Applied Sports Science newsletter – June 26, 2019

Applied Sports Science news articles, blog posts and research papers for June 26, 2019

 

What happens when a pitcher loses his best pitch

ESPN MLB, Jesse Rogers from

If you’ve heard a pitcher say it once, you’ve probably heard him say it a hundred times.

“I lost the feel.”

No matter the age, experience or past success, for lefties and righties alike, losing the feel of the baseball — especially on one’s best pitch — is maddening. It can happen at any time, in the bullpen before a game, in the first inning or even midway through a start. Fortunately, many times pitchers find “it” again and can continue. It’s why you often see a hurler have one bad inning but look like Sandy Koufax before or afterward.

“There are times you wake up, feel great, go to the park, throw a pitch and it’s like you’ve never done this before,” Cubs starter Jon Lester said recently. “Other days, you feel like you couldn’t break a window pane and you go eight shutout. It’s the nature of baseball.”

 

Scottish cycling hero Skinner tells how the pursuit of glory led to depression and early retirement

Daily Mail Online (UK), Scottish Daily Mail, Hugh MacDonald from

What happens when the sheen dulls on the gold, when the miles have been travelled but the destination remains unknown, even unreachable, when everything has been won but something significant has been lost?

‘I was sitting in the Team Scotland pit and I felt trapped. I knew if I stood up or looked anyone in the eye I was going to burst into tears. I was in my kit, sat, for an hour-and-a-half. Trapped. Getting more anxious. It felt like being in a prison. I was texting friends, my mum, looking for help. I was thinking: “I can’t do this”. It was a complete breakdown. It felt like being in a prison.’

The speaker is Callum Skinner, Olympic gold medallist. The scene was the velodrome at the Commonwealth Games of 2018 in the Gold Coast. It was a Friday and Skinner had the heats for the keirin where he failed to progress. The next day, he was scheduled to take part in the sprint. But the dam had burst.

 

Which Team Will Be Able to Entice Kawhi Leonard?

The Ringer, Paolo Ugetti from

… Kawhi has mentioned that staying healthy is at the top of his priorities and it is clear that he and the Raptors are on the same page. Toronto can point to the resting plan it instituted this season (Kawhi played only 60 games, and didn’t play both games in any back-to-backs) and to director of sports science Alex McKechnie, who developed a relationship with Kawhi and should be considered a Toronto celebrity by now. The blueprint is there and so are the results; according to ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski, Toronto’s successes this season “closed the gap” between the Raptors and the Clippers. If it’s a straight-up basketball choice, it’s hard to argue with The North.

 

Your brain activity can be used to measure how well you understand a concept

EurekAlert! Science News, Dartmouth College from

As students learn a new concept, measuring how well they grasp it has often depended on traditional paper and pencil tests. Dartmouth researchers have developed a machine learning algorithm, which can be used to measure how well a student understands a concept based the student’s brain activity patterns.

 

Mental fatigue impairs time trial performance in sub-elite under 23 cyclists

PLOS One; Luca Filipas, Gabriele Gallo, Luca Pollastri, Antonio La Torre from

Purpose

This study investigates the effect of a mentally demanding response inhibitory task on time trial performance in sub-elite under 23 cyclists.
Methods

Ten under 23 road cyclists completed two separate testing sessions during which they performed two different cognitive tasks before completing a 30-min time trial on the cycle ergometer. In the experimental condition, 30 min of a standard cognitive task (Stroop task) was used to elicit mental fatigue; in the control condition, a non-demanding activity was carried out. Subjective workload and mood were measured before and after the treatments, and motivation was recorded before the time-trial. During the time trial, power, cadence, heart rate, and rate of perceived exertion were assessed. Blood lactate concentrations and heart rate variability (using the root mean square of the successive differences) were measured before and after the time trial.
Results

The Stroop task was rated more mentally (P < 0.001) and temporally (P < 0.001) demanding, effortful (P < 0.001), and frustrating (P = 0.001) than the control task; fatigue (P = 0.002) and vigor (P = 0.018) after the cognitive tasks were respectively higher and lower than in the control task. Mean power output (P = 0.007) and cadence (P = 0.043) were negatively affected by the Stroop task, while heart rate (P = 0.349), rating of perceived exertion (P = 0.710), blood lactate concentration (P = 0.850), and root mean square of the successive differences (P = 0.355) did not differ between the two conditions. Conclusion

A mentally demanding activity reduced the subsequent physical performance in sub-elite under 23 cyclists. Thus, avoiding cognitive efforts before training and races could improve performance of high-level athletes. [full text]

 

Why are elite athletes different? Take a look at their microbes

STAT, Elizabeth Cooney from

… Veillonella acts like a “metabolic sink” for lactate, the scientists suspect, converting into fuel the by-product of hard-working muscles runners blame for their aching legs in the latter part of long-distance races. The bacteria turn lactate into propionate, a short-chain fatty acid that’s a source of energy and can also be an anti-inflammatory, a Harvard-affiliated team of scientists reported Monday in Nature Medicine.

In theory that sets up a feedback loop: When the athletes are exercising, they are constantly producing lactate. They are also creating a niche in their microbiome for organisms that can use lactate as a primary energy source.

 

Today’s elite football matches require more targeted training

ScienceNordic, Nancy Bazilchuk, based on an article by Karoline Spanthus Bjørnfeldt from

Today’s elite football matches involve much more sprinting than just a few years ago, requiring players to accelerate and decelerate explosively at a moment’s notice. This new style of play puts huge demands on players’ muscles, especially towards the end of the game.

“Coaches need to adapt their training for football players so they are better equipped to cope with rapid changes in pace,” says Dan Fransson, a researcher at the Department of Nutrition and Sports Science at the University of Gothenburg, who has just completed his PhD.

The time that players need to recover after a match can also vary widely, he says.

 

Exclusive: England players sticking to specially tailored training regime to cope with demands of World Cup

The Telegraph (UK), Luke Edwards from

In their quest to find even the smallest of marginal gains at the World Cup, England have created a new training regime in order to get the players in peak physical condition for evening matches in France.

Whereas most club sides traditionally train in the morning, England have put on their most rigorous sessions in late afternoon or early evening, so their bodies are conditioned to deliver high intensity performance later in the day.

The idea, which is designed to replicate matchday routines, was part of the detailed planning designed specifically for this World Cup campaign.

Although there have been some early kicks off in the group stage, all of England’s games have kicked off at either 6pm or 9pm local time. Their Round of 16 clash with Cameroon will also start at 5:30pm in the northern town of Valenciennes.

 

Ski Racing and the Case for the Late Bloomer

Ski Racing, Sean Higgins from

… For us ski racers, we have our own underdog stories fueling the hopes and dreams of countless racers hoping to someday make it to the sport’s biggest stages. Double Olympic gold medalist Ted Ligety’s parents being told their son wasn’t good enough for the Park City Ski Team as a child, Lindsey Vonn going from being far from the fastest kid at tiny Buck Hill in Minnesota to becoming the Queen of Speed. Then there’s the story of how Austrian legend Hermann Maier was working as a bricklayer and ski instructor before making his World Cup breakthrough. All have been cited countless times as testaments to the underdog legend.

In today’s world of sports-science and data-driven training, what exactly is a “late bloomer” and are these famous underdog stories of the ski racing world really underdog stories at all?

 

Baseball devices pitching in on Pitt’s human performance research

University of Pittsburgh, University Times from

When he was coaching his son’s travel baseball teams, William “Buddy” Clark always got questions from players and their parents about how to improve their swing.

Those questions led Clark, a professor of mechanical engineering at the Swanson School, to develop the Swing Tracker, which is now used by about half the teams in Major League Baseball, including the Pirates, and more then 50 college baseball and softball teams. And his son, Russell Clark, is working for the company that was spun out from the invention.

As part of a project at Pitt to integrate athletics, human performance, academics, the Innovation Institute, the Office of Research and the Clinical and Translational Science Institute, Clark and the company he co-founded, Diamond Kinetics, are working with the Pitt baseball and softball teams to gather data and see how it translates into on-field performance.

“We get to do really complicated science and technology and data analysis and get to apply it right away,” Clark says.

 

Physimax Developing Mobile Injury Screening Product for General Public

SportTechie, Joe Lemire from

Physimax’s markerless motion-capture assessments are gaining traction in elite sports, including with the NBA’s Pacers and Jazz, MLB’s Rockies, the U.S. Tennis Association player development program, major college athletic programs such as Clemson and UNC, and Brazil’s most popular soccer club, Flamengo.

The equipment needed was already minimal—requiring only a 3D camera such as a Microsoft Kinect—but now could become near-universal. Physimax has adapted its algorithms to be compatible with the cameras on smartphones and tablets. The company, headquartered in Israel, said accuracy validation has been conducted in UNC’s Sports Medicine Research Laboratory. The adapted system is currently in field testing with a full release expected in the fourth quarter of 2019.

Dr. Thomas Noonan is an orthopedic surgeon who serves as the head team physician for the Rockies and a practitioner at the UCHealth Steadman Hawkins Clinic in Denver. While Noonan began using Physimax to screen professional ballplayers in spring training, he said the greatest potential for the technology is with public use. Steadman Hawkins replaced its motion capture system with Physimax after careful vetting.

 

Why Strava Is Getting More Social Than Ever

Outside Online, Joe Lindsey from

The company is growing fast, adding roughly a million users a month, and it has lofty goals to expand far beyond its old identity as a platform for logging rides and runs. Can it succeed?

 

Survey – NCAA coaches’ clout concerns trainers

ESPN, Paula Lavigne from

About 19% of college athletic trainers reported in a recent survey that a coach played an athlete who had been deemed “medically out of participation,” according to results released Tuesday by the National Athletic Trainers’ Association that reveal concerns about college coaches having too much influence in medical decision-making.

NATA president Tory Lindley said such actions put athletes at a “major risk.”

“To think that we’re in 2019 and that would still happen is really concerning,” he said. “It should be concerning for everyone involved in that institution. It should certainly be concerning to the parents, and certainly concerning to the athlete.”

 

In light of Jim Mora lawsuit, criticism emerges against football coach Chip Kelly

University of California-Los Angeles, Daily Bruin student newspaper, Sam Connon from

A few former Bruins have been taking some parting shots at coach Chip Kelly.

After three UCLA football alumni sued former coach Jim Mora in May for his role in their career-ending injuries, a handful of other Bruins have taken to social media to turn the conversation to Kelly.

Former high school football coach and football safety activist Kent Johnson compiled a list of seven other Mora-era players who medically retired while at UCLA, but linebacker Jaelan Phillips was quick to shift the blame.

Phillips tweeted that Kelly was the reason tight end Jimmy Jaggers, running back Soso Jamabo and others retired rather than Mora, who had recruited and coached all of them.

 

NCAA warns California over college athlete pay bill

The Sacramento Bee, Andrew Sheeler from

The president of the NCAA has warned that California’s universities could be barred from championship games if lawmakers pass a bill allowing student athletes to profit from their likeness.

The ban could cost universities millions of dollars in revenue, and expose them to NCAA fines.

NCAA President Mark Emmert’s letter to lawmakers aims to discourage them from passing the “Fair Pay to Play Act,” which would allow college athletes to receive compensation for things like brand sponsorships or signing with an agent. It would ban colleges from punishing student athletes for earning that kind of compensation.

 

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