Applied Sports Science newsletter – May 11, 2021

… Of course, no one could have predicted the maelstrom that 2020’s COVID-19 pandemic brought to the world — including pushing the Olympic Games in Tokyo back one full calendar year. One extra year in Oklahoma started to look like two years, and eventually, Johnson and Smith agreed it was time for the young middle-distance talent to move on.

“My college coach [Dave Smith] and I got to a point where we realized that if I really want to make a crack at the [Olympic] team, I needed to immerse myself in an environment that was conducive to running faster and being surrounded by a bunch of people who have done things that I want to do, and I couldn’t recreate that in Oklahoma,” she says. “Ideally, I didn’t want to move, especially during a pandemic, but I don’t think there was going to be a better time to move.

… “Because I was out here doesn’t mean I disrespect any other athlete or sport,” Metcalf said. “I just respect myself and what I can do. Personally, it was a good experience. Anybody else who has a different opinion, you’re entitled to your own opinion. I think I did very well for myself.”

The bigger question swirling around the pristine stadium, though, was whether track did well for itself Sunday. Whether he attracted or detracted attention.

“I agree (Metcalf) competing in the meet will draw needed attention to the sport,” former 200 and 400 world-record holder Michael Johnson tweeted, “but NFL, NBA, tennis, and golf don’t need athletes from other sports for them to draw attention. The best sprinters in the world should be enough. Track and Field, market your own product!”

… “It was a basketball crime of its purest form,” says Jamal Crawford, 21-year vet and three-time Sixth Man of the Year. “Melo is a baller. He’s a hooper. He’s a hooper’s hooper. That’s why he’s so revered and why it bothered so many people. That’s why it was so loud.”

The respect Anthony holds throughout the league never went away, even when he did. Young stars admire his craftsmanship, his attention to detail, his raw scoring power. Anthony, who is now in his second season with the Blazers and just passed Hall of Famer Elvin Hayes for 10th on the NBA’s all-time scoring list, has long been one of the most polarizing players in the game, the de facto dividing line in the debate between good shots and bad.

For players, it’s as if he’s the representation of pure hoops, the pushback against efficiency calibrations and analytics-driven decisions.

The frustration over yet another losing season, combined with what Sabres captain Jack Eichel called “a disconnect” with his team over how to treat a herniated disk led to him questioning his future in Buffalo on Monday.

“I think the most important thing is just trying to get healthy and figure out a way to be available to play hockey next year, wherever that might be,” Eichel said, speaking publicly for the first time since he was hurt in early March.

… Since the integrated stress response pathway and its potential to enhance learning and memory was identified, drugs for dementia and traumatic brain injury are being designed to manipulate it and help the brain recover. But there may be more to the story than anyone realized, Calakos said.

“Our results show that the ISR plays a major role in acetylcholine-releasing cells, and our current best dementia drugs boost acetylcholine,” she said.

Acetylcholine, the chemical that these rare cholinergic interneurons use to signal in the brain, is well known for its powerful effects on influencing brain states for attention and learning. This finding suggests that at least some of the ‘superlearner’ properties of inhibiting the ISR occur by influencing brain state, rather than acting directly in the cells that are being rewired during learning.

What separates the best endurance athletes from everyone else isn’t their amazing lab test data or power values—it’s how well they maintain those values after a few hours of exhausting exercise

On the first day of boys basketball tryouts this winter at Central High School in Newark, Shawn McCray, the team’s coach, stood at center court, waiting for the locker room to empty. A dozen or so boys filed out and straggled onto the hardwood, stretching and chatting. McCray checked his watch and eyed the gym doors for the rest of the players.

He waited. And waited.

But no more boys appeared.

The previous season, just before the coronavirus pandemic hit, McCray had about 40 players across all three levels of play — freshman, junior varsity and varsity. But when the balls rolled out this winter, only 15 players stood before him.

Group work is a staple part of any classroom. Not only has some research highlighted its potential benefits on improving students’ communication skills, academic performance, and confidence, but 97% of students report that working in a group helped improve their learning and collaborative skills in some way.

Learning collaboratively, especially when tackling a new or complex task allows students to divide the workload amongst themselves. By dividing the task so each student tackles a smaller chunk on their own, students can make steady progress as a seemingly impossible task is now more manageable.

However, is the reason why group work so effective have anything to do with overcoming the limitations of our working memory being quite small? Let’s take a closer look…

Researchers at AMBER, the SFI Centre for Advanced Materials and BioEngineering Research, and from Trinity’s School of Physics, have developed next-generation, graphene-based sensing technology using their innovative G-Putty material.

The team’s printed sensors are 50 times more sensitive than the industry standard and outperform other comparable nano-enabled sensors in an important metric seen as a game-changer in the industry: flexibility.

Maximising sensitivity and flexibility without reducing performance makes the teams’ technology an ideal candidate for the emerging areas of wearable electronics and medical diagnostic devices.

Background

Thanks to the specific materials they embed, far infrared (FIR)-emitting garments can interact with the body’s physiological functions. Such effects have been sought in medicine and physiotherapy for a long time for the treatment/relief of a variety of pathologies and disabling conditions. Recently, FIR-emitting garments have been introduced in the sporting domain under the influence of manufacturers seeing here a new opportunity to support physical performance in athletes, though this is not clearly established. To fill this gap, in this systematic review, we summarize the scientific evidence on the use of FIR-emitting garments in sport and provide directions for future research by shedding light on current scientific limitations.
Method

Five scientific databases (PubMed, Cochrane, ScienceDirect, Scopus and SPORTDiscus) were searched by two independent reviewers. Studies investigating the effects of FIR-emitting garments on at least one physiological outcome related to exercise performance and/or recovery in humans were selected. The methodological quality of retained studies was assessed using the Physiotherapy Evidence Database (PEDro) scale.
Results and discussion

Eleven studies met the inclusion criteria and were included in the systematic review. Studies investigating similar outcomes related to exercise performance or recovery were scarce and results inconclusive, which prevents from drawing firm conclusion about the utilisation of FIR-emitting garments in athletes. However, these early results show that FIR-emitting garments may be of interest for exercise performance and recovery, mainly through their effects on the body’s thermoregulation and haemodynamic function. The summary provided in this review can be used to inform the design of future studies.

Now, where’s my house key — could I have left it in the office? And when we want to pull out our wallet at the supermarket checkout, we often find that it’s somehow made way to the bottom of the shopping bag in all the hustle and bustle. A smart ring could soon put an end to such frantic searches: Concealed inside the ring is an RFID tag that is able to pay at the checkout, open the smart front door, act as our health insurance card when attending a medical appointment or replace the key card in a hotel. It might also be possible to save medical data such as our blood group or drug intolerances on this chip: In an accident, the emergency physician would have all the necessary information to hand. Researchers at Fraunhofer IGCV developed the intelligent ring as part of the MULTIMATERIAL Center Augsburg. The large-scale project, sponsored by the Bavarian Ministry of Economic Affairs, Regional Development and Energy, is divided into ten individual projects — including the KINEMATAM project, which came up with the idea and the demonstrator model of the smart part.

… Freelap USA: Wearable IMUs in running are growing in popularity, but they are only as good as the math used. Can you tell me how important the need is to have a development team that understands biology, physics, and coding? Many of the IMU sensors fail because of the sensor quality, but even good hardware fails because of poor engineering. What should professional teams do to help vet this besides expecting a single sport scientist to test it?

Karl Zelik: It takes an interdisciplinary team to make the most of wearable sensors—to ensure reliable data is collected and then processed in a way that provides accurate and actionable insights. In our Center for Rehabilitation Engineering and Assistive Technology at Vanderbilt University, we’ve benefited from close collaborations with biomechanists, roboticists, engineers, data scientists, and clinical specialists (in sports medicine, orthopedics, physical medicine, and rehabilitation).

Wearables for sport are rapidly growing and evolving, which is super exciting! But it also means it’s incredibly important (and not always easy) to match the right monitoring tool with the right use cases, where it can provide value.

At Carolina, the sports medicine staff is part of Campus Health and provides care to all students who are physically active as well as serving as team physicians for the athletics department.

“It’s called an independent medical model and it’s what the NCAA recommends,” explained Dr. Mario Ciocca, director of sports medicine. “There’s a perceived conflict of interest if it looks like coaches are pressuring you and could fire you if they don’t like what you’re doing. You want the people making medical decisions reporting to medical people.”

When the pandemic hit, this collaborative model became particularly important as serious medical decisions were being made daily that affected not only student-athletes but team sports in general.

Desperate to save its pandemic-delayed football season last fall, the Pac-12 made a wager.

Rapid antigen tests — a new technology for detecting the coronavirus — had hit the market in recent months, offering results in 15 minutes. The Pac-12, and other athletic conferences, wanted to try an unproven use: to screen healthy athletes daily for the coronavirus.

Conference Commissioner Larry Scott brokered a deal with Quidel, a prominent test manufacturer, and hailed the tests as a “game-changer.”

But behind the scenes, a debate raged over whether the tests could live up to their promise.

A UW Medicine testing expert warned colleagues the tests wouldn’t catch asymptomatic carriers. UW President Ana Mari Cauce worried the universities were being “duped” by Quidel. And the UW head of sports medicine, who helped lead the conference’s testing efforts, feared giving the public impression that students were serving as “guinea pigs.”

… In comparison to some other sports, football has been rather late with starting to systematically collect large sets of data for scientific analytics purposes aiming to progress teams’ gameplay. This is for several reasons, with the most prominent being that there are far less controllable settings of the game compared to other sports (large outdoor pitch, dynamic game, etc.), and also the dominant credo to rely mainly on human specialists with track records and experience in professional football. On these lines, Arrigo Sacchi, a successful Italian football coach and manager who never played professional football in his career, responded to criticism over his lack of experience with his famous quote when becoming a coach at Milan in 1987: “I never realised that to be a jockey you had to be a horse first.”

Football Analytics poses challenges that are well suited for a wide variety of AI techniques, coming from the intersection of 3 fields: computer vision, statistical learning and game theory (visualised in Figure 2). While these fields are individually useful for football analytics, their benefits become especially tangible when combined: players need to take sequential decision-making in the presence of other players (cooperative and adversarial) and as such game theory, a theory of interactive decision making, becomes highly relevant. Moreover, tactical solutions to particular in-game situations can be learnt based on in-game and specific player representations, which makes statistical learning a highly relevant area. Finally, players can be tracked and game scenarios can be recognised automatically from widely-available image and video inputs.