Applied Sports Science newsletter – January 31, 2019

Applied Sports Science news articles, blog posts and research papers for January 31, 2019

 

Secret Guard-en: The story of Luka Doncic’s undercover Steph Curry workout

NBC Sports, Tom Haberstroh from

… Doncic’s agent, Bill Duffy, wanted to keep it quiet. Only a small circle — maybe a dozen people — attended, but hardly anyone outside that Pleasanton, Calif., gym had a clue that the two-time MVP was going to work out with the Slovenian prodigy. It was so hush-hush that not even Mavericks owner Mark Cuban knew about it.

“For me, I just wanted him to be exposed to the excellence of Steph,” Duffy told NBCSports.com. “Not just Steph’s skill, but appreciating the work that goes into it.”

 

With 20-Year Separation In Age, U.S. Men’s Snowboardcross Reaches Across Generations At World Championships

Team USA, Karen Price from

Nate Holland and Jake Vedder are on opposite ends of the spectrum in their snowboardcross careers, but both are among the athletes looking for success on U.S. soil at the FIS Freestyle Ski, Snowboard and Freeski World Championships this week in Utah.

“I’m a 40-year-old man now and Jake here is 20 so he’s actually closer in age to my 3-year-old daughter than he is to me,” said Holland, a three-time Olympian, from a press conference ahead of the world championships at Solitude Mountain Resort. “There’s a difference in age and it’s fun. The young guys keep me youthful on tour and that spark in their eye that I see keeps it fun. I’ve been on tour a long time and it can become wear and tear at times and these kids spark it up for me.”

 

USMNT 2019: Goalkeeper Zack Steffen fueled by more than determination

Sporting News, Omnisport, Alexis Mansanarez from

… Steffen has plenty of experience with newly minted USMNT manager Gregg Berhalter and everything he brings to the table — literally.

Steffen has a nutrition regimen that Berhalter implemented during his tenure in Columbus and now brings to the men’s national team.

Carbohydrate periodization is defined as “the manipulation of carbohydrate availability on a day-to-day or even a meal-to-meal basis.” But, a more digestible way of putting it is low-, moderate- or high-carbohydrate consumption in given meals. This allows the team to alter carbohydrate availability before a match and to use other nutrients as fuel, such as fats.

 

The influence of short-term fixture congestion on position specific match running performance and external loading patterns in English professional soccer

Journal of Sports Sciences from

The aim of the current study was to investigate positional specific physical performance and external load responses to short term fixture congestion in English professional soccer. A total of 515 match observations were categorised as G1: the first game in a week with >4 days following a previous game, G2: the second game in a week played <4 days since G1, and G3: the third game in a week played with <4 days between each of the previous games. Global positioning system and accelerometer-based metrics were partitioned into fifteen-minute epochs. These data were then analysed using a linear mixed model to assess both the within and between game positional differences. Total, low-intensity (<4.0 m·s−1), medium-intensity (MID; 4.0–5.5 m·s−1), and sprint distance (>7.0 m·s−1) were significantly different across games. No between game positional differences were identified; however, within match position specific differences were observed for measures of MID and HID. No significant differences were evident for accelerometer derived metrics between games or across positions. The current data suggests that the use of fifteen minute within game epochs enables the detection of alterations in physical output during congested schedules. The observed within game positional differences has implications for player specific conditioning and squad rotation strategies.

 

Grant Downie on his ‘performance Rubik’s Cube’

Training Ground Guru, Simon Austin from

… The Sports Office’s Football Squad software also helped Downie himself to keep across information from each area.

“If you have 28 staff writing everything down on their own computer with their own excel sheet doing it their own way, where has that information gone? Where The Sports Office comes into its own is that its acts as a centralised system for people to record what’s going on.

“It enabled me to hold a Rubik’s Cube in my hand. I could look at medical facts, turn it over and look at a social report, then physical facts, mental profiling. All of that was contained on The Football Squad rather than 20 different computers.

 

The internet of human things: Implants for everybody and how we get there

ZDNet, Tech Broiler, Jason Perlow from

Over the past several years, the Government of Sweden has been moving toward becoming a completely cashless society. By 2025, most Swedish citizens will perform all their financial transactions using debit and credit cards, mobile devices, PCs, or wearables.

But a small, growing number have gone even further than using conventional technology to make payments. They are using implants — tiny, rice grain-sized microchips that use Near-Field Communications (NFC) technology — to communicate wirelessly with reader terminals installed in stores and other public places.

 

[1901.09156] Human Pose Estimation using Motion Priors and Ensemble Models

arXiv, Computer Science > Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition; Norimichi Ukita from

Human pose estimation in images and videos is one of key technologies for realizing a variety of human activity recognition tasks (e.g., human-computer interaction, gesture recognition, surveillance, and video summarization). This paper presents two types of human pose estimation methodologies; 1) 3D human pose tracking using motion priors and 2) 2D human pose estimation with ensemble modeling.

 

An important step for regenerative medicine: Human blood cells can be directly reprogrammed into neural stem cells

German Cancer Research Center from

Scientists from the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) and the stem cell institute HI-STEM* in Heidelberg have succeeded for the first time in directly reprogramming human blood cells into a previously unknown type of neural stem cell. These induced stem cells are similar to those that occur during the early embryonic development of the central nervous system. They can be modified and multiplied indefinitely in the culture dish and can represent an important basis for the development of regenerative therapies.

 

IOC Choose Edith Cowan University To Study Sport Injury Prevention

Ministry of Sport (Australia) from

A new Edith Cowan University (ECU) research centre is one of only 11 worldwide to be selected by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to study the prevention and treatment of sports injuries and illness.

The Australian Centre for Research into Injury in Sport and its Prevention (ACRISP), a joint initiative between ECU and La Trobe University, will work with national and international sports bodies to translate elite-level research into practical advancements for sport and public health.

 

Physiotherapy works better when you believe it will help you – new study

The Conversation, Rachel Chester from

… What surprised us was that patients who had said they expected to “completely recover” as a result of physiotherapy did even better than patients who expected to “much improve”.

The most important predictor of outcome was the person’s pain and disability at the first appointment. Higher levels of pain and disability were associated with higher levels six months later. And lower baseline levels were associated lower levels six months later. But this relationship often changed for people who had high “pain self-efficacy”, that is, confidence in the ability to carry on doing most things, despite having shoulder pain.

Another surprise finding was that people with high baseline pain and disability, but with high levels of pain self-efficacy did as well as, and sometimes better than, people with low baseline pain and disability and low pain self-efficacy.

 

Processed foods and food reward

Science, Perspective, Dana M. Small and Alexandra G. DiFeliceantonio from

Signals that convey nutritional information from the gut to the brain regulate food reinforcement and food choice (1–4). Specifically, although central neural computations execute choice, the gut nervous system communicates information about the nutritional outcomes of choices to the brain so that representation of food values can be updated. Here, we discuss recent findings that suggest the fidelity of gut-brain signaling and the resulting representation of food value is compromised by processed foods (3, 4). Understanding this axis could inform about feeding behavior involving processed foods and obesity.

 

The top regulatory considerations for sports nutrition companies

Nutra Ingredients, Adi Menayang from

From differing state laws to CBD use in sports supplements, attorney and sports nutrition expert Rick Collins shared today’s top regulatory considerations for the sports nutrition industry.

 

Any way you slice it, nutrition studies are controversial

Stanford Medicine, Scope Blog from

… Why are nutrition studies so often unreliable?

The question was debated in a scholarly squabble this past month by nutrition specialist Christopher Gardner, PhD, and John Ioannidis, MD, DSc, who focuses on the accuracy and reliability of scientific studies. The two met to debate a controversial statement: Most studies on the effect of nutrition and diet are false.

Ioannidis, a nutrition study skeptic, believes that it’s true. Many nutrition studies, he said, are fraught with design errors: Participants are often not randomized and the data of the studies are frequently kept private. Perhaps even more problematically, large food industries have been caught offering financial incentives to scientists.

And there’s more — the majority of nutrition studies, Ioannidis said, are observational epidemiology studies, in which researchers passively collect information from a sample of a certain population and draw conclusions that extend to the whole. So for example, say a researcher wanted to study the effect of broccoli on cancer risk, and they collect information through a national survey.

 

Super Bowl 2019: Tom Brady’s diet book makes some strange health claims

Vox, Julia Belluz from

… it’s Brady’s diet — and the TB12-branded nutritional bars and dietary supplements prominently featured throughout the book — that he believes truly underpins his success as an athlete.

“It really doesn’t matter how much exercise you do,” Brady writes, “if you’re not eating the right food and providing your body the right nutrients.”

For Brady, the “right foods” are “alkalizing” and “anti-inflammatory.” Alkaline foods lower his pH level, he writes, which can help with a range of ailments, from boosting low energy to preventing bone fractures. (He’s wrong here.) Anti-inflammatory foods, meanwhile, supposedly enhance athletic performance and help speed recovery.

 

Will Sports Betting Transform How Games Are Watched, and Even Played?

The New York Times Magazine, Bruce Schoenfeld from

… Gambling on sports became explicitly legal in Nevada in 1949. Until recently, the prospect of it spreading beyond that state’s borders was treated as potentially ruinous by the franchise owners and commissioners who ruled over sports. They feared that it would alter the relationship between fans and their favorite teams, and that gambling would expose athletes to underworld characters trying to manipulate games. Eventually, the cautionary tale went, the competition in even the biggest leagues would be indistinguishable from the manufactured plotlines of pro wrestling or old-time roller derby. Gambling on sports was already happening, of course — at Las Vegas casinos, on illegal internet sites, at the corner bar — yet somehow that hadn’t made it more palatable. “Even five years ago,” says Steve Murray, a partner with Leonsis in the venture-capital firm that has invested in many of these businesses, “you would have had a hard time finding a single owner in any of these leagues saying that gambling was a good idea. You wouldn’t have been able to do it.”

Since then, attitudes seem to have changed abruptly. It’s now difficult to find anyone inside sports who opposes gambling. In part that’s because the leagues and their investors have come to see how much they stand to gain. But it’s also a result of insiders like Leonsis evangelizing to anyone who would listen: in owners’ meetings, in conversations with sponsors, even with U.S. congressmen during a 2017 gambling conference on Capitol Hill. “He’s a visionary, and he speaks quite eloquently about what the future opportunities are,” says Gary Bettman, the N.H.L.’s commissioner, who until recently strongly opposed gambling on sports. “He has been at the forefront of pushing us to make sure we’re as knowledgeable as we can be. I get emails on this from him daily — more than daily.”

 

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