Applied Sports Science newsletter – February 23, 2021

San Francisco running back Raheem Mostert missed half the 2020 season with an ankle injury, but when he was healthy, he showed off his home run ability.

Specifically, according to the NFL’s Next Gen Stats, Mostert was the single fastest ball carrier in the NFL in 2020 when he reached a top speed of 23.09 mph on a touchdown run against the Jets. Mostert was also the second-fastest ball carrier when he hit 22.73 mph on another play.

Following the proposal made by Professor Seirul·lo, practical proposals and the way of understanding training in team sports must be viewed from their own specific perspective.

Playing and sharing an interpretation of the game with teammates in the closer space (help space) and in the more distant space (cooperation space) is not a matter of mastering pre-determined responses. It is not about automatic behaviours that are triggered when the game environment presents specific characteristics. It is more a question of behavioural structures that allow players to adapt/propose specific responses to the situation and to interact properly with their teammates in order to achieve the common goal that they’re pursuing. This interpretation of the game must be discovered by the player and displayed by the coach in the session. To do this, throughout each session successive tasks/activities should be proposed that are related to each other in such a way that, by adjusting their different abilities, athletes can abstract a cognitive/motor support structure to help understand how they should act in the game. Learning is not about repeating, it is about experiences in changing environments.

The Canadiens will be using science to help them navigate a gruelling schedule that will see them play 41 games over the next 78 days.

Pierre Allard carries the lofty title of sports science and performance director, but he and colleague Patrick Delisle-Houde are more commonly referred to as the team’s strength coaches and they play an important role in making sure the players are physically prepared for the impending grind.

“They monitor our practices, how much energy we’re expending, how much we have left in the tank,” said winger Brendan Gallagher. “They have a pretty good baseline. They’ve been tracking us for a while. They understand how fresh we are and there’s pretty good communication between our strength coaches and our coaching staff to make sure our workload and recovery is weighted properly. It’s going to play an important role going down the stretch.”

Toronto FC have hired former US men’s national team strength and conditioning coach Pierre Barrieu as their Director of High Performance, per a Monday release from the club.

Barrieu comes to Toronto from the LA Galaxy, where he had served as the team’s director of sports performance since 2017.

The COVID-19 pandemic has influenced activity behaviors worldwide. Given the accessibility of running as exercise, gaining information on running behaviors, motivations, and running-related injury (RRI) risk during the pandemic is warranted. The purpose of this study was to assess the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on running volume, behaviors, motives, and RRI changes from the year prior to the pandemic to the timeframe during social isolation restrictions. Runners of all abilities were recruited via social media to complete a custom Qualtrics survey. Demographics, running volume, behaviors, motivations, and injury status were assessed for the year prior to the pandemic, and during social isolation measures. Descriptive statistics and Student’s t-tests were used to assess changes in running outcomes during the pandemic. Logistic regressions were used to assess the influence of demographics on running behaviors and injury. Adjusted RRI risk ratios were calculated to determine the odds of sustaining an injury during the pandemic. Alpha was set to.05 for all analyses. A total of 1147 runners (66% females, median age: 35 years) across 15 countries (96% United States) completed the survey. Runners reported increased runs per week (Mean Difference with Standard Error [MD]: 0.30 [0.05], p < .001), sustained runs (MD: 0.44 [0.05], p < .001), mileage (MD: 0.87 [0.33], p = .01), and running times of day (MD: 0.11 [0.03], p < .001) during the pandemic, yet reported less workouts (i.e. sprint intervals; MD: -0.33 [0.06], p < .001), and less motives (MD [SE]: -0.41 [0.04], p < .001). Behavior changes were influenced by running experience and age. There was 1.40 (CI: 1.18,1.61) times the RRI risk during the pandemic compared to prior to the social isolation period. The COVID-19 pandemic influenced runners’ behaviors with increased training volume, decreased intensity and motivation, and heightened injury risk. These results provide insights into how physical activity patterns were influenced by large-scale social isolation directives associated with the pandemic.

When the double Olympic 1500m medallist Nick Willis first tried athletics’ super spikes last month, they didn’t feel wildly different. A bit more cushioned, sure, which reduced the rigid impact of hitting the hard track. But then he checked his watch. It showed he had run a lung‑busting 1200m time trial two seconds faster than he expected. “I was really surprised,” he told me. “It made me a believer.”

Pulse oximeters, devices used for estimating blood oxygen levels, may be less accurate in people with darker skin pigmentation, the FDA warns. The tools are often used by patients at-home to monitor conditions, however the FDA cautioned that the technology have limitations and a risk of inaccuracy under certain conditions.

Today many pulse oximeters are digitally connected, which has made the device popular for remote monitoring.

While the agency doesn’t explicitly mention race, it cites a recent report published in The New England Journal of Medicine, which found, in two large cohorts of patients, “Black patients had nearly three times the frequency of occult hypoxemia that was not detected by pulse oximetry as white patients.”

The quantification of plantar pressure distribution is widely done in the diagnosis of lower limbs deformities, gait analysis, footwear design, and sport applications. To date, a number of pressure insole layouts have been proposed, with different configurations according to their applications. The goal of this study is to assess the validity of a 16-sensors (1.5 × 1.5 cm) pressure insole to detect plantar pressure distribution during different tasks in the clinic and sport domains. The data of 39 healthy adults, acquired with a Pedar-X® system (Novel GmbH, Munich, Germany) during walking, weight lifting, and drop landing, were used to simulate the insole. The sensors were distributed by considering the location of the peak pressure on all trials: 4 on the hindfoot, 3 on the midfoot, and 9 on the forefoot. The following variables were computed with both systems and compared by estimating the Root Mean Square Error (RMSE): Peak/Mean Pressure, Ground Reaction Force (GRF), Center of Pressure (COP), the distance between COP and the origin, the Contact Area. The lowest (0.61%) and highest (82.4%) RMSE values were detected during gait on the medial-lateral COP and the GRF, respectively. This approach could be used for testing different layouts on various applications prior to production.

The Tampa air was a breezy 63 degrees at kickoff for Super Bowl LV, but Dr. Christina Mack, an epidemiologist who led the NFL’s COVID-19 contact tracing efforts this season, needed a heavier jacket.

“I had chills when I saw [the] kickoff,” said Mack, an adviser to the NFL for the past decade and the vice president of epidemiology and clinical evidence at IQVIA.

The Super Bowl was the culmination of an extraordinary effort from the NFL’s medical community throughout the 2020 season. Aaron Rodgers may have been the NFL’s MVP, but the league’s medical personnel were the real stars this season.

… The tournament in Melbourne is already sharing information with Japanese officials, including frequency and types of testing as well as protocols for handling Covid-19 cases, Tennis Australia Chief Executive Officer Craig Tiley told Bloomberg Television on Tuesday. All 1,200 players and their entourage who came into the country had to complete 14 days in quarantine.

“If you isolate the group and quarantine them, and you can create a modified training environment, then you almost ensure that the athletes coming into your bubble are free of the virus,” Tiley said. Spectators had initially been allowed with limited capacity before a snap lockdown forced the tournament to proceed without crowds.

A better insight into injuries in elite youth football may inform prevention strategies. The purpose of this prospective cohort study was to investigate the frequency, incidence and pattern of time-loss injuries in an elite male football academy, exploring injuries in relation to age and maturation status. Across four consecutive playing seasons, playing exposure and injuries to all academy players (U’9 to U’21) were recorded by club medical staff. Maturation status at the time of injury was also calculated for players competing in U’13 to U’16 aged squads. Time-loss injury occurrence and maturation status at time of injury were the main outcome measures. A total of 603 time-loss injuries were recorded, from 190 different players. Playing exposure was 229,317 hours resulting in an overall injury rate of 2.4 p/1000h, ranging from 0.7 p/1000h (U’11) to 4.8 p/1000h (u’21). Most injuries were traumatic in mechanism (73%). The most common injury location was the thigh (23%) and the most common injury type was muscle injury (29%) combining to provide the most common injury diagnosis; thigh muscle injury (17%). In U’13-U’16 players, a higher number of injuries to early-maturing players were observed in U’13-U’14 players, whilst more injuries to U’15-U’16 players occurred when classed as ‘on-time’ in maturity status. Maturation status did not statistically relate to injury pattern, however knee bone (not-fracture) injuries peaked in U’13 players whilst hip/groin muscle injuries peaked in U’15 players.

GoodSport is a new sports nutrition beverage formulated to deliver effective hydration and clean up the category. The product features ingredients perceived as natural by consumers and derives many of its hydration capabilities from ingredients sourced from ultrafiltered milk.

The product and subsequent business — GoodSport Nutrition — are the brainchild of Michelle McBride, founder and chief executive officer. Ms. McBride was looking for a natural source of hydration for her son while he was participating in youth sports. She settled on chocolate milk, which she calls the inspiration for the beverage that is now GoodSport.

“Are you tracking your macros?” This fairly common question among health aficionados today may not have made sense to nutrition-savvy people of the past. Macros, short for macronutrients, are the building blocks of any diet. Break down any food into its basic molecular components and you’ll find the proteins, fats and carbohydrates that give us the energy to live. And it’s become increasingly common to pay close attention to what proportions of each you eat, whether your goal is weight loss, muscle building, decreased hunger or just improving general health.

If you want to be a professional athlete in most sports, it helps to be born at the right time of year.

In basketball, baseball and ice hockey, players born in the first quarter of their selection year — the cutoff for which age-group teams are picked, which is normally the school year — are overrepresented both in youth and professional sports. In soccer, players born in the first quarter of their selection year are overrepresented throughout major leagues in Europe and South America.

When someone mentions “sports analytics,” the first word that comes to mind for most people is likely “Moneyball,” the book by Michael Lewis and/or the movie starring Brad Pitt. In other words, baseball analytics. Baseball is the first sport where analytics took off and advanced most quickly for two very good reasons. First, because the majority of the game involves only two players at a time – the pitcher and the hitter. And second, due to the wealth of available data from 162 games per season for 100+ years.

In 2002, the innovation of Billy Beane and the Oakland A’s was in the area of player acquisition based largely on a batter’s on-base percentage (OBP). At the time a relatively obscure statistic, OBP includes other ways a batter can get on base besides hitting the ball (such as drawing a walk), in contrast to batting average, which was previously the key metric. The A’s success triggered teams to search for similar inefficiencies related to finding high performing players at a lower cost. But, as with financial market inefficiencies, these competitive advantages tend to close relatively quickly as other teams catch on and begin exploiting them too. Today, baseball has moved on from Moneyball to Betterball, where the focus is developing the players they already have, and keeping them healthy and injury-free.