Applied Sports Science newsletter – September 14, 2020

… MLS Next describes the training environment as “year-round” and “daily.” Parents and families can confidently interpret that as meaning that the new MLS-driven league for boys WILL NOT allow players to join their high school teams.

… Newton doesn’t care if you compete in soccer, basketball, football, or track. How you run fast is how you run fast.

Now, before everyone gets up in arms about this comment, there are other considerations and game situations that put constraints on the ability to execute speed with model technique. Spatial constraints can change the sprint technique the athlete has to adopt. The proximity of an athlete to an opponent or teammate, the need to change body position based on another’s movement, sprinting while simultaneously trying to put the body in a position to defend, etc.—these all can change the athlete’s sprint technique from model technique to a potentially more successful technique for that given situation. These ideas, though, are beyond the scope of this article.

… Complex (CPX) and contrast (CNT) training are often used interchangeably, however, there are distinct differences. CPX training refers to alternating a high-load exercise with a lighter load power exercise (e.g. squat and box jump). CNT training refers to contrasting heavy and light loads, performing all high-load strength exercises at the beginning of the session, followed by lighter load power exercises at the end.

To date, it is unknown what the best exercise sequence is to achieve the greatest performance adaptations. This meta-analysis investigated the effects of CPX and CNT training on lower-body strength, vertical jump, sprinting, and change of direction ability.

… Maryland isn’t quite sure when it will return to action. In the meantime, though, it’s staying optimistic and looking to use this newfound free time to build partnerships on and off the field.

In this time of great uncertainty, it’s all the Terps can do.

“I honestly kind of view it as a spring season, but in the fall,” midfielder Hope Lewandoski said. “I think it’s going to be a great opportunity for us because we’re gonna be able to play as a team all together. Normally for a regular season, we’d have like two weeks before we play, and now we get like a few months.”

… “I think from the outset I’m pretty used to managing players remotely,” she said. The players are in and out of camp in a normal year; there’s just more “out of camp” this year. Even pre-COVID, players would have extended periods of time outside of both the NT and club environment. Maybury said they have a variety of ways to collect data: training apps, wellness apps, GPS monitoring. With GPS, she can see players’ live data as they go through a session on the field and then afterwards there’s more data they can download to look at the whole session. They measure key metrics like total distance, high speed running, impact, accelerations and decelerations, and on and on. Maybury said there are hundreds of metrics they could look at; what she and her staff have to do is pinpoint the stats they think are important for each player. What Becky Sauerbrunn needs to do physically to be ready at center back is different from what Tobin Heath needs to do as a winger.

FIFA has launched a programme for member associations (MAs) to further develop women’s football on a sustainable basis whilst simultaneously pushing it forward into the mainstream.

In line with FIFA’s Women’s Football Strategy, the FIFA Women’s Development Programme aims to provide all 211 member associations with the opportunity to apply for and access additional resources and specialist expertise to develop women’s football at a national level.

Member associations will be able to apply for support across eight key areas of women’s football development during the 2020-2023 period. In addition to financial assistance to cover the costs in selected programmes, the FIFA Women’s Development Programme will also provide MAs with access to women’s football experts, additional equipment and technical support within FIFA in order to develop women’s football in their country.

The aim of the current study is to examine the dose–response relationships between training load (TL) measures and the consequent changes in aerobic fitness. Data were collected over the 6-week pre-season period in elite youth soccer players. Participants completed a lactate threshold test to identify changes in treadmill speed at 2 mmol · l−1 (S2) and 4 mmol · l−1 (S4). Internal TL was quantified with the following training impulse (TRIMP) methods: Banister TRIMP, Edwards TRIMP, Lucia TRIMP, individual TRIMP (iTRIMP) and rate of perceived exertion was also collected. External TL measures were total distance, PlayerLoad, high speed running (14.4–19.8 km · h−1), very high-speed running (19.8–25.2 km · h−1) and maximal sprint distance (>25.2 km · h−1). Individual high-speed distance was derived from each participants treadmill speed at S4. Different Bayesian regression models were run with different likelihood functions. The best-fitting models with both the lowest out-of-sample prediction error and the highest variance explained (R 2) were used. iTRIMP had the strongest relationships with changes in S2 (r = 0.93, R2 = 0.90) and S4 (r = 0.88, R2 = 0.82). Explained variance ranged from 10%–69% and 11%–38% for all other internal TL measures and external measures, respectively. In summary, the iTRIMP method demonstrates a dose–response relationship with changes in aerobic fitness in elite youth soccer players.

… After ten years at the highest levels of soccer youth development, I can see better than ever how, with major changes, we could accelerate the rate of youth development in alpine skiing. We have the athletes, they are motivated and there are now more tools available at our disposal to radically boost the athlete developmental process. We have the youth potential, but are often sidetracked debating which college racer is being passed over, or who is letting us down, the U.S. Ski Team or the clubs/academies. We are missing the opportunity to develop not one, but a team of Shiffrins, Ligetys, Vonns, Millers, and on and on. Here are some ideas combining the best practices from youth soccer and skiing development.

Rice University researchers have received a $1.5 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to develop an open-source platform to meet the urgent need of developing and validating machine-learning (ML) based innovations for future wireless networks and mobile applications.

The goal of the project led by Yingyan Lin, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice’s Brown School of Engineering, is to develop a first-of-its-kind community platform to turbocharge the research process of inventing novel ML-based techniques for intelligent wireless network management and optimization.

“Two of the biggest challenges in leveraging machine learning are the availability of large, diverse and labeled public datasets, and platforms to evaluate a new method in lifelike deployment,” Lin said. “3DML will solve both problems by leveraging Rice’s unique strengths in two complementary areas: embedded machine learning and large-scale wireless research platforms.”

It seems like everyone is wearing a fitness device these days. The Apple watch, Fitbit, Oura ring and many others aim to monitor our bodies to keep us healthy. Most of these devices measure heart rate and step count while, increasingly, some go further to try to detect disease. Our paper explores how we can combine wearable devices with deep learning “artificial intelligence” methods for the real time detection of a common abnormal heart rhythm known as atrial fibrillation.

… So what explains the rise of products like Facebook, which have gotten a large part of humanity mindlessly scrolling through feeds of what can most easily be described as garbage content? Well, we humans aren’t perfect. If you’ve got billions of dollars, some of the brightest minds, and a lot of data at your disposal, you can get a lot of people to do what you want. If you treat users as stupid and lazy, you can turn them into stupid and lazy people in the context of your product… but that’s a subject for another post.

So here’s how I think about people and product design.

Firstly, products should definitely be as simple as possible. Because I respect users’ time, not because I look down on their intelligence.

Second, have a theory of how people behave. I’m a big fan of Self-determination Theory, which states that people value autonomy, relatedness, and competence. And I love building product that help people improve all those three dimensions.

With the rise of autonomous vehicles, smart video surveillance, facial detection and various people counting applications, fast and accurate object detection systems are rising in demand. These systems involve not only recognizing and classifying every object in an image, but localizing each one by drawing the appropriate bounding box around it. This makes object detection a significantly harder task than its traditional computer vision predecessor, image classification.

The hazy, orange skies hanging above cities in the Western United States this week have cast another layer of pall over an already unsettled sports world. San Francisco 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan described the scene at practice this week as looking like an “apocalyptic state.”

Experts in climate science and epidemiology say sports organizations and fans should get used to it. Major weather events like the wildfires burning in California, Oregon and Washington this week — which forced the postponement of one women’s soccer game Saturday — are expected to have an increasing impact on sports in the years to come.

In the last years, evidence is accumulating that the crosstalk between the intestinal microbiota and the immune system is modulated by nutrition and that this modulation can have significant impact on intestinal homeostasis and disease. The interplay between nutrients, gut microbiome, and associated immunomodulation involve a complex network of transcriptional, genetic, and epigenetic programs, much of it remains elusive. Increasing our understanding of how these programs are regulated under different dietary conditions and nutritional states will aid in pinpointing how these intricate factors contribute to the pathogenesis and progression of chronic diseases.

This Research Topic, designed to compile outstanding papers addressing the interplay between nutrients, intestinal microbiota, and the immune system in homeostatic and disease states, could gather original and review articles featuring integrative data on dietary and genetic factors involved in immunoinflammatory conditions such as autoimmunity, obesity, and type1 diabetes.

The push towards data driven decision-making demands that we base our future strategies on evidence and, as some of the biggest decisions a club makes, dealings in the transfer window are no exception. But how can we benchmark our transfer policy against other clubs’ when there are so many different factors at play? Without a solid basis on which to evaluate our past decisions, we’re just as likely to lead ourselves astray as to learn from our past mistakes.