Applied Sports Science newsletter – November 27, 2019

Applied Sports Science news articles, blog posts and research papers for November 27, 2019

 

Vikings’ Everson Griffen finds balance by learning when to turn off

ESPN NFL, Courtney Cronin from

… Griffen’s intensity never left, but as he has gotten older — he is now in his 10th season with the Vikings — he has had to fight through personal challenges and learn how to channel things differently to find the balance to succeed in all areas of his life.

More than a year removed from two incidents in September 2018 that drew police involvement and forced Griffen to step away from the game for five weeks while seeking treatment for his mental health and well-being, the 31-year-old is thriving on and off the field.

 

Megan Rapinoe GQ Profile: The Righteous Arrival of an American Superhero

GQ, Mari Uyehara from

… For a professional player—let alone a superstar—Megan Rapinoe’s soccer biography is unusual. The FIFA Player of the Year, she now has two World Cup wins and one runners-up placement, plus an Olympic gold medal, under her belt. But growing up in rural Redding, California, Rapinoe didn’t play high school soccer (in California the winter season was basketball, which she also played). Just club in the fall. On Tuesdays her mother, Denise, would use her one day off from waitressing to drive Megan and her twin sister, Rachael, to club practice near Sacramento. It was a five-hour round trip on a good day, and when that became too much, the twins would just show up for games, getting up at 4 a.m. on weekends so their father, Jim, could drive them to the Bay Area. “Parents,” she says to me, “are fucking nuts.”

 

A Lack Of Sleep Causes Anxiety — But Don’t Worry About It

The British Psychological Society, Research Digest, Freddy Parker from

How did you sleep last night? If the answer is “badly” followed by an uninvited pang of anxiety, look no further for an explanation than a study published this month in Nature Human Behaviour.

A lack of sleep is known to lead to feelings of anxiety, even among healthy people. But the new paper reveals that the amount of “deep” or slow-wave sleep is most pertinent to this relationship. That, the authors conclude, is because slow-wave brain oscillations offer an “ameliorating, anxiolytic benefit” on brain networks associated with emotional regulation.

To investigate this link, Eti Ben Simon and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, ran a series of experiments. First, the team recruited 18 students to come into the lab: once for a full night of shut eye, and again for a night of no sleep. In the evening and the following morning, participants filled in a questionnaire to measure their anxiety levels. And in the morning they also viewed emotionally-charged, aversive videos while the researchers looked at brain activity using functional MRI.

 

The biggest predictor of performance on the field, Nebraska’s Scott Frost says, is “sleep.” He wants players getting 8-9 hours per night.

Twitter, Mitch Sherman from

“We can’t tuck them into bed at night,” Frost said.

 

Matthew Walker’s “Why We Sleep” Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors

Alexey Guzey from

… In the process of reading the book and encountering some extraordinary claims about sleep, I decided to compare the facts it presented with the scientific literature. I found that the book consistently overstates the problem of lack of sleep, sometimes egregiously so. It misrepresents basic sleep research and contradicts its own sources.

In one instance, Walker claims that sleeping less than six or seven hours a night doubles one’s risk of cancer – this is not supported by the scientific evidence (Section 1.1). In another instance, Walker seems to have invented a “fact” that the WHO has declared a sleep loss epidemic (Section 4). In yet another instance, he falsely claims that the National Sleep Foundation recommends 8 hours of sleep per night, and then uses this “fact” to falsely claim that two-thirds of people in developed nations sleep less than the “the recommended eight hours of nightly sleep” (Section 5).

 

Bettman, NHL figuring out best way to use puck-tracking technology

Sportsnet.ca from

NHL commissioner Gary Bettman gives us the latest updates with where the league stands on their player and puck tracking, says they’re continuing to test, explore and play with the technology, but is excited about possibilities. [video, 1:17]

 

Helmet safety: Inside the complicated equipment industry

Sports Illustrated, Greg Bishop from

With attention and money increasingly directed toward player safety, SI surveyed equipment insiders and medical outsiders about the growing helmet industry. And the picture they paint, of a destined-to-be-unsafe world where marketing can cloud the science, is concerning.

 

3D Body Pose in football

YouTube, Sportlogiq from

At Sportlogiq, our AI team is always coming up with new ways to revolutionize the world of sports data. One thing that’s around the corner is 3D Body Pose directly from a broadcast feed in soccer. We’re really excited about the possibilities that it presents [video, 1:31]

 

Moving Camera, Moving People: A Deep Learning Approach to Depth Prediction

Google AI Blog; Tali Dekel and Forrester Cole from

… A particularly challenging case occurs when both the camera and the objects in the scene are freely moving. This confuses traditional 3D reconstruction algorithms that are based on triangulation, which assumes that the same object can be observed from at least two different viewpoints, at the same time. Satisfying this assumption requires either a multi-camera array (like Google’s Jump), or a scene that remains stationary as the single camera moves through it. As a result, most existing methods either filter out moving objects (assigning them “zero” depth values), or ignore them (resulting in incorrect depth values).

In “Learning the Depths of Moving People by Watching Frozen People”, we tackle this fundamental challenge by applying a deep learning-based approach that can generate depth maps from an ordinary video, where both the camera and subjects are freely moving. The model avoids direct 3D triangulation by learning priors on human pose and shape from data. While there is a recent surge in using machine learning for depth prediction, this work is the first to tailor a learning-based approach to the case of simultaneous camera and human motion. In this work, we focus specifically on humans because they are an interesting target for augmented reality and 3D video effects.

 

Human Activity Recognition with OpenCV and Deep Learning

PyImageSearch, Adrian Rosebrock from

Our human activity recognition model can recognize over 400 activities with 78.4-94.5% accuracy (depending on the task).

 

Documents, claims bring NCAA medical care issues into question

ESPN, Paula Lavigne from

Three years ago, the NCAA and sports medicine leaders worked to establish new rules that would limit the influence coaches have on the hiring, firing and supervision of sports medicine personnel — part of a larger effort to ensure athletes receive sound medical care.

Violate the rules and schools risk being cited for NCAA violations.

But medical independence concerns remain, according to an Outside the Lines investigation. In one case, at Texas A&M, newly hired high-profile football and basketball coaches appear to have directed who will provide medical care to their players, according to documents obtained by Outside the Lines; it is “a direct violation of NCAA policy,” said one sports medicine industry leader.

In 2016, based on input from the National Athletic Trainers’ Association and other sports medicine agencies, the NCAA approved new rules aimed at guaranteeing medical independence for athletic training and sports medicine staff in the Power 5 conferences; last month, the rest of the Division I schools voted to approve the official piece of legislation as well.

 

Got an idea to reduce football players’ leg injuries? The NFL wants to hear from you

Miami Herald, Rob Wile from

Got an idea to save a football player’s ACL? The National Football League league wants to hear it.

In advance of this year’s Super Bowl, to be played at Hard Rock Stadium Feb. 2, 2020, the league is announcing two pitch competitions that come with at least $25,000 in prize money and the possibility of tickets to the big game.

The first competition, the NFL 1st and Future Analytics Competition, gives applicants access to NFL data to help them study the impact of playing on synthetic turf versus natural turf, and what effect each has on lower-extremity injuries. Up to three submissions will be awarded $25,000 each, and will be invited to Miami to present their findings on stage and compete to win Super Bowl tickets.

 

Tar Heel Talk, Ep.2: Behind the ACL Tear

YouTube, UNCUT from

UNC student-athletes Brooke Bingham, Will Bowen, Patrice Rene, and Jackie Williams have a candid conversation at Sutton’s Drug Store about the challenges they’ve endured since tearing their ACLs. [video, 14:51]

 

Special Report: The damaging effects of concussion on our sportswomen

The Telegraph (UK), Fiona Tomas from

Nicola White winced as the needle pierced her forehead. The doctor calmly sunk another into her scalp. One by one, 31 injections of Botox penetrated areas around her head, temples and the back of her neck. It is another medicine to add to the long list of drugs, therapies and holistic treatments the British hockey Olympian has tried in an attempt to banish the migraines and daily headaches that stubbornly persist, 20 months after she sustained a concussion. The procedure is designed to calm nerves and sensory pathways around White’s brain. It cannot, however, erase the date permanently seared in her mind: Monday, March 12, 2018.

It was the day White’s life changed forever, when a player’s shoulder spontaneously rammed into her right temple during a Commonwealth Games warm-up match. Excruciating pain ravaged her jaw, she lost vision – but not consciousness – and felt dazed and confused. Astonishingly, she returned to the pitch and finished the remaining quarter of the game. Within a week, her health spiralled and in the months that followed, her flat morphed into a prison cell. “I went from being an Olympic champion to a bedridden nobody,” White says.

“I could barely lift my head off the pillow. My head was pounding, the room was spinning, I felt like I couldn’t communicate with my mum. I had a constant noise in my ears and in my head – like the old-school computer dial-up system – or when you come back from a night out. I felt really unwell and really frightened. I was like, ‘If I go to sleep, will I wake up?’ ”

 

Study Finds That Student Athlete Safety Is Not a Priority in High Schools Across the United States

National Athletic Trainers Association from

Despite ongoing tragedies in sports as well as research from a host of sources – including the American Academy of Pediatrics – which state schools with athletic trainers (ATs) have lower injury rates, a study released today showed that 34% of public and private high schools, have no access to athletic trainers in the United States. Furthermore, the study indicates that lack of appropriate sports medicine care is even greater for private schools (45% with no AT access) where parents are traditionally paying for what they perceive as a better and safer experience.

The study, Athletic Trainer Services in the Secondary School Setting: The Athletic Training and Locations Services Project (ATLAS), was conducted by the Korey Stringer Institute and published in the Journal of Athletic Training, the National Athletic Trainers’ Association’s (NATA) scientific publication. To date, this is the most comprehensive study to capture the level of athletic trainer services as it included every U.S. public and private high school with an athletics program.

 

The future for load management and a potential new NBA schedule

ESPN NBA, Zach Lowe from

… Last season and earlier this season, it allowed teams to use “load management” as a designation both for players who were just resting — thus potentially subjecting their team to penalties under the resting policy — and for those nursing some injury.

The NBA sought to eliminate such confusion in the wake of this month’s Leonard brouhaha, as Byron Spruell, the NBA’s president of league operations, told ESPN in an interview last week. The league outlined new guidelines for injury reporting in a Nov. 11 memo to teams, a copy of which was obtained by ESPN.

The short version: Load management is now rest. Period. If you see that term, it will mean a healthy player is taking the night off. If skipping that particular game violates the league’s resting policy, that player’s team will be penalized.

 

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