Applied Sports Science newsletter – May 16, 2018

… SN: How rampant is the use of foreign substances in baseball right now?

TB: I think everyone agrees it’s pretty widespread. It’s a fairly well-known secret, if you even want to call it a secret. But the issue is we didn’t have the technology before to quantify exactly how big of an impact that can have on a game, on the pitcher’s success, on his overall repertoire, on his future monetary compensation, on whatever. Now we do. We’ve done the research, we know how much it can increase your spin rate, we know how increased spin rate can improve a player. We have free agents getting signed based on having a higher spin rate than another guy. If I can put pine tar on my hand and increase my spin rate 200 RPM and then get a job over another guy who isn’t breaking the rules, how is that fair?

It’s the same argument that was used with steroids: everyone’s doing it, there’s more home runs and more excitement, it’s good for the game and we’ll just look the other way. What about the guys that don’t want to put that in their body, who don’t want to do that? They have to to compete on a fair playing field. Now, this isn’t the same where you’re negatively affecting your health. It’s just a matter of having pine tar on your glove and making your fingers a little sticky, right? But it still creates an unfair playing field. But now we have the data to quantify how much of an unfair playing field it creates.

SN: You’ve done your own research experimenting the impact foreign substances can have on a baseball. What exactly have you done to test this and what has it shown you?

TB: So, I sat down with a chemical engineer two years ago to discuss exactly how the surface of a ball would interact with skin and how to create more friction. I mixed non-Newtonian fluids, I’ve tested slippery stuff, I’ve tested sticky stuff, all sorts of pine tar sticks, firm grip . . .

… The mood becomes more serious when talk turns to Egbo’s journey to the Borussia first team, though. On the face of it, his rise since joining Gladbach from Crystal Palace in 2015 looks fairly linear, save for a few injury problems. But as Egbo explains, it wasn’t quite as simple as it sounds.

“There were times I was dropped,” he explains when discussing his time with the club’s second team in the fourth tier of the German pyramid. “It wasn’t for any reason other than I wasn’t playing as well as I should be playing.

“I hadn’t really experienced that in the Under-21s at Palace. I started to think: ‘Hold on a second, I’ve played at this stage for Palace already. I’m coming in to my second, third and fourth years playing second-team football. When is there going to be a change?’ There’s not going to be a change if you’re not progressing as a footballer. It’s not just going to come because the amount of time. You’ve got to warrant that move up.”

Even though he enjoyed helping his family away from the pitch, the defender also found it difficult returning to his flat in Mönchengladbach.

Cornerback Tavon Young had a spectacular rookie season, but suffered a torn ACL in last year’s Organized Team Activities. Now, almost a year later, he’s itching to return to the field.

Of all the things that could have broken Scott Jurek on a 2,189-mile run, it was a small tree root that crushed his spirit. He was 38 days into an attempt to beat the speed record for completing the full length of the Appalachian Trail, the mountainous hiking path that snakes along America’s East Coast, from northern Georgia to the top of Mount Katahdin, in Maine. Jurek, one of the greatest ultramarathoners of all times, was in trouble. After battling through a succession of leg injuries, then slogging through Vermont’s wettest June in centuries, he had to make up ground over a particularly merciless stretch of the trail, New Hampshire’s White Mountains. Delirious from just two hours of sleep following 26 straight hours of hiking, he was stumbling along the trail when he encountered the root in his path.

“As I saw it coming, I didn’t know what to do,” Jurek recalls in his new memoir, North: Finding My Way While Running the Appalachian Trail, co-written with his wife, Jenny. “Was I supposed to step around it or over it? I just couldn’t remember.” So he hit it and toppled. “I’d forgotten how to raise my legs,” he writes. “How to run like a sane person.”

… Harden’s unique style of play is easy to identify on the court, but when Adidas began the process of designing the Harden Vol. 2, the company wanted to dive further into the science behind the talents that have made Harden a six-time All-Star and perennial MVP candidate.

The first step of that process came at Peak Performance Project, a sports training facility in Santa Barbara, California, known simply as P3, for short. Adidas’ product, design and marketing teams combed through a sequence of tests that Harden underwent last summer.

Initially, Harden’s results were largely underwhelming, which didn’t come as a surprise. According to the team tasked with building out his signature collection, Harden measured out in average terms by most metrics, ranking nowhere near the explosiveness of Andrew Wiggins or the speed of John Wall.

Objective The aim of the study was to evaluate the reported measurement capabilities and predictive validity of the Functional Movement Screen (FMS) for injury.

Methods This was a prospective observational longitudinal study of 24 male footballers from a single team in England, alongside analysis of an existing database over one season (September 2015–May 2016). A preseason FMS was carried out with scores recorded by an experienced assessor and derived, retrospectively, from the three-dimensional movement data that were simultaneously captured. The assessor scores were compared with the photogrammetric system to determine measurement validity, and predictive validity was quantified by assessing sensitivity and specificity (cut-off score of 14).

Results The real-time assessor score matched the photogrammetric score awarded for one of the participants, was higher than the photogrammetric system for 22 participants and was lower than the photogrammetric system in 1 participant. There was no discernible relationship between FMS scores and the competencies required to be met as per the rules articulated for the allocation of a score. A higher number of total injuries were associated with higher FMS scores, whether determined through real-time assessment or codification of kinematic variables. Additionally, neither method of score determination was able to prospectively identify players at risk of serious injury.

Conclusion The FMS does not demonstrate the properties essential to be considered as a measurement scale and has neither measurement nor predictive validity. A possible reason for these observations could be the complexity in the instructions associated with the scale. Further work on eliminating redundancies and improving the measurement properties is recommended. [full-text]

Study Design

Prospective cohort.
Background

The association between movement quality and injury is equivocal. No soccer-specific movement assessment has been prospectively investigated in relation to injury risk.
Objectives

To investigate the association between a soccer-specific movement quality assessment and injury risk among semi-professional soccer players.
Methods

Semi-professional soccer players (n=306) from 12 clubs completed the Soccer Injury Movement Screen (SIMS) during the pre-season period. Individual training/match exposure and non-contact time loss injuries were recorded prospectively for the entirety of the 2016 season. Relative risks (RR) were calculated, and presented with 90% confidence intervals (CI), for the SIMS composite and individual sub-test scores from generalized linear models with Poisson distribution offset for exposure.
Results

When considering non-contact time loss lower extremity injuries (primary level of analysis), there was a most likely trivial association with the SIMS composite score. Similarly, SIMS composite score demonstrated most likely to likely trivial associations to all injury categories included in the secondary level of analysis (non-contact time loss hip/groin, thigh, knee and ankle injuries). When considering hamstring strains and ankle sprains specifically (tertiary level of analysis) the SIMS composite score, again, demonstrated very likely trivial associations. A total of 262 non-contact time loss injuries were recorded. The overall (training and match exposure combined) incidence of non-contact time loss injury was 12/1000 hours.
Conclusion

The SIMS composite score demonstrated no association to any of the investigated categories of soccer-related injury. The SIMS composite score should not be used to group players into ‘high’ or ‘low’ risk groups.

Social networks continuously change as people create new ties and break existing ones. It is widely noted that our social embedding exerts strong influence on what information we receive, and how we form beliefs and make decisions. However, most studies overlook the dynamic nature of social networks, and its role in fostering adaptive collective intelligence. It remains unknown (1) how network structures adapt to the performances of individuals, and (2) whether this adaptation promotes the accuracy of individual and collective decisions. Here, we answer these questions through a series of behavioral experiments and simulations. Our results reveal that groups of people embedded in dynamic social networks can adapt to biased and non-stationary information environments. As a result, individual and collective accuracy is substantially improved over static networks and unconnected groups. Moreover, we show that groups in dynamic networks far outperform their best-performing member, and that even the best member’s judgment substantially benefits from group engagement. Thereby, our findings substantiate the role of dynamic social networks as adaptive mechanisms for refining individual and collective judgments.

By now, the science is well established: groups of diverse individuals make better decisions. But the workplace statistics are painfully clear: diversifying can be a slow process.

While we wait, there are other ways to engineer some of the benefits of diversity, by manipulating the structure and processes of workplace teams.

Mirta Galesic, a psychologist and professor of human social dynamics, says team structures can almost always be optimized to produce better decisions. At an event on the science of diversity organized by the Santa Fe Institute in March, she explained that while some conditions are fixed—the size of a corporate board can’t be manipulated from one meeting to the next, for example—others can be tinkered with, like how the team makes decisions or how frequently it shares information. Like the sliders on a stereo equalizer, the variables can he adjusted up and down, depending on the needs of the team, and the nature of the decisions it’s trying to make.

Introduction: Training load and other measures potentially related to match performance are routinely monitored in team-sport athletes. The aim of this research was to examine the effect of training load on such measures and on match performance during a season of professional football. Materials and Methods: Training load was measured daily as session duration times perceived exertion in 23 A-league football players. Measures of exponentially weighted cumulative training load were calculated using decay factors representing time constants of 3 to 28 days. Players performed a countermovement jump for estimation of a measure of neuromuscular recovery (ratio of flight time to contraction time, FT:CT), and provided a saliva sample for measurement of testosterone and cortisol concentrations 1 d prior to each of 34 matches. Match performance was assessed via ratings provided by five coaching and fitness staff on a 5-point Likert scale. Effects of training load on FT:CT, hormone concentrations, and match performance were modeled as quadratic predictors and expressed as changes in the outcome measure for a change in the predictor of one within-player standard deviation (1 SD) below and above the mean. Changes in each of five playing positions were assessed using standardization and magnitude-based inference. Results: The largest effects of training were generally observed in the 3- to 14-d windows. Center defenders showed a small reduction in coach rating when 14-d smoothed load increased from -1 SD to the mean (-0.31, ±0.15; mean, ±90% confidence limits), whereas strikers and wide midfielders displayed a small increase in coach rating when load increased 1 SD above the mean. The effects of training load on FT:CT were mostly unclear or trivial, but effects of training load on hormones included a large increase in cortisol (102, ±58 %) and a moderate increase in testosterone (24, ±18 %) in center defenders when 3-d smoothed training load increased 1 SD above the mean. A 1 SD increase in training load above the mean generally resulted in substantial reductions in testosterone:cortisol ratio. Conclusion: The effects of recent training on match performance and hormones in A-League football players highlight the importance of position-specific monitoring and training.

Consumer sleep technologies (CSTs) are widespread applications and devices that purport to measure and even improve sleep. Sleep clinicians may frequently encounter CST in practice and, despite lack of validation against gold standard polysomnography, familiarity with these devices has become a patient expectation. This American Academy of Sleep Medicine position statement details the disadvantages and potential benefits of CSTs and provides guidance when approaching patient-generated health data from CSTs in a clinical setting. Given the lack of validation and United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) clearance, CSTs cannot be utilized for the diagnosis and/or treatment of sleep disorders at this time. However, CSTs may be utilized to enhance the patient-clinician interaction when presented in the context of an appropriate clinical evaluation. The ubiquitous nature of CSTs may further sleep research and practice. However, future validation, access to raw data and algorithms, and FDA oversight are needed. [full-text]

Let’s say you hit the tennis court after a lay-off and leap for an overhead smash, only to feel the gunshot pain of your Achilles tendon snapping. That’s the big strap at the back of the ankle that pushes the foot down to jump, run or walk. The treatment is often surgery to bring the divided ends back together.

After it’s all sewn up, however, comes the vexed question of when to start moving and putting weight through the tendon. Too early and you risk damaging the repair, too late and you can get scar tissue that limits the range of movement.

The new sensors, made from polymers also being researched for retinal transplants and to patch dead heart muscle, promise to give doctors precise information on how much strain is put through the tendon during exercise. The idea is to gauge exactly how much activity it can tolerate and tailor rehab to suit.

The sensors measure direct pressure on the tendon, too – with sufficient sensitivity to detect a grain of salt – something that can also delay healing.

… The basic theory is to insert screws into the bone either side of the injury, across which is stretched a polymer lattice, which works like a tiny bungee cord. The damaged ligament can then grow back through the polymer.

“I was working with Celtic when John Kennedy suffered a horrific injury on his Scotland debut when Romania’s Ionel Ganea went through the back of John and severed all his knee ligaments,” remembers [Gordon] Mackay. “He was out for three years and never really recovered. He had five operations but was eventually forced to retire at 26 because the technology wasn’t there to save his career. Now it is.”

Mackay’s invention was used by German specialist Professor Karl-Heinz Frosch to rebuild European kitesurf champion Mario Rodwald’s knee after he sustained an injury even worse than Kennedy’s when he ruptured all his knee ligaments and was told he might never walk again. Instead, thanks to the Internal Brace, he was competing six months later. The technique is now widespread in the NFL, NBA and MLB, as well as among top skiers and Olympians. The Brazil football team’s medical team insist on it for all ligament injuries.

Most people will experience tiredness or fatigue at some stage during training. And, in most cases, this may be due to increases in the amount or intensity of training, stress-related or simply due to lack of sleep (although it’s always a good idea to see your GP to check for any underlying medical conditions as well). However, adequate nutrition is often overlooked as a contributing factor to fatigue. In many cases, a simple change in eating habits can increase energy levels and improve performance.

Where you live can be a big deal when it comes to sports—especially if you’re not from a recruiting hotbed or are being recruited by an out-of-state school. However, some people may be surprised to find out that where you’re from makes a big impact on your athletic development long before the college recruitment begins. ESPN’s Kids in Sports study dug deep into the numbers behind youth sports in America and there were some surprising findings that surfaced as a result—such as the statistic that 25% of high school girls from cities have never participated in organized sports. Check out some more in this article.