Applied Sports Science newsletter – June 12, 2018

… So the sports-bar manager has known Iceland’s recently retired best-ever player for years, and the walking-tour guide kind of knows probably 22 of the 23 Iceland players through a friend, and the 24-year-old apparel shop owner has a former classmate whose brother knows well two Iceland players who just stopped in the shop, and . . .

All the closeness makes a fine slew of uncommon effects.

Get this: Hallgrimsson, the manager, shows up at a pub three hours before national home matches. He meets with fans. “He tells us the lineup,” said Sunna Gudrun Petursdottir, the woman in the Viking helmet. “He tells us [the planned] tactics. And there’s total f—— silence. No phones. And nobody has ever posted anything about anything that goes on . . . . It’s a beautiful thing and nobody would ever do anything to ruin that, however f—— drunk you are. You would never compromise it.”

IPSWICH TOWN have put Academy Manager Lee O’Neill in charge of sport science at the club, saying the department will be “on a par in terms of quality man for man” with the best Premier League clubs.

Former Shrewsbury manager Paul Hurst took charge of Town at the end of last month, heralding the dawn of what owner Marcus Evans promises will be a more “modern and innovative” culture at the club.

O’Neill started off in Ipswich’s sport science department before moving over to the Academy. His focus will now switch back, although it is unclear how that will affect his Academy job. No-one from Ipswich was available to talk to TGG about it at the end of last week.

What’s the biggest challenge you face in learning and talent development? According to LinkedIn’s Workforce Development Report 2018 the single biggest talent development challenge facing employers is “getting employees to make time for learning”.

This is no surprise to anyone working in corporate learning. But how can we make it easier for employees to make more time for learning?

We took some time out of our own busy schedules to discuss the issue. Here are some of the ideas we had. We would love to hear what is working for you.

The purpose of this study was to determine if elite football players are becoming bigger, faster, and stronger over the past decade by analyzing individual performances at the National Football League’s (NFL) Combine. This study was conducted with (N = 1,263) subjects from the 1999-2000 (99-00) NFL Combines (n = 635) and the 2015-2016 (15-16) NFL Combines (n = 628) separated by position. Data were collected for height, weight, 40-yd (36.58 m) dash, NFL 225 lb. (102.06 kg) repetitions test, vertical jump (VJ), broad jump (BJ), pro-agility shuttle, and 3-cone drill. Statistical significance between the years for all subjects participating in the NFL Combine was found for the 40-yd dash (99-00: mean ± SD = 4.85 ± 3.2; 15-16: 4.80 ± 3.5; p = 0.002) and VJ (99-00 = 32.30 ± 4.08; 15-16: 32.86 ± 4.17; p = 0.028) at the alpha p < 0.05 level. Statistical significance was also found for BJ (99-00 = 111.37 ± 8.81; 15-16: 115.03 ± 9.22; p < 0.001) and the 3-cone drill (99-00 = 7.41 ± 0.42; 15-16: 7.29 ± 4.1; p < 0.001) at the alpha p < 0.001 level. There were no statistically significant findings (p > 0.05) for weight or height found across all subjects by combine years. Results indicate that elite football players have improved their performance, when comparing results from 1999-2000 to 2015-2016. These finding may be beneficial to NFL franchises in their prospective player assessments.

… “Tabarez made the great change that Uruguay needed,” Uruguay Football Association head Wilmar Valdez said in a room of trophies obtained in the old glory days of the two-time World Cup champion.

But Tabarez was expected to resign in 2016 after he was diagnosed with Guillain-Barre syndrome, a neurological disease. Tabarez faced difficulties moving, requiring a walker and an electric wheelchair. He did not go home, though. Instead, he told his bosses there was nothing keeping him from working.

“I am not living with any pain. This neuropathy sometimes causes me problems, especially to walk. But since this is a chronic illness, sometimes I am a little better,” Tabarez said.

His health seems somewhat better in the runup to the World Cup in Russia.

The incredible story of how current world record holder Javier Sotomayor and a team of Cuban psychologists trained in mental jumps.

“Go Forth and Measure.” Words to live by in sports-tech.

The powerful convergence of sports and technology was on full display today at MIT. The Sports Innovation Lab team took a quick trip across the Charles River Tuesday afternoon to see results from the Department of Mechanical Engineering’s “Go Forth and Measure” projects. In this course, students form a hypothesis like “How low should you squat?” and “Do faster movements equal higher muscle activity?” then used advanced measurement techniques to find the answer. Many of the projects had a sport focus and demonstrate how the next frontier of human performance and engineering are being explored hand-in-hand.

Our first stop was with Andrew DeShields, who investigated “What Caused Deflategate”. As any faithful Patriot fan or foe knows, Deflategate questioned whether the ball organically changed inflation levels, or whether human intervention occurred. Andrew measured how the pressure of a football changed in relation to the temperature of the ball itself. By controlling for the temperature changes of the ball, and testing the pressure, he found a linear relationship between ball temperature and the change in pressure. In other words, weather impacts ball inflation. Interestingly, Andrew found that atmospheric pressure had an impact on ball inflation a whopping 85% of the time. The New England Patriots,who lost two draft picks and were fined $1 million dollars, might enjoy a chat with Andrew.

… For the research community [the 2020 Olympics] will provide a platform/forum through which to identify latest trends, bring concepts up-to-date, and disseminate to our end-users and the public. Whether athlete, support staff, applied practitioner or researcher, optimizing performance is a unifying aim. This diverse Research Topic seeks to enthuse and attract researchers with a common focus: the physiology of optimizing athlete performance.

Some fields may be specific to these Games. For example, the populous, sporting and research centres of Western Europe and North America are ≥8 time zones removed and ≥10 hours total travel time from Tokyo. Therefore, the science of athlete travel, sleep and recovery will be important. Similarly, these Games are scheduled for the middle of summer that is marked by high ambient heat (>30 ºC) and relative humidity (>70%), thus athlete preparation for, competition in and recovery from this thermal stress should be high on the agenda. How these, or other conditions, affect individual events (i.e. athletics, swimming, cycling or team-sports) or venues (e.g. indoors vs. outdoors, stadia vs. natural settings) are also of value. Other fields are equally important, ranging from but are not limited to: athlete monitoring and the use of wearable technology, nutrition, supplements, and ergogenic aids (pharmacological, hormonal, physiological, nutritional or physical), trends in doping, maximizing training adaptations and minimizing overtraining, illness and injury. Those researchers whose specialty concerns the multi-faceted nature of motor performance (interaction of mind and body) are equally encouraged to submit contributions, as the brain is integral to both exercise and expert performance.

All researchers in the field of exercise physiology, and whose proposal focuses on physiological and/or performance aspects, are welcome to submit a manuscript. This Research Topic encourages original research and review articles as well as methods and perspectives.

Not even the most optimistic of nutritionists thinks you’ll never touch a piece of cake again. We may assume those who teach people to eat for a living would believe in the elimination of all junk food, but the reality is that even the pros know you’ll cave sometimes. And that’s okay. You just gotta have a plan.

“Eating is a rest-of-your-life thing,” says Teresa Fung, a professor of nutrition at Simmons College. That means whatever your diet plan is, she and other nutritionists want you to be able to stick with it long-term. Unless you have god-level willpower, you’re not going to be able to resist sugar forever—and in fact, nutritionists don’t want you to. Fung explains that regardless of the diet you pick, if you go off of it once you’ve lost whatever weight you want to shed, you’ll just end up gaining it back later and losing the benefit of dieting in the first place. It’s far better for your long-term health to learn how to make better choices than it is to diet intermittently.

Here are a few tips

If you’re a fitness or health nut, chances are high that you’ve used or are using protein powder to build muscle and for recovery purposes. Protein powder has become so prevalent outside of gyms that it’s even being used to replace meals due its appeal as a generic health supplement. And why not? It’s easy to use and protein powder generally digests more easily than traditional sources of protein like meat, eggs, dairy, or fish. Much of the reason why protein powder is so popular is that it allows even the busiest people to get the appropriate amount of protein needed to function and train. Despite this proliferation in its use, few have ever asked the question as to whether protein powder can be dangerous to our health.

A recent report by ConsumerReports.com, in partnership with the Clean Label Project, discovered that many top-selling protein powders contain concerning levels of heavy metals such as arsenic, cadmium, mercury, lead, and toxins like bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical found in some plastic containers and food can liners. The Clean Label Project tested 134 products from various companies. Of the 134 tested, almost all contained the presence of a heavy metal and 55% percent of them tested positive for BPA. It goes without saying that high consumption of products containing heavy metals or BPA can have some negative health effects.

At Stanley Cup Final media day, Washington Capitals center Evgeny Kuznetsov was asked a seemingly simple question: “What is it about the playoffs that brings out the best in you?” After all, the 26-year-old blazed through the first three rounds with a league-high 24 points. His 11 goals were just one shy of that of superstar teammate Alex Ovechkin.

Kuznetsov looked at the reporter, raised an eyebrow and laughed. “Must be a rookie,” he quipped. After a pause, Kuznetsov explained: “I don’t like to talk about my personal game.”

The reporter was, in fact, an industry veteran. The lesson is one that he — and anyone who follows the NHL closely — is keenly aware of: hockey players hate talking about themselves. They abhor it so much that a common tic is replacing the pronoun “I” with “we” or “you.” (Example: When Winnipeg Jets center Mark Scheifele was asked during the Western Conference finals for the secret to his scoring surge, he responded: “You don’t really know if there’s anything specific. You just want to play your game and help the team.”)

As New York Islanders forward Anders Lee told me earlier in the season: “If anything, you hear the pronoun ‘I’ when mistakes start to happen.”

… “I think it’s going to be interesting,” Packers special teams coordinator Ron Zook said during organized team activities. “I think there’s a lot of people wondering about how it’s going to be. Thankfully, we have at least what we think it’s going to be now, the rules and so forth, (so) we’re able to work on it. You’re probably going to see, in my opinion — it’s just my opinion — but more returns.”

Zook believes the elimination of the running start for the coverage team will benefit the return team, which may or may not solve the league’s injury problem. If members of the coverage team need a split second of additional time to get downfield, Zook envisions returners being even more likely to bring the ball out in hopes of igniting their offense with better field position after a big return.

… The Economist has built a statistical model to identify what makes a country good at football. Our aim is not to predict the winner in Russia, which can be done best by looking at a team’s recent results or the calibre of its squad. Instead we want to discover the underlying sporting and economic factors that determine a country’s footballing potential—and to work out why some countries exceed expectations or improve rapidly. We take the results of all international games since 1990 and see which variables are correlated with the goal difference between teams.

We started with economics. Stefan Szymanski, an economist at the University of Michigan who has built a similar model, has shown that wealthier countries tend to be sportier. Football has plenty of rags-to-riches stars, but those who grow up in poor places face the greatest obstacles. In Senegal, coaches have to deworm and feed some players before they can train them; one official reckons only three places in the country have grass pitches. So we included GDP per head in our model.

… The post-mortem since the 2–1 defeat on Oct. 10, 2017 has been largely premised on the belief that the U.S. always ought to qualify for the World Cup, and indeed they did for every edition from 1990 until 2014. A longer review of the record suggests that the USMNT made fairly steady progress in the world game from the 1960s onward. The nadir for “Team USA” was the post-war period up to 1960. This coincided with the peak of American dominance as a superpower. It might sound odd that the world’s mightiest country was such a mouse at soccer back then, but in fact for most of these years the U.S. felt little need to measure itself against other countries. It had its own games. Prewar, an American team staffed largely with recent immigrants had played fairly often against Europeans and South Americans, but after the war the number of games slumped.

Betting odds are frequently found to outperform mathematical models in sports related forecasting tasks, however the factors contributing to betting odds are not fully traceable and in contrast to rating-based forecasts no straightforward measure of team-specific quality is deducible from the betting odds. The present study investigates the approach of combining the methods of mathematical models and the information included in betting odds. A soccer forecasting model based on the well-known ELO rating system and taking advantage of betting odds as a source of information is presented. Data from almost 15.000 soccer matches (seasons 2007/2008 until 2016/2017) are used, including both domestic matches (English Premier League, German Bundesliga, Spanish Primera Division and Italian Serie A) and international matches (UEFA Champions League, UEFA Europe League). The novel betting odds based ELO model is shown to outperform classic ELO models, thus demonstrating that betting odds prior to a match contain more relevant information than the result of the match itself. It is shown how the novel model can help to gain valuable insights into the quality of soccer teams and its development over time, thus having a practical benefit in performance analysis. Moreover, it is argued that network based approaches might help in further improving rating and forecasting methods.