Applied Sports Science newsletter – August 2, 2019

Warriors star Klay Thompson, in his first in-depth interview since suffering a torn ACL in Game 6 of the NBA Finals in June, characterized the injury as “obviously the most tragic part of sports,” saying he was humbled when Golden State then offered him a five-year max contract.

“I knew I did something. But I’ve never had the severity of an ACL injury or an injury that bad,” Thompson told ESPN’s Cari Champion in an interview during a “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare” promotional event Thursday in Los Angeles. “So me, personally, I didn’t think it was that bad, initially. My adrenaline was so high being Game 6, whatever. I thought I sprained my knee; that’s all I thought it was.

Training fatigue is a super common component of building mileage whether it’s for a marathon, half marathon or triathlon. We’re requesting that each week the body do just a bit more, which requires breaking the body down to build it up.

But we can combat the traditional symptoms of burnout and training fatigue with a few smart switches…and yes, indeed I’m going to tell you exactly what those are today. Whether you implement them is entirely in your hands.

The first thing we have to look at is the cause of your fatigue, how deep of a hole you may have dug for yourself (i.e. adrenal fatigue) and then what you can do to start feeling better ASAP.

… it’s neat to see this experiment, from a research team led by James Hardy of Bangor University’s Institute for the Psychology of Elite Performance, on the critical role of something I never would have considered: grammar.

Hardy and his colleagues decided to compare the effectiveness of self-talk using first-person or second-person pronouns—that is, the difference between telling yourself “I can do this!” or “You can do this!” They didn’t just pluck this idea out of thin air. Previous research, for example, has suggested that second-person self-talk enhances public speaking performance and reduces the associated stress, possibly because it enhances “self-distancing.” Stepping outside your immediate experiences and emotions, and viewing them instead from the detached perspective of a supportive onlooker, allows you to take the fear of failure less personally and to make better decisions. Scott Douglas’s excellent article on the new study, for Runner’s World, gets into some of these ideas in greater depth, but I’d like to focus here on the practical side of how to actually implement this.

Not feeling rested after your first night away from home is normal and has traditionally been associated to psychological factors or fatigue from having travelled the day before. This phenomenon is known as the First-Night Effect (FNE), and we now understand that this fatigue originates in the brain due to a habit likely acquired over the course of our evolution. Using neuroimaging techniques and sleep studies, the department of cognitive sciences, linguistics and psychology at Brown University in the United States demonstrated that half of our brain remains awake that first night, causing us to sleep more lightly. As a result, the possibility of waking up during the night is much greater, and this impacts our rest.

When researchers asked elite athletes about the best recovery modalities, they all rated sleep among the top three most important practices for athletic performance, regardless of gender, age, or sport.

The need for sleep is one of the single things that connects all humans. For athletes, it restores our bodies, allowing for critical physical repair. But even further, sleep is the magical tool to enhancing athletic performance. And we can all access it.

But before we get into how sleep affects athletic performance, let’s talk about how we define “performance”.

… Art Jipson sets a timer on his Apple Watch to chime 10 minutes before the end of each class. It’s quiet enough that not all of his students will hear it, said Jipson, an associate professor of criminal justice and sociology at the University of Dayton. But those who notice know what comes next: A few minutes later, Jipson will usually pause and say something like “Ok, let’s reflect on what we just did.”

At that point, it’s time for students — not the professor — to distill what was covered in the class period. Jipson carries a list of his own takeaways, but mostly listens and writes down what students say. Then he asks them to describe strengths and weaknesses of the class period. A student might say, for instance, that it covered too much material. The goal is for students to give succinct responses, and Jipson emphasizes that there are no right or wrong answers.

OBJECTIVES:

Collegiate student-athletes often engage in health-risk behaviors such as alcohol misuse and hazing, but the literature in this domain lacks evidence pertaining to how peers shape attitudes towards such behaviors. We investigated how peer acceptance and social cohesion relate to attitudes towards alcohol use, marijuana use, drinking and driving, playing through a concussion, performance enhancing substance use, and hazing.
DESIGN:

Cross-sectional survey.
METHODS:

Participants were 387 NCAA athletes from 23 intact teams. Multilevel modeling was used to examine the extent that health-risk attitudes clustered within teams and enabled us to disentangle individual-level and group-level effects of peer acceptance and social cohesion.
RESULTS:

Intraclass correlation coefficients revealed that health-risk attitudes clustered within teams. At the individual-level, student-athletes who perceived higher levels of peer acceptance, relative to teammates, held riskier attitudes towards alcohol use, playing through a concussion, and hazing. Meanwhile, those who perceived higher levels of social cohesion relative to teammates held less risky attitudes towards playing through a concussion. At the group-level, teams with greater peer acceptance held less risky attitudes towards playing through a concussion, whereas teams with greater social cohesion held riskier attitudes toward playing through a concussion.
CONCLUSIONS:

These data indicated that health-risk behaviors may cluster within teams, and that peer acceptance and cohesiveness are differentially associated with attitudes toward risky behavior. Given that peer influence is a multilevel phenomenon, it is prudent that prevention efforts leverage social processes within teams, while reducing pressures to engage in risky behaviors.

… Currently there is no reliable, easy way to measure hydration levels in these patients, who number around half a million in the United States. However, researchers from MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital have now developed a portable sensor that can accurately measure patients’ hydration levels using a technique known as nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) relaxometry.

Such a device could be useful for not only dialysis patients but also people with congestive heart failure, as well as athletes and elderly people who may be in danger of becoming dehydrated, says Michael Cima, the David H. Koch Professor of Engineering in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering.

… An ingestible electronic device developed by a French company called Body Cap, which looks like a cold capsule, measures body temperature at 30-second intervals and will store the measurements for up to 16 hours. The data can be downloaded via bluetooth, using a handheld device held within a metre of the athlete’s stomach. According to sports scientist Trent Stellingwerff, Director of Performance Solutions at the Canadian Sport Institute Pacific, such data is extremely useful in helping athletes know how to effectively cool themselves at the world championships in Doha this year and in Tokyo next year.

… In the search for answers to what’s been described as a global sporting “epidemic”, a group of academics from the University of Michigan in 2013 began investigating whether material fatigue, or accumulated ACL microdamage at a molecular level, rather than a single-force incident, could be to blame for ACL failure during normal athletic activity.

They argue that just as bridges, aircraft and machine components can, over time and with repeated use, suffer from material fatigue and fail at stress levels considerably lower than their tensile or yield strength, so too might this be the case with many ACL injuries, given that 70 per cent of them are non-contact.

Sports injury management often requires a specially concocted recipe unique to the athlete and his or her respective sport, which includes a period of rest or activity modification, rehabilitation, and sometimes surgical intervention. Another consideration in this assessment is gaining a proper understanding of the athlete’s movement patterns and how this may increase injury risk or affect overall performance. If appropriately used, biomechanical analysis can provide a useful extension to a sports physician’s physical exam.

Sports biomechanical analysis has been gaining greater interest and popularity, with cutting edge sports performance centers popping up in major cities across the country. Some target their services to professional athletes, Olympians, or collegiate athletes; while others are appealing to a broader population of different ages and skill levels. Just like any medical intervention, I find it important to understand the potential value in utilizing the particular intervention in your practice, while also recognizing its limitations. Biomechanical analysis is no exception.

Australian freestyle swimmer Shayna Jack claims she’s innocent – that she did not knowingly take the banned substance Ligandrol, but that it may have entered her body through a contaminated supplement.

Earlier this week, the news broke that Jack had tested positive in June, before competing at the world swimming championships in South Korea.

For many, it would have been the first they’d heard of Ligandrol and the class of drugs known as SARMs – Selective Androgen Receptor Modulators.

Manchester United displaced Arsenal last season as the Premier League team relying most heavily on graduates of their own academy.

United’s famed youth system produced the most players across the Premier League as a whole for the third year in succession, but the tally of minutes given to homegrown players has previously been the Gunners’ domain.

For the 2018-19 season, however, United’s academy did the double as almost a quarter of their playing time went to talent developed in Carrington.

When Daniel Carcillo debuted in the NHL back in 2006-07, the clichés were still intact. The fourth-line goons patrolling the ice for a few minutes per game. The ridiculous and reductive staged brawls for the coliseum crowds. All of those dusty “I went to a fight, and a hockey game broke out!” jokes were still grounded in reality: 384 games featured at least one fighting major that season, or 31.2% of all games.

That NHL doesn’t exist anymore when it comes to fisticuffs. In the 2018-19 season, the NHL had fewer than 200 games with a fighting major, marking the first time in the modern era that the total dipped that low. Today, the fourth-liners are cost-efficient skill players instead of goons, and staged fights are a rarity without those pugilists on the rosters.

What determines a team’s home advantage, and why does it change with time? Is it something about the rowdiness of the hometown crowd? Is it something about the location of the team? Or is it something about the team itself, the quality of the team or the styles it may or may not play? To answer these questions, season performance statistics were downloaded for all NBA teams across 32 seasons (83–84 to 17–18). Data were also obtained for other potential influences identified in the literature including: stadium attendance, altitude, and team market size. Using an artificial neural network, a team’s home advantage was diagnosed using team performance statistics only. Attendance, altitude, and market size were unsuccessful at improving this diagnosis. The style of play is a key factor in the home advantage. Teams that make more two point and free-throw shots see larger advantages at home. Given the rise in three-point shooting in recent years, this finding partially explains the gradual decline in home advantage observed across the league over time. [full text]