Applied Sports Science newsletter – June 27, 2019

… “You can play the perfect defense, and they’re going to come off these screens and pindowns and they’re going to bury a couple of shots,” Toronto assistant coach Adrian Griffin told CBS Sports. “You can do everything right and they’re still going to score. You just have to have the fortitude to come back the next trip down and say, ‘OK, I’m going to lock in, I’m going to get back into his body, I’m going to keep contesting. And I’m going to keep coming and I’m going to keep coming.’ And I think that’s the approach that our team has taken.”

To win big in the NBA, the assistant coaches agreed, resilience is non-negotiable. The schedule is unforgiving, and it pushes you the same way Golden State does. When things go wrong, players must focus on the next play, the next game. Coaches have to believe their team is an adjustment or two away from getting back on track.

Petr Cech has returned to Chelsea to take up a new senior role – although not the Technical Director job he had been touted for.

The 37-year-old, who played for the Blues for 11 years, will be the club’s Technical and Performance Advisor, providing a bridge between the board and coaching staff. His return had been widely predicted, but as a pure Technical Director overseeing the football functions at Stamford Bridge rather than an advisor.

In a statement, the club said: “The focus of the job will be to provide advice on all football and performance matters throughout the club as well as embed and facilitate strong links between our men’s and Academy teams, ensuring that the various support departments are working together effectively.

According to a recent survey by the Society of Human Resource Management, 97 percent of employers say that reliability is a very or extremely important qualification for an entry-level job; it’s at the top of nearly everyone’s list. How do parents help their kids learn to be reliable—people whom others can trust to consistently do their best work?

One place to start is to teach kids the importance of practice. Kids practice to reach all kinds of goals—writing their names, dribbling a basketball, playing a song on the guitar. But they aren’t always motivated to practice, and they don’t always practice in the right way.

Turns out, airplanes have horns. That’s what neuroscientist Erik Herzog discovered biking home from work one morning in rural North Carolina.

Spaced out and groggy from a two-week schedule based on 28-hour days, Herzog, who studies circadian rhythms, had woken up four hours later each day. In effect, he suffered from jetlag every morning, each day off by another four hours. Herzog’s brain grew so foggy that on that particular morning as he took his usual shortcut through a small airport, he failed to look both ways.

That’s when he learned airplanes will honk at you. “As I looked over my shoulder, I saw an airplane coming down on the runway that I was biking along,” he said. “I had to swerve out of the way of this airplane.”

Even if you never get close to being hit by an airplane, jet lag and irregular sleep schedules play havoc with your biological clock — and your health.

… I’ve learned to recognize and value things that make me feel this way because I notice they lead to the most growth. In running or in life, I’ve found it really important to not shy away from races, workouts, exercises, or experiences that I know I’m not great at or familiar with. It’s a fine balance between preserving your focus and confidence and discovering and sharpening weak areas, but I think it’s an important part of making a breakthrough.

Chloe Werle grew up playing soccer, including playing varsity in university and dreaming of one day making the National Team. Once she realized that playing at the highest level wasn’t the path for her, she set her sights on working to support athletes in their quest to perform on the international stage.

A graduate of the University of Manitoba with a Bachelors in Kinesiology, Chloe was hired by Canadian Sport Institute Ontario (CSIO), in partnership with Canada Soccer, as one of the first Sport Scientist Apprentices within the Canadian Olympic and Paralympic Sport Institute Network (COPSI Network). In her role she began working with the U17 National Excel Women’s Program and the U15-U18 Ontario Regional Excel (REX) Women’s Program based at Bill Crothers Secondary School in Markham. Currently, Chloe is completing her Master of Science in Rehabilitation Sciences.

As a Soccer Scientist her day-to-day includes working with the athletes and coaches to ensure the players are progressing in their development and are fit for competition. This includes balancing their technical and tactical skillset with the physical side – strength and conditioning – load monitoring, heart rate analysis, and GPS analysis; their recovery program, and monitoring nutritional plans.

… The Dunning-Kruger Effect in Coaching

As a coach, the journey from being a novice to an expert is a challenging one. Only the most committed reach their destination. To do so, the greatest barrier coaches must overcome is an internal one, in recognizing what they don’t know. Failing to clear this barrier usually occurs because of too narrow a conceptualization of performance and how to enhance it. Before you say “he’s talking about someone else”, my academic research tells us that the majority of endurance coaches typically focus on biophysical “stuff” (i.e. focusing on developing the physiological engine through training load prescription). However, human performance is complex and multifactorial, in which as coaches we must consider environmental, social, mental, and sometimes spiritual factors, too. Few ever get close to fully understanding how they all interact together. But, not recognizing the importance of and being able to account for complexity in our decision making suggests lack of expertise.

Inflated ego and overconfidence are also markers of “stupidity.” The dichotomy is that people are often attracted to and more likely to follow egotistical, confident people as these attributes can be mistaken for leadership qualities. As coaches, we are judged through association with successful athletes, too. If a coach works with one or two high-profile winners, then it’s far more likely that they’ll attract even more. When this happens, that self-confidence and ego will grow at a rate that is often greatly disproportionate to expertise.

BACKGROUND:

The aim of this study was to quantify power and acceleration metrics in elite soccer matches to gain an insight into positional demands and match-related fatigue patterns.
METHODS:

Elite players (n = 212, observations = 522) were analysed during 50 matches of the Italian Serie A using a semi-automatic tracking system (K-Sport, Montelabbate, PU, Italy – Stats, Leeds, UK) during the 2015/16 season. A principal component analysis (PCA) was performed to find the latent variables that better explain the huge amount of data collected; an ANOVA was performed to find differences among positional roles and a mixed factorial analysis of mixed data (FAMD) was carried out to investigate the patterns of fatigue over time.
RESULTS:

Power and Acceleration were defined as the latent variables out of the 19 investigated that provided most of the variance (90.39%); significant differences among roles were found (p<0.05; Effect Size (ES) as ω2>0.14) and significant patterns of fatigue (p<0.05) with a moderate to large ES were observed over time in some of the key performance indicators. CONCLUSIONS:

The data demonstrate that there are implications for developing power and acceleration in training sessions and assessing these components during a game. With the introduction of ‘live streaming’ of GPS data, the movement patterns could be observed in real time, and interchanges could be made before the onset of fatigue and before evident reductions in performance might be observed.

Haptoglobin (Hp) plays an important part in the binding and transporting of hemoglobin. The plasma concentration of Hp increases several-fold in carcinoma, tissue necrosis, coronary artery, schizophrenia, and in the event of an inflammatory stimulus such as infection, injury, or malignancy, whether local (vascular) or systemic (extravascular).

Hp has been reported to be involved in modulating the immune response, autoimmune diseases, and major inflammatory disorders. Elevated Hp levels are sometimes found in diabetes mellitus, renal disease, and endocrine imbalance. Diseases such as intravascular hemolysis, anemia, malaria, liver disease, jaundice, cirrhosis, mononucleosis, and transfusion of incompatible blood can significantly lower the amount of Hp in plasma. Clearly, Hp has a great clinical importance as a biomarker in diagnostics and monitoring the response of multiple diseases.

Currently, electrochemiluminescence (ECL), an electrochemical phenomenon in which light is emitted without producing heat when high voltage is applied to a suitable electrochemical system, has become an important and powerful analytical technology. As a result, ECL-based biosensors have gained immense popularity. However, ECL behavior greatly depends on electrode materials, dimensions, surface area, electronic conductivity, and size.

Your head is pounding, your muscles are cramping, and your heart is racing. Then you get dizzy and the vomiting starts. Heatstroke kills thousands of people every year. This is what it feels like—and how to know when you’re in danger.

Nearly a year after Braeden Bradforth’s death following his first day of junior college practice, his family is still dealing with the loss of its “gentle giant.” Meanwhile, his mother has fought for answers about the day she lost a son, not knowing how hard that fight would be.

Nearly everyone these days seems to be promoting whole foods over processed foods. Think about how terms like “whole grain,” “clean eating,” “all natural,” “functional” and “local” have taken over the lexicon. Yet, until now, there has been scant scientific evidence to support the eat-whole-foods movement.

In recent weeks, the British Medical Journal published two new populations studies (study 1; study 2) that found a lower risk of heart disease risks and greater longevity among adults who eat less processed food. And a far more rigorous investigation from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) showed that subjects eating ultra-processed foods consumed significantly more calories and gained more weight than the same subjects when they ate minimally processed or whole foods.

The NIH paper, published in Cell Metabolism in an issue dated Aug. 6, also offered some surprising theories to explain the benefits of minimally processed foods. At the same time, it acknowledged that ultra-processed foods make several important contributions to the nation’s diet.

… While Dortmund could never quite shelter themselves from football’s mega-spending predators, a powered-up Liverpool have been able to tie down their major assets with minimal fuss.

Mohamed Salah, Sadio Mane, Roberto Firmino, Jordan Henderson, Joe Gomez, Trent Alexander-Arnold and Andy Robertson have signed new, extended contracts with Liverpool over the past year. Virgil van Dijk wants to agree a new deal and Divock Origi has been offered new terms, with Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, Joel Matip and James Milner among those expected to be next in line. In a market where many of the game’s chief forces like Real, Bayern, Barcelona and Man United have to spend considerably to reconstruct their squads, the Merseysiders have prioritised a policy of retention.

As one source explained to ESPN FC: “Those clubs would happily trade places with Liverpool. We have stability at a time when so much is left up in the air around Europe.

… “Everybody will talk about high-performance sport, that there are tough conversations and it is a challenging environment, but we’re trying to create an environment that is high-challenge but is also high-support as well.”

As Harrington sees it, the structural weaknesses within British Cycling were exposed in part by its “massive growth spurt”. Despite the best intentions, she argues, at a time where “very charismatic, entrepreneurial leaders” had generated tremendous competitive momentum, the governance mechanisms needed to sustain the organisation were not put in place.

When she arrived at British Cycling, she adds, she did not discover “institutional bullying or sexism or discrimination” but a need to address a lack of “process and policies – things like having a whistleblowing policy for athletes, putting some vehicles in place for riders to raise concerns if things weren’t going to plan”.

The NHL Players’ Association had the chance to use the salary cap escalator to increase the spending limit by five percent. It’s believed, however, the NHLPA held firm at 0.5 percent. The resulting cap is roughly $1.5 million lower than projected, and that only hurts the players.