Applied Sports Science newsletter – January 16, 2019

… “Happiness plays an important role in my life. Happiness is fast,” Davison says. “Some people seem to channel negative energy on the start line. But if I’m smiling and relaxed, it puts me in a better headspace. Happiness watts are real. And I try to have a positive, happy approach to racing.”

But like anything worthwhile, true happiness takes effort to attain—and, more importantly, maintain. Here’s what Davison says works for her, based on the tenets of that book.

Extraordinary performances littered the baseball landscape last season. Mookie Betts and Christian Yelich rode breakout seasons to their first MVP awards, while Blake Snell and Jacob deGrom did the same in claiming their first Cy Youngs. Kevin Pillar Spiderman’d his way to home-run robbery. Trevor Story launched a 505-foot moonshot.

Impressive feats, all. Still, none of them were historic or unprecedented. To find that kind of singular performance, we need to turn to a 43rd-round draft pick. To one of just three major leaguers ever to come out of the Naval Academy. To a baseball nomad who embarked on the kind of adventure we’d never before seen in MLB history.

Oliver Drake is that nomad. The right-hander, who turned 32 on Sunday, set a new major league record by pitching for five different teams during the 2018 season. And he’s not even with the team for whom he last pitched last season. In fact, Drake has switched clubs another three times this offseason alone.

The beginning of a calendar year normally would seem a strange time to be preoccupied with endings. But when Andy Murray tearfully announced his impending retirement because of a deteriorating right hip in a pretournament news conference, the Australian Open underwent a jarring mood swing, from the so-called Happy Slam to a major dominated by talk about pain management and the sometimes extraordinary measures required to prolong careers.

The Hospice Slam, anyone?

The marathon world record holder, Eliud Kipchoge, says he is “relishing the prospect” of facing Mo Farah again over 26.2 miles after confirming that he will run the London Marathon in April.

Kipchoge, who won his third London title in last year’s race, with Farah finishing third, then went on to set a stunning world record of two hours, one minute and 39 seconds in Berlin in September – beating the previous best by over a minute.

Farah, meanwhile, went on to claim the Chicago Marathon in October in a European record time of 2hr 5min 11sec – and afterwards promised that he was “not afraid to keep turning up in the same field and testing Kipchoge”.

… Kipchoge has won 10 of his 11 marathons, including three times in London and at the Olympics in Rio. His most recent victory – in Berlin last September – saw him set a world record of 2:01:39. At the Breaking2 time trial in Monza in 2017, he ran even faster, too, with 2:00:25 – a performance just one second per mile short of a hallowed sub-two-hour clocking.

The Kenyan has been described, with good reason, as the greatest marathoner in history. So how can Farah hope to beat him?

For starters, not only did Farah smash the European record with 2:05:11 in Chicago in October, but he looked supremely smooth and strong the entire way. In the world of marathoning, he is on the upward curve whereas Kipchoge’s bubble will inevitably burst sometime.

The San Francisco Giants have hired pitching analyst Matt Daniels to join the staff of new president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi, who vowed when hired in November to find a wide array of experts to help the club.

Now, he has a data-focused staff member to aid in pitching training.

Daniels announced Tuesday he was leaving his position in Seattle as Pitching Coordinator of Driveline Baseball to join the Giants, calling it “such an incredible opportunity.” The Giants confirmed his hiring.

… From the beginning of Dabo’s tenure, another crucial piece was in place in S&C coach Joey Batson. You can tell the programs which have high level S&C by how they use redshirts. Many teams that recruit at a high level don’t like to redshirt players because it becomes a lost year when a RS sophomore goes pro after using only two of his three required years on the field. Clemson often likes to redshirt anyways, particularly across the lines, because their players clearly get a lot from a season in which they can work harder with Joey Batson during the season without concern about saving energy for the practice field or Saturdays.

They still send a lot of players out as freshman without the redshirt but key cogs to the 2018 title such as Clelin Ferell, Kendall Joseph, and Isaiah Simmons were redshirted as freshman before emerging as some of the most freakish components to their defense.

The upshot of all of this was that Dabo essentially assembled a Big 12-style program with coordinators from the Big 12 that had experience either executing that style (Morris) or defending it (Venables) and then combined those strategies with the resources of an SEC program, all within the comfortable confines of the ACC.

What strategies do you use to push through a tough challenge, be it a run on a treadmill or a stressful phone call with your boss? Perhaps you remind yourself of what you have to gain from completing the task, or you use distraction, or you think about the bad things that will happen if you give in? For a paper in the European Journal of Personality, a team led by Marie Hennecke at the University of Zurich has conducted what they say is the first ever investigation of these strategies, and others, that people use spontaneously in their everyday lives to “regulate their persistence during aversive activities”.

The researchers’ main interest was to see whether people with strong self-control differ from flakier types by virtue of their use of more effective strategies. In fact, this was not the case – yes, some strategies were more effective than others (offering hope to those of us with weaker willpower that we might benefit from adopting such strategies), but greater use of effective strategies did not explain the persistence of the grittier types, thus suggesting, as the researchers put it, that “… trait self-control and self-regulatory strategies represent separate routes to good self-regulation”.

… “We know that multi-sport participation leads to higher retention of kids in sport, as well as less injuries,” said Richard Monette. “There’s also evidence that they perform better at the higher levels of competition as they get older. But parents tell us that it is still difficult to find coaches and programming that support multi-sport participation for their kids.”

During the session, over 80 attendees were polled on their attitudes and experiences with multi-sport to date. Approximately 65% agreed that their national and local sport organizations don’t do enough to support multi-sport. At the same time, about 80% stated that they themselves were actively educating parents about the importance of sport sampling and accommodating their athletes in pursuing other sports when scheduling conflicts arose.

The panel then asked delegates to share ideas on how to advance grassroots programming so that a multi-sport approach would become the “new normal” for children in Canada.

Background Sleep quality is an essential component of athlete’s recovery. However, a better understanding of the parameters to adequately quantify sleep quality in team sport athletes is clearly warranted.

Objective To identify which parameters to use for sleep quality monitoring in team sport athletes.

Methods Systematic searches for articles reporting the qualitative markers related to sleep in team sport athletes were conducted in PubMed, Scopus, SPORTDiscus and Web of Science online databases. The systematic review followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines. For the meta-analysis, effect sizes with 95% CI were calculated and heterogeneity was assessed using a random-effects model. The coefficient of variation (CV) with 95% CI was also calculated to assess the level of instability of each parameter.

Results In general, 30 measuring instruments were used for monitoring sleep quality. A meta-analysis was undertaken on 15 of these parameters. Four objective parameters inferred by actigraphy had significant results (sleep efficiency with small CV and sleep latency, wake episodes and total wake episode duration with large CV). Six subjective parameters obtained from questionnaires and scales also had meaningful results (Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (sleep efficiency), Likert scale (Hooper), Likert scale (no reference), Liverpool Jet-Lag Questionnaire, Liverpool Jet-Lag Questionnaire (sleep rating) and RESTQ (sleep quality)).

Conclusions These data suggest that sleep efficiency using actigraphy, Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index, Likert scale, Liverpool Jet-Lag Questionnaire and RESTQ are indicated to monitor sleep quality in team sport athletes. [full text]

Faculty of Health Professor David Hood, Canada Research Chair in Cell Physiology, has led a study that determined that Parkin, a protein that breaks down or degrades unneeded proteins, is present and active in the degradation of muscle mitochondria during exercise.

“Mitochondria are the energy-supplying powerhouses of all cells. When they lose their ability to generate energy, they must be removed and degraded, or they will generate harmful free radicals (or reactive oxygen species) that can lead to premature cellular aging and death. The removal process is termed mitophagy,” Hood explains.

As the number of people suffering from foot pain rises and the health and wellness market grows in popularity, footwear retailers are being urged to focus more on a shoe’s hidden gem: the insole.

Sandwiched between the midsole and upper, the insole is all about substance over style — and as a result, it’s often relegated to the back corners of footwear stores. But whether sold as an insert or as an integrated part of shoes, insoles are doing more work than we give them credit for.

“The insole is the first thing that touches someone’s foot, yet the interior environment of the shoe is typically a hot, sweaty, smelly place. There wasn’t a lot of focus on performance,” said C.B. Tuite, chief sales officer at Ortholite. “It’s not just about stepping comfort; it’s about long-term comfort and performance.”

A handful of brain cells deep in the brain may play a surprising role in controlling women’s bone density, according to new research by UC San Francisco and UCLA scientists.

In a study published Jan. 11, 2019, in Nature Communications, researchers showed that blocking a particular set of signals from these cells causes female (but not male) mice to build extraordinarily strong bones and maintain them into old age, raising hopes for new approaches to preventing or treating osteoporosis in older women.

… Led by Ernst Tanner, the German sporting director who joined the club in August, the Union wrote themselves out of this year’s draft process with one fell swoop. Shipping expansion side FC Cincinnati all five of their draft picks in exchange for either $150,000 or $200,000 in General Allocation Money, depending on performance-related clauses, the club decided that nothing in this year’s college crop was better than what they’re already producing via their USL team and cutting-edge academy system.

“The level of MLS has increased a lot, and I think the level in the university has been more or less the same. There is quite a big gap,” Tanner told reporters on a conference call. “Out of what I’ve seen last year when I’d see the draft picks, there are a lot of players who are quite OK for the USL level. But it doesn’t necessarily make us better on the MLS level.”

Pitchers in the Astros organization were K-happy this past season. Thanks to a bevy of power arms and analytics-based attack plans, each of Houston’s full-season minor league affiliates led its respective league in strikeouts. So did their short-season and, most notably, their big-league club.

Given that he’d spent the last six seasons as a high-ranking member of Houston’s front office, I asked Mike Elias if that’s something that could maybe be replicated in Baltimore.

“We’re very much hoping to replicate even a semblance of that success here,” answered the Orioles Executive Vice President and General Manager. “The fact that we have (Assistant GM, Analytics) Sig Mejdal here, and Chris Holt, who was our assistant pitching coordinator in Houston, makes me feel really good about our chances of doing so. There is a little bit of a secret sauce behind that. I’m not going to explain it fully, but we had a great program there. We took a lot of time developing it, and we want to get it in place here as well.”