Applied Sports Science newsletter – April 22, 2019

If Breanna Stewart needs some inspiration in her rehab and recovery from a ruptured right Achilles tendon, the Seattle Storm star and 2018 WNBA MVP can look toward former Olympic teammate Tamika Catchings.

The two were on the U.S. team that won gold at the Rio de Janeiro Games in 2016, which was Stewart’s first season in the WNBA and Catchings’ last. The former Indiana Fever standout knows well what Stewart is facing.

During a WNBA playoff game in Detroit on Sept. 3, 2007, Catchings went to make a cut, pushed off and suffered a torn right Achilles tendon. She was able to return to the Fever the following July and played in the Beijing Olympics in August. In all, she played in 25 of Indiana’s 34 games that 2008 season.

… Good news for Cousins: he did not aggravate the surgically repaired left Achilles tendon that had sidelined him for nearly a year. Bad news for Cousins: the center tore his left quadriceps muscle. That makes it “unlikely” Cousins will return for the Warriors’ playoff run, according to a league source.

“It’s so easy to reinjure this kind of injury if you come back too soon,” said James Gladstone, the chief of sports medicine at the Mount Sinai Health System in New York. “So I would imagine they would be pretty careful about it. I’m pretty sure they would put him through the routine before they send him back onto the court.”

… “I look at a running back as a sprinter. And running is actually in the title of my job, my occupation. My job is to run, and it’s to do it fast,” McCaffrey told STACK. “Everything I do is really pertinent to track. All of my speed work is with a track coach. All of my lifting is with a track coach. Those are the fastest people in the world. And at my position, being fast does not hurt. It’s a very big track-based program.”

That track coach is Brian Kula, owner of Kula Sports Performance. Their relationship dates back to McCaffrey’s time at Valor Christian High School (Highlands Ranch, Colorado), where Kula serves as the head track and field coach. McCaffrey was on Valor’s 4x200m relay team that set the Colorado state record. The two stayed in touch as McCaffrey went on to star at Stanford. After McCaffrey’s rookie NFL season, he came to Kula looking to enhance his speed.

… He told Optus Sport: “Probably in the Premier League sometimes, because of the money and the reluctance to injure players because they’re worth so much, they try to protect the players a little bit.

“I believe you build resilience into players and that protects them from injury, so we’ve had a much more aggressive training approach since I’ve been here.” [video, 3:51]

Research and experts say your muscles are actually more primed to qualify for (and run!) the Boston Marathon at age 35 than at 25.

A muscle contract, transfers load across the tendon into the attachment to another bone on the other side of a joint, sometimes across 2 joints. There can be a mechanical flaw/injury in the muscle or tendon, or the joint, if inflamed, can neurologically inhibit that muscle-tendon team. The journal abstract has a nice diagram looking at the potential cellular and molecular changes at the tendon interval.

… Researchers have long known about this phenomenon in an experimental setting, terming it the “first-night effect”. Sleep study participants often sleep poorly during their first experimental session in a new environment and sleep quality usually improves dramatically on the second night.

So what happens in the brain when people sleep in a new place? In our study, published today in Current Biology, we found poor sleep in an unfamiliar setting may be linked to an important function of the brain to protect the sleeper from potential danger.

… When running, landing the foot in front of the body increases the peak braking force, a horizontal force that occurs opposite the direction of travel. According to one recent study, conducted by researchers from the University of British Columbia-Vancouver, runners with the highest values of peak braking force were eight times more likely to sustain a running-related injury.

But thankfully there appears to be a solution. The same group of UBC researchers, led by 2:33 marathoner and physical therapist Dr. Chris Napier, found that the braking force can be modified by increasing step rate.

“Unbelievable,” was the reaction to what Channel 2 Investigates uncovered by one collegiate official.

Thursday night’s report detailed coaches and trainers for the University of Houston’s Women’s soccer program who had options to use physical punishment on players in recent years.

We’re onto the second day of announcements here at the Garmin Connect IQ Summit. The list from Day 1 is over on my previous post, though as noted the majority of those were developer focused (except the new iOS/Android Connect IQ apps, which I’m told as of this morning the Android app should be fixed). And while the theme of the summit is of course developers in general, I think you’ll find the nuggets of consumer goodness in today’s announcements.

Or at least, understand how they could be impactful for real-world scenarios to real-world normal people (and not just developers).

… Ultrasound, also known as sonography, is an imaging modality that converts an electrical current into high-frequency sound waves to produce real-time and dynamic images of the body. The sound waves generate an image of underlying soft tissue structures and bony surfaces with exquisite detail. This portable and safe modality can be used for both diagnostic and therapeutic purposes in sports medicine.

The diagnostic potential includes the diagnosis of tendon tears, tendinopathy, muscle strains or contusions, nerve entrapments, ligament sprains, joint effusions, arthritis and evaluation to look for foreign bodies. When traditional methods of management like rest, ice and anti-inflammatories fail to provide adequate relief, ultrasound offers another alternative to help guide injections. The therapeutic potential of ultrasound includes needle tenotomies, aspiration, lavage, barbotage and biopsies.

The type of guided injection can range from corticosteroid, hyaluronic acid (otherwise known as “gel”), platelet rich plasma, prolotherapy, and in some cutting-edge instances, stem cells. There have been multiple studies demonstrating that ultrasound guided injections are more accurate than palpation or “blind” injections. For example, one study demonstrated the accuracy of shoulder injection (also known as a subacromial subdeltoid bursa) was 100 percent with ultrasound verses 72 percent without ultrasound (1).

Scientists at the Laboratory of Organic Electronics have developed an ultra-sensitive heat sensor that is flexible, transparent and printable. The results have potential for a wide range of applications – from wound healing and electronic skin to smart buildings.

… now that teams have learned how to properly value a player’s skills, this sort of thing really is not much of problem anymore. Yes, you do get the occasional Eric Hosmer contract and Chris Davis contract that are still fair to criticize, but they are more the outliers than the norm.

Contract analysis over the past several years has focused more on how well a team has evaluated a player based on the contract given. Sometimes it is done purely on a $/WAR basis, a model that is fine as a start, but it is too oversimplified to draw conclusions on without further information. A lot of comprehensive analyses will conclude that a new contract is some degree of “overpay” or “underpay,” though often not to an excessive degree.

The advent of increased access to legal sports betting has created increased attention on various aspects of professional and collegiate sports that might be ripe for exploitation.

Chief amongst the concerns is the potential vulnerability of unpaid college athletes. New Jersey apparently saw such a concern as a reason for excluding in-state collegiate teams from legal wagering. How long will it be before we see uniform NCAA injury reports?

The University of Colorado hired a new football coach in December, and as coaches are wont to do, he talked tough.

“Our team, we will be physical,” Coach Mel Tucker said at his introductory news conference. “My dad always told me the name of the game is hit, hit, H-I-T. There is always a place on the field for someone who will hit.”

He was preaching that old-style pigskin religion. Unfortunately, Tucker, who came from the University of Georgia, runs a football program that has produced at least a half-dozen players — including several who played in the N.F.L. — who have killed themselves. Other former players are alive but afflicted by severe post-concussion problems.

Two university regents, dissenters from the Church of Hit, Hit and Hit, read Tucker’s remarks and shook their heads. A few days later, these heretics voted against his five-year, $14.75 million contract. They could not block the contract, but another cannon had been fired in the football concussion wars.