Applied Sports Science newsletter – November 9, 2019

Olympic bronze medallist Jamie Greubel Poser tells olympic.org why she was so keen to be an Athlete Role Model (ARM) at the upcoming Winter Youth Olympic Games (YOG) Lausanne 2020.

… After taking that swing in that first half, which Linden hit in 1:11:40, she was about three minutes slower in the second 13.1 miles, experiencing cramps in her feet and calves in miles 18 and 19, she said. It was a diversion from how Linden typically races marathons, usually clocking nearly identical splits. By comparison, Jepkosgei clocked 1:11:39 for the first half and 1:10:59 for the second.

“It’s about trying something new. You don’t have a breakthrough doing the same thing over and over again, being really conservative and really cautious,” Linden said. “It wasn’t about running stupid or dumb, it was just going with the flow of the race.”

… His advice is to simplify your huge challenge in your mind by breaking it into smaller tasks and preparing for each of them, one at a time.

A metaphor that Chin says he and his fellow climbers often use is: “It is literally one step in front of the other.”

“You’re breaking down the variables you can control [and] you identify the variables you can’t control,” he says.

Whether we like it or not, our parents play a big part in who we become as adults. From our taste in music to our social values, their imprint often stays with us, good or bad, well past childhood.

Now new research suggests that we still rely on them well into mid-life — at least when it comes to our health, that is. Alexandra Kissling and Corinne Reczek, a team from the Ohio State University, found that while we look to our mothers in much the same way we do when we’re children — asking them for advice and hoping they’ll be there to help us through periods of bad health, for instance — fathers act more like “cautionary tales”, examples of what not to do.

The clocks have gone back, leaving many of us reaching for the coffee as our body clocks struggle to realign. But there are many aspects of sleep that still leave experts scratching their heads…

Sleep is essential in the preparation for, and the recovery from, training and competition. Despite being important for all individuals, young athletes are considered an at-risk group for reduced sleep duration and quality. The purpose of this review is to synthesise current literature relating to sleep duration and quality in young (14–25 years) athletes. Specifically, typical sleep and wake patterns, factors affecting sleep and wake patterns, and the consequences of altered sleep and wake patterns in young athletes are discussed. Scheduling training and competition in the afternoon or evening appears to result in reduced sleep duration due to less time in bed. Evidence suggests that young athletes who obtain less than 8 h of sleep per night are at a higher risk of musculoskeletal injury. An increase in sleep duration above habitual nightly sleep may be associated with favourable performance in young athletes; however, the associations between sleep quality and performance- and health-related outcomes remain unclear.

… Researchers have found that the type of sleep most apt to calm and reset the anxious brain is deep sleep, also known as non-rapid eye movement (NREM) slow-wave sleep, a state in which neural oscillations become highly synchronized, and heart rates and blood pressure drop.

“We have identified a new function of deep sleep, one that decreases anxiety overnight by reorganizing connections in the brain,” said study senior author Matthew Walker, a UC Berkeley professor of neuroscience and psychology. “Deep sleep seems to be a natural anxiolytic (anxiety inhibitor), so long as we get it each and every night.”

… As globalised capitalism and technology move us ever closer to a 24/7-365 existence, and away from our circadian rhythms, most of the world’s working adults have lost their connection to both the steady daily routines of agrarian, pre-electric society, and increasingly the regulated “Fordist” industrial capitalism of the 9-5 production line (“Fordist”, after the Ford Motor Company). In a smartphone-enabled, gig economy world, what happens to human beings who never clock off? We now live, to use an aptly queasy term coined by the academic Alex Williams, in an age of “post-Fordist plasticity”.

For one thing, these changes are having deleterious consequences for our mental and physical health – not just insomnia but depression, anxiety, heart disease and cancer are all rising, in part because of sleep deprivation. We know we have a problem – we talk about sleep and stress constantly; but we tend towards short-term palliatives, sleep-tracking apps, meditation and tablets.

… the thing is, if you’re getting fit and getting stronger, you don’t need to become skinny or get abs. That’s not a natural endpoint of most people’s fitness journey. Models and bodybuilders are often only at their leanest for a short time each year, and use photos taken during that time to populate their feed the rest of the year. I follow a lot of Olympic weightlifters on Insta, and the week before a big meet (like the recent world championships), a lot of the smaller lifters post bikini pics. That’s because they do drastic and often unhealthy cuts (crash diets) to make weight, and it’s only deep into those cuts that they have abs for a hot minute. They don’t have that body type year round, and most are only dieting in the first place because they have calculated that a certain weight class gives them the best chance at a spot in the Olympics.

Track and field phenom Mary Cain was the youngest American athlete to make a World Championships team at age 17. But her trajectory was dismantled when she joined a prestigious Nike distance running group in Oregon in 2013, she said in a New York Times video op-ed.

Why it matters: Cain’s story reveals some of the methods employed at the recently shuttered Nike Oregon Project and the “win-at-all-costs culture” touted by its coach Alberto Salazar, who now faces a four-year athletics ban for doping offenses.

… One of the potential negatives for consumers, says [Jitesh] Ubrani, is that even if Google vows not to sell ads against your health data, it could find other creative ways to monetize whatever you’re sharing through your wrist.

“They have the data, so they can tie software and services together to try to sell more of their other services,” he says. That’s both the upside and downside of interoperability, of your software working across your phone, your laptop, your smartwatch, or potentially even your smart glasses—when it works, it works, but it’s another access point into your life for one of the tech giants.

Consumers may also be rightfully concerned about privacy and security. Facebook’s privacy missteps have been a “watershed moment” for these issues in the tech sector, Ubrani says, and privacy policies are being scrutinized more.

Data sharing is the crux of the issue. Fitness app companies are often incentivized to share your valuable real-time health data with third parties, whether they are advertisers, law firms, or social networks like Facebook that profit from your sensitive information. If they were fully transparent about how your data was shared or how to adjust your privacy settings, users might be less likely to trust the apps. That’s why, to date, the fitness and health app industry has been dogged by scandals.

There are many valid reasons for an app to share data. It can lead to better service that the user wants. It can also be required by law for police investigations. But app makers don’t always treat the privacy of your sensitive information as a top priority.

The effective range of Wi-Fi, and other wireless communications used in Internet of Things networks could be increased significantly by adding wireless noise, say scientists.

This counter-intuitive solution could extend the range of an off-the-shelf Wi-Fi radio by 73 yards, a group led by Brigham Young University says. Wireless noise, a disturbance in the signal, is usually unwanted.

The remarkably simple concept sends wireless noise-energy over-the-top of Wi-Fi data traffic in an additional, unrelated channel. That second channel, or carrier, which is albeit at a much lower data rate than the native Wi-Fi, travels further, and when encoded can be used to ping a sensor, say, to find out if the device is alive when the Wi-Fi link itself may have lost association through distance-caused, poor handshaking.

In 2019, we write applications in layers.

A business unit is supported by a feature team. Feature teams are supported by platforms, tooling, UI components. All teams are supported by software as a service from outside the company.

Elite athletes may be as likely as members of the general population to experience mental disorders, and there has recently been a surge of research examining mental health among athletes. This paper provides an overview and commentary of the literature on the mental health of elite athletes and explores how trends within and beyond the field of sport psychology have impacted this literature. Reviewing the contextual influences on this field, namely disorder prevalence, barriers to support seeking, mental toughness, and psychiatric epidemiology, are important to understand the broader picture of mental health research and to further strengthen work undertaken in sport psychology. In addition, appreciating the influence of various contextual factors on athlete mental health research can help to highlight where sport psychology practitioners may focus their attention in order to advance research and applied practice with elite athletes experiencing poor mental health. It is important that researchers consider how they measure mental health, how studies on the mental health of elite athletes are designed, implemented, and evaluated, and how both researchers and practitioners may help to combat athletes’ perceptions of stigma surrounding mental health. Considering topics such as these may lead to a deeper understanding of athlete mental health, which may in turn help to inform sport specific policies, applied practice guidelines, and interventions designed to enhance athlete mental health.

Early this year, longtime Sharks broadcaster and former player Jamie Baker made a stunning admission via social media, revealing that he has battled depression for nearly two decades and “almost committed suicide on numerous occasions.”

Baker later expounded on his struggles in an emotionally powerful piece by Katie Strang of The Athletic, and now he’s talking about the steps he takes to fight his demons on a daily basis.

“You’ve got to re-train your brain because your brain is almost programmed to think in a negative way — to hate yourself, to beat yourself up,” he says in a digital vignette airing this month on NBC Sports Bay Area and NBC Sports California.

After helping her daughter through the physical and emotional journey of her sports injury, one mother offers guidance to other parents by creating a documentary.

While many flock to Israel for falafel and shakshuka, it is less famous for its food technology. … “So much is happening in such a small place,” says Tamar Weiss, development manager for the agri-food tech sector of Start-Up Nation Central.

Weiss believes this is down to Israel’s ambition to tackle the environmental and ethical challenges around agriculture. “People are aware of it in their own personal life, this has really pushed the sector forward,” she adds.

Background

Dietary protein supports resistance exercise–induced anabolism primarily via the stimulation of protein synthesis rates. The indicator amino acid oxidation (IAAO) technique provides a noninvasive estimate of the protein intake that maximizes whole-body protein synthesis rates and net protein balance.
Objective

We utilized IAAO to determine the maximal anabolic response to postexercise protein ingestion in resistance-trained men.
Methods

Seven resistance-trained men (mean ± SD age 24 ± 3 y; weight 80 ± 9 kg; 11 ± 5% body fat; habitual protein intake 2.3 ± 0.6 g·kg−1·d−1) performed a bout of whole-body resistance exercise prior to ingesting hourly mixed meals, which provided a variable amount of protein (0.20–3.00 g·kg−1·d−1) as crystalline amino acids modeled after egg protein. Steady-state protein kinetics were modeled with oral l-[1-13C]-phenylalanine. Breath and urine samples were taken at isotopic steady state to determine phenylalanine flux (PheRa), phenylalanine excretion (F13CO2; reciprocal of protein synthesis), and net balance (protein synthesis − PheRa). Total amino acid oxidation was estimated from the ratio of urinary urea and creatinine.
Results

Mixed model biphasic linear regression revealed a plateau in F13CO2 (mean: 2.00; 95% CI: 1.62, 2.38 g protein·kg−1·d−1) (r2 = 0.64; P ˂ 0.01) and in net balance (mean: 2.01; 95% CI: 1.44, 2.57 g protein·kg−1·d−1) (r2 = 0.63; P ˂ 0.01). Ratios of urinary urea and creatinine concentrations increased linearly (r = 0.84; P ˂ 0.01) across the range of protein intakes.
Conclusions

A breakpoint protein intake of ∼2.0 g·kg−1·d−1, which maximized whole-body anabolism in resistance-trained men after exercise, is greater than previous IAAO-derived estimates for nonexercising men and is at the upper range of current general protein recommendations for athletes. The capacity to enhance whole-body net balance may be greater than previously suggested to maximize muscle protein synthesis in resistance-trained athletes accustomed to a high habitual protein intake.

… The Red Sox could make a small bet on Porcello, a one-year deal low in guarantees but high in incentives to lure the durable right-hander back to Boston.

But there are so many layers to this situation that what the Red Sox choose to do with Porcello could tell us exactly where their offseason is headed.

… A good analogy that many coaches are familiar with is a poker game. Think of a 1 percent chance of winning as a single poker chip. If one player gains a poker chip because of a good bet, then that player has a marginally higher chance of winning. At the same time, the other player loses a poker chip. It’s a zero-sum game. At the end of the game, one player has all the chips and the other player has none. This is just like a football game.

“The thing we realized is when we focus on GWC, it creates some really great insight,” says Frigo. “Traditionally teams think in terms of, ‘Oh, I have to score points. I have to advance the ball. I have to get a first down. I have to keep my opponent from doing certain things.’ And those all matter, but they matter in context. If you can represent these different facets of the game in a win probability metric, it gives you a much better understanding of how to manage risk, how to make good decisions and ultimately how to win.”