Applied Sports Science newsletter – November 7, 2017

… “Good job” was all Schumacher, 47, said as he embraced Flanagan, doling out a few well-earned pats on the back before taking a step to size up Flanagan for himself, as if to confirm that the gold medal around her neck and laurel wreath atop her head were genuine.

He had more to say in a rare interview a few minutes later.

“As [assistant coach] Pascal [Dobert] and I were talking as we were watching the race, I said, I tell you what, if Shalane starts to smell the finish line…” Schumacher said. “It reminds me a lot of a lot of the athletes we’ve worked with and the good athletes we’ve worked with, but in particular Chris Solinsky. When Chris and Shalane, there’s something about those two, when they smell that finish line, there’s a well that’s so deep that they can dig into. Some people say they can go to a really dark place. I don’t know what it is. It’s a deep well, that’s what I would describe it as. And when she started to smell that she could do it and something special was going to happen, I could just feel that she wasn’t going to be denied. And I saw that same thing with Chris Solinsky in a lot of races. To see that come out again — because I haven’t got to see that in a while — and to see that come out in her, that was really fun.”

The simple thought crossed Shalane Flanagan’s mind as she raced alone through Central Park: Just keep it together, keep it together.

She would not dare look over her shoulder. Her gaze remained ahead, on the prize that had eluded an American female marathon runner like herself since 1977.

Flanagan, 36, had a vague sense of the history. She felt a more personal stake in this New York City Marathon taking place just days after a terror attack in Lower Manhattan. It reminded her of the inspiring performance by her friend, Meb Keflezighi, the American male winner of the first Boston Marathon after the bombing in 2013 (he was in this race, too, in what he said would be his last marathon.)

That is partly why, as the finish line neared, Flanagan, with tears in her eyes, began pointing and shouting (with maybe a few colorful words thrown in).

… The team will play on consecutive days 14 times this season, but this weekend’s back-to-back games — the team’s first of the season — are the only ones that were both scheduled as matinees. Clippers coach Doc Rivers is thankful for that because he says afternoon starts are difficult for players who have been accustomed to playing at night since high school.

“We’re creatures of habit. And you have the whole day to kind of get your habits down,” he said. “When you throw that afternoon game in, all your habits are gone. You wake up in the morning, you’re at the game.”

… Ronaldo’s general play is not a significant cause for concern. He contributes reasonably well in open play and takes up intelligent positions in the penalty area. Yet the incisive edge that previously defined his game has now deserted him. Seven shots against Las Palmas took his total for the season to one goal from 48 shots. To contextualise that figure, Lionel Messi has scored 12 goals from 69 shots. The habitual tendency to compare the two players serves only to demonstrate that at the moment, there is no comparison to be made.

It is possible that we are simply bearing witness to Ronaldo’s inevitable, gradual decline. Real Madrid operate in the upper echelons of elite sport, where the margins are almost incomprehensibly fine. Perhaps, at the age of 32, Ronaldo has reached the brow of the hill and is descending on the other side. This current season is his 16th as a professional footballer, and his admirable professionalism and dedication will only preserve his status at the top of the game for a finite period of time.

If you’re an NFL fan with a pulse, your heart sank a bit on Thursday as you read about Deshaun Watson going down for the remainder of the season with a torn ACL. Every injury is bad, of course, but Watson may very well have been the most pleasant surprise of an often-dour 2017 season. As an exciting young player playing in a city that has been on a roller coaster through tragedy to the joy of Wednesday night’s World Series victory, there might be no player in the league that neutral fans would have wanted to see stay healthy more than Clemson’s national champion quarterback.

Watson’s injury raises all kinds of questions. Let’s try to answer a few of them here.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the utility of 10 Hz global positioning system (GPS) technology to determine peak speed (PS) during both field-testing assessments and tracking during football matches.

Materials and Methods: Twenty-three semi-professional football players wore GPS devices during 14 preseason (non-competitive; n = 6) and in-season (competitive; n = 8) fixtures (GPSMatch), and also during 40-m maximal sprint assessments (GPSSprint) measured concurrently via timing gates at 10-m intervals.

Results: A large agreement (r = 0.84; 90% confidence interval [CI]: 0.70–0.92) and trivial bias (−0.30 km ∙ h−1; 90% CI: −0.61 to 0.01 km ∙ h−1) were observed for PS determined via GPSSprint versus timing gates in sprint testing. Absolute PS was faster in matches (31.4 ± 1.5 km ∙ h−1) versus timing gate (+0.80; 90% CI: 0.13–1.47 km ∙ h−1; likely small effect) and GPSSprint (+1.14; 90% CI: 0.47–1.81 km ∙ h−1; likely moderate effect), irrespective of positional role and stage of the season.

Conclusions: These data question the relevance of sprint testing in football and suggest that PS can be determined from GPS tracking data collected over a series of matches.

Background

Understanding soccer players’ match-related fatigue and recovery profiles likely helps with developing conditioning programs that increase team performance and reduce injuries and illnesses. In order to improve match recovery (the return-to-play process and ergogenic interventions) it is also pivotal to determine if match simulation protocols and actual match-play lead to similar responses.
Objectives

(1) To thoroughly describe the development of fatigue during actual soccer match play and its recovery time course in terms of physiological, neuromuscular, technical, biochemical and perceptual responses, and (2) to determine similarities of recovery responses between actual competition (11 vs. 11) and match simulations.
Methods

A first screening phase consisted of a systematic search on PubMed (MEDLINE) and SportDiscus databases until March 2016. Inclusion criteria were: longitudinal study with soccer players; match or validated protocol; duration > 45 min; and published in English.
Results

A total of 77 eligible studies (n = 1105) were used to compute 1196 effect sizes (ES). Half-time assessments revealed small to large alterations in immunological parameters (e.g. leukocytes, ES = 1.9), a moderate decrement in insulin concentration (ES = − 0.9) and a small to moderate impairment in lower-limb muscle function (ES = − 0.5 to − 0.7) and physical performance measures (e.g. linear sprint, ES = − 0.3 to − 1.0). All the systematically analyzed fatigue-related markers were substantially altered at post-match. Hamstrings force production capacity (ES = − 0.7), physical performance (2–4%, ES = 0.3−0.5), creatine kinase (CK, ES = 0.4), well-being (ES = 0.2−0.4) and delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS, ES = 0.6–1.3) remained substantially impaired at G + 72 h. Compared to simulation protocols, 11 vs. 11 match format (CK, ES = 1.8) induced a greater magnitude of change in muscle damage (i.e. CK, ES = 1.8 vs. 0.7), inflammatory (IL-6, ES = 2.6 vs. 1.1) and immunological markers and DOMS (ES = 1.5 vs. 0.7) than simulation protocols at post-assessments. Neuromuscular performances at post-match did not differ between protocols.
Conclusion

While some parameters are fully recovered (e.g. hormonal and technical), our systematic review shows that a period of 72 h post-match play is not long enough to completely restore homeostatic balance (e.g. muscle damage, physical and well-being status). The extent of the recovery period post-soccer game cannot consist of a ‘one size fits all approach’. Additionally, the ‘real match’ (11 vs. 11 format) likely induces greater magnitudes of perceptual (DOMS) and biochemical alterations (e.g. muscle damage), while neuromuscular alterations were essentially similar. Overall, coaches must adjust the structure and content of the training sessions during the 72-h post-match intervention to effectively manage the training load within this time-frame.

Many Husker fans saw the expansion of Memorial Stadium’s East Stadium as an opportunity to enhance its capacity and move up the ladder of college football’s intimidating backyards. Others saw it as a hidden treasure buried under the genuine vision Tom Osborne set forth many years ago.

Slowly but surely, his vision came to be the 23,000 square-foot Nebraska Athletic Performance Lab on the second and third floors of East Stadium that is slowly gaining world recognition.

Osborne was responsible for establishing Nebraska’s original strength and conditioning program as well as the Training Table, the first in the country. His inspiration for the program came from football players who went to work on the family farm all summer and came to fall camp in peak condition.

… The risk of developing overuse injuries may be magnified during running in a fatigued state. Changes in running kinematics with fatigue may be more prominent in novice runners, since they lack the training status and technical skills to maintain their non-fatigued kinematics towards the end of an exhaustive run.

Most studies on kinematic changes with running fatigue focused on recreational runners or runners with a particular overuse injury, while studies including well trained, competitive runners are less common. Competitive long-distance runners may be more resistant to changes with fatigue compared with novice runners due to their better training status.

The purpose of this study was to identify changes in the peak joint angles during stance as well as the kinematic waveforms of a whole stride cycle after an exhaustive run in novice as well as competitive long-distance runners. The second aim was to determine whether novice runners and competitive runners respond differently to an exhaustive run.

… I’ve never made the connection before, but professional sport suffers from its own “revision notes” syndrome. There is an over-reliance on repetition, reductiveness and the elimination of risk; and under­investment in surprising and demanding practices designed to make real matches feel easier.

Edge, a perceptive new book by the football writer Ben Lyttleton, explores this theme. It describes how Thomas Tuchel, the pioneering 44-year-old German coach who enjoyed success at Mainz and then Borussia Dortmund in the Bundesliga, trains defenders to improve marking and tracking at corner kicks. Tuchel found that during practice, defenders were falling back on what was tried and tested: grabbing the attackers’ shirts. Cheating, basically. In real matches, players are likely to cheat as far as the referee allows them to. But surely there was a better way to improve than just honing cheating?

… Whether or not the crowd is wise or foolish depends on the type of information individuals have, and is very sensitive to the network structure on which they interact. Unlike in Galton’s experiment, guesses can spread. A few loud, wrong individuals can be amplified and dominate the decision-making process.

Will our social networks lead to collective wisdom? It’s a question that’s about as important as it is difficult to answer. Globally, the consequence of structures that promote poor decisions is difficult to overstate. We may fail to fix global warming, we may start a nuclear war, or we may damage our world in other ways that make it uninhabitable. At the same time, our understanding of how network structure impacts collective decision-making is largely limited to theory or small-scale experiments.

Overhead throwing athletes are at high risk of the elbow ulnar collateral ligament (UCL) injury, and there is a need for clinical tools to objectively diagnose severity of injury and monitor recovery. The objectives of this study are to evaluate the reliability of shear wave ultrasound elastography (SWE) for quantifying UCL shear modulus in 16 healthy non-throwing individuals, and use this technique to evaluate the difference in UCL shear modulus between the injured and uninjured elbows in a baseball pitcher with UCL tear. In the reliability test, the UCL shear modulus of both elbows of each participant was evaluated by SWE for five trials. The same procedures were repeated on two different days. The intra-day and day-to-day reliabilities were determined by the five measurements on the first day and two averages on the two days, respectively. In the case study, each elbow of the baseball pitcher with UCL tear was tested for five trials, and the average was calculated. The intra-day (ICC = 0.715, Cronbach’s alpha = 0.926) and day-to-day (ICC = 0.948, Cronbach’s alpha = 0.955) reliabilities were found to be good. There was no difference between both arms. In the case study, the UCL shear modulus of the injured elbow (186.45 kPa) was much lower than that of the uninjured elbow (879.59 kPa). This study shows that SWE could be a reliable tool for quantifying the mechanical properties and health status of the UCL.

A flexible detector for terahertz frequencies has been developed by Chalmers researchers using graphene transistors on plastic substrates. It is the first of its kind, and can extend the use of terahertz technology to applications that will require flexible electronics, such as wireless sensor networks and wearable technology. The results are published in the scientific journal Applied Physics Letters.

Terahertz radiation has a wide range of uses and can occur in everything from radio astronomy to medicine. The term refers to the electromagnetic waves whose frequencies range from 100 gigahertz to 10 terahertz. Demand for higher bandwidth in wireless communications and depiction for security applications has led to intensified research on systems and components intended for terahertz frequencies.


One challenge has long been to enable low weight and cheap applications. However, advances in polymer technology have promoted the development of flexible electronics and enabled the production of high frequency units on flexible substrates.

Each day countless devices—from monitors in hospitals to diagnostic tests to Fitbits—capture huge amounts of health data. That data could change how patients and doctors interact, how diseases are diagnosed and treated, and the amount of control individuals have over their health outcomes.

But there’s a catch, says Wendy Nilsen, PhD, program director of the Smart and Connected Health Initiative at the National Science Foundation.

The data is plentiful, Nilsen acknowledged. The challenge, she said, is how to make that data easier to use, how to standardize it so it can be analyzed, how to scale it, keep it safe, and how to account for external factors such as the environment or a person’s genome.

Tom Brady says the secret to his success includes avoiding mushrooms, tomatoes and eggplants. The New England Patriots quarterback also limits dairy, gluten, white sugar, white flour, processed sweets, condiments, alcohol and salt.

Instead, Brady eats mostly fresh, local and organic fruit and vegetables, according to his new book, The TB12 Method: How to Achieve a Lifetime of Sustained Peak Performance. His staples also include wild fish and free-range, hormone-free meat, along with whole grains, nuts and products from his line of snacks and protein bars.

A major motivator for his choices about food as well as about exercise, hydration, sleepwear and mental training, he writes — in sweeping statements without references or citations — is to fight inflammation and help his body absorb nutrients.