Applied Sports Science newsletter – September 19, 2019

By pledging his allegiance to Team USA for next summer’s Olympics, Curry is getting a head start on what’s shaping up to be a big year

Jordan Mailata had never played football before the Eagles drafted him last year. Now he has to prove himself in one of the sport’s most technically demanding positions

Sleep deprivation and sleep restriction both increase fatigue and decrease readiness to training. At present, there is limited knowledge surrounding the effects of inadequate sleep on strengthperformance. Therefore, the aim of this systematic review is to understand the effect of sleep deprivation and sleep restriction on resistance training performance, and to explore the effects of inadequate sleep on hormonal responses and markers of anabolism.

… During the recent Caps Media Fantasy Camp, Caps equipment manager Brock Myles delivered a presentation about the team’s use of the product. Myles said the equipment staff originally had to sew the trackers into shoulder pads and chest protectors, but they ran into trouble as players would frequently swap out their pads. Players change their pads “like they change their underwear”, Myles said.

To solve that problem, players will wear the sports bra-like attire during practices, as seen on Jakub Vrana below, which was taken right before Vrana took the team’s skate test on the first day of training camp on Friday.

The elite sports environment provides a unique setting for studying human performance, where both cognitive and physical demands are high. Successful performance in sport is contingent upon key cognitive skills such as attention, perception, working memory and decision-making. The demands of competitive sport also increase loading on the central nervous system (CNS). Neuroimaging methods such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and electroencephalography (EEG) offer the potential to investigate the cognitive demands of sport, neuroplasticity of athletes, and biofeedback training. However, practical and technical limitations of these methods have generally limited their use to laboratory-based studies of athletes during simulated sporting tasks. This review article, provides a brief overview of research that has applied neuroimaging technology to study various aspects of cognitive function during sports performance in athletes, alternative methods for measuring CNS loading [e.g., direct current (DC) potential], possible solutions and avenues of focus for future neuroergonomics research in sport.

During high stress situations such as making a goal in soccer, some athletes experience a rapid decline in performance under pressure, known as “choking.” Now, Salk Institute researchers have uncovered what might be behind the phenomenon: one-way signals from the brain’s emotion circuit to the movement circuit. The study, which was published online on September 6, 2019, in eLife, could lead to new strategies for treating disorders with disrupted movement, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety and depression, along with aiding in recovery from spinal cord injuries or physical performance under pressure.

“This finding is very exciting as it is the first time that a comprehensive circuit mechanism has been found showing how emotional states can influence movement through connections in an area of the brain called the basal ganglia, a region involved in guiding behavior,” says Associate Professor Xin Jin.

In the face of fear, whether it be caused by a grizzly bear or an audience waiting to hear you speak, your body initiates a reaction to stress. The breath quickens, the pupils dilate, the heart begins to pound. These automatic responses occur as a part of the so-called fight-or-flight response, the body’s evolved mechanism to threats around us. Scientists have known for decades that this reaction is triggered by hormones released by the adrenal glands, two cone-shaped organs that sit atop the kidneys. Now a new hormone has entered the picture—osteocalcin, a protein produced and secreted by bone.

Gerard Karsenty, a physician and geneticist at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center, started his work on osteocalcin more than 20 years ago. At first, he set out to investigate calcification—a gradual hardening of bone caused by a buildup of minerals. At the time, Karsenty suspected that osteocalcin was a key player in this process because of its abundance in the skeleton. But when his team knocked out the gene coding for osteocalcin in mice, the calcification process remained unperturbed. Instead it found rodents lacking the protein had excess body fat and trouble breeding. These results were perplexing but fit with the fact that osteocalcin is present in blood. That connection led Karsenty to propose that osteocalcin was a hormone, released from the skeleton into the blood to help regulate functions in other parts of the body.

Emotion is well-recognized as a distinguished symbol of human beings, and it plays a crucial role in our daily lives. Existing vision-based or sensor-based solutions are either obstructive to use or rely on specialized hardware, hindering their applicability. This paper introduces EmoSense, a first-of-its-kind wireless emotion sensing system driven by computational intelligence. The basic methodology is to explore the physical expression of emotions from wireless channel response via data mining. The design and implementation of EmoSense {face} two major challenges: extracting physical expression from wireless channel data and recovering emotion from the corresponding physical expression. For the former, we present a Fresnel zone based theoretical model depicting the fingerprint of the physical expression on channel response. For the latter, we design an efficient computational intelligence driven mechanism to recognize emotion from the corresponding fingerprints. We prototyped EmoSense on the commodity WiFi infrastructure and compared it with main-stream sensor-based and vision-based approaches in the real-world scenario. The numerical study over 3360 cases confirms that EmoSense achieves a comparable performance to the vision-based and sensor-based rivals under different scenarios. EmoSense only leverages the low-cost and prevalent WiFi infrastructures and thus constitutes a tempting solution for emotion sensing.

Maintaining carbohydrate availability is a key challenge in multi-stage races

A major challenge in multi-stage races such as cycling’s Grand Tours, and the Marathon des Sables, is maintaining adequate carbohydrate availability. This is because we rapidly deplete carbohydrate stores during exercise, and we have a limited carbohydrate storage capacity. Furthermore, when carbohydrate stores a low, we have difficulty maintaining race-pace intensities of exercise. The storage form of carbohydrates in humans is glycogen, which is mainly found in muscle and the liver. The maximum amount of glycogen that an athlete can store is thought to be less than 3500 kcal of energy. This is not enough to support even one full day of racing, and even if athletes are consuming carbohydrates during exercise, they will almost always end up with low glycogen stores at the end of each stage. Therefore, rapidly replenishing these glycogen stores before beginning the next stage is a key nutritional consideration.

… Having a higher vegetable score made a significant impact on rucking scores. Beans and greens were significant to higher APFT scores and run/ruck times. Seafood and plant-based protein were significant factors to faster road march times as well. There were no significant associations between total fruit, whole fruit, whole grains, dairy, total protein foods, or fatty acid ratio score and any physical performance measures.

Another indicator of performance was the increase of sodium consumed by those who scored higher in faster rucking events. This makes sense, as one of the big issues with longer-distance road marches is electrolyte replacement and water consumption. Maintaining sodium levels is critical for performance, especially when in hot/humid or arid environments. There were no significant associations between added sugars or saturated fats and individual component scores and physical performance.

In July, researchers out of the Graz University of Technology in Austria discovered that the typical apple you find in your local grocery store contains roughly 100 million bacteria. Interestingly, researchers found that although the number of bacteria did not differ between organic and non-organic apples, organic apples are bacterially more diversity and deemed more balanced.

Using scientific evidence to bring products to elite athletes and active consumers is a job potentially fraught with pitfalls so the industry has to simplify the science for shoppers and comb away the confusion entangled into social media.

Eli Manning has been benched, Ben Roethlisberger is out for the season, and Drew Brees will miss at least six weeks. Many older QBs have been sidelined this season, while a younger generation is showing glimpses of a new future in the NFL.

This paper compares predictions of metabolic energy expenditure in gait using seven metabolic energy expenditure models to assess their correlation with experimental data. Ground reaction forces, marker data, and pulmonary gas exchange data were recorded for six walking trials at combinations of two speeds, 0.8 m/s and 1.3 m/s, and three inclines, -8% (downhill), level, and 8% (uphill). The metabolic cost, calculated with the metabolic energy models was compared to the metabolic cost from the pulmonary gas exchange rates. A repeated measures correlation showed that all models correlated well with experimental data, with correlations of at least 0.9. The model by Bhargava et al. (J Biomech, 2004: 81-88) and the model by Lichtwark and Wilson (J Exp Biol, 2005: 2831-3843) had the highest correlation, 0.95. The model by Margaria (Int Z Angew Physiol Einschl Arbeitsphysiol, 1968: 339-351) predicted the increase in metabolic cost following a change in dynamics best in absolute terms.

… [Duncan] Watts has argued that we are often wrong to attribute success or failure to intrinsic merit or to deep cultural forces. Whether it’s the election of President Donald Trump, the views of the Republican Party on immigration or the fame of the Mona Lisa, the real reason might be: Visible downloads, at just the right time.

A new study provides Watts with a lot of support.

Building directly on the music downloads experiment, the sociologist Michael Macy of Cornell University and his collaborators asked whether the visible views of other people could suddenly make identifiable political positions popular among Democrats and unpopular among Republicans — or vice versa.