Applied Sports Science newsletter – February 1, 2021

… This is how he spends a 7 figure sum of money on keeping his body fit.

Naturally, all of this is apart from his regular intense physical fitness routine.
Which modern recovery therapies does LeBron James use?

By spending all that money, LeBron gets access to several unconventional (and unheard of) but highly effective recovery therapies. You may have never heard of some of these therapies.

Why me?

That’s the question Aaron Barrett screamed as he doubled over in pain, clutching his right arm after snapping his humerus bone while throwing a pitch at a Florida practice facility in 2016. When the day began, he appeared to be on the cusp of returning to the majors almost a year after undergoing Tommy John surgery to repair a torn ligament in his elbow.

But instead, a loud crack that still haunts those who were close enough to hear it signaled the start of yet another rehab process. Barrett, a Nationals relief pitcher who broke into the majors as a rookie in 2014, had never experienced anything like it. A spontaneous fracture like that was usually considered a career-ending injury. Barrett wasn’t sure if he’d ever be able to use his arm normally again, never mind pitch in the major leagues.

“I was about ten days away from going on my major-league rehab assignment,” Barrett said in an interview with NBC Sports Washington. “That’s how close I was to getting back to the major leagues from my Tommy John and when that moment happened, when I broke my arm, I honestly went into shock and it was such a traumatic event.

… Hoppe, who was a midfielder for most of his life, is a rare exception who moved in the opposite direction.

He was late in developing the 6-foot-3 frame that provides him with the necessary physicality to play up front. His father estimates that he was around 5-4 when he started his freshman year at Yorba Linda High.

“Some of these kids hit their peak at 13,14,” Jimmy Nordberg said. “Matthew was definitely not that kid.”

The arch of the human foot is unique among hominins as it is compliant at ground contact but sufficiently stiff to enable push-off. These behaviours are partly facilitated by the ligamentous plantar fascia whose role is central to two mechanisms. The ideal windlass mechanism assumes that the plantar fascia has a nearly constant length to directly couple toe dorsiflexion with a change in arch shape. However, the plantar fascia also stretches and then shortens throughout gait as the arch-spring stores and releases elastic energy. We aimed to understand how the extensible plantar fascia could behave as an ideal windlass when it has been shown to strain throughout gait, potentially compromising the one-to-one coupling between toe arc length and arch length. We measured foot bone motion and plantar fascia elongation using high-speed X-ray during running. We discovered that toe plantarflexion delays plantar fascia stretching at foot strike, which probably modifies the distribution of the load through other arch tissues. Through a pure windlass effect in propulsion, a quasi-isometric plantar fascia’s shortening is delayed to later in stance. The plantar fascia then shortens concurrently to the windlass mechanism, likely enhancing arch recoil at push-off. [full text]

I’m honoured to speak with Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett in this episode. Lisa is a University Distinguished Professor at Northeastern University with appointments at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. She is among the top 1% most cited scientists in the world for her revolutionary research in psychology and neuroscience. [audio, 1:02:14]

… On this week’s episode of How To!, Sian Beilock, president of Barnard College and the author of Choke, reveals the science of why we sometimes play our worst when it matters the most. Beilock says it’s all too common for women to shy away from competition for fear of being labeled “not nice,” and she has the tips for helping Juliet, and the rest of us, break through that self-consciousness on and off the court.

… In order for a provider to be certified under the FIFA Quality Programme as FIFA Basic for Broadcast EPTS, they must follow the procedure outlined in the newly-established test requirements.

The testing consists of making a number of clips available to providers from which the player tracking data is extracted. The videos are from the commonly used world feed and a lateral tactical camera angle (typical of match analysis) tracking all outfield players and at least one goalkeeper at all times. The data provided will then be assessed for concurrent validity with VisionKit – a non-commercial tracking system that has itself been validated against VICON. While it is important to stress that concurrent validity is not a scientific gold standard, it does, however, allow for assessment of whether key metrics including distance and velocity are within a reasonable range of the baseline and, more importantly, does so at a fraction of the cost in-line with the objective of making the technology more broadly available. A scientific peer-reviewed paper on VisionKit is to be published shortly.

Since 18th January 2021, Broadcast EPTS providers have had the opportunity to participate in an ongoing test event in order to assess their systems. Technology providers have until the end of March 2021 to submit test applications with the first results anticipated for publication in June 2021. The next anticipated window for testing is in Q3 2021. In the future, FIFA intends to host these events on an annual basis with future iterations of the testing expected to include a wider range of camera angles.

Engineers created thread sensors that can be attached to skin to measure movement in real time, with potential implications for tracking health and performance

In the next years, increasing use of electronic devices in consumables and new technologies for the internet of things will increase the amount of electronic scrap. To save resources and minimize waste volumes, an eco-friendlier production and more sustainable lifecycle will be needed. Scientists of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have now been the first to produce displays, whose biodegradability has been checked and certified by an independent office. The results are reported in the Journal of Materials Chemistry. (DOI: 10.1039/d0tc04627b)

“For the first time, we have demonstrated that it is possible to produce sustainable displays that are largely based on natural materials with the help of industrially relevant production methods. After use, these displays are no electronic scrap, but can be composted. In combination with recycling and reuse, this might help minimize or completely prevent some of the environmental impacts of electronic scrap,” says Manuel Pietsch, first author of the publication and researcher of KIT’s Light Technology Institute (LTI), who is working at the Heidelberg InnovationLab.

@NCAA_SSI
provides mental health educational resources and best practices. [video, 0:37]

This week, in the midst of a pandemic, college football players from all over the country are gathering in Alabama. Why is the game still on? And how have organizers managed to—so far—keep players, coaches and scouts safe?

The U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Services have once again developed new food guidelines for Americans that urge people to customize a diet of nutrient-dense food. For the first time, they make recommendations for infant nutrition and other stages of life.

But, as in past iterations, they lack seasoning. They do not acknowledge the nuances of culture and ethnicity at the heart of how Americans feed themselves.

A recent study found that adolescent female runners who were consciously trying to restrict calories to achieve a certain body weight were at risk of osteoporosis and other problems.

Somewhere in Real Madrid’s sporting vision, one that has recently been lauded as a flag-bearer of rebuilding the right way by signing the best young players in the world, lies a hidden message: It is incredibly hard to juggle youth development and success at the highest level, even when you have put so much emphasis in doing so.

Real Madrid have long been a buyer, not a seller. As the financial landscape dramatically shifts, and buying power veers towards privately-owned clubs, Florentino Perez has pivoted to scouting younger players and grooming them – with less reliance on luring the super-duper stars that have come to the Bernabeu over the past two decades.

In many ways, Martin Odegaard is the poster-child of Real Madrid’s new-found youth policy.

Saquon Barkley. Dak Prescott. Christian McCaffrey. Consider all the stars who missed significant time in 2020, and that all-injured team would be a strong Super Bowl contender. But just how widespread was the injury bug this year? Was the rate of injuries actually higher or did it just seem that way because of the big names missing from the action? Well, according to nflfastR play-by-play data, this season was truly a brutal one on the injury front, seeing about a 14% increase in 2020 over the average rate from the previous decade.

Using nflfastR play-by-play data for every game since 2010 and filtering to only include plays which featured the word “injured,” I ran a t-test (a method for determining whether a significant difference exists between averages) to see whether the injury rate was significantly higher in 2020 compared to the decade before (see below).