Applied Sports Science newsletter – May 2, 2019

A shot like Damian Lillard’s series-clinching, 37-foot missile doesn’t just happen.

When the Portland Trail Blazers guard pulled up over Paul George to sink the three-pointer that ended the Oklahoma City Thunder’s season April 23, he made it look and sound as easy as could be. After playing 45 intense minutes, Lillard coolly dribbled the clock down and launched from more than 13 feet behind the three-point line. He explained later that he was in “comfortable range,” and his stoic reaction — a wave goodbye to the Thunder and a blank face as he was mobbed by teammates — only added to the air of effortlessness.

In fact, Lillard’s shot was the culmination of 12 months of intense and purposeful work with Phil Beckner, his longtime player development trainer, and Ben Kenyon, the Blazers’ sports performance coach. The three men decided at the beginning of last summer that extending Lillard’s range was their offseason priority. The goals were simple: to give Lillard a weapon that could stretch opposing defenses past the breaking point, and to prepare Lillard’s mind, body and shooting stroke for a moment just like the closing seconds of Game 5.

… Allen’s physical transformation, going from 210 pounds as a senior in high school to 260 pounds as a senior in college, has also taken his game to the next level.

“Here’s what I’ve noticed by him staying. If you watch the Georgia game from last season, those big 300-pound tackles were eating him up a little bit,” Fiore said. “He’s stronger, he’s a step quicker, he has a few more moves and he’s dominating those kids now. The other thing is he’s so much more multiple this year. He’s defending the run and the pass. He’s not just a pass rusher and it’s helped Kentucky’s defense.”

Balance tests are commonly used in clinical practice with applicability in injury prevention and return to sport decisions. While most sports injuries occur in a changing environment where reacting to a non-planned stimulus is of great importance, these balance tests only evaluate pre-planned movements without taking these dynamics environmental aspects into account. Therefore, the goal of this paper was to describe the development of a clinician-friendly test that respects these contextual interactions and to describe the test protocol of an adapted Y-balance test that includes environmental perception and decision-making.

Within the theoretical construct of balance and adaptability, balance errors were selected as outcome measures for balance ability and, visuomotor reaction time and accuracy are selected as outcome measures for adaptability. A reactive balance task was developed and described using the Y-balance test for the balance component, while the FitLight training system TM was chosen for the environmental perception and decision- making component of the test.

Take a peek at your feet. Are your big toe and second toe longer than the others? It might be a sign that you’re destined for running greatness. According to a study out of Ritsumeikan University in Japan, runners with distinctively longer forefoot bones may have an advantage over other distance runners.

The study, which compared the feet of 45 male distance runners to 45 untrained males, found the former displayed consistently longer big and second toes across all shoe sizes. What’s more, runners who had longer big toes than second toes clocked faster 5K times than their fellow runners with same-length or longer second toes. The same Japanese team that published the study on endurance runners also found the long-toe advantage in 400-meter sprinters.

But does this mean stubby-toed runners are doomed? Probably not.

… further insight into the psychology of coming second or third comes via Mark Allen, Sarah Knipler and Amy Chan of the University of Wollongong, who have released their findings based on the 2016 Olympic Games. These latest results, published in Journal of Sports Sciences, again challenge that initial eye-grabbing result that suggested bronze medallists are happier than silver medallists, but they support the idea that the nature of counterfactual thinking differs depending on whether athletes come second or third.

In the first study, the researchers had 20 participants rate how happy 486 Olympic medallists looked whilst standing on the podium. The participants based their judgments on full headshot photos of each athlete, deliberately cropped so that they could not see which medal the athletes had won.

Participants rated gold medal athletes as being significantly happier than those who won either silver or bronze. They rated bronze medallists as marginally happier than silver medallists, though by such a small margin that it is “likely to be trivial or negligible”, according to Allen and his team.

Elite soccer teams that participate in European competitions need to have players in the best physical and psychological status possible to play matches. As a consequence of congestive schedule, controlling the training load (TL) and thus the level of effort and fatigue of players to reach higher performances during the matches is therefore critical. Therefore, the aim of the current study was to provide the first report of seasonal internal and external training load that included Hooper Index (HI) scores in elite soccer players during an in-season period. Nineteen elite soccer players were sampled, using global position system to collect total distance, high-speed distance (HSD) and average speed (AvS). It was also collected session rating of perceived exertion (s-RPE) and HI scores during the daily training sessions throughout the 2015–2016 in-season period. Data were analysed across ten mesocycles (M: 1 to 10) and collected according to the number of days prior to a one-match week. Total daily distance covered was higher at the start (M1 and M3) compared to the final mesocycle (M10) of the season. M1 (5589m) reached a greater distance than M5 (4473m) (ES = 9.33 [12.70, 5.95]) and M10 (4545m) (ES = 9.84 [13.39, 6.29]). M3 (5691m) reached a greater distance than M5 (ES = 9.07 [12.36, 5.78]), M7 (ES = 6.13 [8.48, 3.79]) and M10 (ES = 9.37 [12.76, 5.98]). High-speed running distance was greater in M1 (227m), than M5 (92m) (ES = 27.95 [37.68, 18.22]) and M10 (138m) (ES = 8.46 [11.55, 5.37]). Interestingly, the s-RPE response was higher in M1 (331au) in comparison to the last mesocycle (M10, 239au). HI showed minor variations across mesocycles and in days prior to the match. Every day prior to a match, all internal and external TL variables expressed significant lower values to other days prior to a match (p<0.01). In general, there were no differences between player positions. [full text]

A University of Minnesota project combines robotics, simulated hugs and AI conversations in hopes of an eventual day-to-day stress tracking technology.

In a paper to be submitted by May 3 for the International Symposium on Wearable Computers, College of Design researchers detail a compression vest that can be used to relieve stress. A University of Minnesota Grand Challenges Initiative looks to combine three devices: a compression vest, a biometric-gathering bracelet and an at-home AI assistant into a stress management plan.

With the “Smart Hugs” technology, a person would speak to the AI in the morning about stressors they anticipate, and again in the evening to check in about stressful events. The bracelet would track the indicators of a stressor and the vest would alleviate stress via the simulation of a hug.

BioInteractive Technologies in Vancouver, Canada, develops a wearable device for individuals who have suffered from a hand injury. The aim of the patent-pending wristband is to help patients have a better recovery process.

GYANT, which is based in San Francisco, marries artificial intelligence, messaging and medical experts to help primary care patients. The company was part of the 2019 MassChallenge HealthTech cohort and the Cedars-Sinai accelerator’s fall 2017 cohort.

Montreal, Canada-based Hexoskin offers a wearable shirt for in-home rehabilitation. The product can measure heart rate, activity, breathing rate and sleep.

Life365 is a remote patient monitoring company headquartered in Tempe, Arizona. Its focus is on evaluating patient adherence to care plans in post-acute settings.

… Jarillo-Herrero has never been a slacker, but his activity has jumped several levels since his dramatic announcement in March 2018 that his lab at MIT had found superconductivity in twisted bilayer graphene — a one-atom-thick sheet of carbon crystal dropped on another one, and then rotated to leave the two layers slightly askew.

The discovery has been the biggest surprise to hit the solid-state physics field since the 2004 Nobel Prize–winning discovery that an intact sheet of carbon atoms — graphene — could be lifted off a block of graphite with a piece of Scotch tape. And it has ignited a frenzied race among condensed-matter physicists to explore, explain and extend the MIT results, which have since been duplicated in several labs.

The observation of superconductivity has created an unexpected playground for physicists. The practical goals are obvious: to illuminate a path to higher-temperature superconductivity, to inspire new types of devices that might revolutionize electronics, or perhaps even to hasten the arrival of quantum computers. But more subtly, and perhaps more important, the discovery has given scientists a relatively simple platform for exploring exotic quantum effects. “There’s an almost frustrating abundance of riches for studying novel physics in the magic-angle platform,” said Cory Dean, a physicist at Columbia University who was among the first to duplicate the research.

… The wearable sweat patch can be worn by athletes during practice or workouts to help them track hydration and nutrients they’ve lost through perspiration, reports Inc.

Users stick the three-inch-long patch to their forearm, and built-in sensors measure how much they sweat and how much sodium they lose during their workout. That info is relayed to Gatorade’s GX app, which then offers advice on how to refuel–with Gatorade, naturally.

This is a key part of the company’s plans for providing athletes with access to comprehensive information about their performance, according to Xavi Cortadellas, Gatorade’s head of innovation and design.

The aim of this review was to understand the use of wearable technology in sport in order to enhance performance and prevent injury. Understanding sports biomechanics is important for injury prevention and performance enhancement and is traditionally assessed using optical motion capture. However, such approaches are limited by capture volume restricting assessment to a laboratory environment, a factor that can be overcome by wearable technology. A systematic search was carried out across seven databases where wearable technology was employed to assess kinetic and kinematic variables in sport. Articles were excluded if they focused on sensor design and did not measure kinetic or kinematic variables or apply the technology on targeted participants. A total of 33 articles were included for full-text analysis where part]icipants took part in a sport and performed dynamic movements relating to performance monitored by wearable technologies. Inertial measurement units, flex sensors and magnetic field and angular rate sensors were among the devices used in over 15 sports to quantify motion. Wearable technology usage is still in an exploratory phase, but there is potential for this technology to positively influence coaching practice and athletes’ technique. [full text]

To complement traditional dietary surveys, which are costly and of limited scale, researchers have resorted to digital data to infer the impact of eating habits on people’s health. However, online studies are limited in resolution: they are carried out at country or regional level and do not capture precisely the composition of the food consumed. We study the association between food consumption (derived from the loyalty cards of the main grocery retailer in London) and health outcomes (derived from publicly-available medical prescription records of all general practitioners in the city). The scale and granularity of our analysis is unprecedented: we analyze 1.6B food item purchases and 1.1B medical prescriptions for the entire city of London over the course of one year. By studying food consumption down to the level of nutrients, we show that nutrient diversity and amount of calories are the two strongest predictors of the prevalence of three diseases related to what is called the “metabolic syndrome”: hypertension, high cholesterol, and diabetes. This syndrome is a cluster of symptoms generally associated with obesity, is common across the rich world, and affects one in four adults in the UK. Our linear regression models achieve an R^{2} of 0.6 when estimating the prevalence of diabetes in nearly 1000 census areas in London, and a classifier can identify (un)healthy areas with up to 91% accuracy. Interestingly, healthy areas are not necessarily well-off (income matters less than what one would expect) and have distinctive features: they tend to systematically eat less carbohydrates and sugar, diversify nutrients, and avoid large quantities. More generally, our study shows that analytics of digital records of grocery purchases can be used as a cheap and scalable tool for health surveillance and, upon these records, different stakeholders from governments to insurance companies to food companies could implement effective prevention strategies. [full text]

Eight out of 10 marijuana users in states where cannabis is legal say they partake in the drug shortly before or after exercise, and most report that it motivates them to work out, helps them enjoy exercise more and improves their recovery, according to surprising new CU Boulder research.

The paper, to be published Tuesday in the journal Frontiers in Public Health, is among the first to explore the complicated intersection between cannabis use and physical activity.

While many assume the former impedes the later, the data suggest otherwise.

“There is a stereotype that cannabis use leads people to be lazy and couch-locked and not physically active, but these data suggest that this is not the case,” said senior author Angela Bryan, a professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience and the Institute for Cognitive Science.

I want to try to explain the conceptual problem for the integrity of runing performance because of the potential of a shoe to enhance performance by upwards of 2%.

Let me try to do this by asking you to consider the following two statements, A and B. What you need to know is that only one of these can be true.

– they are not glamorous problems and most people aren’t trained well to tackle them
– 80% of these applications can be handled by a relatively simple model that is easy to use