Applied Sports Science newsletter – September 15, 2020

Former Team Sky director Sean Yates has raised questions over his former team’s Tour de France tactics, telling L’Equipe that Ineos Grenadiers have been ‘uselessly expending their energy’ at times during the race, and questioning the team’s decision to replace the late Nicolas Portal with a shared structure within their core group of directors.

Yates was part of the management when they raced under the Sky banner between 2010 and 2012 and helped guide Bradley Wiggins to Britain’s first Tour de France title. He left at the end of 2012 but was critical over the team’s approach to this year’s race, specifically after stage 13 when defending champion Egan Bernal lost over half a minute to both race leader Primoz Roglic and Tadej Pogacar. Bernal now sits third overall, 59 seconds off Roglic’s lead but on stage 13 Ineos set the pace on the penultimate climb, only for Bernal to falter.

“It’s a strange strategy,” L’Equipe reports Yates as saying.

From college walk-on to major league starter, Chicago Cubs right-hander Alec Mills had to earn most every break he got.

On the brink of big league history, he was happy to welcome this bit of luck: expecting to see two-time batting champion Christian Yelich in the on-deck circle, Mills looked over and saw his backup instead.

“That kind of surprised me,” he said.

While House violated the COVID-19 protocols, the NBPA should’ve negotiated for the cause of such violations to remain private so as to not impact the player’s reputation.

I committed to the London Marathon on Monday, Aug. 17, just 7 weeks ahead of the race. They announced the race days later. I have been excited and honored to be a part of a historic race in a unique “bubble” experience. But my preparation timeline has been limited — now I’m 3.5 weeks way — making this a very different build up. I like to have 3 months to get ready for a marathon, and that’s if I’m already fit-ish. Maybe even 4 months.

This time, I get 7 weeks.

A PhD graduand, who has conducted an extensive study on the effects of warming up and stretching before physical activity, will receive a PhD at Charles Darwin University’s virtual graduation ceremony this Friday.

Dr Tony Boutagy, who has been a personal trainer for 25 years, used 60 people performing six different warm up methods throughout the study.

The aim of the study was to identify the effects of various stretching methods – either alone or in combination – on the muscle performance tasks of strength, speed, power and endurance.

Injury is something which can fill players and coaches with a feeling of dread, potentially hindering performance for both the individual and the team.

Preparing the body through conditioning, strength training, and developing power, speed and agility are all key factors in preventing injury in football, ensuring the body is primed and ready for the demands of the sport. However, preventing injury isn’t simply about physical fitness. In fact preventing injury starts before even stepping into the training session.

In this post we explore the key aspects of daily training and match routines to help lower the risk of injury taken from Complete Conditioning for Soccer.

The aims of this systematic review were to (a) examine the reliability of the reactive agility tests and (b) analyze the discriminatory validity of the agility tests. A literature search was conducted following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA). We explored PubMed, SPORTDiscus, and Cochrane Plus databases looking for articles about agility in team sports. After filtering for article relevance, only 42 studies met the inclusion criteria; 37 of which assessed the reliability of agility tests and 22 assessing their validity. Reliability showed a high intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) in almost all studies (range 0.79-0.99) with the exception of 2 studies. In addition, other studies also assessed the reliability of decision time (ICC = 0.95), movement time (ICC = 0.92), and decision accuracy (ICC = 0.74-0.93), all of which exhibited acceptable reliability. Furthermore, these data show high discriminatory validity, with higher performance level players being faster than lower performance level players (mean = 6.4%, range = 2.1-25.3%), with a faster decision time (mean = 23.2%, range = 10.2-48.0%) with the exception of 1 study, and better decision accuracy (mean = 9.3%, range = 2.5-21.0%). Thus, it can be concluded that reactive agility tests show good reliability and discriminatory validity. However, most agility tests occur in simple contexts whereby only 2 possible responses are possible. Therefore, future research should consider creating more specific and complex environments that challenge the cognitive process of high-level athletes.

High school basketball coach Tim Notke used to drill the importance of hard work into the minds of his young players with the quote “Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard.” Little did Notke know that his quote would have such a profound impact on not just his student or on basketball, but the sporting world as a whole, becoming an adage to live by for elite athletes like Kevin Durant and Tim Tebow. Notke may not be the first name to come up in football consciousness, but the impact of his philosophy on football is no less significant. However, hard work alone does not result in success at elite levels as it is now being understood. There are several factors at play.

There are few sides that have played as attractive and bold a brand of football as Atalanta have in the 2019/20 season. The Bergamo based club have a rich history of punching above their weight, thanks largely to a florid youth system but their ups were often quickly followed by downs: throughout the 88 years of their history they have been promoted from the Serie B thirteen times; relegated to it on twelve occasions.

Background

The rising prevalence of childhood obesity in developing and developed countries poses a major public health challenge to policy makers and an effective strategy to promote physical activity among adolescents is warranted. This study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of providing descriptive norms messages with personal identification in promoting physical activity among adolescents by measuring step counts via a randomized controlled trial (NCT03081013).
Methods

A total of 311 participants aged 13–16 were randomized into two study arms (Onymous and Anonymous Arms). Each arm consisted of 13 groups of 12 participants. During the trial, participants received weekly short message service (SMS) about their past week’s physical activity performance. Participants in the Anonymous Arm received information about step counts of group members ranked from highest to lowest. Participants in the Onymous Arm received the same information with the group members’ full names. Participants’ quality of life, depression, physical activity social support, self-efficacy and enjoyment before and after the intervention were also evaluated. This study adheres to the CONSORT guidelines.
Results

The number of steps was not higher when descriptive norm message was onymous compared to when it was anonymous. Scores in quality of life, depression, social support, self-efficacy, and enjoyment of physical activity were not significantly different between both arms (p > 0.05).
Conclusions

Our findings indicated that the effect of providing descriptive norms messages containing personal identification on physical activity promotion was not evident in the main analysis. Future studies may consider using a more relevant reference group to use social norms as a tool to increase physical activity among adolescents.

Gut microbes affect human health, but there is still much to learn, in part because they’re not easy to collect. But researchers now report in ACS Nano that they have developed an ingestible capsule that in rat studies captured bacteria and other biological samples while passing through the gastrointestinal (GI) tract.

Currently, researchers obtain gut microbes by collecting stool samples or using techniques such as colonoscopy or endoscopy. However, stool samples can’t capture all the microorganisms in the upper GI tract, and they can’t keep microbes from different parts of the tract separate. Colonoscopy and endoscopy are invasive procedures, which deters some patients. Sarvesh Kumar Srivastava and colleagues wanted to avoid these drawbacks by designing a device that could be swallowed and then eliminated.

The researchers developed a self-polymerizing reaction system of poly(ethylene glycol) diacrylate monomer, iron chloride and ascorbic acid — all loaded into tiny hollow cylinders. The cylindrical microdevices were packaged in miniature gelatin capsules, which were coated with a protective layer to prevent digestion in the stomach’s acidic environment. After they were fed to rats, the capsules remained protected in the stomach but disintegrated in the small intestine’s more-neutral pH, releasing the microdevices.

In the last blog post, we discussed how much ado has been made over injury prediction, how it fits in an athletic environment and whether or not it is even a feasible prospect in sport.

To make injury prediction a feasible endeavor, we might have to start treating it like the weather. This means we need to study the athlete in their environment like it is a complex-adaptive system (because it is).

We also need to get as close as possible to the inciting event to capture relevant, time-sensitive data that can be used to reduce the uncertainty in a model that assigns a probability of injury to the athlete.

While the European teams are in action in the Nations League, South America is sitting out the September FIFA dates.

Two rounds of World Cup qualifiers had originally been scheduled for this month, but they fell foul of the sad fact that most of the continent has been unable to bring the coronavirus pandemic under control.

The clock is ticking. South America’s marathon format of World Cup qualification — all 10 nations meeting each other home and away — was supposed to kick off at the end of March, when all international football was cancelled. Missing out on two FIFA dates means that the continent is already four games behind schedule.

… So, as we get ready to kick things off with the Chiefs and Texans on Thursday night and the rest of the league on Sunday and Monday, we thought we’d offer a quick refresher on some of the changes. Some of these are CBA changes that were in place back before we knew there would need to be COVID-19 protocols. Others are directly tied to the league’s efforts to execute a full season during the pandemic. We’ll help you keep track of which is which, and please feel free to bookmark this story for reference during the season — it could get confusing

There will be a 2020 NBA Draft Combine, but like so many other things in 2020 it will not look or feel like anything that has come before it.

A two-part Draft Combine will take place starting later this month, the league told general managers on a conference call Friday.

… In a typical year, the Academy can have a fully enrolled prep school, hundreds of athletes (youth and professional) training and participating in camps each week and host multiple outside events. With a little luck tied to its location (Florida has remained one of the most open states throughout the pandemic) and a multi-dimensional business model that gave them additional revenue streams to fall back on, IMG Academy was able to successfully pivot much of that normal business.

Year-round camps turned into the soft launch of virtual training offerings called IMG Academy+, planned to continue post-pandemic. The revenue-generating addition complemented the limited in-person offerings the school was still able to accommodate starting later in the summer.

“A lot of [who was able to operate and how] depended on where they were, where the virus was and what the government decided to do in either the local municipality or state government, so there was absolutely an element of luck so to speak,” said Princeton athletic director Mollie Marcoux Samaan, who spent 19 years with Chelsea Piers Management (which owns and operates two highly regarded amateur sports complexes similar to IMG’s non-boarding school athletics operations). “But when you have a more independent facility, as opposed to a college or athletic department or even a normal high school that’s part of a much larger entity, you can make very different decisions.”