Applied Sports Science newsletter – October 28, 2017

The Journey is an original U.S. Soccer series that follows U.S. Women’s National Team players on and off the field as they work toward earning a spot at the 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup in France. In this episode of The Journey, Sponsored by Motrin, we learn how U.S. WNT midfielder Samantha Mewis grew up in Hanson, Massachusetts while always looking up to her older sister Kristie, a U.S. Youth National Team star and elite college player. As the years have gone by, Sam has emerged from her sister’s shadow, blossoming into a strong, independent and mature person, as well as an impact player for club and country who is making a name for herself at the international level.

… I spoke with Gray on the phone in August and we discussed his American record, doping in the sport (and why he considered doping himself), the origins of the “Gray Zone” (Gray was famous for taking races out super hard which people started to refer to as “taking it to the Gray zone” in honor of Gray), his training under the Igloi system, and current U.S. stars Donavan Brazier and Ajee Wilson.

What are your memories of that race when you broke the American record?

Well actually, before the race I was trying to talk my coach into allowing me not to run because I had just come from running a big race in Zurich and I was kind of tired. I had just run a 1:43-low and then most of my competitors who were just as good were sitting, waiting on me to arrive, and then I would have to race the next day. So I didn’t really want to run at a disadvantage but we got paid and my pay was already given to me and sent back to the States. So my coach (Merle McGee) said in order to have a roof over my head, you need to run, hypothetically speaking. So I said okay, I’ll run.

… Larin, 22, is entering the first of two option years left on his contract, and has drawn interest from overseas clubs since his college years. He previously expressed his desire to play in Europe at some point but said he felt Orlando City was the right place for him to continue developing in 2017.

Still, rumors of an overseas move ran rife all year. He did not play in the final two matches of the Lions’ season due to a hip flexor injury, according to the club. He also declined media requests during that time, raising additional questions about his future.

Larin said he was a bit sore when he returned from international duty with Canada ahead of the final home match Oct. 15, which also served as Kaká’s farewell, but wanted to play. Lions coach Jason Kreis said Larin struggled through training and was left off the game-day rosters after failing physical testing.

Is she a proud athlete or is this another twist in the topsy-turvy career of Martina Hingis? It’s a harsh but legitimate question now that she has decided to retire for a third time.

On Thursday at a news conference in Singapore, Hingis unexpectedly announced she was walking away from the game again. The timing of the decision came in much the same way she traveled through the game for 23 remarkably successful and often bizarre years.

Few NBA players have overcome one devastating injury, much less two. Then again, few NBA players possess the grit and outlook of Jabari Parker. “I see the beauty in my scars. They tell my story.”

Targeted strength and conditioning (S&C) programs can potentially improve performance and reduce injury risk factors in competitive runners. However, S&C practices of distance runners are unknown. This study aimed to explore S&C practices of competitive middle- and long-distance runners and examined whether reported frequency of injuries was influenced by training behaviors. One thousand eight hundred eighty-three distance runners (≥15 years old) completed an online survey. All runners who raced competitively were included in data analysis (n = 667). Distance runners mainly engaged with S&C activities to lower risk of injury (63.1%) and improve performance (53.8%). The most common activities used were stretching (86.2%) and core stability exercises (70.2%). Resistance training (RT) and plyometric training (PT) were used by 62.5 and 35.1% of runners, respectively. Junior (under-20) runners include PT, running drills, and circuit training more so than masters runners. Significantly more international standard runners engaged in RT, PT, and fundamental movement skills training compared with competitive club runners. Middle-distance (800-3,000 m) specialists were more likely to include RT, PT, running drills, circuit training, and barefoot exercises in their program than longer-distance runners. Injury frequency was associated with typical weekly running volume and run frequency. Strength and conditioning did not seem to confer a protection against the number of injuries the runners experienced. Practitioners working with distance runners should critically evaluate the current S&C practices of their athletes, to ensure that activities prescribed have a sound evidence-based rationale.

The purpose of this study was to determine whether recovery of cardiac-autonomic activity to baseline occurs between consecutive-day training sessions among positional groups of a collegiate football team during Spring camp. A secondary aim was to evaluate relationships between chronic (i.e., 4-week) heart rate variability (HRV) and training load parameters. Baseline HRV (lnRMSSD_BL) was compared with HRV after ∼20 hours of recovery before next-day training (lnRMSSDpost20) among positional groups composed of SKILL (n = 11), MID-SKILL (n = 9), and LINEMEN (n = 5) with a linear mixed model and effect sizes (ES). Pearson and partial correlations were used to quantify relationships between chronic mean and coefficient of variation (CV) of lnRMSSD (lnRMSSD_chronic and lnRMSSDcv, respectively) with the mean and CV of PlayerLoad (PL_chronic and PL_cv, respectively). A position × time interaction was observed for lnRMSSD (p = 0.01). lnRMSSD_BL was higher than lnRMSSDpost20 for LINEMEN (p < 0.01; ES = large), whereas differences for SKILL and MID-SKILL were not statistically different (p > 0.05). Players with greater body mass experienced larger reductions in lnRMSSD (r = -0.62, p < 0.01). Longitudinally, lnRMSSDcv was significantly related to body mass (r = 0.48) and PL_chronic (r = -0.60). After adjusting for body mass, lnRMSSDcv and PL_chronic remained significantly related (r = -0.43). The ∼20-hour recovery time between training sessions on consecutive days may not be adequate for restoration of cardiac-parasympathetic activity to baseline among LINEMEN. Players with a lower chronic training load throughout camp experienced greater fluctuation in lnRMSSD (i.e., lnRMSSDcv) and vice versa. Thus, a capacity for greater chronic workloads may be protective against perturbations in cardiac-autonomic homeostasis among American college football players.

… Joint stiffness, dehydration and sleep deprivation, loss of appetite and a body clock sent haywire. These are some of the common side effects of long distance travel and yet, according to sports scientists, they are factors often overlooked by the growing number of athletes making lengthy journeys to training camps and competitions.

Reporting in the Strength and Conditioning Journal recently, a team of researchers from the sports and exercise departments of the University of Gloucestershire and Birmingham City University described how many athletes travel with little planning for the potential impact it might have on their physical and mental wellbeing.

… Researchers in Barabási’s lab studied the nematode brain, which has been mapped neuron by neuron, synapse by synapse. They developed a theory to predict precisely what neurons would control specific types of locomotion—the worm’s ability to squirm and scoot around. Then, colleagues from the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, tested the predictions by killing individual neurons from the nematode brain with a laser. They then measured the effects of these “microsurgeries” on behavior.

“Remarkably, the predictions were confirmed, supporting the theory and providing new insight into how individual neurons control body movements,” said William Schafer, a scientist at the MRC lab who led the laser experiments.

A few days after the Panthers hired him as their head coach last June, Bob Boughner wandered into a bookstore near his offseason Ontario home—“I’m old school,” the 46-year-old explains, “my kids make fun of me”—and purchased a paperback copy of Legacy, a 224-page tome chronicling the history of the All Blacks, New Zealand’s decorated men’s national rugby team. Armed with a highlighter and pen, Boughner devoured the text, jotting notes in the margins and dog-earing passages to remember, which wound up being most of them anyway. He had already been brainstorming messages to send his new players in Florida, elements of the revamped culture he hoped to establish. “When I read the book, it hit me like a pile of bricks,” Boughner says. “It was right in my face. No need to look anywhere else.”

Matthew Walker has learned to dread the question “What do you do?” At parties, it signals the end of his evening; thereafter, his new acquaintance will inevitably cling to him like ivy. On an aeroplane, it usually means that while everyone else watches movies or reads a thriller, he will find himself running an hours-long salon for the benefit of passengers and crew alike. “I’ve begun to lie,” he says. “Seriously. I just tell people I’m a dolphin trainer. It’s better for everyone.”

Walker is a sleep scientist. To be specific, he is the director of the Center for Human Sleep Science at the University of California, Berkeley, a research institute whose goal – possibly unachievable – is to understand everything about sleep’s impact on us, from birth to death, in sickness and health. No wonder, then, that people long for his counsel. As the line between work and leisure grows ever more blurred, rare is the person who doesn’t worry about their sleep. But even as we contemplate the shadows beneath our eyes, most of us don’t know the half of it – and perhaps this is the real reason he has stopped telling strangers how he makes his living. When Walker talks about sleep he can’t, in all conscience, limit himself to whispering comforting nothings about camomile tea and warm baths. It’s his conviction that we are in the midst of a “catastrophic sleep-loss epidemic”, the consequences of which are far graver than any of us could imagine. This situation, he believes, is only likely to change if government gets involved.

… Rather than play it safe, the famously hands-on coach (at Tulane, he used to cut the grass, line the field and paint the locker room himself) latched on to a wildly unorthodox idea. The thought had been planted years before by Steve Spurrier (“Get your guys to game day,” the genius Florida play caller had told Teevens, when Teevens was the Gators offensive coordinator) and reinforced by Bill Walsh, the San Francisco 49ers legend, who advised Teevens, then head coach at Stanford: “Take care of your players.”

And so, before the 2010 season, Teevens heeded their advice and his own conscience and became the first college coach to ban live tackling from his practices. The goal: reduce concussion and injury risk with practice hits on dummies, not teammates.

As well as the successful qualifying campaign, Lopetegui has also steered Spain to impressive friendly victories over Belgium and France.

So what’s going right?

First of all, it’s clear that Spain have rediscovered their style. They are dominating games in midfield just as they did in the days of Xavi Hernandez. Their passing game has improved noticeably.

But Lopetegui has also freshened things up. Spain have embraced high-pressing tactics, and they are also much quicker in transition. There is purpose to the passing.

… The authors of a new study published in the Journal of Neuroscience say this is one of the first to show that sound sleep might protect against fear and distress, while a person’s tendency to sleep fitfully can make them more likely to be traumatized later on.

For the study, a team of researchers from Rutgers University sent 17 subjects home with sleep-monitoring devices—headbands that monitor their brain waves, wristbands that track arm movements, and sleep logs—and asked them to sleep as they normally would for a week. They were monitoring how much sleep they were getting—especially REM, or rapid-eye-movement sleep.

With a heavy calendar and very little downtime to train, finding the balance between strength and conditioning training and tactical training is not always easy.

The good ol’ days of torturous training camps are well behind us. We are more conscious about our players’ health, and injuries during pre-season camp is certainly not what we hope for–especially not for the sake of proving a point. So after hard off-season training, is there a way we can establish a reliable and safe baseline for our athletes without risking injury?

As we enter a new season with multiple athletes and sometimes many new faces, our time is limited. Processes to create baselines must be easy to implement and fast at giving us the pertinent information we need. Establishing a program that allows for each athlete to retain current physical and cognitive capacities is very difficult. But it’s a lot easier with solid data.

A large number of very popular team sports involve the act of one team trying to score a goal against the other. During this game play, defending players constantly try to predict the next move of the attackers to prevent them from scoring, whereas attackers constantly try to predict the next move of the defenders in order to defy them and score. Such behavior is a prime example of the general human faculty to make predictions about the future and is an important facet of human intelligence. An algorithmic solution to learning a model of the external world from sensory inputs in order to make forecasts is an important unsolved problem. In this work we develop a generic framework for forecasting future events in team sports videos directly from visual inputs. We introduce water polo and basketball datasets towards this end and compare the predictions of the proposed methods against expert and non-expert humans.

As of 2016 there were more than 165,000 health and wellness apps available though the Apple App Store alone. According to Rice University medical media expert Kirsten Ostherr, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulates only a fraction of those. Americans should be concerned about how these apps collect, save and share their personal health data, she said.

How do you live healthier with data? How do you get used to sensors and wearables? I receive plenty of questions after my keynotes about digital health; how it changes my life and how it could transform society in the future. A while ago, I was on stage in Lisbon, when someone asked me whether I think the use of health sensors might limit our freedom of choice. As it generated a discussion within The Medical Futurist team too, I decided to outline my position and the counter-arguments. Needless to say, I stood for technology not curbing our freedom in any way.

Adidas has launched the first of six planned city-themed running shoe models in London as it capitalizes on its first Speedfactory, which it has opened in Germany and equipped with time-saving robotics.

… “I don’t think there’s that word that describes how excited we are about being here, how helpful it’s going to be for our players (with) the emphasis we put on player development and player growth,” Budenholzer said. “Hopefully it’s going to put our players in a better position to be the best they can be and hopefully make our team the best it can be.”

The Hawks have high hopes for the new practice facility as a comfortable workplace for current players that includes an advanced sports medicine operation in the Emory Sports Medicine Center. The Hawks also plan to use the facility as a lure for future free agents.

This step by step guide outlines how easy it is to link the data you are collecting back to team performance and injury history. In particular, the analysis of performance data of other winning teams can be key to understanding and shaping the pathway to progress your own team’s performance. By aggregating and connecting this data, expert knowledge is supported with objective insights, optimising day-to-day decision making and long term planning to help secure the best outcomes for both individual athletes and the team.

As the NBA and National Basketball Players Association work to find common ground related to whether players can use wearables during games and what the league can do with the data collected from them, an NBA tech executive is envisioning how those devices might be used further into the future.

The long-term goal is to use tracking devices to detect player motion, which when combined with optical tracking technologies the NBA has used for the past seven years, will help computers better understand the game of basketball and improve the game overall for teams, players and fans, said Steve Hellmuth, executive vice president of media operation and technology for the NBA.

… Concerning for the player’s union is teams’ willingness to “trash” players in the closed-door, confidential setting. This concern becomes increasingly important when the arbitration criteria are written broadly enough to let teams use various types of character, mental health and public appeal evidence.

It is easily reasoned that the language of “mental defect” is solely to protect the interests of organizations and their owners. “Defect” provides grounds only for a deduction in money owed to a player, not a basis for higher player salaries.

It’s a study that probably couldn’t be conducted anywhere other than this hot spot for professional combatants, where marquee fights are about as common as Celine Dion concerts.

Researchers have enrolled close to 700 mixed martial arts fighters and boxers, both active and retired, in the past six years. The ambitious goal: to learn to identify early signs of trauma-induced brain damage from subtle changes in blood chemistry, brain imaging, and performance tests — changes that may show up decades before visible symptoms such as cognitive impairment, depression, and impulsive behavior.

Among the participants is 29-year-old Gina Mazany. She has a streak of pinkish-purple hair, a tattoo of a pterodactyl with a cheeseburger in its beak, and a reputation as a formidable MMA fighter worthy of her nickname, Gina Danger. Once a year, she undergoes a battery of medical tests here at the Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health, an outpost of the Cleveland Clinic, to help suss out the toll of a career marked by concussions and blows to the head.

… At most universities, instructors are asked to sign a contract of acknowledgment when a student will be missing class for school-sanctioned athletic activities. From now on, when a football player offers me this form, I will, with the utmost respect and kindness, explain my position and decline to sign. To be fair to these young men, I will continue to excuse their absences and offer make-up exams. But I will not sign my name when asked to certify that is OK to trade educational hours for an activity that may destroy their ability to learn, think, and enjoy life.

It is, simply put, not OK. To the extent that I can articulate that fact without harming their education, I intend to do so. Of course, on my own, this can have little more than a localized, symbolic impact. As a widespread movement, however, it has the potential to stoke difficult conversations among university administrators and athletic directors.

Take Home Message: A college athlete with a specific genetic variation at IL-6R has almost 3.5 times greater risk of concussion and an athlete with a genetic variation at APOE4 had a 40% lower risk.

… It’s increasingly clear that the repeated head injuries many football players experience can cause long-term damage—but the NFL has worked hard to bury these facts.

A powerful slide from Dr. Ann McKee’s presentation summarizing her findings on CTE at the Powering Precision Health Summit. The BU Brain Bank most recently analyzed 111 brains of former NFL players, finding that all but one had signs of CTE.

The NFL spent years, beginning in the 1990s, working to control the science behind the health consequences of repeated head injuries incurred while playing football. By doing so, the company infringed on its players’ right to know and ability to make informed decisions about their health and career paths. And as the NFL failed to do its due diligence to conduct honest science on the game, players were consistently told to return to play after collisions only to be left with debilitating health issues and devastated family members.

Former NBA commissioner David Stern says he is convinced that marijuana does have medicinal qualities and should be taken off the league’s list of banned substances.

Stern sat down for an interview with former NBA player Al Harrington, who has become a medical marijuana entrepreneur and advocate.

“I’m now at the point where personally I think it probably should be removed from the banned list. You’ve persuaded me,” Stern told Harrington for a documentary on UNINTERRUPTED.

Purpose

To examine the dose–response effects of acute glutamine supplementation on markers of gastrointestinal (GI) permeability, damage and, secondary, subjective symptoms of GI discomfort in response to running in the heat.
Methods

Ten recreationally active males completed a total of four exercise trials; a placebo trial and three glutamine trials at 0.25, 0.5 and 0.9 g kg−1 of fat-free mass (FFM) consumed 2 h before exercise. Each exercise trial consisted of a 60-min treadmill run at 70% of V˙O2max

in an environmental chamber set at 30 °C. GI permeability was measured using ratio of lactulose to rhamnose (L:R) in serum. Plasma glutamine and intestinal fatty acid binding protein (I-FABP) concentrations were determined pre and post exercise. Subjective GI symptoms were assessed 45 min and 24 h post-exercise.
Results

Relative to placebo, L:R was likely lower following 0.25 g kg−1 (mean difference: − 0.023; ± 0.021) and 0.5 g kg−1 (− 0.019; ± 0.019) and very likely following 0.9 g kg− 1 (− 0.034; ± 0.024). GI symptoms were typically low and there was no effect of supplementation.
Discussion

Acute oral glutamine consumption attenuates GI permeability relative to placebo even at lower doses of 0.25 g kg−1, although larger doses may be more effective. It remains unclear if this will lead to reductions in GI symptoms. Athletes competing in the heat may, therefore, benefit from acute glutamine supplementation prior to exercise in order to maintain gastrointestinal integrity.

The impact and value of game and training data analytics and their application to the sports we love have recently come into question. Kevin Seifert of ESPN wrote an article titled “NFL coaches skeptical on benefits of chip-generated game-day data.” Earlier this year, Greg Haff, president of the National Strength & Conditioning Association, said at a conference that “because there hasn’t been overwhelming success, some of the coaches are growing skeptical of the sports scientist. … I think we’re at a crossroads.” And recently there was a Wall Street Journal article titled “The Downside of Baseball’s Data Revolution.”

All industries experience growing pains, and sports data analytics is no different. Nonetheless, they are here to stay given fans’ desire for data-driven storytelling, and the fact that the data provides insights not only into what just happened, but also into how and why it happened. Instead of Odell Beckham Jr.’s famous one-handed catch being simply described as a spectacular 43-yard touchdown, imagine the story providing insights into Beckham’s speed, his separation from the defensive back, the length and velocity of the throw, and the angle at which the catch was made. Such insights will increasingly enhance the fan experience across a multitude of platforms, improve tactical coaching applications, and allow for greater effectiveness in managing athletes’ performance.

To refute those questioning sports data analytics, the industry needs to restore confidence and generate growth through leadership focused on three initiatives: Integrity, Innovation and Insights.

The expansion Atlanta United have set attendance records on their way to the MLS Cup playoffs in their debut season. From a glistening new stadium to a pedigreed staff and the exciting product they put on the field, the club is forging a new blueprint for Major League Soccer.

… Let’s talk about that shortness. What does it mean? Now that Altuve’s in the majors. Forget about scouting biases, or how hard it was for Altuve to get noticed. That’s all behind him. He’s clearly more than proven himself. He’s amazing! How, though, is his game different from the usual one? Every so often there might be a ground ball or liner that’s just out of Altuve’s reach. So it goes. But there’s also an effect on his hitting. Two effects, I suppose, one of which is obvious, and the other one less so.

Altuve does have a small strike zone. He couldn’t not, given that strike zones are almost directly correlated to height. Altuve’s zone is relatively little, but then, it’s not that little. It’s not microscopic. Altuve has a somewhat upright stance. If the pitch-tracker strike zones are to be believed, Altuve’s zone is about 14% smaller than George Springer‘s, but it’s barely any smaller than, say, Brian McCann‘s. And if you don’t trust those zones, which are human-set? Here are two screenshots, showing Altuve and Alex Bregman.

The NBA has been reviewing the officiating of the last two minutes of close games as part of a transparency initiative. This project is an on-going effort to enhance this transparency by making the data more accessible.

Since March 2015, the NBA has reviewed 16,702 plays from 1,026 games. In those 3,082 minutes of action, the officials have missed or incorrectly called 1,638 plays, or about 9.8% of all calls reviewed. This amounts to 1.60 wrong decisions in the final minutes of each close game.

An automated system using machine learning methods, applied to a broad historical database, while avoiding survivorship bias, and for a variety of performance metrics, is developed and tested against actual historical human performance, for drafts, free agency, and trades, in the National Basketball Association (NBA). The resulting system is robust, comprehensive, realistic, and does not overfit information from the future. Backtested over 10 years in a partial equilibrium non-zero-sum setting where only one team can benefit from its recommendations, the automated general manager would have outperformed the actual historical production of every single team, by substantial margins. From draft decisions alone, the average team lost about $130 million worth of on-court productivity relative to what they could have had with the automated general manager in total over the decade; this shortfall represents a quarter of the average franchise value. Thus, the general management of sports franchises may benefit substantially from automation.

The Los Angeles Dodgers are hyper-focused on the franchise’s on-field performance as it seeks to earn a World Series title over the Houston Astros. But off the field, the Dodgers are staying busy investing in technology startups, which became an objective for the organization dating back to 2015, when it launched an accelerator with R/GA.

One of the alumni of the Dodgers accelerator is a company called FieldLevel, which is a private social network for sports recruiting that connects coaches and helps college teams find the best athletes for their programs. The FieldLevel executive team has thus far only raised friends-and-family seed capital, but that is all about to change with the Dodgers taking the lead on a round of fundraising that will probably be $2.35 million, $2.1 million of which has been committed to date.

The Dodgers will likely fill the gap to close the round unless FieldLevel finds other investors who are determined to be strong, strategic fits. FieldLevel has roughly two more months to secure the additional funding.

IN MANY WAYS, Iceland has no right to feed at the top table of world football. A nation of just 325,000 people marooned on a volcanic island in the North Atlantic, miles away from the bright lights of the Champions League, had barely left a mark on the sport until a few years ago. Fishing and agriculture had for some time provided Icelanders with a living, and with a previous unsurprising dearth of full-size natural football pitches, it was barely surprising that as recently as seven years ago the country’s national team sat outside the top 100 in FIFA’s rankings.

One European Championships quarter-final appearance and a maiden World Cup qualification later, however, and they are no longer living off crumbs. These Football Times sat down recently with Arnar Bill Gunnarsson, Technical Director of the Icelandic FA (KSÍ), just days after they had secured their passage to Russia 2018.

Some of his thoughts on his side’s historic rise were to be expected, others were a little surprising, but one thing that shone through was his pride that comes with being part of this organisation and a country of 325,000 that has held the best sides in the world to account.