Applied Sports Science newsletter – October 17, 2019

My friend on Fb… “if a man won under these circumstances (injuries) there would be multiple documentaries about it.”

… “I’ve seen him tear up a couple times, already. Just getting past the first round, and now that we’re on to the World Series,” shortstop Trea Turner said amid the frivolity Tuesday night, talking about the first guy ever drafted by the Nationals in 2005 and the only player to wear their uniform in each and every one of their 15 seasons (even once when the word across the chest read “Natinals”).

“He’s put his heart and soul into this organization,” Turner said. “He sacrificed a lot. And he’s given this organization a lot. For me, that speaks a lot about him and his family. I can’t say enough nice things about him, because he’s a good person and a great ballplayer. I love watching him bat in this order and drive in runs for us and be a part of this run.”

I ended my 2019 season on Monday night in Doha, Qatar with a Silver Medal and a new personal best. It was a great day! It was a culmination of the year’s training and racing, and also the culmination of a year of planning, strategizing, visualizing, and dreaming. I was facing the best women in the world, including the current World Record holder, so knew I had to bring my best fitness and focus into the World Championships. … I started the race too fast and faded into 6th at the end. In Zurich I tried to go with the World Record holder, Chepkoech, and started my first 1000m in 2:53. That is 4:36 mile pace, while hurdling and jumping over a water jump. It was too fast for me. At Prefontaine, I started the race in 2:56 and didn’t fade. I know 3 seconds doesn’t seem like a lot, but in this sport, we are pushing our bodies to razor thin margins and 3 seconds is enough to push you over the edge. Analyzing Zurich and Prefontaine, I knew that 2:55/2:56 would be an ideal start for me, and no faster.

… Molly Huddle, 35, is the American record holder for the 10,000 meters (30:13.17) and the half marathon (1:07:25). In April she ran her fastest 26.2 miles at the London Marathon, finishing in 2:26:33. In other words, she’s no stranger to going after those big personal records. So we asked her to share her best tips for pulling off the PRs, even when doubt creeps in.

Humans are capable of many sophisticated behaviors. One such behavior is using landmarks to navigate from one place to another, distant place. This type of navigation, known as landmark-based navigation, requires the navigator to extract spatial information from places in the environment. Another sophisticated behavior is recognizing the type of place one is in and acting appropriately in that environment (e.g., recognizing that you are in a kitchen, and thus making a cup of coffee). This type of behavior does not rely on spatial information so much as it relies on extracting cues related to the category membership of different places. Here we show that these complex interactions with our environment, navigating between places and recognizing them, are neurally dissociable. [full text]

The aims of this study were as follows: (a) to analyze associations between session rating of perceived exertion (sRPE) and training impulse (TRIMP); (b) to verify whether significantly different ranges of percentage of heart rate peak (%HRpeak) would be reached in each discrete RPE category; and (c) to investigate the amount of time spent >90% of HRpeak and associated intraplayer and interplayer variability during soccer technical training sessions with similar contents and duration. This was a single-group observational study that measured the internal training load during 6 weeks of the competitive period in 17 high-level female soccer players. All training sessions started around 9 PM. and lasted on average 94 ± 5 minutes. During each training session, RPE, sRPE, TRIMP, HRex (%HRpeak), and time spent at >90% of HRpeak were assessed. A very large correlation was found between sRPE and TRIMP (r = 0.78; 95% confidence interval: [0.74-0.82]). Significant differences were observed between %HRpeak associated with each RPE value (i.e., RPE = 2 arbitrary unit [68%; 65-69% of %HRpeak]; RPE 3 [72%; 69-75%]; RPE 4 [79%; 76-82%]; RPE 5 [84; 81-87%]; χ = 73.34; df = 3; P < 0.001). Intraplayer and interplayer coefficients of variation for the time spent >90% of HRpeak (∼8% of training time, ∼7 minutes per session) during training sessions were 73 and 92%, respectively. In conclusion, it was confirmed that sRPE and TRIMP displayed good convergent validity, and different %HRpeak were observed for each discrete RPE. However, because of the high variability in the time >90% of HRpeak, careful monitoring of individual exercises should be performed to ensure the desired training stimulus for each player.

… Google Product Director Luke Wroblewski espoused the design principle “obvious always wins,” and pushed designers to recognize that clear interactions outperform clever ones. After analyzing the user engagement statistics of apps that switched from semi-hidden navigation within hamburger menus to more visible bottom navigation bars, and apps that switched from more exposed to semi-hidden navigation, Wroblewski saw a trend. “Navigation is the manifestation of what is possible in an app and when people can’t see what’s possible, they likely won’t know what they can/should do in that app,” he told me in an interview about this idea. Increasing visibility boosts usage.

The Chelsea Foundation’s education and innovation team hosted the second annual Tech Slam – a one-day sports and technology event – at Stamford Bridge last week.

The event for 14-16 year olds is designed to give young people the opportunity to try their hand at technology used in sport, and understand the impact STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) subjects play within a football club.

Researchers at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) have developed a metamaterial that’s strong but supercompressible at the same time. Or rather: they had computers do it. Using machine learning, two different designs were made, one on a macro-scale for maximum compressibility and one on a micro-scale imparting strength and stiffness. Applied together on a brittle polymer, they transform into a lightweight, recoverable and supercompressible material.

… Here are common myths surrounding exertional heat illness in athletes and ways to counteract these misconceptions.

Myth No. 1: You can’t suffer heat illness if you’re properly hydrated.

Thanks to ongoing education and reminders, athletes generally get the message about the importance of hydration. But some athletes may take it too far, assuming that as long as they’ve been fueling themselves well and drinking enough fluids, they have nothing to worry about when training in the heat.

Dislocated shoulders, knees, ankles; torn muscles, fractures and sprains; lacerations on the forehead, chin, cheeks — all come with the turf in contact and collision sports. Fixing them is “fun,” “rewarding,” “intense,” local team doctors say. These physicians make the tough and often unwelcome calls on who gets patched up and back in the game and who goes off in an ambulance.

The Worst Scenario: Head And Neck Injuries

Dr. Jeff Brown, team physician for Central Connecticut State University and Hartford Athletic, says, “The worst-case scenario is a spinal cord injury.” He has had to backboard a college football player for a cervical spine injury, which involved stabilizing the student’s neck on the field and lifting him onto a backboard before sending him by ambulance to the emergency room.

Background The vertical drop jump (VDJ) test is widely used for clinical assessment of ACL injury risk, but it is not clear whether such assessments are valid.

Aim To examine if sports medicine professionals and coaches are able to identify players at risk of sustaining an ACL injury by visually assessing player performance during a VDJ test.

Methods 102 video clips of elite female handball and football players performing a baseline VDJ test were randomly extracted from a 738-person prospective cohort study that tracked ACL injuries. Of the sample, 20 of 102 went on to suffer an ACL injury. These 102 videos were uploaded to an online survey. Sports medicine professionals and coaches were invited to assess athlete performance and rate each clip with a number between 1 and 10 (1 representing low risk of sustaining an ACL injury and 10 representing high risk). Receiver operating characteristic analyses were used to assess classification accuracy and between-group differences were analysed using one-way analysis of variance.

Results 237 assessors completed the survey. Area under the curve values ranged from 0.36 to 0.60, with a mean score of 0.47, which is similar to random guessing. There were no significant differences in classification accuracy between groups (physicians, coaches, certified athletic trainers, researchers or physical therapists).

Conclusion Assessors have poor predictive ability (no better than chance), indicating that visual assessment of a VDJ test is a poor test for assessing ACL injury risk in elite female handball and football players. [full text]

… While those who study or bet on the nation’s most popular professional league dissect every aspect of play-calling and outcome with quantitative analysis, most front office personnel and coaching staffs have been slower to respond.

That’s changing. Because those who acted earlier and more intelligently are winning more games in unorthodox ways. Others will try to replicate their success.

“I think you will definitely see more utilization of data in the decision-making,” professional sports bettor and data analyst Rufus Peabody told Bookies.com. ‘I think what’s going to happen is you’ll see that teams that are very analytically driven are going to be more successful.

“The smarter organizations, team like the Patriots – and actually, I think the most analytically driven organization in the NFL is the Eagles – when they have success, people are going to say, ‘OK, why aren’t we doing that?’”

… Gambling’s popularity was helped along by the spread of statistics, that particular lifeblood of baseball that still keeps fans hooked today. Developed initially to allow the results of a game to be printed onto the page in the form of box scores, statistics also created a pool of data that gamblers could use to inform their bets – many of which were made from the stands, in the middle of games.

In his history of Fenway Park, Glenn Stout describes how, in the ballpark’s early years, “the best seats were quickly taken over by a rabid contingent of gamblers who bet on absolute everything imaginable, ranging from the eventual winner … to ball and strike calls” and “even such arcane issues as whether the wind would change direction.” Fans waving dollar bills and barking out bets resembled “brokers on the floor of the stock exchange.”

… Under the new regime, if the referee is concerned that a skater may have sustained a head injury, the program can be stopped, and the athlete instructed to be assessed for concussion by a qualified individual. If the athlete is cleared, then the program continues – with no deduction to the skater’s score.

Levac emphasizes the importance of taking the decision out of the hands of the athlete, coach or parent, and giving that responsibility to an objective referee.

“The assessment has to happen pretty quickly – within 3 minutes,” she adds. “But the point is that concrete steps are being taken to ensure that an athlete with a potential head injury is prevented from making things worse by continuing to skate. Trying to finish a program with concussion symptoms could be disastrous.”