Sports Science Weekly Gym Bag - 10-28-09

Welcome to a World Series edition of the Weekly Sports Science Gym Bag, a collection of some of the best stuff I've found in the last week.  A few more baseball stories are included, while you watch the Yankees lose in 6 games!

The Overmanager: Why the New York Yankees' Joe Girardi is too smart for his own good
To play in the NFL, you have to make a show of going to college. To play in the NBA, you have to get through high school. To sign a contract with a major league baseball team, all you have to do is convince someone you're 16, provided you weren't born in a country with inconvenient labor laws. Perhaps this goes some way toward explaining both the high reverence in which the intellectual is held in baseball and the low standards necessary to qualify as one...

Running To The Right Beat
With the Fall marathon season in full swing, thousands of runners are gearing up for the big day.  Just as important as their broken-in shoes and heart rate monitor is their source of motivation, inspiration and distraction: their tunes.  Several recent studies try to chase down the connection between our ears and our feet...

Phys Ed: Do More Bicyclists Lead to More Injuries?
Recently, surgeons and emergency room physicians at the Rocky Mountain Regional Trauma Center in Denver noticed a troubling trend. They seemed to be seeing cyclists with more serious injuries than in years past. Since many of the physicians at the hospital, a Level I trauma center serving the Denver metropolitan area, were themselves cyclists, they wondered if their sense of things was accurate.  So the doctors began gathering data on all cycling-related trauma admittances at the hospital and dividing them into two blocks, one covering 1995-2000 and the other 2001-6...

Football
In light of a recent post on the difficulty of changing our decision-making habits - even when we're aware that our habits are biased and flawed - I thought it might be interesting to look at two examples from professional football. Why sports? Given the intense competitive pressure in the NFL - there's a thin line between victory and ignominy - you'd expect head coaches to have corrected many of their decision-making mistakes, especially once those mistakes have been empirically demonstrated. But you'd be wrong. 
Consider some research done by David Romer, an economist at UC Berkeley, who published a 2001 paper entitled "Do Firms Maximize? Evidence From Professional Football". The question Romer was trying to answer is familiar to every NFL fan: what to do on 4th down? Is it better to bring on the kicking team for a punt or field-goal attempt? Under what conditions should coaches risk going for it?

Missed Kicks Make Brain See Smaller Goal Post
Flubbing a field goal kick doesn’t just bruise your ego — new research shows it may actually change how your brain sees the goal posts.  In a study of 23 non-football athletes who each kicked 10 field goals, researchers found that players’ performance directly affected their perception of the size of the goal: After a series of missed kicks, athletes perceived the post to be taller and more narrow than before, while successful kicks made the post appear larger-than-life.  Professional athletes have long claimed that their perception changes when they’re playing well — they start hitting baseballs as large as grapefruits, or aiming at golf holes the size of a bucket — but many scientists have been slow to accept that performance can alter visual perception...  

Baseball: Head-first Slide Is Quicker
Base running and base stealing would appear to be arts driven solely by a runner's speed, but there's more than mere gristle, bone and lung power to this facet of baseball -- lots of mathematics and physics are at play. Who gets there faster, the head-first slider or the feet-first?

Pump your arms to speed up your legs, thanks to “neural coupling”
“Keep pumping your arms!” That’s one of those canonical pieces of advice that it seems every coach gives to his or her runners. The idea is that, late in a run or race when your legs are burning and you’re starting to slow down, if you keep moving arms briskly, your legs will follow. It’s a nice idea — it’s always good to have some concrete piece of advice that you can hang onto when it seems like the world is about to explode. But does it work?
Unfortunately, I don’t know. But in the course of researching a completely different topic today, I stumbled on an interesting piece of research by Daniel Ferris, a University of Michigan researcher who’s best known for his research into assisted movement using robotic exoskeletons. The paper, which appeared in the journal Exercise and Sport Science Reviews back in 2006, is called “Moving the arms to activate the legs.” The full text is available here...

The Human Body Is Built for Distance
Does running a marathon push the body further than it is meant to go?  The conventional wisdom is that distance running leads to debilitating wear and tear, especially on the joints. But that hasn’t stopped runners from flocking to starting lines in record numbers.  Last year in the United States, 425,000 marathoners crossed the finish line, an increase of 20 percent from the beginning of the decade, Running USA says. Next week about 40,000 people will take part in the New York City Marathon. Injury rates have also climbed, with some studies reporting that 90 percent of those who train for the 26.2-mile race sustain injuries in the process...

Running To The Right Beat

With the Fall marathon season in full swing, thousands of runners are gearing up for the big day.  Just as important as their broken-in shoes and heart rate monitor is their source of motivation, inspiration and distraction: their tunes.

Running with music has become so common that the two biggest names in both industries, Nike and Apple, have been joined at the hip with the Nike + iPod combination. So, what is it about music and running, or any exercise, that feels so right?

Several recent studies try to chase down the connection between our ears and our feet.

For the last 20 years, Costas Karageorghis, a sports psychologist at Britain’s Brunel University, has been setting the research pace for understanding our need to groove and move.

In addition to his lab research, Karageorghis has helped create a half marathon in London that tries to find the perfect music mix of live bands based on his research of human reaction to rhythm. The second annual "Run to the Beat" event was held a few weeks ago with 9,000 laboratory rats, er, runners either enjoying the live music or listening to their own mix of tunes on their MP3.  Karageorghis even offered a scientific selection of songs based on his findings.

According to Kargeorghis, there are four factors that contribute to a song's motivational qualities: rhythm response, musicality, cultural impact and association.

The first two are known as "internal" factors as they relate to the music's structure while the second two are "external" factors that reflect how we interpret the music. Rhythm response is tied to the beats per minute (bpm) of the song and how well it matches either the cadence or the heartbeat of the runner. A song's structure such as its melody and harmony contribute to its musicality. The external factors consider our musical background and the preferences we have for a certain genre of music and what we have learned to associate with certain songs and artists.

Picking the right music can have several benefits.

Syncing beats per minute with an exercise pace increases your efficiency. In a recent study, subjects who cycled in time to music found that they required 7 percent less oxygen to do the same work when compared to music playing in the background. Music can also help block out the little voice in your brain telling you its time to quit. Research shows that this dissociation effect results in a 10 percent reduction in perceived effort during treadmill running at a moderate intensity.

In the current study, published in the Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 30 subjects synchronised their pace to the tempo of the music which was 125 bpm. Before the experiment, a pool of music was rated using a questionnaire tool (the Brunel Music Rating Inventory) which then selected the most motivational pieces for the treadmill test. The subjects were given a choice of either pop or rock music.

When compared to a no-music control, the motivational synchronised music led to a 15 percent improvement in endurance.

"The synchronous application of music resulted in much higher endurance while the motivational qualities of the music impacted significantly on the interpretation of fatigue symptoms right up to the point of voluntary exhaustion," Karageorghis reported.

Matching the beats per minute of our music with our exercise heart rate also takes an interesting non-linear path, according to research.

Karageorghis found that when our hearts are performing at between 30 and 70 percent of maximum, we prefer a somewhat linear increase from 90 to 120 bpm. However, when we reach our anaerobic threshold between 70 and 80 percent of maximum, we prefer a jump in rhythm from 120 to 150 bpm. Above 80 percent of maximum heart rate, a plateau is reached where even faster music is not preferred.

Another new study by researchers from Liverpool John Moores University, and detailed online in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, looked at the tempo angle differently. Instead of a mix of different songs at different tempos, they asked a group of cyclists to pedal to the same song over three different trials.

What the subjects did not know is that the researchers first played the song at normal speed, but then increased or decreased the speed of the same song by 10 percent. The small change was not enough to be noticed, but it did have an effect on performance.

Speeding up the music program increased distance covered/unit time, power and pedal cadence by 2.1 percent, 3.5 percent and 0.7 percent, respectively. Slowing the program produced falls of 3.8 percent, 9.8 percent and 5.9 percent. The researchers concluded that we increase or decrease our work effort and pace to match the tempo of our music.

Finding the right beat has now become even easier with a couple of cool software plug-in tools, Cadence or Tangerine.  Cadence is an iPhone/iPod Touch app, while Tangerine is Mac only. By integrating with your iTunes library, they can build a custom playlist based on the BPM range you provide, while arranging the songs in several different tempo shapes including warm-ups and warm-downs. With the right mix, your brain and feet will be in perfect harmony.

Sports Science Weekly Gym Bag - 10-7-09

Time for another edition of the Sports Science Weekly Gym Bag. (Yes, a Wisconsin Badger football gym bag this week...they're 5-0!) If you ever run across something that you would like to share, just add it to the comments below!

Marathon Runners Mull the ‘D Word’
This is the time of year, after marathoners have logged their longest miles, that any kind of pain, nagging or excruciating, can send runners into a panic about whether they will make it to the starting line. Or if they should even try...

Faster tunes make you bike faster, even if it hurts a bit more
Researchers have been studying how music and other “distractions” affect exercise performance for decades (see here, for instance), hoping to trick us into pushing a little harder without realizing it. One of the factors they’ve looked at extensively is the speed of the music — the idea that faster tempos make us pick up the pace. The problem is that the effects of tempo tend to be swamped by the effect of whether the subjects in the experiment like the particular tunes selected for them...

How Do Marathons Affect Your Heart?
Last year the European Heart Journal published a study that continues to prompt discussion among researchers who work with marathoner runners and those, many of them the same researchers, who run marathons. In the study, German scientists scanned the hearts of 108 experienced, male distance runners in their fifties, sixties and seventies.  By standard measures, the group’s risk for heart problems was low. But when the researchers studied the runners’ scan results, they found that more than a third of the men showed evidence of significant calcification or plaque build-up in their heart arteries. Several also had scarring of some of the tissue in their hearts...

The Eyes Have It - Is visual training the sports world's next big thing?
Seattle Mariners first baseman Russell Branyan began this season on a tear. In interviews, Branyan credited his newfound success in large part to a piece of software that runs on an ordinary laptop. "I think it's helped me really pinpoint and focus on the ball," Branyan said of the Vizual Edge program, which offers a variety of exercises to train and sharpen visual skills. "I see the ball exactly where it is. I don't want to say it's all because of this. … But, I mean, I was a .230 hitter."

Watch Out Gatorade, Powerade, Accelerade! Mother Nature's Entered the Game!
"I'm convinced more than ever that Mother Nature is a runner. I've recently hailed Mother Nature's "natural sports drink"—coconut water—and its health benefits, especially how its naturally high level of potassium helps keep my calf cramps at bay on long runs. Well, it appears that Mother Nature has expanded her line of sports drinks..."

Young Athletes and Women More Likely to Have Second ACL Surgery Within a Year
According to one of the largest studies ever conducted on the outcomes of ACL surgery, patients under 40 and women are both more likely to have second knee surgery within a year of an ACL repair.  Investigators looked at surgical outcomes in 70,000 patients who had ACL reconstruction surgery from 1997 to 2006 in New York state. The results, published in the October 2009 issue of The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, found the following...

Despite Size, NFL Players Not More Likely To Develop Heart Disease, Even After Retirement
Former professional football players with large bodies don't appear to have the same risk factors for heart disease as their non-athletic counterparts, UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers have found in studying a group of National Football League (NFL) alumni....

I Run, Therefore I Drink?

Here’s a question for your buddies at the next golf outing or bowling league night: Are we more active because we drink more or do we drink more because we’re more active? Recent research showed that there is a correlation between the two, but could not offer a solid reason.

Either way, another study claims the combination of moderate alcohol use and exercise will help our hearts more than just choosing one over the other.

Michael French, a health economics professor at the University of Miami, and his colleagues dug into data from the 2005 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, a yearly telephone survey of roughly 230,000 Americans, and found a surprisingly strong positive correlation between the levels of alcohol intake and exercise.  For both men and women, those who drank at least some alcohol exercised 7.2 minutes more per week than non-drinkers.

While that may not seem like much, the study showed that the more booze, the more minutes spent sweating. Light, moderate, and heavy drinkers worked out 5.7, 10.1 and 19.9 minutes more per week, respectively. Also, drinking resulted in a 10.1 percent increase in the probability of vigorous physical activity.

Now, that doesn’t mean that these folks were drinking while exercising, nor that it was necessarily good for them to engange in more than light drinking. Instead, French and his team, who have studied many facets of alcohol abuse and its triggers, are trying to make sense of this correlation that seems too strong to ignore. It seems counterintuitive to traditional views that if people engage in one unhealthy behavior, like excessive drinking, that they will most likely engage in other unhealthy behaviors, like physical inactivity.

French suggests that heavy alcohol use may be masked by the appearance of a healthy lifestyle and cautions physicians not to jump to conclusions.

“For example, taking into account only the patients’ levels of physical activity and perhaps diet would overlook potential alcohol use problems that could be detected and treated,” French writes. “Physically active individuals who engage in problematic drinking are often ‘‘healthy looking,’’ because alcohol use consequences are sometimes delayed.”

The study appears in the September/October issue of American Journal of Health Promotion.

Maybe we exercise more because we know how many calories those beers and mixers are adding to our waistlines. Even so, Danish researchers found that we’re still better off combining moderate alcohol consumption with exercise.

Morten Gronbaek, epidemiologist with Denmark’s National Institute of Public Health, and his team surveyed 12,000 people over a 20-year period to determine the cardiovascular effects of alcohol use and exercise. They divided the population into four groups: those who did not drink or exercise; those who had both moderate levels of alcohol use and exercise; and those who either just drank or just exercised at moderate levels.

The group with the highest risk of fatal ischaemic heart disease, a form of heart disease characterized by a reduced blood supply to the heart, were the non-drinking, non-exercisers. Choosing either moderate drinking or moderate exercise provided a 30 percent decrease in risk factors. However, drinking and exercising, (not necessarily at the same time), showed a 50 percent lower risk.

Their findings were detailed in the European Heart Journal.

“Being both physically active and drinking a moderate amount of alcohol is important for lowering the risk of both fatal IHD and death from all causes,” Gronbaek concluded.  Of course, the key is moderation, defined in the study as one drink per day for women and two per day for men. Also, Gronbaek warns that there is no heart benefit until a certain age.

“You wouldn’t advise everyone to drink,” he said. “You shouldn’t even think about doing it until age 45 or 50. There’s absolutely no proof of a preventative and protective effect before age 45.”