Applied Sports Science newsletter – March 13, 2018

… For Federer, the thrill of trailblazing, even in his mid-30s, keeps him going. Pushing limits, surprising himself and bending historic bounds of success are part of the fun.

“It’s interesting to myself,” Federer said Monday over a cappuccino (with regular milk) a few hours before a charity exhibition here that featured Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates. Two weeks had passed since Federer regained the top ranking from Nadal on Feb. 19 after winning his second title of 2018 at Rotterdam.

Federer is aware of team-sport athletes such as Tom Brady, 40, who are pushing past the expected frontiers of decline. He cited NHL standouts Jaromir Jagr, who played this season in his mid-40s, and Chris Chelios, who retired at age 48, as other prime examples.

But tennis, he noted, is an individual sport. Few men have dominated over 30.

… Do you have any advice for New Orleans Pelicans All-Star center DeMarcus Cousins, who suffered a season-ending Achilles tendon tear last month?

He has to really get through the rehab. He has to attack it hard and heavy. It’s definitely going to be tough for him. For me, I went into a real depression time when I tore my Achilles. I saw guys got paid. I thought it was my chance. Especially with my whole thing in Detroit, I was bitter. I was bitter a lot just off the fact that I felt like, ‘Dang, this is my DNA.’ I was becoming [a star] and I had to stop.

A lot of it was bitterness, but I had to grow up. Even when I got to the Knicks, I wasn’t over what was going on. That is why I had to go to China to get my head right. I had to say to myself, ‘I’m blessed. I’m still playing basketball. I’m still making millions of dollars playing.’ I had to wake up and being the bigger man with everything.

Overload and overreaching is common in swimming. During these periods, the nervous system undergoes high levels of stress. Luckily, there are top researchers looking into the influence of training on the nervous system.
This interview with PhD (c) in human performance and health research, Alexandra Coates (see her info and past research here). Alexandra is a former competitive swimmer and elite triathlete.

… It’s one of the more popular and interesting subjects revolving around the world of sports. How much sleep do athletes need? Are they getting enough rest? What happens when players are sleep deprived? Does frequent travel have a significant impact?

Studies suggest sufficient sleep leads to better performance on the court, proper healing, less injuries and even longevity.

But individuals are different. Some, like Anderson, value sleep, while others can do without it.

“A lot of teams are onto it now,” said Los Angeles Lakers coach Luke Walton. “When I was a young player, I didn’t think it was very important, and then as I got older, I realized that it’s everything. It’s when your body recovers. I think the NBA and individuals within the NBA have started to realize that, seeing the research on it now.”

… “The Norwich way is about pursuing sports as a means of developing life skills and building lasting relationships, and not just creating champions,” explains Crouse, a sportswriter for the New York Times who spent months in Norwich trying to understand what makes this town tick. “A lot of these Norwichians didn’t set out to become Olympians. The lesson is that you don’t have to choose either-or. It’s a way of teaching discipline, delayed gratification, perseverance, and risk-taking. Excellence can be a great byproduct, but it’s not the sole purpose. It should be about the journey.”

… In a paper appearing in the March 6 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Assistant Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience Dean Mobbs and his co-authors show for the first time that there are two areas of the brain involved in processing fear. The areas, which they call “fear circuits,” split up the responsibility for dealing with threats. Distant threats that allow more time for thinking and strategic behavior are handled by the cognitive-fear circuit, which consists of connections closer to the front of the brain among brain regions called the hippocampus, the posterior cingulate cortex, and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (an area of the brain responsible for assessing risk and making decisions). Immediate threats requiring a quick response (fight, flight, or freeze) are handled by the reactive-fear circuit, which consists of connections near the center of the brain between two structures known as the periaqueductal gray and the midcingulate cortex.

The research also shows a relationship between the two circuits that Mobbs likens to a seesaw. When activity in one circuit goes up, activity in the other goes down, with the immediacy of the threat determining which way the seesaw tips. That interaction helps the brain react in a way appropriate to the type of threat being faced.

Although familiar to each of us, the sensation of inhabiting a body is ineffable. Traditional senses like vision and hearing monitor the external environment, allowing humans to have shared sensory experiences. But proprioception, the sensation of body position and movement, is fundamentally personal and typically absent from conscious perception. Nonetheless, this ‘sixth sense’ remains critical to human experience, a fact that is most apparent when one considers those who have lost it. Take, for example, the case of Ian Waterman who, at the age of 19, suffered a rare autoimmune response to a flu infection that attacked the sensory neurons from his neck down. This infection deprived him of the sense of position, movement and touch in his body. With this loss of feedback came a complete inability to coordinate his movements. While he could compel his muscles to contract, he lost the ability to orchestrate these actions into purposeful behaviors, in essence leaving him immobile, unable to stand, walk, or use his body to interact with the world. Only after years of dedicated training was he able to re-learn to move his body entirely under visual control.

Engineering students at Carnegie Mellon University are spending this week trying to make ice rinks safer for the hometown hockey team and other players.

The students are being challenged by the Pittsburgh Penguins to develop solutions to improve ice rink dasher boards and glass and are developing prototypes that eventually could be submitted for review by the National Hockey League and USA Hockey, a youth hockey association.

To develop the prototypes, the students are using materials from Covestro, the German plastics maker which has its North American headquarters in Robinson.

The Penguins recently named Covestro as its official innovation partner and the challenge at CMU, dubbed “Rethink the Rink,” is the first project the partnership has undertaken.

A small, wireless patch developed by EPFL spin-off Smartcardia can measure emergency-room patients’ vital signs with the same reliability as existing systems involving cumbersome cables. After extensive testing at several hospitals, the device recently obtained the European Union’s CE marking for medical devices and will be launched on the market in the coming days.

Background The relationship between specific types of stressors (eg, teammates, coach) and acute versus overuse injuries is not well understood.

Objective To examine the roles of different types of stressors as well as the effect of motivational climate on the occurrence of acute and overuse injuries.

Methods Players in the Norwegian elite female football league (n=193 players from 12 teams) participated in baseline screening tests prior to the 2009 competitive football season. As part of the screening, we included the Life Event Survey for Collegiate Athletes and the Perceived Motivational Climate in Sport Questionnaire (Norwegian short version). Acute and overuse time-loss injuries and exposure to training and matches were recorded prospectively in the football season using weekly text messaging. Data were analysed with Bayesian logistic regression analyses.

Results Using Bayesian logistic regression analyses, we showed that perceived negative life event stress from teammates was associated with an increased risk of acute injuries (OR=1.23, 95% credibility interval (1.01 to 1.48)). There was a credible positive association between perceived negative life event stress from the coach and the risk of overuse injuries (OR=1.21, 95% credibility interval (1.01 to 1.45)).

Conclusions Players who report teammates as a source of stress have a greater risk of sustaining an acute injury, while players reporting the coach as a source of stress are at greater risk of sustaining an overuse injury. Motivational climate did not relate to increased injury occurrence. [full text]

Stem cells are increasingly making the leap from lab to clinic, and therapies that use them have the potential to transform patients’ lives with dramatic treatments and cures.

But reaping stem cells’ full benefits requires a detailed understanding of the complex relationships between the cells and their environments — whether in a lab dish or a patient’s body. That was an important takeaway message from the second annual symposium of Stanford’s Center for Definitive and Curative Medicine, which I attended last week.

Thousands of athletes showcased their abilities for the world in PyeongChang, South Korea, in pursuit of Olympic gold. But for every dazzling triple axel or stellar snowboarding run, athletes face the risk of career-ending injuries.

Athletic performance isn’t the only casualty of sports injuries. These injuries pose economic burdens on athletes and their families and can have long-lasting effects on an athlete’s quality of life. To help reduce the risk of injury, researchers at the University of Tennessee Chattanooga have developed a framework that measures an athlete’s risk of injury using Internet of Things (IoT) technology.

Published in the journal Risk Analysis, the study, “Mitigating sports injury risks using Internet of Things and analytic approaches,” outlines how injury risk screening procedures can be administered using wireless devices, such as smartphones, connected to a cloud server. This connection between phones, computers and other devices is what researchers refer to as the Internet of Things.

The sugar industry and its various offshoots, like the soda industry, have spent years trying to trick you.

Big Sugar has paid researchers to conduct misleading — if not false — studies about the health effects of added sweeteners. It has come up with a dizzying array of euphemistic names for those sweeteners. And it has managed to get sugars into a remarkable three-quarters of all packaged foods in American supermarkets.

Most of us, as a result, eat a lot of sugar. We are surrounded by it, and it’s delicious. Unfortunately, sugar also encourages overeating and causes health problems. As confusing as the research on diet can often seem, it consistently points to the harms of sugar, including obesity, diabetes and other diseases.

Virtually the only way to eat a healthy amount of sugar is to make a conscious effort. You can think of it as a political act: resisting the sugar industry’s attempts to profit off your body. Or you can simply think of it as taking care of yourself.

Purpose The aim of the present study was to examine the effect of dehydration on exercise performance independently of thirst with subjects blinded of their hydration status.

Methods Seven male cyclists (weight: 72±9 kg, body fat: 14±6%, VO2peak: 59.4±6 ml[BULLET OPERATOR]kg-1·min-1) exercised for 2 hours on a cycle ergometer at 55% VO2peak, in a hot-dry environment (35°C, 30% rh), with a nasogastric (NG) tube under euhydrated – non-thirst (EUH-NT) and dehydrated – non-thirst (DEH-NT) conditions. In both trials, thirst was matched by drinking 25 mL of water every 5-min (300 mL[BULLET OPERATOR]h-1). In the EUH-NT trial sweat losses were fully replaced by water via the NG tube (calculated from the familiarization trial). Following the 2-h of steady state, the subjects completed a 5-km cycling time trial at 4% grade.

Results Body mass loss for the EUH-NT and DEH-NT after the 2-h was -0.2±0.6 and -2.2±0.4%, while after the 5-km time trial was -0.7±0.5 and 2.9±0.4%, respectively. Thirst (35±30 vs. 42±31 mm) and stomach fullness (46±21 vs. 35±20 mm) did not differ at the end of the 2-h of steady state between EUH-NT and DEH-NT trials (P>0.05). Subjects cycled faster during the 5-km time trial in the EUH-NT trial compared to the DEH-NT trial (23.2±1.5 vs. 22.3±1.8 km·h-1, P<0.05), by producing higher power output (295±29 vs. 276±29 W, P<0.05). During the 5-km time trial, core temperature was higher in the DEH-NT trial (39.2±0.7 °C) compared to the EUH-NT trial (38.8±0.2°C; P>0.05).

Conclusion These data indicated that hypohydration decreased cycling performance and impaired thermoregulation independently of thirst, while the subjects were unaware of their hydration status.

Brian Snitker filled out his first lineup card in 1982, when he managed the Anderson (S.C.) Braves of the South Atlantic League, a group that included future major leaguers Zane Smith and Duane Ward, and dozens more currently living out middle age in relative anonymity.

Now, entering his 42nd season with the Atlanta Braves’ organization, Snitker handles All-Stars like Freddie Freeman, flies charter instead of overnight buses and marries the worldview of his modest beginnings with his fortunate present.

Yet as Snitker, 62, begins his second full season as the Braves’ manager, he knows his job is not guaranteed beyond this year, and realizes that managers like him – the organizational lifer – are increasingly rare.