance to drive adaptive changes in the athlete’s physiology, but finding the right amount of redox ‘stress’ and quantifying the athlete’s own individual redox ‘threshold’ is a serious scientific undertaking.

OBJECTIVES:

This study aimed to examine the difference between absolute and relative workloads, injury likelihood, and the acute:chronic workload ratio (ACWR) in elite Australian football.
DESIGN:

Single cohort, observational study.
METHODS:

Forty-five elite Australian football players from one club participated in this study. Running workloads of players were tracked using Global Positioning System technology, and were categorised using either; (1) absolute, pre-defined speed thresholds, or (2) relative, individualised speed thresholds. Players were divided into three equal groups based on maximum velocity; (1) faster, (2) moderate, or (3) slower. One-week and four-week workloads were calculated, along with the ACWR. Injuries were recorded if they were non-contact in nature and resulted in “time-loss”.
RESULTS:

Faster players demonstrated a significant overestimation of very high-speed running when compared to their relative thresholds (p=0.01, ES=-0.73). Similarly, slower players demonstrated an underestimation of high- (p=0.06, ES=0.55) and very high-speed (p=0.01, ES=1.16) running when compared to their relative thresholds. For slower players, (1) greater amounts of relative very high-speed running had a greater risk of injury than less (RR=8.30, p=0.04), and (2) greater absolute high-speed chronic workloads demonstrated an increase in injury likelihood (RR=2.28, p=0.16), while greater relative high-speed chronic workloads offered a decrease in injury likelihood (RR=0.33, p=0.11). Faster players with a very high-speed ACWR of >2.0 had a greater risk of injury than those between 0.49-0.99 for both absolute (RR=10.31, p=0.09) and relative (RR=4.28, p=0.13) workloads.
CONCLUSIONS:

The individualisation of velocity thresholds significantly alters the amount of very high-speed running performed and should be considered in the prescription of training load.

… Organizations are increasingly hiring employees around the globe, and they need tools that help people collaborate across distances. But using a regular webcam to live-stream a whiteboard usually produces a mirror image in which the letters are displayed in reverse. Even when all participants can see the board correctly, shadows and reflections can make words and drawings frustratingly difficult to decipher.

Cyclops, a startup based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is developing a new approach: an online videoconferencing service that uses computer-vision algorithms to clarify writing on whiteboards and flips their orientation so both the meeting host and remote viewers can read them easily. The technology, which took about two years to develop, reduces the “noise,” or visual distortions, produced by consumer-grade laptop cameras and webcams. Cyclops’s algorithms also scan whiteboards for marks that look like text or lines and enhances them to give viewers a more vibrant, higher-contrast image.

A combined MOON (Multi-Center Orthopaedic Outcomes Network)- MARS (Multi-Center ACL Revision Study) looked at patellofemoral (kneecap) cartilage changes after allograft or autograft primary ACL reconstruction as identified at the time of revision ACL reconstruction. This study presented by Robert Magnussen of Ohio St. at the Toronto AOSSM (American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine) meeting in July. 134 patients had undergone MOON primary ACL reconstruction followed by MARS revision ACL reconstruction. Progression was identified as progression of one grade worse or a 25% increase in size of the lesion. 31 (23%) had worsening progression of arthritis. Results showed allografts had a 15.5 times higher risk of progression. Odds also increased 10% with each unit increase of BMI. Age, sex, activity level, meniscus status, injury mechanism had no impact. The association between graft choice and damage was surprising. Previously it was thought maybe a patellar tendon (BTB) autograft might be at more riskk. Allografts with more laxity may place more pressure on cartilage, but we cannot be sure. Further work will be necessary to sort this out.

Sleep is generally recognised as a critical factor in athlete’s performance. Sleep is thought to affect both physiological and cognitive function, that can affect sports performance. Recent evidence, suggests that athletes have lower quality of sleep as well as lower quantity of sleep, compared with the non-athlete, particularly during periods of intensified training (Read Sleep disturbances in trained athletes). Lack of sufficient sleep is likely to have detrimental effects on athletic performance.Compromised sleep might also influence cognition, learning, memory, pain perception, immunity and inflammation. Chronic partial sleep deprivation may result in changes in carbohydrate metabolism, protein synthesis, appetite, and food intake. These factors can ultimately have a negative influence on an athlete’s nutritional, metabolic and hormonal status and could therefore potentially reduce athletic performance.

… Anderson also became the first player with college ties to reach a Grand Slam singles final since Todd Martin at the 1999 US Open, and if he finds a way to defeat Rafael Nadal on Sunday, Anderson will become the first ex-college player to win a major title since John McEnroe here in 1984.

“I really didn’t know too much about college tennis when I was in South Africa,” Anderson said to ESPN.com afterward. “My last year of juniors I started getting calls from coaches, and the more we looked at it, the more we realized it was a very worthwhile opportunity to explore. Coming from South Africa, we didn’t have the funding required to establish a base in the U.S. where I could play a lot of tournament and develop my game, which was important.”

… [Mike] Hazen, 41, grew up in suburban Boston and had his hopes raised and extinguished by the 1986 Red Sox. He played college ball at Princeton, spent two years as an outfielder in the Padres’ system and parlayed a summer job scouting the Cape Cod League for Peter Gammons into an internship with the Cleveland Indians. After 16 years as a scout and executive in Cleveland and Boston, Hazen landed the Arizona job and brought in former Red Sox colleagues Amiel Sawdaye and Jared Porter to help implement his vision.

Arizona’s new front office looked to Fenway for its first big addition, hiring former Red Sox bench coach Torey Lovullo to succeed Chip Hale as the eighth manager in the franchise’s 20-year history. Lovullo has emerged as a National League Manager of the Year contender while strengthening a rapport with Hazen that took root during their days together in the Cleveland and Boston organizations.

“Times have changed,” Lovullo said. “The newer front offices are engaged and involved on an impressive level, and the key point is the relationship between the manager and the front office. To me, it’s like a marriage. You’ve got to have a relationship where you share the good and the bad. From Day 1, Mike and I had aggressive, understanding, learning conversations. There’s never, ever a judgment. We’re doing this for one reason — their players and their performance on the field. We checked a lot of boxes quickly.”

Artificial-intelligence research has been transformed by machine-learning systems called neural networks, which learn how to perform tasks by analyzing huge volumes of training data.

During training, a neural net continually readjusts thousands of internal parameters until it can reliably perform some task, such as identifying objects in digital images or translating text from one language to another. But on their own, the final values of those parameters say very little about how the neural net does what it does.

Understanding what neural networks are doing can help researchers improve their performance and transfer their insights to other applications, and computer scientists have recently developed some clever techniques for divining the computations of particular neural networks.

But, at the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods on Natural Language Processing starting this week, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory are presenting a new general-purpose technique for making sense of neural networks that are trained to perform natural-language-processing tasks, in which computers attempt to interpret freeform texts written in ordinary, or “natural,” language (as opposed to a structured language, such as a database-query language).

… Sabres fans feel like they are on solid ground with Ristolainen on the top pair, while analytics writers seem to believe he should be sent to the AHL.

There might not be a bigger separation in opinion on any player in the NHL.

I fall into both of those categories, having written hockey analytics since 2010. I’ve consulted for AHL, NCAA and NHL people on numbers and scouting, and have covered Rasmus since he first arrived in America and could barely speak English.

I’ll tell you what I see in Ristolainen and have heard from at least a dozen NHL coaches, players and scouts, then we’ll get to the numbers.