Applied Sports Science newsletter – March 4, 2019

Joel Embiid said the reason behind his decision to sit out the past several games with left knee soreness — including Saturday night’s nationally televised showdown with the Golden State Warriors — is that he’s focusing on his long-term health.

“It’s all about long-term preservation and making sure I’m ready not just for the playoffs, but also for the next 15 years,” Embiid said before Saturday night’s game at Wells Fargo Center. “Knowing the team, what we’ve been through, and knowing me and I like to push everything, I like to play through anything. We just felt like it was better to preserve.

“I didn’t feel good, but it’s getting better.”

Initially reticent to give a specific time frame for his return, Embiid eventually relented and said — after saying he’d be back “soon” several times — that he plans to return sometime next week.

The Warriors’ decision Thursday night to rest forward Kevin Durant against the Magic didn’t require any training-room debates or deep schedule analysis. With 61 games played, Durant was Golden State’s only player who had yet to miss an appearance this season.

“He’s just wiped out,” Warriors head coach Steve Kerr said of Durant, who also started the NBA All-Star Game on Feb. 17 in Charlotte, N.C. “He’s tired. He’s been going at it hard.”

That Durant has a chance to top Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as the league’s all-time points leader speaks almost as much to Durant’s durability as it does his scoring ability. In his previous 11 NBA seasons, Durant has played at least 80 games four times, including all 82 in 2009-10.

… [J.D.] Martinez suggested Bradley call Craig Wallenbrock, a 72-year-old hitting savant that had helped him rebuild his own swing.

Wallenbrock is essentially the Dr. Frankenstein that turned Martinez into a baseball-bashing monster. He’s also a close confidant of hitting coach Tim Hyers, so everybody in the Red Sox clubhouse was on board.

“We share ideas like mad scientists working together,” Hyers said. “It’s really fun. For a hitting coach, we love doing that.”

“(Martinez) was finding that he was trying to help so many of his teammates out that he wasn’t able to do the drills he likes to do,” Wallenbrock said. “So he gave Jackie my number. Said, ‘By phone isn’t the best way to do it, but maybe you can start sending Craig some film and he can talk to you, exchange thoughts, and maybe he can make a little video from time to time that might help you.’”

… “Our findings suggest that the common behavior of burning the candle during the week and trying to make up for it on the weekend is not an effective health strategy,” said senior author Kenneth Wright, an Integrative Physiology professor and director of the Sleep and Chronobiology Lab.

Previous research by Wright and others has shown that insufficient sleep can boost risk of obesity and diabetes, in part by boosting the urge to snack at night and decreasing insulin sensitivity – or the ability to regulate blood sugar. Some adverse metabolic health impacts can kick in after just one night of lost sleep, recent CU Boulder research has shown.

Sleeping in on the weekend can help the body recover mildly during those two days, studies suggest. But the effects don’t last.

What’s happening: The Toronto Blue Jays are one of a handful of teams that will make batting practice optional this season, preferring their hitters to focus on indoor cage work, instead, The Athletic’s John Lott reports (subscription). Here’s why:

It’s more beneficial

… “I am in the first season in England, and I started to understand some things,” he told Sky Sports.

“Now I realise that here it takes longer and it is more difficult because the mentality is different.

“For example, with an English player it is very easy to have a very good intensity during training, but it is very difficult to have a session only about tactics.

… The NPD found that US smartwatch ownership grew from 12 percent in 2017 to 16 percent in 2018, largely driven by younger buyers. The firm found that nearly a quarter of people between ages 18 to 34 now have a smartwatch.

… Clubs increasingly use their growing funds and staff numbers to search for incremental gains, both on and off the field.

It’s impossible to know whether Barça’s Innovation Hub is trendsetting within football, because their rivals are secretive. “Other clubs are afraid of sharing what they know,” says Bartomeu, who (mostly) does want to share.

Ignacio Palacios-Huerta, a director of the football club Athletic Bilbao and a professor at the London School of Economics, says that in football data analytics, at least, “there is clear leadership by one club: Liverpool. They have a group of four or five PhDs in maths and physics, and they know football.”

But Palacios-Huerta praises Barça for letting the hub’s specialists research freely. And Barcelona’s innovations may be wider-ranging than Liverpool’s.

… [Martin] O’Reilly muses that, in spite of the competitive nature of the sports they are measuring, sports science itself has only been able to progress by incrementally building on the work of colleagues in pursuit of mutual beneficence. During the last 2 years of his degree in Sports and Exercise Engineering, he completed placements with wearable sensor company Shimmer in Dublin. “During the placement, I had a bit of down time and started to explore how the sensors I was working with during the day, could be applied to the Strength and Conditioning (S&C) training I was doing in the evenings for my own sporting performance.”

Output Sports is the fruit of the idea that took root during this time. However, O’Reilly is quick to point to the aid of collaboration in helping the concept evolve and develop. “This [their progress] is thanks to domain expertise from Darragh and Prof Brian Caulfield and engaging with system users (gym-goers, sports coaches etc.)”. Not merely satisfied to make up the numbers, the Output Sports team is determined to create “something that adds true value in S&C environments.”

Using just a single wearable motion sensor Output Sports tests and tracks multiple components of athletic performance, combining their top-of-the-range equipment with machine-learning algorithms trained on unique athletic data sets during their 5+ years of interdisciplinary research at UCD.

Frank Lampard believes Dubai’s nanoM sports health assessment clinic is the “way forward for sport” as professional athletes look to manage their bodies better and prevent injury – especially as they enter their twilight years.

Former England and Chelsea star Lampard, now Derby County manager, became an ambassador for the clinic, located at the Golden Mile Galleria on Palm Jumeirah when he officially opened it in November 2017.

The 17,000 square foot facility, part of the Emirates Healthcare Group, houses the latest equipment to analyse health, fitness, functionality and performance capabilities of visiting athletes.

Objective We undertook this qualitative study within an international circus company—Cirque du Soleil—to explore the narrative of artists and the artistic team in regards to injuries and their prevention and to describe the prevention of injuries from a systems thinking lens.

Methods Focus groups (FG) with artists and semistructured individual interviews with the artistic team were conducted in six selected shows. The structure of the interviews and FGs concerned the themes: ‘injury’, ‘injury-related factors’ and ‘injury prevention’. Data were analysed through comparative data analysis based on Grounded Theory. Concept mapping and systems thinking approaches were used to design a map of participants’ views on how to prevent injuries.

Results Injury was mainly described based on performance limitation. The factors mostly mentioned to be related to injury occurrence were physical load factors. Many of these factors were said to be connected and to influence each other. Injury prevention was mapped as a multilevel system, composed by artist-related factors (eg, technique and life style) and extrinsic factors (eg, touring conditions and equipment) that integrate different strategies and stakeholders.

Conclusion Our study reinforces the importance of multilevel injury prevention approaches with shared responsibility and open communication among stakeholders. [full text]

… It turns out, despite decades of diet fads and government-issued food pyramids, we know surprisingly little about the science of nutrition. It is very hard to do high-quality randomized trials: They require people to adhere to a diet for years before there can be any assessment of significant health outcomes. The largest ever — which found that the “Mediterranean diet” lowered the risk for heart attacks and strokes — had to be retracted and republished with softened conclusions. Most studies are observational, relying on food diaries or the shaky memories of participants. There are many such studies, with over a hundred thousand people assessed for carbohydrate consumption, or fiber, salt or artificial sweeteners, and the best we can say is that there might be an association, not anything about cause and effect. Perhaps not surprisingly, these studies have serially contradicted one another. Meanwhile, the field has been undermined by the food industry, which tries to exert influence over the research it funds.

Now the central flaw in the whole premise is becoming clear: the idea that there is one optimal diet for all people.

NBA teams are letting 3s fly like never before. Just how far can offenses go? The numbers and the game’s biggest 3-point progressives suggest long-range shooting may only keep growing from here.

It’s been clear for some time: Craig Kimbrel is not walking back through that ninth-inning door.

But who is? For the Red Sox, there might not be just one answer.

As the Red Sox contemplate how they’ll handle ninth-inning responsibilities in a post-Kimbrel world, the team seems increasingly open to the possibility of taking a flexible approach to the later stages of the game rather than making an unwavering commitment to one person for the last three outs.

… Perhaps, in the early months of the season, there were mitigating circumstances: the lingering effects of that shoulder injury sustained in the Champions League final, the one that threatened his involvement in the World Cup and that hampered his performances in Russia.

And perhaps, even as the injury has healed, its effects are still felt. Klopp dismisses any notions that Salah has lost confidence, but the heavy touches when he was once so deft, the slight stumbles when he was once so sure: they are the surefire signs.

Salah’s newfound profile means he has to deal with the closer attentions of opposing defenders. He has had to do so, at times, in the absence of much creative assistance from Liverpool’s midfield, and for much of the year in a new position, too. He has not been able to pick up the burden when he is not quite as fluid, not quite as free as he used to be.