Applied Sports Science newsletter – September 14, 2019

BACKGROUND:

The variability of throwing metrics, particularly elbow torque and ball velocity, during structured long-toss programs is unknown.
HYPOTHESIS:

(1) Elbow torque and ball velocity would increase as throwers progressed through a structured long-toss program. (2) Intrathrower reliability would be high while interthrower reliability would be variable.
STUDY DESIGN:

Descriptive laboratory study.
LEVEL OF EVIDENCE:

Level 3.
METHODS:

Sixty healthy high school and collegiate pitchers participated in a structured long-toss program while wearing a validated inertial measurement unit, which measured arm slot, arm velocity, shoulder rotation, and elbow varus torque. Ball velocity was assessed by radar gun. These metrics were compared within and between all pitchers at 90, 120, 150, and 180 ft, and maximum effort mound pitching. Intra- and interthrower reliabilities were calculated for each metric at every stage of the program.
RESULTS:

Ball velocity significantly changed at each progressive throwing distance, but elbow torque did not. Pitching from the mound did not place more torque on the elbow than long-toss throwing from 120 ft and beyond. Intrathrower reliability was excellent (intraclass correlation coefficient >0.75) throughout the progressive long-toss program, especially on the mound. Ninety-one percent of throwers had acceptable interthrower reliability (coefficient of variation <5%) for ball velocity, whereas only 79% of throwers had acceptable interthrower reliability for elbow torque. CONCLUSION:

Based on trends in elbow torque, it may be practical to incorporate pitching from the mound earlier in the program (once a player is comfortable throwing from 120 ft). Ball velocity and elbow torque do not necessarily correlate with one another, so a degree of caution should be exercised when using radar guns to estimate elbow torque. Given the variability in elbow torque between throwers, some athletes would likely benefit from an individualized throwing program.
CLINICAL RELEVANCE:

Increased ball velocity does not necessarily equate to increased elbow torque in long-toss. Some individuals would likely benefit from individualized long-toss programs for rehabilitation.

A new study followed 602 overweight or obese adults using fitness trackers and found those who entered a competition game to boost their daily steps had the highest increase in physical activity when compared to groups with no, or different, rewards. … People exposed to competition added 920 steps a day to their activity levels compared to the control group, while the collaboration and support groups only added 600 steps,” said Dr. Mitesh Patel, who directs the Penn Medicine Nudge Unit, the world’s first behavioral design team embedded within a health system.

Monitoring fatigue is of vital importance to practitioners; however, logistics and concerns about reliability may impede the use of certain measures. This study aimed to quantify the reliability of potential measures of fatigue; a subjective wellness questionnaire, jump performance tests, and tri-axial accelerometer variables derived during submaximal shuttle running in elite youth soccer players. A secondary aim was to establish the minimum test duration that could be used for the submaximal shuttle run while maintaining good reliability. Seventeen male youth team players (age: 17.4 ± 0.5 years) were assessed on 2 occasions, spaced 7 days apart. Typical error, coefficient of variation (CV%), interclass correlation (ICC), and minimum detectable change were calculated for a subjective wellness questionnaire, countermovement jump (CMJ), squat jump (SJ) and drop jump contact time (DJ-CT), drop jump height (DJ-JH), and reactive strength (DJ-RSI). A novel submaximal shuttle running test was also used to assess tri-axial accelerometer data reliability. Results suggest that CMJ, SJ, DJ-CT, and DJ-RSI have good test-retest reliability (CV% = 4.5-7.7; ICC = 0.80-0.88); however DJ-JH did not show acceptable reliability (CV% = 6.0; ICC = 0.76). Good reliability was found for all tri-axial accelerometer variables during a 3-minute (2-minute analysis) submaximal shuttle run (CV% = 2.4-8.0; ICC = 0.81-0.95), except for % PlayerLoad anterior-posterior (%PLAP) (CV% = 7.2; ICC = 0.63). The subjective wellness questionnaire demonstrated poor reliability for all items (CV% = 11.2-30.0; ICC = 0.00-0.78). The findings from this study provide practitioners with valuable information about the reliability of a range of potential fatigue-monitoring measures. This can be used to help make accurate decisions about the magnitude of change in these assessments when used in practice.

Brittni Donaldson was almost literally born into basketball in Iowa, but even she could never have imagined her improbable path to becoming the league’s 10th current female assistant coach, and the youngest at just 26 years old.

Donaldson spent the last two seasons as a data analyst — i.e., advanced stats guru — in the Raptors’ front office before Masai Ujiri, Toronto’s president and alternate governor, and Nick Nurse, the head coach, picked her in mid-July to fill an opening on Toronto’s bench.

Female coaches play a key role in inspiring achievement in girls and young women, but their numbers are few and they often burn out and quit, sports leaders said on Thursday.

Women who coach sports like soccer need better support to stay in their jobs, said participants at a Beyond Sport conference, held ahead of meetings at the United Nations this month on development goals including gender equality.

Globally, fewer than one in 10 registered soccer coaches is female, according to FIFA, the international governing body of the game, and most coaches of the U.S. National Women’s Soccer League’s nine teams are men.

The All Blacks have timed their arrival in Japan perfectly despite a harsh introduction to the country’s climate, says an expert in physical performance in stressful conditions.

Images of the All Blacks visibly struggling in the heat and humidity in Japan have filtered back to New Zealand but Jim Cotter, a professor at the school of Physical Education at the University of Otago, reassured New Zealanders that they had given themselves enough time to adapt before their Rugby World Cup opener against South Africa on September 21.

As the NFL celebrates its 100th season this fall, technology continues to transform the sport. The league is upgrading stadiums to 5G networks, partnering with Sportradar to exclusively distribute official data for sportsbooks, connecting on-field officials with the centralized replay review headquarters, and testing a series of innovations in the background. Those experiments include the use of computer vision to identify on-field events, direct video feeds to conduct replays, and a pilot program to study how sensors embedded in mouthguards might help detect head impacts.

SportTechie spoke with NFL chief information officer Michelle McKenna to preview the technology being utilized in league operations in 2019. On Thursday morning, the league and Verizon announced that 13 stadiums would have the 5G Ultra Wideband network installed for the start of the season, with more to come throughout the fall.

Swim practice may be getting a little techier, as a new pair of augmented reality-enabled goggles promises to keep track of swimmers’ heart rates and performance. Officially launching in November, the technology was born from a partnership between Canadian company Form, which specializes in tech supported goggles, and Finnish-based company Polar, which works on sports technology including heart rate monitoring.

The new technology uses Form’s swim googles and Polar’s optical heart rate monitors. Users will have to purchase both in order for these tracking capabilities to work.

By asking short, digitally delivered questions, associate professor Stephen Intille hopes to get a more complete picture of people’s health—and ultimately make fitness trackers work better for people.

… The state-of-the-art 307,000 square-foot, four-story facility is located next to the Rutgers Athletics Center. It includes 134,000 square feet dedicated to athletics as well as a 173,000 square foot parking deck holding 535 spaces. The total site area is 6.2 acres.

The building will host team areas –practice facilities, training areas, locker room and office space – for men’s and women’s basketball, wrestling and gymnastics. It will also hold shared sports medicine, strength and conditioning and nutrition facilities for all Rutgers student-athletes, plus a public area holding the the Rutgers athletics hall of fame and a fan store.

… The 165,000-square-foot operations building will be added to the existing Butts-Mehre athletic center. It will include coaches’ offices, an expansive locker room and players’ lounge, a new sports-medicine facility, a much-larger weight room, and a multi-purpose space to entertain recruits.

Background:

The probability of returning to competition for injured baseball pitchers is similar after ulnar collateral ligament (UCL) repair as after UCL reconstruction, but the time to return is significantly quicker after UCL repair. Previous research has found no differences in pitching biomechanics between pitchers with and without a history of UCL reconstruction, but pitching biomechanics after UCL repair has not been studied.
Hypothesis:

There will be significant differences in pitching biomechanics between pitchers returning to play after UCL repair and pitchers with no injury history.
Study Design:

Controlled laboratory study.
Methods:

A total of 33 pitchers were tested shortly after UCL repair (9.8 ± 2.6 months) and compared with a matched group of 33 uninjured pitchers. Each group comprised 14 college pitchers and 19 high school pitchers. Shoulder and elbow passive ranges of motion were measured. The biomechanics of 10 fastballs was then collected using a 12-camera automated motion capture system. Ball velocity was measured using a separate 3-camera optical tracking system. Data were compared between the UCL repair group and the control group using the Student t test (significance set at P < .05). Results:

There were no differences in passive range of motion or fastball velocity between the 2 groups. There were no differences in joint kinetics during pitching, but 3 kinematic variables showed significant differences. Specifically, the UCL repair group produced less elbow extension (flexion: 27° ± 6° vs 24° ± 4°, respectively; P = .03), less elbow extension velocity (2442 ± 367 vs 2631 ± 292 deg/s, respectively; P = .02), and less shoulder internal rotation velocity (6273 ± 1093 vs 6771 ± 914 deg/s, respectively; P = .049 ) compared with the control group.
Conclusion:

Elbow extension, elbow velocity, and shoulder velocity differed between pitchers with a recent history of UCL repair and a matched control group, but it is unclear whether this has clinical significance, as there were no differences in ball velocity and passive range of motion. Furthermore, it is unknown whether these few differences in pitching biomechanics resolve with time.
Clinical Relevance:

Elbow and shoulder kinematics during pitching might not be completely regained within the first year after UCL repair, although passive range of motion and pitch velocity show no difference in comparison to other healthy pitchers.

Will Hastings went down in a heap. He was running down the visitor’s sideline at Jordan-Hare Stadium, looking for a pass from quarterback Bo Nix that had been tipped by one Tulane defender, when another came over from his safety spot and drilled him in the helmet.

The senior wide receiver described it after the game as “one of the harder hits I’ve taken.” But it certainly wasn’t the toughest blow.

Those came last year. There were two of them. The first came in March, when he suffered a torn ACL during a spring scrimmage. The second came seven months later in October, when he suffered a setback that required a second surgery.

So there was no tentativeness in Hastings’ voice by the time he got back to the home sideline. Trainers checked him out, presumably for a concussion, and cleared him to return. He told Gus Malzahn he was ready to go right back into the game.

INTRODUCTION:

Fatigue has a negative impact on lower extremity neuromuscular and biomechanical control. Since ACLR athletes show already neuromuscular/biomechanical deficits in an unfatigued state, the negative impact of fatigue may magnify these deficits or help expose other deficits. So far this has only scarcely been assessed warranting further research.
METHODS:

Twenty-one athletes who had an ACLR and twenty-one uninjured controls performed five unilateral landing tasks before and after a match simulation protocol while muscle activation (vastus medialis, vastus lateralis, hamstrings medialis, hamstrings lateralis, gastrocnemius medialis, gastrocnemius lateralis, gluteus medius) and landing kinematics and kinetics of the hip, knee and ankle joint were recorded. A two-way ANOVA with a mixed-model design (main effects for group and fatigue) was used to compare landing kinematics, kinetics and muscle activation between groups, and pre- and post-fatigue. To avoid unjustified reduction of the data to discrete values, we used one-dimensional Statistical Parametric Mapping.
RESULTS:

Only two interaction effects were found: an increased post-fatigue knee abduction moment and an increased post-fatigue thorax flexion angle was found in the ACL injured legs but not in the uninjured legs of the ACL group or in the control group, during the lateral hop and the vertical hop with 90° medial rotation, respectively.
CONCLUSION:

This study showed that overall ACLR athletes and uninjured athletes have similar biomechanical and neuromuscular responses to fatigue. For 2 biomechanical parameters however, we did find an interaction effect suggesting that landing deficits in ACLR athletes may become clearer in certain tasks when fatigued.

The biggest stars in the world are pledging their brains. Young players are leaving the game with their destinies unfulfilled. The stories they tell spark fear and raise questions. And the science hasn’t even begun to provide answers.

… Mono is caused by a virus that can be transmitted through saliva (hold your jokes please, it could come from sharing a glass or food with someone). Per the Mayo Clinic, symptoms include fatigue, sore throat and fever. As my colleague Andrew Joseph can attest to after getting mono in college, “Basically, I didn’t even have the energy to get off the couch” for two weeks.

But the symptom that’s most dangerous for anyone, including and especially a player in the NFL, is enlargement of the spleen.

The timing of macronutrient ingestion in relation to exercise is a purported strategy to augment muscle accretion, muscle and athletic performance, and recovery. To date, the majority of macronutrient nutrient timing research has focused on carbohydrate and protein intake. However, emerging research suggests that the strategic ingestion of various ergogenic aids and micronutrients may also have beneficial effects. Therefore, the purpose of this narrative review is to critically evaluate and summarize the available literature examining the timing of ergogenic aids (caffeine, creatine, nitrates, sodium bicarbonate, beta-alanine) and micronutrients (iron, calcium) on muscle adaptations and exercise performance. In summary, preliminary data is available to indicate the timing of caffeine, nitrates, and creatine monohydrate may impact outcomes such as exercise performance, strength gains and other exercise training adaptations. Furthermore, data is available to suggest that timing the administration of beta-alanine and sodium bicarbonate may help to minimize known untoward adverse events while maintaining potential ergogenic outcomes. Finally, limited data indicates that timed ingestion of calcium and iron may help with the uptake and metabolism of these nutrients. While encouraging, much more research is needed to better understand how timed administration of these nutrients and others may impact performance, health, or other exercise training outcomes.

… People typically want to know what they should take as a “pre-workout” and what they should use to recover after exercise. There are many great supplement options available, but I want to touch on nutrition and diet first. If you haven’t spent time on your eating habits, I would suggest that you fine-tune this before you spend money on supplements. For anyone to exercise and recover at their best, a nutritionally adequate diet and sufficient hydration are critical. Supplements might enhance performance only when they add to, but do not substitute for, this dietary foundation. You can find tips on healthy meal prepping here and a food-first approach to performance nutrition here.

In “The Book,” Tango/Lichtman/Dolphin found that batters perform significantly worse when they play a game as DH than when they play a fielding position. Lichtman (MGL) later followed up with detailed results — a difference of about 14 points of wOBA. That translates to about 6 runs per 500 PA.

A side effect of my new “luck” database is that I’m able to confirm MGL’s result in a different way.

… “We look to penetrate all the time. We need to have longer periods with the ball. We’re improving in that aspect. The next couple of years will be about being able to do everything. The best teams in this league, if you look at Man City and Liverpool, they can counter-attack at speed, they can trap you in a sector of the pitch and keep circulating the ball. And when they lose it, they’re brilliant in transition. For us, we’re becoming an aggressive team, which is good. We’re still very good on the counter. We’re getting better in the possession phase and we’ll look to constantly make that better.”

It’s worth quoting him at length, in part because it’s so rare to hear a manager explaining his strategic thinking. Rodgers was always generous in that regard, clearly fascinated by the game and quite happy to share his insights with the media and by extension the public. But there’s also the tone. There’s a self-belief that, along with that line about why *he* was brought in could, in the wrong context and with prolonged exposure, have an echo of the old David Brent caricatures. But more fundamentally there’s an authority and a clear fascination with the mechanisms of the game.

… Craig O’Shannessy, Djokovic’s strategy coach and the proprietor of Brain Game Tennis, frequently notes that 70% of all points are decided by four or fewer shots. The player who wins more of those short points will win the match 90% of the time.

Data proliferation and analysis might be transforming all sports and businesses, but that movement has only started to accelerate in tennis over the past few years. The industry is now making room for individual strategy consultants such as O’Shannessy, as well as boutique firms such as Golden Set Analytics, Tennis Stat and Tennis Analytics. Even major tech companies are entering the space. SAP provides the WTA with an analytics platform. Infosys does the same for the ATP and is a technology partner for two Grand Slams, the Australian Open and French Open. IBM has partnered with the USTA to develop tools for American players and also powers the fan-facing SlamTracker for the U.S. Open and Wimbledon.

In the era of Big Data, we’ve come to believe that, with enough information, human behavior is predictable. But number crunching can lead us perilously wrong.