Applied Sports Science newsletter – May 17, 2021

Before celebrating its 25th anniversary season, which tips off Friday, the WNBA and its 144 players had to navigate the most unusual season in their quarter-century history. In 2020, the coronavirus pandemic forced players (some with family), coaches and support staff into a bubble in Bradenton, Florida. Isolated but not sheltered, 144 players protested in unison after the shooting of Jacob Blake. They underwent daily testing for coronavirus. They practiced and they played. As depicted in ESPN Films’ “144,” which debuts Thursday (9 p.m. ET, ESPN and available immediately after on ESPN+) the challenges were both physical and mental. A’ja Wilson, the league’s reigning MVP; Dearica Hamby, the mother of a then-3-year-old daughter; and Nneka Ogwumike, the president of the executive committee of the Women’s National Basketball Players Association, reflect on the challenges they overcame and the lessons they learned before, during and after their nearly 100 days inside the “Wubble.”

Nights have always been the hardest for Dominique Badji.

During the day Badji, a forward with Nashville SC, a second-year club in MLS, has soccer to occupy his mind and teammates to distract him from his thoughts.

A “kind of paradise, a little bubble,” he calls it.

But at night, alone in his living room, Badji’s thoughts often turn to his extended family in Senegal, where deadly political protests recently rocked the country.

Last Friday, the NFL Players Association held a conference call to update its members on the offseason calendar. The union reiterated its request that players skip voluntary spring workouts, something its leadership has been advocating for since the end of the 2020 season. Toward the end of the call, Tom Brady got on the line to help make the case.

“We shouldn’t have overly competitive drills in May and June,” Brady said, according to the NFL Network. “There’s no fucking pro baseball player that’s throwing 95 miles per hour in the middle of December.”

Brady has long advocated for changing the league’s offseason training regimen, and his voice carries weight for obvious reasons. He won the Super Bowl in his first season with the Buccaneers despite the cancellation of all offseason training due to COVID-19.

… But between the 2018 and 2019 seasons, Giolito saw a dramatic shift in performance. His strikeout rate more than doubled to 32.3 percent (and has hovered around the 30s ever since), and his walk rate plummeted to 8.1 percent. Giolito’s seemingly overnight success was no fluke, though — the tools were there all along. Rather, it was a slight mechanical change that unlocked his potential — a change that seems to be sweeping the rest of baseball as well.

But most apps only set goals and send reminders–which work in the short run. But they don’t form habits. In fact, apps that keep us making decisions could hurt habit formation.

… our randomized experiments demonstrated that compared to generic messages, personalized messages were more effective in reducing in-person doctor visits and replacing them with telehealth services. Post-experimental surveys of the experimental subjects revealed that the accuracy of these personalized messages, in fact, made patients comfortable with adopting telehealth services deployed by the platform. Thus, they were substituting their offline physician interactions with online ones, reducing their overall medical expenses. This was a silver lining of personalization.

Our findings have several implications:

First, our study shows that users of mHealth devices and apps can became more autonomous and more motivated in self-regulating their health behavior and more engaged and consistent in their lifestyle and wellness behavior, which leads to improved health outcomes. This suggests that it would be worthwhile for government and private insurers and tech companies to subsidize the prices of these devices in order to encourage their use. Apple, in fact, has been recently collaborating with Medicare plan providers to subsidize its watches for the elderly.

Scientists from the Institute of Scientific and Industrial Research at Osaka University used machine learning methods to enhance the signal-to-noise ratio in data collected when tiny spheres are passed through microscopic nanopores cut into silicon substrates. This work may lead to much more sensitive data collection when sequencing DNA or detecting small concentrations of pathogens.

Miniaturization has opened the possibility for a wide range of diagnostic tools, such as point-of-care detection of diseases, to be performed quickly and with very small samples. For example, unknown particles can be analyzed by passing them through nanopores and recording tiny changes in the electrical current. However, the intensity of these signals can be very low, and is often buried under random noise. New techniques for extracting the useful information are clearly needed.

Now, scientists from Osaka University have used deep learning to “denoise” nanopore data. Most machine learning methods need to be trained with many “clean” examples before they can interpret noisy datasets. However, using a technique called “Noise2Noise,” which was originally developed for enhancing images, the team was able to improve resolution of noisy runs even though no clean data was available.

Soft, skin-integrated electronic sensors can provide continuous measurements of diverse physiological parameters, with broad relevance to the future of human health care. Motion artifacts can, however, corrupt the recorded signals, particularly those associated with mechanical signatures of cardiopulmonary processes. Design strategies introduced here address this limitation through differential operation of a matched, time-synchronized pair of high-bandwidth accelerometers located on parts of the anatomy that exhibit strong spatial gradients in motion characteristics. When mounted at a location that spans the suprasternal notch and the sternal manubrium, these dual-sensing devices allow measurements of heart rate and sounds, respiratory activities, body temperature, body orientation, and activity level, along with swallowing, coughing, talking, and related processes, without sensitivity to ambient conditions during routine daily activities, vigorous exercises, intense manual labor, and even swimming. Deployments on patients with COVID-19 allow clinical-grade ambulatory monitoring of the key symptoms of the disease even during rehabilitation protocols. [full text]

Thousands of retired Black professional football players, their families and supporters are demanding an end to the controversial use of “race-norming” to determine which players are eligible for payouts in the NFL’s $1 billion settlement of brain injury claims, a system experts say is discriminatory.

Former Washington running back Ken Jenkins, 60, and his wife Amy Lewis on Friday delivered 50,000 petitions demanding equal treatment for Black players to Senior U.S. District Judge Anita B. Brody in Philadelphia, who is overseeing the massive settlement. Former players who suffer dementia or other diagnoses can be eligible for a payout.

Under the settlement, however, the NFL has insisted on using a scoring algorithm on the dementia testing that assumes Black men start with lower cognitive skills. They must therefore score much lower than whites to show enough mental decline to win an award. The practice, which went unnoticed until 2018, has made it harder for Black former players to get awards.

… The human physique is capable of many feats, but when it gets too hot, it falls apart. “We have to maintain a very specific range of body temperatures,” says Shane Campbell-Staton, a UCLA evolutionary biologist who studies the impact of heat on humans and other animals. Most of us are comfortable when the air around us hovers at about 70 degrees Fahrenheit, which allows our bodies to maintain an internal thermostat of around 98 degrees. When the environment pushes us past those limits, the delicate balance of chemical reactions that keep us alive starts to wobble, leading to cascades of negative effects that can very quickly become fatal.

Exposure to extreme heat could be the culprit behind thousands of deaths in the US each year and many more around the globe, according to those researching the phenomenon, though it’s hard to say how many for certain, given that most of them go unrecorded. But whatever that grim tally is, we know one thing for sure: We can expect more deaths in the future.

The short answer is no. A brief thread

Background The relationship between hamstring muscle injuries (HMIs) that involve the intramuscular tendon and prolonged recovery time and increased reinjury rate remains unclear in elite footballers.

Objective To determine the association of time to return to full training (TRFT) and reinjury of HMIs using the British Athletic Muscle Injury Classification (BAMIC) and specific anatomical injury location in elite-level football players.

Methods The electronic medical records of all players at an English Premier League club were reviewed over eight consecutive seasons. All players who sustained an acute HMI were included. Two experienced musculoskeletal radiologists independently graded each muscle using the BAMIC, categorised each injury location area (proximal vs middle vs distal third and proximal vs distal tendon) and reported second muscle involvement. TRFT and reinjury were recorded.

Results Out of 61 HMIs, the intramuscular tendon (BAMIC ‘c’) was involved in 13 (21.3%). HMI involving the intramuscular tendon (‘c’) had a mean rank TRFT of 36 days compared with 24 days without involvement (p=0.013). There were 10 (16.4%) reinjuries with a significant difference of 38.5% reinjury rate in the group with intramuscular tendon injury (‘c’) and 12.5% in the group without (p=0.031). TRFT and reinjury involving a second muscle was statistically significantly higher than without. Most of the HMIs to the biceps femoris with reinjury (5 out of 9) were in the distal third section related to the distal tendon site involving both the long and short head.

Conclusion TRFT in HMI involving the intramuscular tendon (‘c’) of the Biceps femoris is significantly longer with significantly higher reinjury rate compared with injuries without, in elite football players. The finding that most reinjures of the biceps femoris occurring in the distal third muscle at the distal tendon site, involving both the long and short head, merits further investigation. [full text]

The fungible relievers’ life drove Ryan Buchter deep into drinking and depression. After changing organizations 10 times in 14 seasons, he wants to evolve how baseball and its players deal with a growing mental health crisis.

PepsiCo’s Gatorade is rolling out its newest brand, Gatorlyte, featuring a five-electrolyte blend to promote “rapid rehydration” and give athletes another option to fuel their workout, said Gatorade’s head of brand strategy

… It looked like Guardiola was on a clear path to decline as recently as October. His style seemed desperate to add in more controlled periods of possession along with the high pressing style and it just wasn’t working. Every time he put in a better passer over a more physical option, it made them more open on the transition.

And then, suddenly, he just fixed it. City won both legs against PSG on the night without any huge surprises to the starting eleven. And he fixed it by becoming exactly what he wasn’t supposed to be: efficient, ruthless, boring. His team this season is probably the least enjoyable side he’s ever produced, at least in my subjective opinion. It’s also the most effective he’s had since Barcelona.