Applied Sports Science newsletter – November 7, 2019

… “We’re at the crossroads now where women’s sports are at the forefront,” said Diana Taurasi, considered one of the greatest players in history. “Now it’s time to take it to the next level.”

Throughout much of the next year, the basketball players plan to use their platform the way the U.S. women’s soccer team did in the buildup to this year’s World Cup. The soccer team, led by Megan Rapinoe and Alex Morgan, outspoken advocates for gender equality, created a template for athletes in other sports to follow.

… “Kawhi Leonard is not a healthy player under the league’s resting policy and, as such, is listed as managing a knee injury in the LA Clippers’ injury report,” spokesman Mike Bass told ESPN earlier Wednesday. “The league office, in consultation with the NBA’s director of sports medicine, is comfortable with [the] team medical staff’s determination that Leonard is not sufficiently healthy to play in back-to-back games at this time.”

The Clippers and Leonard are working on a long-range plan to keep him healthy, and that will continue to include his sitting out portions of back-to-backs, as well as other limitations during the season.

Entering the preseason, Leonard said he felt much better than he did going into the previous season and that his load management would be different than it was in Toronto. Coach Doc Rivers insisted there is no reason to be concerned about Leonard’s health.

What do you think the proper balance of right and left foot usage should be in the perfect player – or team? Is it a goal to get to 50/50, or is it natural for even the best players in the world to favor one foot over the other by a measurable amount?

While these questions are not new in coaching circles, thanks to the wonders of modern technology, we can now have real conversations backed by actual data gathered across all ages and levels. And it’s not just left and right leg usage, but dozens of other data points that have only been previously available at the world’s biggest clubs with their armies of paid video analysts and sport scientists.

SoccerWire collected some of this newly available data through our partnership with PlayerMaker, spanning dozens of training sessions and games in the top leagues of the U.K., Premier League Academies, NCAA men’s and women’s teams, and U.S. Development Academies. And the results show some potential for concern about the pace of development of more balanced players in the USA as compared to the U.K.

Alex McKechnie wants to set the record straight. The Toronto Raptors’ newly promoted vice president of player health and performance didn’t invent the term “load management”; it’s been used over the years to describe everything from how electricity moves to how hospitals schedule shifts for nurses. But the success Alex had in stewarding Kawhi Leonard and company through the 2018-19 season, en route to the franchise’s first NBA championship, has elevated those two words into the league’s popular lexicon.

The thing is, as Alex sees it, that rise in popularity has led to a broad misunderstanding of what load management actually means.

“People seem to think, ‘Okay, load management, you’re playing 60 games and that’s it,’” he tells CloseUp360 by phone from his office in Toronto. “It’s not about necessarily resting. It’s about managing the load, meaning exactly what it means.”

Knowledge of subject-specific muscle volumes may be used as surrogates for evaluating muscle strength and power generated by ‘fat-free’ muscle mass. This study presents population-based statistical learning approaches for predicting ‘fat-free’ muscle volume from known anthropometric measurements. Using computed tomography (CT) imaging data to obtain lower-limb muscle volumes from 50 men and women, this study evaluated six statistical learning methods for predicting muscle volumes from anthropometric measurements: (i) stepwise regression, (ii) linear support vector machine (SVM), (iii) 2nd-order polynomial SVM, (iv) linear partial least squares regression (PLSR), (v) quadratic PLSR, and (vi) 3rd-order spline fit PLSR. These techniques have successfully been demonstrated in bioengineering applications and freely available in open-source toolkits. Analysis revealed that separating a general population into sexes and/or cohorts based on adipose level may improve prediction accuracies. The most important measures that statistically influence muscle volume predictions were shank girth, followed by sex and finally leg length, as identified using stepwise regression. SVM learning predicted muscle volume with an accuracy of 85 ± 4% when using linear interpolation, but performed poorly with an accuracy of 59 ± 6% using polynomial interpolation. The simpler linear PLSR exhibited muscle volume prediction accuracy of 87 ± 2%, while quadratic PLSR was slightly reduced at 82 ± 3%. For the spline fit PLSR, high accuracy was observed on the training data set (~ 99%) but over-fitting (a drawback of high-interpolation methods) resulted in erroneous predictions on testing data, and hence, the model was deemed unsuitable. In conclusion, use of linear PLSR models with variables of sex, leg length, and shank girth is a useful tool for predicting ‘fat-free’ muscle volume.

… This current article will cover blood lactate testing in detail. We use the widely accepted blood lactate concentration of 2mMol/L to define AeT. However, some literature suggests a concentration of as high as 2.5mMol/L, and one method defines AeT as the point where lactate rises 1mMol/L above the lowest reading obtained during the warm-up or while the athlete is resting. Just be consistent with the measurement and protocol you use.

Background

In addition to the beneficial health effects of being active, sports are also associated with a risk of sustaining injuries. To avoid the occurrence of sports injuries, preventive measures can be applied. The aim of the current article is to provide insight into the systematic developmental process of two evidence-based interventions designed to stimulate injury-preventive behaviour in runners and skiers, in which Intervention Mapping (IM) and Knowledge Transfer Scheme (KTS) are used as developmental protocols. However, the ultimate steps in the process are adjusted to meet requirements of the intervention and the target group.
Methods

Using a three-step process, we developed two interventions to stimulate injury-preventive behaviour in runners and skiers. Sports participants, sports experts and behaviour experts contributed throughout steps two and three of the developmental process.
Results

In step one we started with a problem statement in which we used information about the number and the burden of running-related and skiing-related injuries in the Netherlands. In step two, in-depth research was performed using four research strategies. During this step we tried to answer the following question: Which preventive measures or actions should be executed to prevent what injuries by whom, and how should we do that? A desk research/systematic review of the literature, expert meetings, target user surveys, and target user focus group meetings were conducted. In step three of product development, both interventions were developed. During the developmental process, co-creation sessions with target users were held. Before finalizing the interventions, pre-tests of the interventions were performed with target users.
Conclusions

Through a three-step approach, we developed two interventions to stimulate injury-preventive behaviour in runners and skiers. To develop an intervention that fits the needs of the target population, and will be used by them, it is necessary to involve this population as soon and as much as possible. Several steps in the IM and KTS protocols have thus been adjusted in order to establish an optimal fit between intervention and target group. [full text]

… In the NBA and NFL, Signal spans every level from players to executives. In the wake of a round of NBA free agency where news of deals were broken prior to the formal start of free agency, NBA commissioner Adam Silver announced stricter enforcement of rules for tampering and salary-cap circumvention. The NBA even distributed a memo this week that appeared to target the use of Signal, saying teams can’t use communication methods that auto-delete.

In the post-deflate-gate NFL, players, agents and executives took cues from the league weaponizing Tom Brady’s text messages and have flooded to Signal as a tool for extreme privacy. It’s not uncommon to have the setting set to wipe all messages after 24 hours.

In the sports world, Signal has become a place where business gets done.

Coaches are tasked with helping their athletes improve, but when those athletes are underwater, in the case of competitive swimmers, it can be hard to actually see if what they’re doing is right. A University of Pittsburgh invention, called Impulse, helps coaches visualize a swimmer’s form under water.

A swimmer wears a belt around their waist, which is attached to a rope. That in turn is hooked up to a sensor at the edge of the pool. The force of each stroke pulls on the system, creating data that shows up as waves on a screen.

This provides an arm-by-arm representation of a swimmer’s form, and Pitt’s associate head coach for Women’s Swimming, Marc Christian, said that’s important for training. [audio, 1:28]

The purpose is straightforward: To know all that’s happening with the players on a football pitch. Their position in regard to their opponent and in relation to the play. Their speed, maximum and average. Distance covered. The orientation of their body at all times. Tracking devices are set to revolutionise the game in many aspects, including the team’s tactical preparation, how matches are read and analysed, as well as the information that will be available for broadcasting and journalists. A technology that will have been developed at FC Barcelona’s home stadium.

This is one of FIFA’s most important projects establishing quality standards for this kind of technology. A first-of-its-kind trial was carried out on the 11th of October at the Camp Nou stadium, featuring electronic performance tracking system (EPTS) devices from 13 separate companies.

The University of Victoria (Australia) was in charge of analysing each brand. Rob Aughey, a researcher of the Institute for Health & Sport, explained the following during the tests: “The reason why it is so important to work in a stadium like this one is that it involves a challenge. The sheer size of the stands can block or interfere with the satellite signals, which could hinder the GPS accuracy. And in terms of visual optics, a field this size contains areas of light and shadow, really putting the devices to the test. If they work here, they’ll work virtually anywhere”.

It’s impossible to truly define what football is. Sure you can referee it and score it, but can you really define it? It has the ability to help us forget the mundane of the 9 to 5, stir up hopes, dreams, aspirations and creativity. It can simultaneously tear apart and bring together families, neighbours, communities, cities and countries. It is the matriarch of a Friday night in the pub with your mates when speculating your starting XI for your fantasy team. But the name on everyone’s tongue at the moment is that of Andre Gomes, the Everton midfielder who suffered a fracture-dislocation of his ankle at the weekend and had surgery on Monday. Thankfully, Everton FC have stated that the procedure was a success and Andre is expected to make a “full recovery”. In this piece I’m going to discuss the nuance between making a full recovery and returning to play and how the two are not necessarily the same. I’ll touch upon what success looks like for club and player and what the duty of care Everton and their medical staff have for Gomes.

… The Wolves have taken the league’s nutritional data trend to new heights, unveiling the league’s first load-based nutrition plan, where each player’s daily meals are tailored to his workload (Culver’s nutritional goals include adding lean muscle).

But even cutting-edge programs and food cooked in the fanciest kitchens couldn’t crack Culver’s egg riddle. For that, they needed Regina.

“He is such a routine kid,” Regina said. “He likes to go to the gym at the same time, he likes to nap at the same time.”

…

As a whole, NBA athletes are playing about four minutes less per game than their counterparts 14 years ago. Teams are also averaging more than 20 different starting lineups a season compared to 17.4 a decade ago. Still, opinions on efficacy of load management are varied.

Jazz forward Joe Ingles, who at 32 is the second oldest player on the roster, said he’d rather play whenever possible.

“Personally, I don’t really like it. I enjoy playing,” he said. “Obviously if I’m injured and going to hurt myself, I’m not going to do it. But I’ve been fortunate. I take pride in trying to play every game. It’s just something I’ve done. I try to play as many games as I can.”

Only big club managers will sympathise with Jurgen Klopp over the fixture crisis

The physical demands placed on elite sides is what keeps English football honest

For the rest, the destructive curse of fixture congestion is one of their only hopes

This week in Milan at the Next Gen ATP Finals – the tournament designed to boost the profile of tennis’ rising stars while experimenting with new rules and technology – eight players aged 21 or under will compete in one of the shorter scoring formats on offer, many of which remain alien to tennis traditionalists.