Applied Sports Science newsletter – November 29, 2018

Applied Sports Science news articles, blog posts and research papers for November 29, 2018

 

Joe Flacco should medically be able to play soon, but …

The San Diego Union-Tribune, ProFootballDoc from

… In order for a hip to dislocate, the strong capsule and/or labrum would have to be torn or there would have to be an associated fracture. In my almost two decades in the NFL, only one player on my team suffered a hip dislocation.

Assuming it is fact there is no tear (and presumably no fracture) makes the chance that Flacco would dislocate his hip extremely low.

It is good the coach is looking out for his player and not rushing him.

 

Kemba Walker never saw this superstar turn coming

ESPN NBA, Zach Lowe from

… “He and Dame [Lillard] are the closest things to Stephen Curry,” says James Borrego, Charlotte’s coach. It might be the single most remarkable transformation of a jump shot in the history of the sport. Even Jason Kidd, the archetypal point guard who learned to shoot, never dreamed of taking, and making, the high-wire bombs Walker squeezes off within a space — between two defenders — as tight as a high-school locker.

Walker didn’t see it coming, either. “I never saw myself playing at this level, and shooting the ball like this,” he says during a late November sit-down. “I guess you could say I’m surprised.”

 

Boise State coach Leon Rice won’t play true freshmen

Idaho Statesman, Rachel Roberts from

Five different Boise State men’s basketball players have been hampered by injuries just five games into the 2018-19 season.

The lineup instability has played a part in the Broncos’ 2-3 start, but coach Leon Rice doesn’t plan on making any rash decisions ahead of Boise State’s game at Drake (3-1) on Tuesday. Tipoff is 6 p.m. MT at the Knapp Center in Des Moines, Iowa.

“I just know that every decision I’ve made in the short term, I’ve regretted that I didn’t make it in the long term,” Rice said during a press conference Monday. “… I don’t want to do a knee jerk and take somebody off redshirt and then we get everybody healthy again and they don’t play.”

 

Young people value diversity, humour and honesty in their friendships – new research

The Conversation, Constantino Dumangane Jr. from

Friendships made in school play a special part in young people’s development. They are more than just moral support, friends help them learn key social skills, and serve as a source of social support. Close school friends also help young people develop a sense of importance, trust, acceptance and belonging within their school. Young people who are well appreciated and accepted by their friends are more likely to be happy and do well at school and more likely to develop positive friendships and relationships as adults. In fact, schools in the UK have been found to be the most important place for young people to make friends with others of their own age.

But just what is it that makes an ideal friend? Is it that they should be generous? Or they should be supportive in times of crisis over all else? For the the past six years, my colleagues and I have been conducting the WISERD Education multi-cohort, longitudinal study with pupils in secondary schools, to increase our understanding of the lives of young people in Wales. In our most recent surveys – conducted between February and May 2018 – we were particularly interested in exploring what young people think of their friendship networks. We wanted to know more about how these associations develop and how the relationships impact and shape young people’s identities, behaviour, relationships and perspectives.

 

AZ Alkmaar introduce teqball and foot squash to aid implicit learning

Training Ground Guru, Simon Austin from

AZ Alkmaar have installed a foot squash court and teqball tables at their Academy and are getting youngsters to organise ‘deliberate play’ tournaments every month.

Last October, we reported how the Dutch club had installed a ‘Performance Playground’, made up of a ‘beach’, asphalt pitch with two goals and basketball hoop, and a concrete wall.

Academy Director Paul Brandenburg explained: “We want to train boys who understand the game. We do this by compelling them in a variety of ways to make their own choices and to adapt.”

 

Central nervous system modulates the neuromechanical delay in a broad range for the control of muscle force

Journal of Applied Physiology from

Force is generated by muscle units according to the neural activation sent by motor neurons. The motor unit is therefore the interface between the neural coding of movement and the musculotendinous system. Here we propose a method to accurately measure the latency between an estimate of the neural drive to muscle and force. Furthermore, we systematically investigate this latency, which we refer to as the neuromechanical delay (NMD), as a function of the rate of force generation. In two experimental sessions, eight men performed isometric finger abduction and ankle dorsiflexion sinusoidal contractions at three frequencies and peak-to-peak amplitudes {0.5, 1, and 1.5 Hz; 1, 5, and 10 of maximal force [%maximal voluntary contraction (MVC)]}, with a mean force of 10% MVC. The discharge timings of motor units of the first dorsal interosseous (FDI) and tibialis anterior (TA) muscle were identified by high-density surface EMG decomposition. The neural drive was estimated as the cumulative discharge timings of the identified motor units. The neural drive predicted 80 ± 0.4% of the force fluctuations and consistently anticipated force by 194.6 ± 55 ms (average across conditions and muscles). The NMD decreased nonlinearly with the rate of force generation (R2 = 0.82 ± 0.07; exponential fitting) with a broad range of values (from 70 to 385 ms) and was 66 ± 0.01 ms shorter for the FDI than TA (P < 0.001). In conclusion, we provided a method to estimate the delay between the neural control and force generation, and we showed that this delay is muscle-dependent and is modulated within a wide range by the central nervous system.

 

The magnitude of Yo-Yo test improvements following an aerobic training intervention are associated with total genotype score

PLOS One; C. Pickering, J. Kiely, B. Suraci, D. Collins from

Recent research has demonstrated that there is considerable inter-individual variation in the response to aerobic training, and that this variation is partially mediated by genetic factors. As such, we aimed to investigate if a genetic based algorithm successfully predicted the magnitude of improvements following eight-weeks of aerobic training in youth soccer players. A genetic test was utilised to examine five single nucleotide polymorphisms (VEGF rs2010963, ADRB2 rs1042713 and rs1042714, CRP rs1205 & PPARGC1A rs8192678), whose occurrence is believed to impact aerobic training adaptations. 42 male soccer players (17.0 ± 1y, 176 ± 6 cm, 69 ± 9 kg) were tested and stratified into three different Total Genotype Score groups; “low”, “medium”and “high”, based on the possession of favourable polymorphisms. Subjects underwent two Yo-Yo tests separated by eight-weeks of sports-specific aerobic training. Overall, there were no significant differences between the genotype groups in pre-training Yo-Yo performance, but evident between-group response differentials emerged in post-training Yo-Yo test performance. Subjects in the “high” group saw much larger improvements (58%) than those in the ‘medium” (35%) and “low” (7%) groups. There were significant (p<0.05) differences between the groups in the magnitude of improvement, with athletes in the “high” and medium group having larger improvements than the “low” group (d = 2.59 “high” vs “low”; d = 1.32 “medium” vs “low”). In conclusion, the magnitude of improvements in aerobic fitness following a training intervention were associated with a genetic algorithm comprised of five single nucleotide polymorphisms. This information could lead to the development of more individualised aerobic training designs, targeting optimal fitness adaptations.

 

Now You Can Sequence Your Whole Genome for Just $200

WIRED, Science, Megan Molteni from

… Today, slightly more than a million people have had their whole genomes sequenced. Compare that to the 17 million estimated to have had their DNA analyzed with direct-to-consumer tests sold by 23andMe and Ancestry. They use a technology called genotyping, which takes about a million snapshots of a person’s genome. That might sound like a lot, but it’s really less than 1 percent of the full picture. Genotyping targets short strings of DNA that scientists already know have a strong association with a given trait. So say, for example, scientists discover a new gene that increases your risk of developing brain cancer. If that gene is not one that 23andMe looks at (because how would it know to look if the gene hasn’t been discovered yet), then you’d have to get tested all over again to learn more about your brain cancer risk. Whole genome data on the other hand, once you have it, can be queried with computer algorithms whenever a new genetic discovery gets made.

 

The embargo has lifted on @bachyns and my CTE paper in Neurology, and it’s a big one.

Twitter, Zachary Binney from

Headline: prevalence of CTE in NFL retirees is AT LEAST 10% – and plausibly much higher (20-50%).

 

Microbiome dynamics in obesity

Science, Christoph A. Thaiss from

The prevalence of obesity has increased at an astounding rate over the past decades. More than 44% of the global population is estimated to be overweight, and more than 300 million individuals are affected by morbid adiposity (1). Obesity is a major risk factor for a number of co-occurring diseases, including type II diabetes mellitus, nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, and ischemic cardiovascular disease (2). Thus, the obesity pandemic has far-reaching consequences on life expectancy, quality of life, and health-care costs.

What has caused this rapid increase in obesity within less than a generation? The past century has seen dramatic changes in human lifestyle, ranging from new dietary patterns to improved hygiene and altered sleep-wake cycles. However, the molecular and cellular mechanisms by which these environmental factors predispose humans to obesity remain largely unknown. As a graduate student in Eran Elinav’s laboratory at the Weizmann Institute of Science, I investigated three phenomena of human obesity that are tightly linked to the modern human lifestyle. For all three, we discovered an unexpected role for temporal and spatial dynamics of the intestinal microbiome—the community of trillions of microorganisms that inhabit the gastrointestinal tract (see the figure).

 

These professional athletes created their own clean supplement brand

PhillyVoice, Bailey King from

LeBron James, Arnold Schwarzenegger and more teamed up to create the subscription-based service

 

The Best Foods for Athletes

The New York Times, Gretchen Reynolds from

More fat? More carbs? What kind? How much? When?

Questions about what constitutes an ideal and practical diet for competitive athletes consume and confuse many athletes, as well as their coaches and families. But a new, comprehensive review about the science of sports nutrition published recently in Science provides a lucid overview of what currently is known — and not known — about how athletes should eat.

To find out more about these and other topics, I spoke with Louise Burke, a sports dietitian and professor at Australian Catholic University who has worked with many elite Australian sports teams. She wrote the new review with her husband John Hawley, the director of the Mary MacKillop Institute for Health Research at Australian Catholic University. What follows are edited and summarized excerpts from our conversation.

 

Nobody Wants Baseball’s 30-Something Free Agents Anymore

FiveThirtyEight, Travis Sawchik from

… Harper and Machado — rare 26-year-old superstar free agents — could break contract records this year. (Harper has already turned down $300 million.) But the rest of the free-agent class of 2018-19, which was once expected to be historically rich in talent, is not as strong as it could have been. Dodgers ace Clayton Kershaw declined to exercise his opt-out and signed a new three-year, $93 million deal with the Dodgers on Friday without ever becoming a free agent. Josh Donaldson, the 2015 American League MVP, suffered a series of injuries that diminished his value, and A.J. Pollock has a similar recent history. Andrew McCutchen, a former National League MVP, is now 32 and no longer a star-level player.

While there is star power at the top, more more money to spend and perhaps fewer rebuilding teams, the vast majority of this class’s 250-plus free agents — who became eligible to sign with any team on Saturday — face the same questions that tormented the middle tier of free agents last year: Will any team sign them? And even if they land on major league rosters, how long will they have to wait, and what kind of salary will they have to accept to get there?

 

Premier League referees have toughest job in world football – ex-official Peter Walton

ESPN FC, Liam Twomey from

… “The Premier League is the worst in the world for [criticism], because of the exposure they have, because of the publicity it affords, and because of the rewards on offer for successful teams and individuals,” Walton, who refereed in the Premier League from 2003 to 2012, said. “Of course, people want the best all the time and they have the best.

“However, there will be times when people make mistakes, and those are magnified in the Premier League unfortunately.”

 

For those clamoring that 6 games is too small a sample for accurate NCAA rankings, keep in mind 6 NBA games ≈ 40 NHL games ≈ 60 MLB games in terms of assessing team talent.

Twitter, Michael Lopez from

Hoops rankings can be much more accurate in small samples than in other sports.

 

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