Applied Sports Science newsletter – July 4, 2018

… There are many, however, who argue that Quintero’s football belongs to another era. For all the bundles of talent, the tricks and the deft close-ball control, that incredible all-seeing vision and the famed low centre of gravity, Quintero’s languid style does not fit easily into the modern game. Rivaldo and Juan Román Riquelme were both Quintero idols but such players no longer populate the elite level of the game as they have often proved too easy for opponents to nullify.
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Thus Pekerman’s gamble to field both Rodríguez and Quintero together was a bold call. Yet it was also recognition that Colombia had become too staid and increasingly dependent on Rodríguez over the last four years. Indeed, a turning point came in 2017 when Colombia toiled to a 1-0 home win over Bolivia after Rodríguez tucked home a penalty at the second attempt with just seven minutes to go. Against what was in essence a Bolivia C-team Pekerman was rightly very concerned. “We suffered out there,” he complained. “There are things we are not doing well; there are things we must change.”

… Jorgensen is undeniably a physically gifted athlete, but what sets her apart is this uncompromising, all-or-nothing, champion mindset. That bold gold medal announcement shocked the distance running world, where even the top marathoners, past Olympians, noncommittally talk about putting in the work and hoping for the best. But maybe it shouldn’t. Maybe more runners should think this way.

I visited Jorgensen’s singular universe of high expectations by phone the day after she placed seventh in the USATF National Championship 10,000 meter race. (I know—seventh! She was not happy, but not devastated, either). I expressed surprise at her qualifying time of 31:55—fourth-fastest among the 20 U.S. race entrants, 15th in the world so far in 2018, run eight months after giving birth on maybe five months of serious training. From nearly any perspective, 31:55 would be something to celebrate, but it was “not a great time” in Jorgensen’s world. But, I continued, trying to make her see the unreasonableness of her perspective. She is in her first year of focusing on running, comparing herself with the world’s best, runners like Kenyan Mary Keitany. (Who, I later confirmed, has a track 10,000 meter best of 32:18)

“Exactly,” she said. “I need to be confronted with the world standard on a daily basis. Yes, I am comparing myself with Mary Keitany. I need to surround myself with the best in the world. That’s why I’m grateful to be able to work out with Shalane Flanagan and Amy Cragg and the women at Bowerman [Track Club]. Those are the people I need to be looking to.”

The time came for Jayson Werth to leave home on June 18, and suddenly a certainty felt more like a decision. For 22 years, he had played professional baseball, always focused on the next workout, the next at-bat, the next pitch. He had been home in McLean for the past 10 days, recovering from the hamstring he pulled on a minor league diamond in Nashville, playing for Class AAA Tacoma, with the belief he would eventually be called up to the Seattle Mariners. He finally felt healthy, and he was a ballplayer, so that meant it was time to leave.

Except Werth wanted to stay. At home, he got to coach first base and watch his 16-year-old son, Jackson. He studied the Mariners’ outfield situation and saw little urgent need for a right-handed bat. He would have to relocate to Tacoma, where “it’s like playing on the rings of Saturn,” Werth said — he would text his family to say good night between batting practice and first pitch.

The hamstring strain had been minor, but he wondered if it wasn’t a sign from the baseball gods. A serious injury — Achilles’ tear, knee ligaments — could affect him for years and limit his ability to hunt and snowboard and whatever else he wanted to do.

… At PSU’s Lift for Life Challenge Saturday, we asked Galt how the rest of the summer will play out for the team. He said the Lions will have their normal summer workouts this week, but will get the July 4 holiday off.

Then they will be given a week off during what is called a “discretionary period.” This is a time when the players are only allowed to workout on their own — with no assistance from the strength staff — but for the Nittany Lions it will be a week off where they can recuperate before the home stretch leading up to camp.

… So what is the requirements to be an elite outside back? An elite center midfield? What does Christian Pulisic do in a Men’s National Team game that makes him successful?

U.S. Soccer has benchmarked averages of their normal physical outputs for each of our players on our national team, on the women’s and men’s side, and all youth national teams

And then we can benchmark the players’ position and then track to see how we can develop these attributes in a player if they don’t have them.

With the FIFA World Cup about to enter the knockout stages, there is a very real possibility that many matches will require at least 120 minutes, plus penalties, to determine which team progresses, or even wins the tournament. Matches played in the group stages adhere to the typical format of two 45 minute halves being played, and points allocated to teams who draw and win. However, in the knock-out phase, an additional 30 minute passage of play (termed extra-time) may be necessary when an outright winner is needed and scores are level at 90 minutes. Interestingly, the last three finals of FIFA World Cup competitions have required extra-time, and 50% of knockout matches at the 2014 FIFA World Cup required 120 minutes of match-play.

So what happens when players are required to undertake an additional 30 minutes of match-play?

Gary O’Reilly & Chuck Nice talk with a Neuroscientist about what goes on in your brain during pressure-filled moments

You see the flour in the pantry, so you reach for it. You see the traffic light change to green, so you step on the gas. While the link between seeing and then moving in response is simple and essential to everyday existence, neuroscientists haven’t been able to get beyond debating where the link is and how it’s made. But in a new study in Nature Communications, a team from MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory provides evidence that one crucial brain region called the posterior parietal cortex (PPC) plays an important role in converting vision into action.

“Vision in the service of action begins with the eyes, but then that information has to be transformed into motor commands,” says senior author Mriganka Sur, the Paul E. and Lilah Newton Professor of Neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. “This is the place where that planning begins.”

Sur says the study may help to explain a particular problem in some people who have suffered brain injuries or stroke, called “hemispatial neglect.” In such cases, people are not able to act upon or even perceive objects on one side of their visual field. Their eyes and bodies are fine, but the brain just doesn’t produce the notion that there is something there to trigger action. Some studies have implicated damage to the PPC in such cases.

Background

In team sports, it is imperative that the warm-up improves acute explosive performance. However, the exact strategies, methods, and consequences of different warm-up practices remain unclear. A time delay between the warm-up and match and during half-time could negate the positive metabolic effects of the warm-up.
Objectives

We conducted a systematic review to synthesize and analyze the potential effects of strategies during a warm-up (before match), post-warm-up (time between the end of warm-up and the start of a match), and re-warm-up (half-time break within a match) on explosive performance in team sports. Furthermore, we examined optimal warm-up strategies based on the included studies.
Methods

We performed a search of four databases (Web of Science, Scopus, PubMed, and ScienceDirect) for original research articles published between January 1981 and August 2017. A total of 30 articles met the inclusion criteria, and the Cochrane risk of bias tool was used to assess the risk of bias. The results of the included studies were recalculated to determine effect sizes using Cohen’s d.
Results

A warm-up comprising 8 sets of 60-m sprints (− 2.19%, d = 1.20) improved sprint performance. Additionally, 7 min of dynamic exercises after 5 min of jogging improved sprint (− 7.69%, d = 1.72), jumping (8.61%, d = 0.61), and agility performance (− 6.65%, d = 1.40). The use of small-sided games also seems to be a valid strategy, especially for jumping performance (6%, d = 0.8). These benefits resulted from the warm-up strategies combined with some passive rest (between 2 and 10 min) before the main performance. In this post-warm-up period, the use of heated garments could result in better outcomes than simple rest (− 0.89%, d = 0.39). However, if the transition was longer than 15 min, before entering the match, performing a re-warm-up with short-term explosive tasks to reactivate was the most effective approach (− 1.97%, d = − 0.86). At half-time, heated garments maintained better sprint (− 1.45%, d = 2.21) and jumping performance (3.13%, d = 1.62).
Conclusion

Applying properly structured strategies in the warm-up and avoiding a long rest in the post-warm-up improves explosive performance. Studies tend to recommend a short active warm-up strategy (10–15 min), gradually increasing intensity (~ 50–90% of maximum heart rate), and the use of heated garments soon after the warm-up to maintain muscle temperature. However, 2 min of active re-warm-up with short-term sprints and jumps should be needed for transitions longer than 15 min (~ 90% of maximum heart rate). Last, at the half-time re-warm-up, combining heated garments to maintain muscle temperature and performing an active strategy, with explosive tasks or small-sided games for 5 min before re-entering the game, resulted in better explosive performance than 15 min of resting.

Tracking objects in video is a fundamental problem in computer vision, essential to applications such as activity recognition, object interaction, or video stylization. However, teaching a machine to visually track objects is challenging partly because it requires large, labeled tracking datasets for training, which are impractical to annotate at scale.

In “Tracking Emerges by Colorizing Videos”, we introduce a convolutional network that colorizes grayscale videos, but is constrained to copy colors from a single reference frame. In doing so, the network learns to visually track objects automatically without supervision. Importantly, although the model was never trained explicitly for tracking, it can follow multiple objects, track through occlusions, and remain robust over deformations without requiring any labeled training data.

Derived from rapid advances in computer vision and machine learning, video analysis tasks have been moving from inferring the present state to predicting the future state. Vision-based action recognition and prediction from videos are such tasks, where action recognition is to infer human actions (present state) based upon complete action executions, and action prediction to predict human actions (future state) based upon incomplete action executions. These two tasks have become particularly prevalent topics recently because of their explosively emerging real-world applications, such as visual surveillance, autonomous driving vehicle, entertainment, and video retrieval, etc. Many attempts have been devoted in the last a few decades in order to build a robust and effective framework for action recognition and prediction. In this paper, we survey the complete state-of-the-art techniques in the action recognition and prediction. Existing models, popular algorithms, technical difficulties, popular action databases, evaluation protocols, and promising future directions are also provided with systematic discussions.

We propose a way to incorporate personal calibration into a deep learning model for video-based gaze estimation. Using our method, we show that by calibrating six parameters per person, accuracy can be improved by a factor of 2.2 to 2.5. The number of personal parameters, three per eye, is similar to the number predicted by geometrical models. When evaluated on the MPIIGaze dataset, our estimator performs better than person-specific estimators. To improve generalization, we predict gaze rays in 3D (origin and direction of gaze). In existing datasets, the 3D gaze is underdetermined, since all gaze targets are in the same plane as the camera. Experiments on synthetic data suggest it would be possible to learn accurate 3D gaze from only annotated gaze targets, without annotated eye positions.

… Future stars of the sport could potentially be spared such discomfort with the help of new motion-capture technology, according to bio-mechanical experts from Britain’s Coventry University.

It deploys 3D optical tracking equipment similar to that used for Hollywood movies and then applies its own algorithms to measure loads imposed on joints, bones and muscles, according to the team.

The resulting data can help improve training and, crucially, it could help players avoid injury.

… I encounter this general notion—that older and younger athletes/humans have radically different dietary requirements—quite often. Earlier this year a publisher I’ve worked with in the past asked me to write a nutrition book for endurance athletes over 50. I declined, for the simple reason that I see little need for such a book, but obviously the publisher did.

To me, the notion that older and younger athletes/humans have radically different dietary requirements is yet another example of our society’s tendency to grossly overthink nutrition and diet, sacrificing common sense and pragmatism in favor of something that seems more sciency but succeeds only in overcomplicating nutrition and diet and compelling unnecessary changes. Think about it for a moment. Throughout most of history, in every human population on earth, it wasn’t even an option for men and women to change their diet when they got older. And this remains the case in most populations today. There is only one way to eat in these environments and everyone eats that way from weaning to death. They may eat a little less as their appetite decreases, and they may even eschew one or two particular foods that no longer agree with them, but they do not effect any sort of wholesale shift from one diet to another.

… Although contracted to 2020 with the national team, a drumbeat of calls for Deschamps to go would have started had France crashed out with its luxury squad collectively valued in excess of one billion dollars.

A big reason that didn’t happen is because Deschamps has deviated from the recipe that won France the World Cup in 1998, when he was its captain. That team was more seasoned, with an average age of 28 when it lined up in the final against Brazil. Deschamps’ squad in Russia, on the other hand, is one of the youngest at the tournament and is making a compelling argument that coaches should place great faith in youth more often.

Like Alex Ferguson when he unleashed teenagers David Beckham, Ryan Giggs and Paul Scholes at Manchester United, Deschamps sees that young players can shoulder big responsibilities and that their inexperience doesn’t have to define them. Properly encouraged, they can be trusted with far more than bit-roles. That was the short-sighted predicament faced by then 19-year-old Lionel Messi at the 2006 World Cup, left on the bench when Argentina lost to Germany in the quarterfinals.