Applied Sports Science newsletter – May 23, 2018

Applied Sports Science news articles, blog posts and research papers for May 23, 2018

 

Andy Robertson: ‘The problem with Real Madrid is they’re all fantastic’

The Guardian, Donald McRae from

“It’s hard not to think about it,” Andy Robertson says as he looks forward to the Champions League final after the Liverpool left-back has reflected for 45 minutes on his uplifting story from being a Celtic reject and relegated with Hull City a year ago to facing Cristiano Ronaldo and Real Madrid in Kiev this Saturday. “When you’re lying in bed you just think: ‘What if?’”

Robertson’s freckly face breaks into a helpless smile. He has fought hard to reach this point but the 24-year-old Scot allows himself to enjoy the fleeting anticipation of Liverpool possibly becoming European champions for a sixth time with Robertson as one of their new cult heroes. “That’s natural,” he says during a break at Liverpool’s training camp in Marbella. “Real Madrid have been to three finals in the last four years so they’ll do the same.”

 

Contract, workout regimen factors in Patriots’ Rob Gronkowski absence

ESPN NFL, Mike Reiss from

Taking control of his workouts. Gronkowski’s body has taken a beating in his NFL career, with several significant injuries. As a reminder, last year at this time, many were wondering how he would respond after his third back surgery. When Gronkowski announced last month that he would be returning to the Patriots in 2018, he said on “Uninterrupted” that a big part of his approach was to “see where your body is at” after a long run to the Super Bowl. “You feel it, playing the game,” he pointed out before explaining that the months following the Super Bowl helped him explore different types of treatments while also working out. Gronkowski added, “It’s the best I’ve ever felt right now.” He noted that he feels “super, super pliable,” which he called a “difference-maker.” So a significant part of his offseason approach has been his wanting to dictate his workout approach.

 

NBAGL athlete Raphiael Putney remains upbeat despite year-round basketball grind

SB Nation, Ridiculous Upside blog, Keith Schlosser from

Filled with promise and athleticism, Raphiael Putney’s basketball career has turned into a year-round grind but he wouldn’t have it any other way.

 

Nabbout reveals van Marwijk’s influence on Caltex Socceroos

Caltex Socceroos from

… It’s not just the training intensity that has impressed the players, but the attention to detail that Dutchman is imposing on the squad in every session.

“Those little details: turning very quickly, looking over your shoulder, all that sort of stuff, as a pro footballer you tend to forget the smaller things sometimes concentrating on the big picture,” said Nabbout after a day of double sessions in Antalya as well as suit fittings for the squad.

“When they emphasise the small details it kind of makes the big difference much, much easier.”

 

Where Humans Meet Machines: Intuition, Expertise and Learning

Medium, MIT IDE from

Professor Daniel Kahneman was awarded a Nobel Prize for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making, as well as behavioral economics. In this age of human/machine collaboration and shared learning, IDE Director, Erik Brynjolfsson, asked Kahneman about the perils, as well as the potential, of machine-based decision-making. The conversation took place at a recent conference, The Future of Work: Capital Markets, Digital Assets, and the Disruption of Labor, in New York City. Some key highlights follow.

 

The Right Moves – New study sheds light on brain’s ability to orchestrate movement

Harvard Medical School, News from

To carry out any action, whether playing the piano or dancing the jitterbug, the brain must select and string together a series of small, discrete movements into a precise, continuous sequence.

How exactly the brain achieves this remarkable feat has been a mystery, but a new study in mice, led by scientists from Harvard Medical school, brings much needed insight into this process.

 

NHL preparing puck-tracking technology to further develop live data

Sporting News, John Arlia from

… The league is working to develop a smart puck, which will track movement on the ice roughly 200 times per second, according to a report by SportTechie. The technology, alongside a camera-based player-tracking system that NHL commissioner Gary Bettman said in December the league was committed to developing (with the help of technology companies), will revolutionize the way the sport is quantified.

In simple terms, hockey may soon have a statistical equivalent to baseball’s exit velocity or basketball’s player usage rate.

 

WTA in Masimo deal for athlete health monitoring technology

SportsPro Media, Elena Holmes from

The Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) has announced a partnership with US firm Masimo, which manufacturers patient monitoring technologies.

Under the terms of the deal, the WTA sport sciences and medicine team will use Masimo’s ‘MightySat’ system at sanctioned tournaments.

The MightySat technology involves a fingertip pulse oximeter designed for general wellness and health to provide non-invasive patient measurements – such as oxygen saturation and pulse rate – and displays these in real time. Users are also able to track their data through an app.

“We’re fortunate to have this new technology in the training room and on the court at the WTA. This equipment will aid us in assessing player health and allow them to better service the immediate needs of our athletes,” said Kathleen Stroia, senior vice president of the WTA sports sciences and medicine team.

 

[1805.07780] Unsupervised Video Object Segmentation for Deep Reinforcement Learning

arXiv, Computer Science > Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition; Vik Goel, Jameson Weng, Pascal Poupart from

We present a new technique for deep reinforcement learning that automatically detects moving objects and uses the relevant information for action selection. The detection of moving objects is done in an unsupervised way by exploiting structure from motion. Instead of directly learning a policy from raw images, the agent first learns to detect and segment moving objects by exploiting flow information in video sequences. The learned representation is then used to focus the policy of the agent on the moving objects. Over time, the agent identifies which objects are critical for decision making and gradually builds a policy based on relevant moving objects. This approach, which we call Motion-Oriented REinforcement Learning (MOREL), is demonstrated on a suite of Atari games where the ability to detect moving objects reduces the amount of interaction needed with the environment to obtain a good policy. Furthermore, the resulting policy is more interpretable than policies that directly map images to actions or values with a black box neural network. We can gain insight into the policy by inspecting the segmentation and motion of each object detected by the agent. This allows practitioners to confirm whether a policy is making decisions based on sensible information.

 

Epidemiology of Hip and Groin Injuries in Collegiate Athletes in the United States

Orthopaedic Journal of Sports Medicine from

Background:

Hip and groin pain is a common complaint among athletes. Few studies have examined the epidemiology of hip and groin injuries in collegiate athletes across multiple sports.
Purpose:

To describe the rates, mechanisms, sex-based differences, and severity of hip/groin injuries across 25 collegiate sports.
Study Design:

Descriptive epidemiology study.
Methods:

Data from the 2009-2010 through 2013-2014 academic years were obtained from the National Collegiate Athletic Association Injury Surveillance Program (NCAA ISP). The rate of hip/groin injuries, mechanism of injury, time lost from competition, and need for surgery were calculated. Differences between sex-comparable sports were quantified using rate ratios (RRs) and injury proportion ratios (IPRs).
Results:

In total, 1984 hip/groin injuries were reported, giving an overall injury rate of 53.06 per 100,000 athlete-exposures (AEs). An adductor/groin tear was the most common injury, comprising 24.5% of all injuries. The sports with the highest rates of injuries per 100,000 AEs were men’s soccer (110.84), men’s ice hockey (104.90), and women’s ice hockey (76.88). In sex-comparable sports, men had a higher rate of injuries per 100,000 AEs compared with women (59.53 vs 42.27, respectively; RR, 1.41 [95% CI, 1.28-1.55]). The most common injury mechanisms were noncontact (48.4% of all injuries) and overuse/gradual (20.4%). In sex-comparable sports, men had a greater proportion of injuries due to player contact than women (17.0% vs 3.6%, respectively; IPR, 4.80 [95% CI, 3.10-7.42]), while women had a greater proportion of injuries due to overuse/gradual than men (29.1% vs 16.7%, respectively; IPR, 1.74 [95% CI, 1.46-2.06]). Overall, 39.3% of hip/groin injuries resulted in time lost from competition. Only 1.3% of injuries required surgery.
Conclusion:

Hip/groin injuries are most common in sports that involve kicking or skating and sudden changes in direction and speed. Most hip/groin injuries in collegiate athletes are noncontact and do not result in time lost from competition, and few require surgery. This information can help guide treatment and prevention measures to limit such injuries in male and female collegiate athletes.

 

The brutality of football for the physios

The Football Pink, Gavin Blackwell from

… Last May – during the Football Medical Association Conference dinner – we were informed that 12 people in the game had already lost their jobs. I can recall at breakfast the following morning asking Alan Smith, former England and Sheffield Wednesday sponge man, who those people were. He informed me his own son was one of three medical staff shown the door by the manager at Hillsborough.

During my 30 years in football I have often spent some of the close season either on a course or at a conference and news of medical staff dismissals is never far from the topic of conversation.

For Dave Butler, Roy Bailey (twice) and Ian Liversedge (four times) that experience remains raw. In 1991 Bailey was dismissed by then Manchester City manager Peter Reid having spent 20 years looking after the needs of the club’s injured players. It was one of the worst days of his life, shattering both him and his family. Reflecting on that day, Roy said; “No one will ever understand how hurt I was. It’s a feeling that I’ll never forget.” Roy’s departure from the club left him a void, and it took him a while to get over.

 

Gut Microbiota, Probiotics, and Sport: From Clinical Evidence to Agonistic Performance. – PubMed – NCBI

Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology from

Human beings harbor clusters of bacteria in different parts of the body, such as the surface or the deep layers of the skin, the mouth, the lungs, the intestine, the vagina, and all the surfaces exposed to the outer world. The majority of microbes resides in the gut, have a weighty influence on human physiology and nutrition and are vital for human life. There is growing evidence showing that the gut microbiota plays important roles in the maturation of the immune system and the protection against some infectious agents. In addition, there are several well-known effects of exercise on gut physiology. Exercise volume and intensity have been shown to exert an influence on gastrointestinal health status. An estimated 20% to 60% of athletes suffer from stress caused by excessive exercise and inadequate recovery. Supplementing the diet with prebiotics and/or probiotics able to improve the metabolic, immune, and barrier function can be a therapy for athletes. A recent study showed the effects of coadministration of 2 probiotic strains (Bifidobacterium breve BR03 and Streptococcus thermophilus FP4) on measures of skeletal muscle performance, damage, tension, and inflammation following a bout of strenuous exercise. Probiotic supplementation likely enhanced isometric average peak torque production from 24 to 72 hours into the recovery period following exercise. The active formulation also moderately increased resting arm angle at 24 and 48 hours following exercise. In conclusion, selected beneficial bacteria could positively affect athletes undergoing periods of intense training and may assist in the performance recovery.

 

Creatine: Not Just for Muscle

SimpliFaster Blog, Craig Pickering from

In this article, I’ll give an overview of the research underpinning creatine’s use as a training aid, but also focus on some of the more novel findings regarding creatine. This includes its use as an agent to prevent disuse atrophy in injured athletes, as a cognitive enhancer, and as a potentially important agent in the recovery from concussion. Given these important new findings, we can no longer just consider creatine from the perspective of muscle, but instead view it as a supplement that can optimize performance across a number of different realms.

 

What If The NFL Were Regulated By OSHA?

Deadspin, Nicole Wetsman from

Last month, 253 men got new jobs. The process was highly publicized, and employers announced new hires to an audience of millions on live television. It’s likely that no one in the Cowboys’ stadium, where the 2018 NFL Draft took place, was thinking about them that way, though. Instead, they called them rookies, draftees, team members.

But in the eyes of the law and regulatory systems, professional football players are, in fact, employees of the NFL. That means that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), which is responsible for overseeing and intervening in health risks to employees, could technically step in and issue rules and regulations to reduce the potential harm caused by the work they do—which, in this case, is play football.

“The NFL is many things,” says Glenn Cohen, a professor of health law and bioethics at Harvard Law School. “It’s also a workplace, and it ought to be regulated the way other workplaces are.”

 

Wharton People Analytics Conference 2018: Howie Roseman with Cade Massey

University of Pennsylvania, Wharton, People Analytics from

Howie Roseman is not only the architect of the Super Bowl LII champion Philadelphia Eagles, but also is a pioneer in the use of analytics in the NFL. In this conversion from the 2018 Wharton People Analytics Conference between Howie and Cade Massey, Practice Professor in the Wharton School’s Operations, Information and Decisions Department, the two discuss what it takes to build a winning organization.

 

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