Applied Sports Science newsletter – July 27, 2018

The love was gone. For so many reasons, be it injury or starting to lose his dominant place in the midfield, Kellyn Acosta no longer enjoyed soccer in Dallas, the place he’s played the game almost his entire life. Once seen as a rare American prospect with obvious potential to play professionally in Europe, Acosta’s meteoric rise in the sport and the U.S. Men’s National Team has since leveled.

But Acosta, 22, thinks he can find that love again in Denver, and team captain Tim Howard believes the Rapids’ newly acquired midfielder can not only help transform Colorado back into an MLS Cup contender, but also put himself in position to sign an international contract.

“He could go to Europe tomorrow. He has that type of talent,” Howard, the Rapids’ goalie, said of Acosta. “The things we’d like him to do – and he will – is be focused and dialed in. Be part of our group, be part of winning, and then let the executives take care of the rest.

Vancouver Whitecaps star Alphonso Davies chatted with the media on Thursday about his transfer move to Bayern Munich, and what it means for his parents, who came to Canada as refugees.

“My family went through a lot coming to Canada. I’m just really happy I can do this for them and that they’re proud of me,” Davies said.

“Life comes with challenges and I’m ready to take on this one.”

… Sauerbrunn was drawn to a particular phrase, a two-word expression that she knew the Americans latched onto after winning the 1999 World Cup.

Wholesome discontent.

It was a rallying cry for a U.S. women’s team that had already reached the pinnacle of its sport — an Olympics gold medal, a World Cup championship — yet wanted more.

“Wholesome discontent was the one that really stuck with me because for a team that at that point had won World Cups, Olympics and was easily the best team in the world, for them to not be happy with where they were and to keep wanting to get better, to me that really resonated,” Sauerbrunn said.

Nearly two decades later, Sauerbrunn has put it into practice.

Performance in endurance sports relies on athletes’ drive, which is the sum of all factors pushing athletes to exert effort during exercise. Mental fatigue can influence endurance performance by decreasing athletes’ drive to exercise. From a psychological point of view, mental fatigue has two separate components: it can affect drive by increasing the perceived effort necessary for a given task (“I cannot do this, I am too exhausted”), or by decreasing the perceived value of the reward that can be obtained (“I do not want to do this, it is not worth it”). Neurophysiological theories confirm this dual nature of mental fatigue. Mental fatigue can activate the inhibition centers of the brain, increasing perceived effort for a task, hence decreasing drive and willingness to act. On the other hand, it may also deactivate facilitative brain centers (normally responsible for motivated behaviour and increased drive towards a reward), also resulting in decreased drive.

In this Perspective we will adopt a multidimensional approach, describing how mental fatigue interacts with drive and performance in endurance exercise. We will study the interaction between mental fatigue and other factors impacting on drive, such as perceived exertion and motivation, and examine how these factors combined result in athletes’ exercise behaviour (such as pacing) and performance. This will provide researchers, coaches and athletes with useful tools in order to understand, influence and enhance athletes’ drive in exercise, which is of high relevance in elite endurance sports, where mental fatigue, motivation and stakes are of Olympic level.

… “We looked at everything,” [Bubba] Cunningham said. “Whether it happened at practice, whether it happened in games, whether it happened on grass, on turf, how fatigued somebody was, what their lifting habits were, what their eating habits were, sleeping habits.

“Whether their GPS readings, from how hard they’re exerting themselves in practice and games. And all of those factor into fatigue and whether or not you’ve been previously injured, to determine how likely it is that you can be injured in the future.”

Cunningham said the team is taking all that data and working with the exercise and sports science department at the school, the trainers, and strength and conditioning coaches to decide how to best prevent injuries heading into this season.

When the Cal State Fullerton baseball team was floundering midway through the 2004 season, on a pace to become the first losing team in the program’s history, an unusual team meeting was called. The players were brought before a kindly gentleman with weary eyes, a warm smile and a Wilford Brimley mustache.

The man was Ken Ravizza, a kinesiology professor at the university. He got right to the point: Forget the last game, forget the last play and forget the excuses.

To help drive home the point, Ravizza left the players with a miniature toilet small enough to fit in the pocket of a baseball glove. It became a fixture in the dugout, a metaphorical cue to flush away a bad at-bat, a poor pitch or a fielding mistake.

“We all thought it was pretty funny — it’s a toy,” said Kurt Suzuki, that team’s captain, who is now a veteran catcher with the Atlanta Braves. “But as we bought into it, it really helped.”

Vice President at Adidas Global IT, Markus Rautert, and Senior Director for Platform Engineering at Adidas, Fernando Cornago, touch upon their recently created platform at The DevOps Enterprise Summit 2018.

Rautert leads the platform engineering and architecture practice, which is dedicated to the design, creation, and operation of next-generation architecture, technology services and best practices that can be used by different product and project teams to create solutions faster and with a higher quality.

Carnago is in charge of the recently created platform engineering practice at Adidas, where he designs, builds and runs the company’s platforms and technologies to be used by the agile product teams, in both collaboration and co-creation with them.

Their work for the German outlet is not just about the speed of delivery but, instead, about opening innovation translates. Through sport, they believe they have “the power to change lives”, which is rooted in the heritage of the company itself, as well as its products.

Move over pace and heart rate, there’s a new running metric in town. Power has long been used by cyclists to help produce consistent performance and now companies such as Stryd, RunVi and Garmin want to kick off a Running Power Revolution too. But is power better than running on pace or heart rate?

I armed myself with a Stryd running sensor and went along to the Dixons Carphone Race to the Stones to see what lessons I could learn while powering my way through a 100km multi-stage ultra.

Bluetooth has a serious security vulnerability:

In some implementations, the elliptic curve parameters are not all validated by the cryptographic algorithm implementation, which may allow a remote attacker within wireless range to inject an invalid public key to determine the session key with high probability. Such an attacker can then passively intercept and decrypt all device messages, and/or forge and inject malicious messages.

… This is serious. Update your software now, and try not to think about all of the Bluetooth applications that can’t be updated.

Device manufacturers are taking steps to create medical devices that are smaller, lighter, and less invasive. Whether they’re adhering device components together or sticking a device to skin, adhesives are uniquely bonded to a device’s success.

Moving to ultra-low (<100 nL) sample volumes presents numerous challenges, many of which can be resolved by implementation of open nanofluidic films. These nanofluidic films are fabricated using a hexagonal network of gold-coated open microchannels which capture all of the following innovative advantages: (1) sample volumes of <100 nL cm-2; (2) zero analyte exchange and loss with the film materials; (3) rapid and omni-directional wicking transport of >500 nL min-1 per square of film; (4) ultra-simple roll-to-roll fabrication; (5) stable and bio-compatible super-hydrophilicity for weeks in air by peptide surface modification. Validation includes both detailed in vitro characterization and in vivo validation with sweat transport from the human skin. Sampling times (skin-to-sensor) of <3 min were achieved, setting new benchmarks for the field of wearable sweat sensing. This work addresses significant challenges for sweat biosensing, or for any other nano-liter regime (<100 nL) fluid sampling and sensing application.

This study aimed to: (i) examine whether the speed synchronization and physical performance of an elite football team changed between the first and the second half, using match time blocks of 15-min, and (ii) explore the match-to-match variation of players’ speed synchronization performance. Twenty-eight outfield elite footballers participated in 51 official matches. Positional data were gathered and used to calculate the total distance covered as a physical workload indicator. For all the outfield teammate dyad combinations (45 pairs), it was processed the percentage of time that players’ speed was synchronized during walking, jogging and running using relative phase (Hilbert Transform). Also, the match-to-match variation of the players’ speed synchronization, expressed in coefficient of variation was computed. The differences in the total distance covered from all players within the different match’s time block periods revealed a moderate decrease in the distance covered in the last 15-min of the match compared to the first 15-min (-6.5; ±1.07%, most likely: change in means with 95% confidence limits). However, when compared the last minutes from both halves a small increase was observed (2.7; ±1.2%, likely) from first to second half. The synchronization of the players’ speed displacements revealed small to moderate decreases in the % of synchronization in the second half periods for the jogging and running speed, while the opposite was found for the walking speed (~13 to 24% more, most likely). The playing position analysis for the walking zone showed similar trends between the groups, with small to moderate higher values in the second half, with the exception of [30’-45’] vs [75’-90’] in the midfielder’s dyads and in [15’-30’] vs [60’-75’] match periods for forwards. Similar trend was found during the running speed, in which small to moderate higher synchronization was found during the first half periods, with the exception of [15’-30’] vs [60’-75’] and [30’-45’] vs [75’-90’] in midfielder’s dyads. Regarding to the match-to-match variation of the players’ speed synchronization, overall results showed small to moderate increases in coefficient of variation during jogging and running displacements from the beginning to the end of the match (32.1; ±13.2% increase in jogging and 26.2; ±10.5% in running, both comparisons most likely). The higher distance covered during most of the first half periods and the higher dyadic synchronization at high speeds might have limited players’ performance in the second half. In addition, the decrease trend in speed synchronization during the second half periods might have resulted from accumulated muscular and mental fatigue towards the match. Within, the match-to-match variation in tactical-related variables increased across the match duration, with especial focus in the midfielder dyads. Dyadic speed synchronization might provide relevant information concerning the individual and collective performance.

In the few training sessions the Chelsea squad have had with new boss Maurizio Sarri and his staff so far, one element has already greatly stood out. It is the amount of times the players are asked to really step it up, to properly express themselves, to take the most forward-thinking pass… to take the bravest option. It is something new signing Jorginho is naturally leading by example on, having so fully absorbed Sarri’s methods in three years at Napoli.

The Italian’s approach is already so different that many are effectively “relearning” how to play, a phrase so conspicuously used by players like Dries Mertens at the Serie A club.

And it possibly illustrates how Chelsea – whether by chance or design – have learned a new approach to their managers, because their appointment of Sarri represents the equivalent of how he wants to play.

The secret sauce to the Super Bowl Champion Philadelphia Eagles’ historic run is analytics, I’ve often said this. With the application of analytics still in its infant stages, the Eagles are ahead of the curve. This is evidenced by them being the only team to hire EdjFootball for the 2017 season, a division of Edj Analytics. With any new advancement in the sport there’s bound to be confusion regarding how analytics are applied. Thankfully the success of the Eagles and other teams with a soft spot for game theory has caused an uptick in discussion surrounding the topic.

Howie Roseman spoke at the Wharton People Analytics Conference earlier this year, shedding some light on how the Eagles use player tracking, sports science and the drafting of Carson Wentz. Now we have another source from which to gain a better understanding. Frank Frigo, the Founder of Edj Analytics and Chief Business Officer of Edj Sports recently spoke with the gentlemen at Wharton Moneyball. The following is the notes taken from that discussion.

One quick note not discussed in the podcast before we begin. EdjFootball runs thousands of game simulations that provided the Eagles with situational, opponent specific data. This data aided them in making in-game decisions based on the success rates provided in the simulations. It gets as detailed as providing analytics for on-field match-ups and coordinator tendencies.

It seems like the most banal advice you could give an athlete: don’t overtrain. And yet, when the National Football League (NFL) and the NFL Players Association agreed, as part of their collective bargaining agreement (CBA) in 2011, to practice restrictions–ostensibly to cut down on injuries–controversy erupted.

The rules, which notably limited full-padded practice to once per day during off season and to a total of 14 during the regular season, would change the way the game was played, critics warned–and to its detriment.

As ESPN Monday Night Football analyst and former NFL head coach Jon Gruden explained, “The less time we spend meeting, the less time we spend practicing, the less time we spend together practicing like we’re going to play on game day, the less we’re going to execute, the less we’re going to be disciplined and the less we’re going to perform.”