Applied Sports Science newsletter – July 13, 2018

The Manchester United players who have not been involved in the World Cup are preparing to return to Carrington this week – but the hard work has already begun for a lot of their teammates.

And while a depleted squad will be put through its paces in a series of tests and drills a, number of players have already been putting in hours of hard work over their summer break.

Luke Shaw, Eric Bailly and Andreas Pereira are just three who will be hoping to push on at United next season and stake a claim for a regular starting place.

And they have been proving their points to the United boss before pre-season even begins.

Shaw was criticised for his shape after pictures emerged of him enjoying himself on holiday in Ibiza with his friends, but hit back at the critics with a topless photo of himself looking trim in training in Dubai, where he was accompanied by United’s head of strength and conditioning Gary Walker.

… The figures of the deal made many skeptical, including myself. It felt extremely risky to give a large amount of money and a long commitment to a first baseman that had season-to-season numbers that would make your head spin.

Perhaps part of the risk seen in this was Hosmer’s lack of ability to make adjustments. In the era of home runs holding up offensive value, especially for first baseman, he has had a lot of trouble accessing that power with the gaudy ground ball rates he puts up. As a consequence, he has been a below-average hitting first baseman for his career.

The issues with Hosmer’s swing have reached an all-time high in his first season with San Diego.

… Novotna’s legacy at Wimbledon lives on not only in memories, but in a player currently ranked 200th in singles. Novotna’s last efforts in tennis were spent coaching Barbora Krejcikova, 22, who also hailed from Brno, Czech Republic, Novotna’s hometown.

Krejcikova, who won three junior Grand Slam doubles titles in 2013 alongside Katerina Siniakova, was looking for help in transitioning to the professional ranks the next year when she stumbled across an article that mentioned that Novotna lived in Omice, a village just outside Brno.

Inspired and emboldened, Krejcikova, still ranked outside the top 300, decided to go to Novotna’s house with her parents. She met the Wimbledon champion in her front yard.

There is a lot of research out there looking at soccer and basketball and the distances covered by athletes in games. Not only that, but this information is often broken down by position type and by running speeds. This is a powerful tool for the development of both metabolic conditioning programs, small sided games, scrimmages, and speed training programs.

In American football, there is a paucity of information on this and nothing recent. In the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, Sanders et al published a study doing exactly this using division I college football players.

The authors studied a division I football team. Athletes wore sensors to track their distance and speeds in games. Only those athletes who participated in at least 75% of the offensive or defensive plays were studied. The study lasted the entire season (i.e. every game was studied).

While studying this, the authors broke down player speeds into four categories (from slowest to fastest). In the results below I’m only reporting on the slowest and the fastest categories, note that there are two intermediate categories that I’m not reporting on.

In part one of our AS Roma breakdown, we explored how Director of Performance Darcy Norman and Head Performance Coach Ed Lippie adapted a structure around a core mission statement; “putting the athlete at the center of all decisions.” And how this structure allowed them to create a performance ecosystem. In part two, we’ll explore the benefits from leveraging this structure and how coaches gain more time for creativity while in the training center. “Creating systems allows you to be more creative because if you’ve got a framework that you can fall back on, it frees your mind to come up with some creative tweaks.” While routine is key, breaking out of the mundane in the training center can help both the staff and the athletes feel refreshed every time they come in.

Dr Ben Rosenblatt is the most important person on the England team you’ve never heard of.

He is the strength and conditioning coach who is helping to prepare England for the test of extra time and penalties, which so far has worked, securing them their first ever victory in a World Cup penalty shoot out and a place in the semi-final against Croatia on Wednesday night.

Dr Rosenblatt is the man behind the scenes helping the England squad to conserve their energy to last up to 120 minutes playing in high temperatures.

As the Football Association’s leading physical performance and fitness coach, he was the one that helped them fight the fatigue that saw them through the game against Colombia.

… According to Vice a team from the German Technische Universitat of Dortmund, the Technical University in Munich and the Ghent University in Belgium crunched 100,000 scenarios to predict that Germany had the best chance of winning. Goldman Sachs, never knowingly outdone, crunched 1 million scenarios to come up with a Brazil win — after a final against Germany.

Unless you followed their advice to a betting site no damage done. But not dissimilar machine learning technology is being used every day to determine things in fields that do matter to you — and will be even more so in future as AI takes off. So what might this teach us about the practical application of AI?

Emerging video analytics company Flixsense wants machines to understand sports.

A radical notion when we’re used to the idea of players sitting in small rooms and theatres sifting and scrubbing through video content to plan match ups and tactics. Flixsense, and their sports analytics arm Gameface, has set the mission of changing that. The company has developed video analysis powered by artificial intelligence which instantly recognises people, movement and objects to add big insights to tactical team sports such as football and cricket.

It is artificial intelligence that can watch match vision in real time to help coaches understand in-game situations and plan and adjust tactics accordingly.

Directa Plus plc, a producer and supplier of graphene-based products for use in consumer and industrial markets, is pleased to announce that Oakley®, in collaboration with Bioracer, a designer and manufacturer of innovative, customised clothing for cycling teams and individuals as well as for other sporting activities, have launched the G+ Graphene Aero Jersey containing the Company’s graphene-based products. Unveiled on Monday at the EUROBIKE 2018 trade show in Friedrichshafen, Germany, the new jersey is designed to leverage the unique properties of Graphene Plus (G+) to dissipate heat from the rider’s body enabling them to focus less on the conditions around them and more on performance. For more information see the IDTechEx reports on wearable technology materials and graphene

Purpose To examine knee and hip biomechanics during walking and jogging in groups of ACLR patients at early, mid, and late time frames post-surgery and healthy controls.

Methods Participants included individuals with a history of primary, unilateral ACLR, stratified into Early (1.4±0.4 years post, n=18), Mid (3.3±0.6 years post, n=20), and Late (8.5±2.8 years post, n=20) ACLR groups based on time post-surgery, and a healthy control group (n=20). Walking and jogging motion capture analysis of knee and hip kinetics and kinematics were measured in the sagittal and frontal planes. Inter-limb (within groups) and between-group comparisons were performed for all gait variables. Statistical comparisons were made across the gait cycle by plotting graphs of means and 90% confidence intervals and identifying regions of the gait cycle in which the 90% confidence intervals did not overlap.

Results Early ACLR group demonstrated reduced knee flexion, knee extension, knee adduction, and hip adduction moments on the ACLR limb. Mid ACLR group demonstrated no gait differences between limbs or other groups. Late ACLR group demonstrated reduced knee flexion moments, and greater knee and hip adduction moments in their ACLR limb. Control group demonstrated no inter-limb differences.

Conclusions Walking and jogging gait biomechanics presented differently in patients at different stages in time following ACLR surgery. The Early ACLR group demonstrated lower sagittal and frontal plane joint loading on the ACLR limb compared to contralateral and control limbs. The Mid ACLR group did not demonstrate any gait differences compared to the contralateral or control limb. The Late ACLR group demonstrated lower sagittal plane joint loading compared to control limbs and greater frontal plane joint loading compared to contralateral and control limbs.

A team of bioengineers at UC San Diego has answered a question that has long puzzled neuroscientists, and may hold a key to better understanding the complexities of neurological disorders: Why are axons, the spindly arms extending from neurons that transmit information from neuron to neuron in the brain, designed the way they are?

Axons are not designed to minimize the use of cell tissue— they wouldn’t be so long and convoluted if that were the case. Conversely, they’re not optimized for speed, as recent studies have shown that axons don’t fire as fast as they physically could, since this would overwhelm the neuron and lead to a loss of network activity.

So what is the role of the geometry of axons in information flow in the brain?

The answer—that axons are designed and optimized to balance the speed that information flows into the neuron relative to the time it takes the neuron to process that information—seems intuitive, but has never been quantified until now.

Behavioral interventions to increase disclosure and proper management of concussion in youth sports have unrealized potential when it comes to preventing concussion. Interventions have focused on changing individual athlete behavior and have fallen short of the potential for sustained systemic behavioral change. One potentially critical reason for this shortfall is that other key determinants of risk behaviors at all levels of the socio-ecological model (e.g. interpersonal, community, policy) are not addressed in extant programming. There is a critical need for theory-driven interventions that address concussion prevention and education at the community level and target sustainable culture change. The Popular Opinion Leader (POL) intervention, a multi-level intervention model previously successfully employed in multiple public health contexts, is theoretically well positioned to affect such change. POL is based on the Diffusion of Innovations framework and involves identifying, recruiting, and training well-respected and trusted individuals to personally endorse prevention and risk-reduction within their social networks. Critical behavioral changes related to concussion disclosure and management have been shown to diffuse to others if enough opinion leaders endorse and support the behaviors. This article summarizes the concepts and principles of POL and describes how it could be adapted for and implemented in youth sport settings. For optimal impact, POL needs to adapt to several factors unique to youth sports settings and culture. First, adult involvement may be important, given their direct involvement in the athlete’s medical care. However, parents and coaches’ opinions on injury care-seeking, competition, and safety may affect their perceptions of POL. Second, youth sports are structured settings both physically and socioculturally. Games and practices may provide opportunities for the informal interactions that are critical to the success of POL. However, youth sport setting membership is transient as players get older and move to other sport settings; POL approaches need to be self-sustaining despite this turnover. Moreover, stakeholder value placed on athlete development and competition, alongside safety, must be considered. Formative research is needed to ensure that POL principles are translated into the youth sport setting while maintaining fidelity to the concepts and principles that have made POL successful for other health outcomes. [full text]

… Prior to Liga MX Femenil, there was indeed women’s soccer in Mexico. “Women’s football has existed in Mexico since the 60’s,” Rodebaugh says, “but it has always developed outside of the Federation (the FMF – Mexico’s governing body for the sport) or the ‘official’ governing body.” It was a much more casual affair back then, and even coming into the current day it wasn’t what most would think of when thinking about a professional soccer team. “Some teams that trained during the week and others that did not – they just gathered and played on the weekends.”

Liga MX Femenil however has changed how the women playing look at the game. “Now it’s everybody understanding that this is becoming professional,” Rodebaugh says. “It’s a job, and it should be seen as a job by the players, by the coaching staff, by the club – it’s another team within their structure and should be treated as such, no difference – and by the league as well, having another competition.”

Saying that the Los Angeles Lakers didn’t want to fall into “the trap” of trying to beat the Golden State Warriors at their own offensively loaded game, general manager Rob Pelinka said the Lakers’ goal in free agency was to purposely build a team “very differently than the past ones” surrounding LeBron James.

In a clear departure from how the Cleveland Cavaliers surrounded James with perimeter shooters, Pelinka explained Wednesday how the Lakers — who finished 35-47 last season — deliberately added what they feel are versatile, tough players with playoff experience and the ability to defend, to play around James in an effort to find another way to combat the defending champs.

“If your goal is to win a championship, you’ve got to look at the way the champs are assembled and how you can give yourself the best chance to take them down,” Pelinka said of one of the many reasons for the construction of the Lakers’ current roster.

Facts and falsehoods coexist on the Internet with perplexing similarity. Could social media — where misinformation is too often spread — be a place to help build trust in science and the research enterprise? Debra Karhson, PhD, a Stanford postdoctoral scholar in psychiatry, thinks so.

Karhson explored a method for authenticating the social media profiles of communicators to help users identify sources of accurate scientific information. Her essay on the idea, “A verification vaccine for social contagion,” won second place in this year’s Lasker Essay Contest, presented by the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation.