Applied Sports Science newsletter – January 25, 2019

… He has trained his entire life to bury these shots in conditions far more adverse than a well-lit, state-of-the-art gymnasium with pristine regulation balls and rebounders to feed you.

Try shooting 3-pointers outside, in the snow, with a bitter Ontario wind ripping through you, after you’ve just held a deep-knee squat for 12 minutes, a cup of piping hot tea carefully balanced on your thigh to make sure you do not waver — all this executed under the watchful eye of your father, a martial arts enthusiast and basketball junkie who has been honing your skills since you were an infant.

That father, Roger Murray, is bound together with his son Jamal on a quest: to prove not only that this Canadian talent can thrive but also that he could someday emerge as one of the best — if not the best — in the NBA.

“It’s funny — his rookie year he couldn’t make a shot,” Clippers coach Doc Rivers says. “I told [president of basketball operations] Lawrence Frank, ‘That kid is going to lead the league in scoring one year.’ Lawrence looked at me like I was crazy. He said, ‘Why would you make that comment?’ I said, ‘Because he’s fearless. He’s going to give himself a chance because believes he’s the best scorer out here.'”

… what do you do with him? It’s the problem numerous managers had with Steven Gerrard: some players just seem to have been born out of time. At the World Cup, two years older, Pogba accepted the more defensive duties demanded of him by Didier Deschamps, operating alongside N’Golo Kante at the back of midfield.

Jose Mourinho was impressed, leading to his comment that the World Cup, as an intense month of high-pressure games was the ideal environment for Pogba to maintain his “concentration”.

Which may have a grain of truth, but perhaps not in the way Mourinho intended. It is much easier for a player to accept an uncomfortable tactical role for half a dozen games when the World Cup is at stake.

Julian Edelman loves road games, because you can quiet your doubters on the road in a way that’s impossible at home. He loves the road for its opportunity to prove you can accomplish something in front of those who don’t believe you can. He likes to poke the bear.

Edelman walks a fine line with the underdog stuff. Last week, he sold “Bet Against Us” T-shirts on his website. Edelman walked off the field at Arrowhead Stadium exactly how he wanted to Sunday, with the shrieks of his victorious teammates piercing the dejected silence of the crowd drifting out into the cold and the offseason, but it took two of the biggest catches of the Patriots’ season in overtime to make that happen. Midway through the fourth quarter, it looked as if Edelman might have won that bet for those he dared to pick against him when a sequence of events involving the receiver gave the Chiefs their first lead late in the game.

“It’s part of the game,” Edelman said. “I always preach you’ve got to have a short memory, whether it’s good or bad. That was a bad play. I felt awful. But you’ve got to move on.”

How do you deal with a packed schedule that includes training for several different events at once? If you’re swimmer Caeleb Dressel, you break things down.

“I like to aim for three objectives per day,” said Dressel, who took home gold with Team USA in the 4×100-meter freestyle and 4×100 medley at the Olympic Games Rio 2016 before becoming a breakout star the following year. “I have this habit where I will just go and go and go and try to get as much done as I can, and I’ll just start making stuff up to do, so I try to limit myself. It lets me go to bed feeling like I’ve gotten a lot accomplished.”

The 22-year-old from Florida is used to juggling a lot at once. This is the man who announced himself as USA Swimming’s next big name by winning a record-tying seven gold medals — including three in the space of about two hours — at the 2017 FINA World Championships, where he was literally running around between a couple of events.

At home in Florida, where he practices under the tutelage of former University of Florida coach Gregg Troy, Dressel maintains a strict training schedule that nevertheless leaves time for things he loves. Here, he takes us through a day in his life.

… Keeping that emotion in check is something the 35th-ranked player in the world has long worked on, said Mark Guilbeau, the former Virginia coach who worked with Collins when she won the NCAA singles tournament in 2014 as a sophomore and 2016 as a senior. Against Pavlyuchenkova, Collins emitted teeth-baring screams and double fist-pumps after big games, thwacked her racket against the court and pulled faces after dubious line calls. … “She’s had to work on it, really, really, really hard,” Guilbeau said with a laugh in a phone conversation on Tuesday. “The emotion gets everybody, there’s no getting around it. The word I used with her a million times was professionalism . . . I always told her, picture yourself in the final of the U.S. Open. How would you want to emote and handle yourself in those situations? And look, she’s going to be more fiery than anyone you’ll see, but she’s really learned to not have the down moments take her off of her game.”

In this article, I’d like to share 30 “one-sentence stories” about building better habits. (They are not all exactly one sentence, but they are very short.)

None of these stories are mine. They were sent to me by readers of Atomic Habits. My hope is that these examples will illustrate how real people are putting the book into practice. They will show you what people are actually doing to build good habits and break bad ones. And hopefully, they will spark some ideas for how you can do the same.

I have divided the stories into categories that roughly correspond to different sections or ideas in the book.

I did a talk for Arsenal Football club’s HP team, and spoke about the role of sports science in the elite environment. I think sports science has under-delivered, because it is too operational, too myopic, and misses its own strategic & tactical importance. It’s more about the process & system of thinking, which means good people do it better than most sports scientists. I shared that presentation and concepts on Wednesday.

Preventing injuries in sport is difficult. When laws change, they often achieve the opposite – an unintended outcome of trying to improve the spectacle is that it compromises safety. On Thursday I wrote a little about about that

… 1. QUALITY NOT QUANTITY OF STAFF

Grant Downie: We often think that having an extra member of staff will solve problems, but it doesn’t always. You need a combination of young exuberant energy and grey hair. Some clubs carry a very large number of staff. Sometimes less is more. If you rehab an injury for 12 hours of the day, will the player come back quicker than if you did six? And what impact will it have on their welfare?

Clubs sometimes think it’s better to employ two physios instead of one who costs more. However, that physio might have craft knowledge and experience coupled with a continual desire to improve. That’s invaluable.

Today, adidas announced the launch of its new sports accelerator program “Platform A” at Station F, the world’s largest start-up campus located in Paris. 13 start-ups have been selected to work with adidas on new business initiatives for the sports industry starting in January. adidas is investing a total of one million euros in the development of the program. The accelerator aims to use the innovative power of the global start-up scene to jointly identify the potential for new strategically important projects. The focus lies on the areas of digital, global sales and community building.

Twenty-three years after Fox’s glowing puck made its debut, the NHL’s next big technological advancement will be on display this weekend during All-Star festivities.

NBC will showcase puck and player tracking as part of its broadcast of the skills competition Friday night and then as the centerpiece of a digital-only broadcast of the All-Star 3-on-3 tournament Saturday night. It’ll be the first chance for American hockey fans to get an up-close look at the system that could be in place as soon as next season.

We’ve joined forces with Netherlands-based smart camera technology company Incatec to help teams streamline their recording process and secure the best views in the house. See what’s in store for 2019 and beyond.

A sound nutritional plan is essential for achieving and maintaining optimal athletic performance. In addition to daily meal planning, a sports nutritionist pays special attention to the needs of athletes before, during and following training sessions and competitions. A wide variety of foods and nutritional products are available for the athlete to meet these needs. Sports nutrition professionals spend a lot of time reading and interpreting the relevant literature, and in many cases, researching the best products and ways to deliver the needed nutrients. In the research world, we often examine individual ingredients that have been removed from foods in an effort to examine the potential beneficial effects in isolation. In the real world, we most often eat foods that contain several important ingredients. So, it is ultimately also necessary to conduct research studies with real foods to determine how the food is received as a whole, and whether the important ingredients reach the target tissues in sufficient amounts, whether they interact with each other, and of course, whether beneficial effects are realized. This supplement examines the potential complications and benefits of eating foods in the context of achieving and maintaining optimal performance.

The Gatorade Sports Science Institute (GSSI) has been bringing sports nutrition and sports science researchers together for the past 30 years to address many issues that relate to the health, wellbeing and performance of athletes. Since 2012 this gathering has been known as the GSSI Expert Panel, which continued in 2017 with a meeting in October to discuss several nutritional issues that influence athlete performance. Following the meeting, the authors summarized the recent work in their topic area, resulting in the manuscripts in this Sports Medicine supplement (the sixth in a series supported by GSSI).

The temporary offices for the NHL Seattle franchise are in a nondescript, tan two-story building on a residential street, two blocks from the arena. If visitors ring the doorbell, staffers must scurry from their seats to greet them. Receptionist? That’s somewhere on the to-do list. Only 13 people work here now. So while the walls are filled with framed photos of outdoor hockey games, motivational posters such as Wayne Gretzky’s “You miss 100 percent of the shots you never take” mantra and, yes, whiteboards scribbled with a few options for the eventual team nickname, there are rows of empty desks.

“It’s like working for a startup,” says team chief operating officer Victor DeBonis. By the time the arena opens in 2021, DeBonis projects there will be about 1,000 on staff.

The New England Patriots might be the only team in the NFL that truly reloads every season. Eighteen straight years of nine or more wins and nine trips to the Super Bowl during that stretch is evidence enough.

The common ingredient, at least in terms of players, is quarterback Tom Brady.

How Cam Newton’s right shoulder responds to whatever treatment is chosen for the 2015 NFL MVP is key to whether 2019 is a rebuilding or reloading year for the Carolina Panthers.

If Newton comes back 100 percent, there are enough pieces in place to consider this a reloading process even though the Panthers have had losing records in two of the past three seasons. If he doesn’t, rebuilding will be more accurate.