Young Sports Stars Score With A Growth Mindset

Amazing young athletes have been going viral lately.  Did you see the video of the 11-year-old star of the Downey Christian high school varsity basketball team, who recently performed at halftime of an Orlando Magic game?  How about the 9-year-old girl running around and over the boys in her youth football league, who was invited to sit next to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell at last month’s Super Bowl?  Then there’s the 10th grader who is currently starting for the Erie Otters, a major junior hockey team with an average age of 19, whose agent is Hall of Famer Bobby Orr and who NHL star Sidney Crosby compares to himself.

These young YouTube sensations, Julian Newman, Sam Gordon and Connor McDavid, have all been dealing with the crush of recent media attention thanks to their incredible athletic skills.  Certainly, there are more like them across the country waiting to be discovered, but the stories of these three give us a chance to look behind the highlights for similarities and clues of early athletic achievement.  According to two new studies, it is all about their mind-set.

To most kids, making their high school varsity basketball team when they’re only in 6th grade and 4’ 5” tall would sound impossible.  Many young girls (and their parents) wouldn’t think of playing in a boys football league assuming they could never compete.  And a 16 year old hockey player is often told that the odds of him ever playing in college or the pros is a long shot unless you were born with just the right set of skills.

Carol Dweck, Stanford University psychology professor, calls this a fixed mind-set, believing that the skills you were born with define the upper limits of your success in life.  Conversely, those students with a growth mind-set are driven by their desire to learn new things and look at failure as just part of the process.  A fixed mind-set dwells on performance goals; only trying new tasks that they believe fall within their innate gifts. A growth mind-set thrives on learning goals and can’t wait to take on the next challenge even it means a struggle.

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In most cases, researchers believe we can thank our parents for giving us our current mind-set.  Two new studies have confirmed that how parents praise their children can have a lasting effect on how their kids face new challenges.

Dweck and a team from Stanford, Temple and the University of Chicago videotaped mothers with their toddlers at ages 1, 2 and 3 as they accomplished everyday play activities.  Some moms used what the researchers call “person praise”, saying things like “you’re so smart” and “you’re good at hockey.”  Other moms used “process praise” with phrases like, “you figured it out” or “you learned how to make that shot.”

Five years later, the team revisited the kids and asked them if they would like to tackle some tough learning problems like math or complicated skill movements.  As expected, those kids who had been praised with fixed “you’re smart” phrases were afraid to try new challenges in fear they would fail, ruining their reputation for being “smart.”  On the other hand, process-praised children took on the new tasks knowing their only failure would be to not try.

“What we found was that the greater proportion of process praise, the more likely the child was to have a mindset five years later that welcomed challenges and that represented traits as malleable, not a label you were stuck with,” Dweck said. “'You're great, you're amazing' – that is not helpful. Because later on, when they don't get it right or don't do it perfectly, they'll think they aren't so great or amazing."

Their research was just published in the journal, Child Development.

Praising the wrong way seems intuitive to most parents.  In a similar experiment, Dutch researchers asked 357 adults to write down the encouragement that they would give to six different children, three with high self-esteem and three with low self esteem, for completing an activity.  Sample descriptions of the hypothetical kids were either, "Lisa usually likes the kind of person she is” or "Sarah is often unhappy with herself.”

The adults used person praise twice as often as process praise for the low-esteem children.  "Adults may feel that praising children for their inherent qualities helps combat low self-esteem, but it might convey to children that they are valued as a person only when they succeed," lead author Eddie Brummelman of Utrecht University said. "When children subsequently fail, they may infer they are unworthy."

The study appears in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

Eduardo Briceño, Co-Founder and CEO of Mindset Works, a company that helps schools and teachers adopt the growth mind-set, explains Dweck’s research in this recent TED talk:

Connor McDavid clearly has a growth mind-set.  Sherry Bassin, general manager of the Otters, described McDavid’s attitude in a recent USA Today article, “First guy on the ice for practice, last guy off. He just loves it. He's like those doctors who can't leave the hospital for 18 hours. He is honing his skills like a top surgeon."

As for Julian and Sam, if they see walls in front of them, they have learned to either dribble or sprint around them.

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The Semantic Spaces Of An Athlete's Brain

Playing different sports is rather redundant.  Think about the motor skills and objects of, say, hockey versus soccer.  Players on two teams try to keep control of the puck/ball and put it past the opposing keeper into the goal.  Tennis, badminton and volleyball share the concept of hitting an object over a net at an opponent.  Football and rugby both need to advance a ball across a goal line.  There are similar objects such as a ball, a goal and the field of play and movements like jumping and running.

An athlete’s brain needs to learn these shared concepts early on to be able to navigate the tactics and motor skills required for different sports. Now, neuroscientists may have discovered how our brains organize this overlapping information so we don’t need to relearn the basics of each new sport.

Think about when you started driving.  While you may have been taught in one particular car, you learned the more general concepts of driving and how to identify the common objects found in dozens of vehicles.  Within seconds of sitting in a different car, you can recognize the steering wheel, ignition switch, pedals, lights, not to mention the basic mechanical functions of making it move.

Neuroscience has traditionally explained this ability to recognize objects by localizing it only to the visual cortex, a specific area of the brain.  Now, neuroresearcher Alex Huth of the University of California – Berkeley and his team have discovered that these different categories of objects are actually represented over a larger overlapping space in the brain in the somatosensory and frontal cortices covering almost 20% of the brain.

From the same visual system modeling lab that brought us a mind-reading computer last year, Huth used a similar technique of watching the brains of five researcher volunteers while they watched two hours of movie trailers.  Using fMRI scanning, the roughly 30,000 locations, also known as voxels, in the cortex were recorded while seeing over 1,700 different categories of objects and actions from the clips.

By matching the electrical pattern in the subjects’ brains with the scenes they were watching, a “semantic space” map was created showing which areas of the brain were active when seeing certain objects or actions.  As seen in the image above, categories that light up the same pattern in the brain are colored the same.  For example, focus on the middle of this image and you’ll see a green section that identifies human actors, including athletes.  Each small leaf on each branch represents one of the 1,700 different object or action types, which is not an exhaustive list of things in our world but a good cross section.

“Our methods open a door that will quickly lead to a more complete and detailed understanding of how the brain is organized. Already, our online brain viewer appears to provide the most detailed look ever at the visual function and organization of a single human brain,” said Huth.

Indeed, that online brain viewer is a fascinating tool.  By choosing an object such as “athlete” or an action such as “kicking” on one side of the viewer, you can see the corresponding layout of brain topology that is used to visualize it.

“Using the semantic space as a visualization tool, we immediately saw that categories are represented in these incredibly intricate maps that cover much more of the brain than we expected,” Huth said.

The research is published in the journal Neuron.

By studying the semantic map, we can see the shared properties of athletic endeavours.  The athlete cluster includes “ballplayer”, “skater” and “climber.” Interestingly, a cluster called “move self”, (including actions such as reach, jump and grab), uses a separate brain network then a more general grouping called “move” (including actions of pull, drop and reach).  From a skill practice perspective, the idea of a concept neighborhood makes sense as other research has shown the transferability of movements and logic from one sport to another.

In case you were wondering, vehicles do have their own semantic group including everything from a moped to a pickup to a locomotive.

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How Cristiano Ronaldo Sees The Ball

Last year, the Spanish newspaper Marca revealed the nicknames that Real Madrid players have given each other inside the Santiago Bernabéu locker room.  While some names poked fun at a player’s appearance (“Nemo” for Mesut Özil’s bulging eyes), superstar Cristiano Ronaldo was simply known as “la máquina”, Spanish for “the machine.”  With his humanoid robot physique and his superior speed and quickness, Ronaldo seems to be programmed for goal scoring.

Indeed, sponsor Castrol has developed a self-proclaimed documentary, “Ronaldo – Tested To The Limit”, to attempt to explain the Portuguese player’s body strength, mental ability, technique and skill.  The most interesting of the four segments, mental ability, helps us realize that without the command center of the brain, the machine-like body parts are useless.

While physical attributes such as strength, speed, agility and power are necessary for athletic greatness, sport skill begins with evaluating the playing environment, taking in cues and making decisions through sensory input and perception.  Vision supplies 80-90% of the information athletes use to plan their motor skill movement.

Surrounded by sports scientists and testing equipment at a Madrid soundstage, Ronaldo was asked to perform two experiments that showcase his visual perception skills of gaze control and spatial awareness.

First, his challenge was to keep the ball away from an opponent for at least 5 seconds in a 1v1 drill.  While his opponent was a former Division One player, Andy Ansah, there was no doubt Ronaldo would succeed in keeping possession.  The insight came from both players wearing eye tracker equipment that can later show the gaze or saccadic movements of their eyes.  Elite athletes have more sophisticated patterns of cues that they watch for and focus on to beat their opponents versus novice players that gaze at many focal points.

Professor Joan Vickers at the University of Calgary is best known for her pioneering work in athlete eye tracking and working with coaches and players to develop strategies and logic of what they should be looking at during competition.  For example, hockey or soccer goalies should focus on the shooter’s hips or body angle rather than the puck or ball.

Through the eye tracking video, Ronaldo’s opponent, Ansah, looked mostly at the ball and the feet but his eyes darted in a less defined pattern.  Ronaldo, on the other hand, clearly had a strategy of watching Ansah’s hips and space around Ansah that he could exploit.  His command of the ball at his feet allowed him to only occasionally check its position.  This superior spatial awareness allows great players to watch their opponent and react to the slightest hints of their next movement.thlete eye tracking and working with coaches and players to develop strategies and logic of what they should be looking at during competition.  For example, hockey or soccer goalies should focus on the shooter’s hips or body angle rather than the puck or ball.

Another aspect of visual perception in many sports is to track a moving object.  An outfielder racing to catch a fly ball, a tennis player returning a 100 mph serve, or a soccer striker taking a one-time shot of a well-crossed ball all require a sophisticated, yet mostly subconscious, skill to intercept the object’s path and act on it.

To show that most of this task is calculated in the brain rather than simply with the eyes, Ronaldo was asked to do something he is paid very well to do, finish off a crossed ball into the goal.  However, to make it more interesting, during the ball’s flight to Ronaldo, the lights were turned off inside the arena forcing the player to calculate the final flight trajectory of the ball and make contact with it in the dark.

Just as a baseball hitter only gets about ¼ of a second to decide to swing at a 90 mph pitch (and can rarely “see” the ball all the way across the plate), an athlete often relies on his brain to complete the 3D scenario and rapidly predict the path of the flying object.

As seen in the video, the first two crosses are “easily” finished off by Ronaldo when he is allowed to see about half the ball’s flight towards him.  The real expertise is shown when the room goes dark immediately after Ansah kicks the ball.  The only cues available to Ronaldo are angles and movement of Ansah’s hips and legs to predict where the ball will end up.  Not only did he meet the ball but added a bit of Portuguese style by using his shoulder to finish the goal.

There has been some debate over the years on how exactly humans track moving objects.  Several studies and theories have looked at the movement of baseball outfielders as they follow a fly ball off the bat.  The late Seville Chapman, a physicist at Stanford, developed the Optical Acceleration Cancellation (OAC) theory that argues a fielder must keep moving to keep the rising ball at a certain angle to him. If he moves forward too much, the ball will rise too fast and land behind him.  If he mistakenly moves backward, the ball’s angular flight will drop below 45 degrees and land in front of him.  By keeping a constant angle to the ball through its flight, the fielder will end up where the ball does.

Subconsciously, Ronaldo may be using the OAC theory to start moving towards the ball based on its early trajectory, then computes the rest of the flight in the dark.  The advanced skill of predicting the path of the ball instantly after the kick puts Ronaldo into a world class category.

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Euro 2012: A New Way To Track Team Performance

Imagine if the new Adidas soccer ball that will be used in this month’s Euro 2012 tournament had a memory chip in it that could retrace its entire path through each of the scheduled thirty-one games.  Not only its direction and distance traveled, but if it could also log each player’s touch leading up to every shot on goal.

Would the sum of all of those individual path segments tell the story of the game and which players contributed the most to their team’s success?  Northwestern University engineering professor Luís A. Nunes Amaral has not only answered that question, but has now built a side business to enlighten coaches and fans.

While most sports have an abundance of statistical metrics to measure a player’s development, soccer’s fluid gameplay and low scores make it more difficult to evaluate a specific player’s impact and contribution.  To fill the void, several game analysis service firms now offer data on each action of every player during a game, but it’s left to the consumers of this data (coaches, players and fans) to interpret what combination of stats best explains if the team is improving beyond the ultimate metric of wins and losses.

Amaral, a lifelong player and fan from Portugal, saw an opportunity to help.  “In soccer there are relatively few big things that can be counted,” he said. “You can count how many goals someone scores, but if a player scores two goals in a match, that’s amazing. You can really only divide two or three goals or two or three assists among, potentially, eleven players. Most of the players will have nothing to quantify their performance at the end of the match.”

In his lab at Northwestern, Amaral and his team of researchers study complex systems and networks; everything from metabolic ecosystems, the Internet, neural networks in our brain and the propagation of HIV infection.  To him, the game of soccer is no different.

“You can define a network in which the elements of the network are your players,” he commented. “Then you have connections between the players if they make passes from one to another. Also, because their goal is to score, you can include another element in this network, which is the goal.”
They dug into the stats of the previous European championship, Euro 2008, and mapped the ball movement and player statistics for each game into a computer model.  They made the assumption that the basic strategy of every soccer team is to move the ball towards their opponent’s goal.

“We looked at the way in which the ball can travel and finish on a shot,” said Amaral, who also is a member of the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO) and an Early Career Scientist with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.  ”The more ways a team has for a ball to travel and finish on a shot, the better that team is. And, the more times the ball goes through a given player to finish in a shot, the better that player performed.”

By combining a player’s passing efficiency (number of successful passes divided by total passes) and the ball flow around the field, the model can draw a network diagram of the paths that most often led to a shot on goal.  These well-worn paths begin to tell a story of which players are the most reliable and effective.  Amaral has given a very sports-bar worthy name to this ability – flow centrality.  The more often that a player is involved in the build-up of passes towards a shot, the more vital he or she is to the team’s success.

The research was published in the online science journal, PLoS ONE.

Since the study came out almost two years ago, Amaral has set-up a new company, Chimu Solutions, to not only offer soccer analysis but also to expand their algorithms and software to other lines of business to reveal “intricate team dynamics as well as individual metrics with the goal of differentiating role players from superstars.”

While goal scorers and goalkeepers most often get their names in the headlines, it’s often the supporting cast of players that determine the outcome of games.  Understanding how the ball should be and how it is moving up and down the field is critical to player development and game tactics.  One of the most difficult skills for free-flowing sports like hockey and soccer is the visual awareness of teammates’ locations and quick decisions to make progress towards the goal.  Flow centrality may just be the answer.

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Body Checking In Youth Hockey Causes More Brain Injuries

Youth hockey players in the Atom division of Hockey Canada are more than 10 times likely to suffer a brain injury since bodychecking was first allowed among the 9 and 10-year-olds, says a study led by St. Michael's Hospital neurosurgeon Dr. Michael Cusimano.

The findings, published online in the journal Open Medicine, add to the growing evidence that bodychecking holds greater risk than benefit for youth and support widespread calls to ban the practice.

According to the researchers, led by Cusimano, director of the Injury Prevention Research Centre at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto, the odds of visiting an emergency department due to a brain injury from bodychecking increased significantly among all minor hockey players after Hockey Canada relaxed bodychecking rules in the 1998/1999 season. At that time, the organization allowed, for the first time, body contact among 9 and 10 year-olds in the Atom division.

The team examined the records of 8,552 male youth 6-17 years-old who attended one of five emergency departments in Ontario for hockey related injuries that occurred before and after the rule change. Researchers found more than half of hockey-related injuries were a result of bodychecking. What's more, the risk of a head or neck injury, including concussions, increased across all minor hockey divisions.
"Our work confirmed the fact that body checking is the most common cause of injury in hockey. While proponents argue lowering the age for bodychecking helps players learn how to properly bodycheck and reduces injuries at older ages, our study clearly showed the opposite ― the risk of all injuries and especially, brain injuries, increases with exposure to bodychecking," Cusimano said. "While all age groups showed increases in injuries, the youngest were the most vulnerable and that bodychecking puts youth unnecessarily at the risk of the long-term effects of brain injuries, such as cognitive and social-behavioural problems."

For some time, researchers like Dr. Cusimano have called on organizations like the NHL to take more leadership in reducing the incidence of brain injuries. In recent weeks, pressure has mounted on the NHL after Pittsburgh Penquins captain Sidney Crosby and Montreal Canadiens' Max Pacioretty suffered serious concussions that sidelined both players.

"Ice hockey is a sport with great potential to increase the health of individuals but practices that increase the risk for the vast majority of players must be minimized," Cusimano adds. "It is now very clear that there is no benefit to any one or any group to continue to allow bodychecking. Hockey organizers, sponsors, the media, coaches, trainers, and players and parents must come together to advocate for multifaceted approaches that include changes to the rules to reduce the risk of injury."

Source: St. Michael's Hospital and Michael D Cusimano, Nathan A Taback, Steven R McFaull, Ryan Hodgins, Tsegaye M Bekele, Nada Elfeki; Canadian Research Team in Traumatic Brain Injury and Violence. Effect of bodychecking on rate of injuries among minor hockey players. Open Medicine, Vol 5, No 1 (2011)

See also: New Return-To-Play Guidelines For Sports Concussions and Youth Sports Concussions Double In Last Ten Years

Do Young Athletes Need Practice Or Genetics? A Conversation With Peter Vint

Recently, while I was taking up my normal Saturday position on a youth soccer game sideline, I overheard a conversation between two parents as they watched the players warm-up. “I just love watching James play soccer.  He’s just one of those natural talents.” “I agree. Even though his parents never played growing up, he just seems to have inherited all the right genes to be a top player.” 

It’s a common belief among parents and some coaches that kids either have “it” or they don’t.  Of course, some skills can be gained from practice, but the talent theory of player development and team selection seems to favor the opinion that athletic skill is “hard-wired”, unable to progress much beyond the natural limit.

Now, several books are out to prove this theory incorrect, with titles such as “The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born, Its Grown”, “Talent Is Overrated”, and “The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You've Been Told About Genetics, Talent, and IQ Is Wrong.” The common thread through all of the research studies quoted by the authors is the mantra that practice makes perfect. More specifically, about 10,000 hours of highly structured practice is required to reach elite performance levels.

Is athletic success that black or white? Instead, is there a combination of talent and tenacity that is required to reach the top? I put these questions to an expert who spends most of his waking hours trying to find the answer.

Peter Vint

Peter Vint is the High Performance Director for the United States Olympic Committee. His responsibilities include leading and coordinating the efforts of sport science and medical professionals focused on the Olympic sports of swimming, track and field, shooting, equestrian, weightlifting, and golf as well as the Pan Am sports of bowling and water skiing.

His team is responsible for conceptualizing, developing, and implementing successful and sustainable applied sport science programs with a focus on maximizing athlete development, performance, and longevity.

Recently, Peter was kind enough to endure my endless questions on this topic. Here is a synopsis of our conversation:

Dan Peterson: Peter, what makes a great athlete? Is it raw, inherited talent or years of dedicated practice?

Peter Vint: The question of what makes an athlete great is very complex.  The extent to which performance is influenced by genetic predisposition or the expression of these traits through extensive hard work and practice is not at all a black and white issue. Human performance is always nuanced and complicated and multivariate. That said, if forced to give an opinion, I would absolutely fall on the nurture/deliberate practice side of this issue than on the nature/"giftedness" side.

But, whether you subscribe to the narratives in The Talent Code, Talent is Overrated, Bounce, Outliers, Genius in All of Us, etc. or not, a great number of the cited references in these books are solid and substantial. Be sure to review the footnotes and bibliographies.

DP:  Most of the books you reference go back to the research of K. Anders Ericsson of Florida State University, known as the “expert on experts.”  His theory states that an individual needs at least 10 years and 10,000 hours of deliberate practice in their chosen sport or skill to become world-class.  Some authors take this literally and suggest that is all that is needed.  Do you agree?

PV:  First, it’s important to recognize that the 10 year/10,000 hr rule is more of a general guideline than an absolute standard. Ericsson is very clear on this but perhaps owing to the simplicity of the message, it is quite possible that the general public has interpreted this in a more absolute sense. That said, I do think that Ericsson’s work is being somewhat oversimplified in that he, and others in this field, realize that there are obvious and necessary interactions between genetic predisposition, "deliberate practice", and even "opportunity" or circumstance. To what extent this has actually happened I cannot say. I can point to several examples in the popular media where authors have captured these complexities nicely (e.g., Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, Matthew Syed’s Bounce, and David Shenk’s The Genius in All of Us).

It is likely that athletes like Lebron James, Shaquille O'Neill, and Kevin Durant would never have become an Olympic gymnast or Triple Crown winning jockey - regardless of how hard or how deeply they practiced. But, how many athletes with a relatively similar genetic makeup to guys like Lebron, Shaq, and KD have NOT become superstars? A lot. And, to flip the coin, how many superstars arise from relative obscurity or against all odds? A lot. Even when we do become aware of "young geniuses", closer inspection often yields interested and engaged and supportive parents and an environment that encourages and supports "effort" - and not "the gift" (see Carol Dweck’s “Mindset” for an exceptional treatment of this topic). Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky, and Tiger Woods come to mind.

My feeling in reading a broad body of literature related to human performance is that, in general (and there are notable exceptions to this), there is likely a minimal set of physical traits or genetic makeup which facilitates achievement to a particular level of success. Note that this may not be an absolute necessity (think, Mugsy Bogues). However, I believe the great differentiator in human performance is not genetic predisposition. but rather the expression of the gene pool which is itself now clearly related to the extent to which the individual accumulates hours of "deliberate practice".

I see another common misinterpretation in the 10 year/10,000 hr rule. The literature is clear in this but the general public’s understanding often misses the distinction in that this is not simply accumulated hours of practice, but accumulated hours of DELIBERATE practice. Dan Coyle's introduction in "The Talent Code", "The girl who did a month's practice in 6-minutes" is, in my opinion, perhaps the most insightful example of this distinction I’ve ever read.

DP: So, do genetics play any role in sports success?

PV: My short answer is yes, to varying extents, they do. But, as before, I do not believe that genetics are necessarily an absolute limiter of exceptional performances. "Skill" is developed, not from basic physical or cognitive attributes or from some magical quality ("a gift"), but from sustained, effortful, and effective practice complemented with meaningful, well-timed, and actionable feedback.

Skill itself is a complex process and almost always involves many different types or classes of skill: motor skill (the physical actions involved with "doing something"), mental skills, and perceptual skills. The extent to which these various types of skills are called into play will depend on the overall task being executed.

For example, a pilot controlling an automated aircraft may need only nominal motor skill to press a button, but will require substantial mental and perceptual skill to understand what happens when the automation switches from one mode to another. On the other hand, a basketball player will require extensive motor skill in executing a drive to the basket but will, though to a lesser extent, also involve perceptual and mental skills. Good examples of the world's best players in sport (especially team sports) seem to have exceptionally well developed perceptual skills which allow them to "see the field" better than others and "know where players will be before they even arrive".

So, physical ability (height, strength, speed, coordination) and the specific genetic code which tends to manifest it, may or may not play a significant role in the execution of the skill, depending on what the skill actually requires. The same is true of genetic predisposition, which may either enhance or impair the development of mental and perceptual skill.

In the context of sport, well-matched physical abilities are often very advantageous. That said, those same physical attributes, without an ability to properly coordinate body actions or to properly execute the action at the appropriate time or to adequately control them under pressure or in unusual circumstances, more often than not, will lead to poorer performances. Pointing again to examples like Wayne Gretzky or Magic Johnson, these were not the biggest, fastest, or strongest athletes in their sport. Their exceptional performances came from exceptional development of all facets of the skills they were required to execute in the environments they worked in. This did not happen magically but through hard work, vast and varied experiences, and a level of physical ability that allowed them to execute.  To quote Wayne Gretzky, “I wasn't naturally gifted in terms of size and speed; everything I did in hockey I worked for. ..The highest compliment that you can pay me is to say that I work hard every day…”

DP:  Peter, thank you very much for your insight.

See also: Brains Over Brawn In Sports and Winning Olympic Gold With Sport Science

Football Players May Still Injure Brain Even Without A Concussion

Thomas Talavage, co-director of the Purdue MRI Facility, prepares to test a Jefferson High School football player. (Credit: Purdue University photo/Andrew Hancock)

A study by researchers at Purdue University suggests that some high school football players suffer undiagnosed changes in brain function and continue playing even though they are impaired.
"Our key finding is a previously undiscovered category of cognitive impairment," said Thomas Talavage, an expert in functional neuroimaging who is an associate professor of biomedical engineering and electrical and computer engineering and co-director of the Purdue MRI Facility.

The findings represent a dilemma because they suggest athletes may suffer a form of injury that is difficult to diagnose.

"The problem is that the usual clinical signs of a head injury are not present," said Larry Leverenz, an expert in athletic training and a clinical professor of health and kinesiology. "There is no sign or symptom that would indicate a need to pull these players out of a practice or game, so they just keep getting hit."

Findings are detailed in a research paper appearing online this week in the Journal of Neurotrauma.
The team of researchers screened and monitored 21 players at Jefferson High School in Lafayette, Ind.
"The athletes wore helmets equipped with six sensors called accelerometers, which relay data wirelessly to equipment on the sidelines during each play," said Eric Nauman, an associate professor of mechanical engineering and an expert in central nervous system and musculoskeletal trauma.

Impact data from each player were compared with brain-imaging scans and cognitive tests performed before, during and after the season. The researchers also shot video of each play to record and study how the athletes sustained impacts.

Whereas previous research studying football-related head trauma has focused on players diagnosed with concussions, the Purdue researchers tested all of the players. They were surprised to find cognitive impairment in players who hadn't been diagnosed with concussions.

The research team identified 11 players who either were diagnosed by a physician as having a concussion, received an unusually high number of impacts to the head or received an unusually hard impact. Of those 11 players, three were diagnosed with concussions during the course of the season, four showed no changes and four showed changes in brain function.

"So half of the players who appeared to be uninjured still showed changes in brain function," Leverenz said. "These four players showed significant brain deficits. Technically, we aren't calling the impairment concussions because that term implies very specific clinical symptoms, such as losing consciousness or having trouble walking and speaking. At the same time, our data clearly indicate significant impairment."

The findings support anecdotal evidence that football players not diagnosed with concussions often seem to suffer cognitive impairment.

Researchers evaluated players using a GE Healthcare Signa HDx 3.0T MRI to conduct a type of brain imaging called functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, along with a computer-based neurocognitive screening test.

"We're proud of our association with Purdue and feel longitudinal studies will provide a valuable platform to better study brain injuries," said Jonathan A. Murray, general manager of cross business programs for GE Healthcare.

The research could aid efforts to develop more sensitive and accurate methods for detecting cognitive impairment and concussions; more accurately characterize and model cognitive deficits that result from head impacts; determine the cellular basis for cognitive deficits after a single impact or repeated impacts; and develop new interventions to reduce the risk and effects of head impacts.

"By integrating the fMRI with head-based accelerometers and computer-based cognitive assessment, we are able to detect subtle levels of neurofunctional and neurophysiological change," Nauman said. "These data provide an opportunity to accurately track both the initial changes as well as the recovery in cognitive performance."

(Credit: iStockphoto/Bill Grove

The ongoing research may help to determine how many blows it takes to cause impairment, which could lead to safety guidelines on limiting the number of hits a player receives per week.  "We're not yet sure exactly how many hits this is, but it's probably around 50 or 60 per week, which is not uncommon," Nauman said. "We've had kids who took 1,600 impacts during a season."

The research paper was written by Nauman, Leverenz, Talavage, Katie Morigaki, a graduate student in the Department of Health and Kinesiology, biomedical engineering graduate student Evan Breedlove, mechanical engineering graduate student Anne Dye, electrical and computer engineering graduate student Umit Yoruk, and Henry Feuer, a physician and neurosurgeon in the Department of Neurosurgery at the Indiana University School of Medicine.

Feuer is a neurosurgical consultant to the National Football League's Indianapolis Colts and a member of NFL subcommittees assessing the effects of mild traumatic brain injury.

The researchers studied the football players last season and are continuing the work this season.
The helmet-sensor data demonstrated that undiagnosed players who didn't show impairment received blows in many areas of the head, but the undiagnosed players who showed impairment received a large number of blows primarily to the top and front. This part of the brain is involved in "working memory," including visual working memory, a form of short-term memory for recalling shapes and visual arrangement of objects such as the placement of furniture in a room, Nauman said.
"These are kids who put their head down and take blow after blow to the top of the head," said Nauman, who also is an associate professor of biomedical engineering and basic medical sciences and leads Purdue's Human Injury Research and Regenerative Technologies Laboratory. "We've seen this primarily in linebackers and linemen, who tend to take most of the hits."

Helmet sensor data indicate impact forces to the head range from 20 to more than 100 Gs.
"To give you some perspective, a roller coaster subjects you to about 5 Gs and soccer players may experience up to 20 G accelerations from heading the ball," Nauman said.
Head impacts cause the brain to bounce back and forth inside the skull, damaging neurons or surrounding tissue. The trauma can either break nerve fibers called axons or impair signaling junctions between neurons called synapses.

The findings suggest the undiagnosed players suffer a different kind of brain injury than players who are diagnosed with a concussion.

"To be taken out of a game you have to show symptoms of neurological deficits -- unsteady balance, blurred vision, ringing in the ears, headaches and slurred speech," Leverenz said. "Unlike the diagnosed concussions, however, these injuries don't affect how you talk, whether you can walk a straight line or whether you know what day it is."

The fMRI reveals information about brain metabolism and blood flow, showing which parts of the brain are most active during specific tasks, Talavage said.

"One of the most challenging aspects of treating concussions is diagnosing the part of the brain that has been damaged," he said.

The fMRI data from before, during and after the season were compared to see whether there was any difference in brain activity that indicated impairment. The players also were studied using a standard cognitive test to show how well they were able to remember specific letters, words and patterns of lines.

The work may enable researchers to learn whether high school players accumulate damage over several seasons or whether they recover fully from season to season. The researchers have found that players diagnosed with concussions or who showed marked cognitive impairment had not yet recovered by the end of the season.

New preliminary data, however, suggests the players might recover before the start of the next season, but additional research is needed to determine the extent of recovery, Talavage said.
The work brings together faculty members from Purdue's College of Engineering and the new College of Health and Human Sciences along with research partners at GE Healthcare. The multidisciplinary team includes researchers specializing in neuroimaging, brain health, biomechanics, clinical sports medicine and analytical modeling.

The research group, called the Purdue Acute Neural Injury Consortium, also is studying ways to reduce traumatic brain injury in soldiers who suffer concussions caused by shock waves from explosions.  "There are numerous parallels between head injuries experienced by soldiers and football players," Nauman said.

Other researchers in the consortium are Dennis A. Miller, a sports medicine expert; Charles A. Bouman, the Michael J. and Katherine R. Birck Professor of Electrical and Computer engineering and co-director of the Purdue MRI Facility; and Alexander L. Francis, an expert in learning and cognitive processing and an associate professor of speech, language and hearing sciences.

The work has been funded by the Indiana Department of Health and GE Healthcare. The researchers would like to extend their study to more high schools and are seeking additional funding for the work.
Researchers are working to create a helmet that reduces the cumulative effect of impacts, said John C. Hertig, executive director of the Alfred Mann Institute for Biomedical Development at Purdue.

"We're funding the development of a novel injury mitigation system created by researchers at Purdue for use in sports or military helmets," Hertig said. "This technology is targeted at mitigating the collective impacts absorbed by the brain in such a way as to dissipate the harmful energy that occurs during repeated impacts. Football linemen, soccer and hockey players, and others will benefit from the re-engineering of a sports helmet design created by Eric Nauman and his team."

Source:  Purdue University and Thomas M. Talavage, Eric Nauman, Evan L. Breedlove, Umit Yoruk, Anne E Dye, Katie Morigaki, Henry Feuer, Larry J. Leverenz. Functionally-Detected Cognitive Impairment in High School Football Players Without Clinically-Diagnosed Concussion. Journal of Neurotrauma, 2010; : 101001044014052 DOI: 10.1089/neu.2010.1512

See also: Hockey Hits Are Hurting More and Lifting The Fog Of Sports Concussions

Youth Sports Concussions Double In Last Ten Years

A new study from Hasbro Children's Hospital finds visits to emergency departments for concussions that occurred during organized team sports have increased dramatically over a 10-year period, and appear to be highest in ice hockey and football. The number of sports-related concussions is highest in high school-aged athletes, but the number in younger athletes is significant and rising. The study is published in the September 2010 issue of Pediatrics and is now available online ahead of print.

In a review of national databases of emergency department (ED) visits, there were 502,000 visits to EDs for concussions in children aged 8 to 19 years in the period from 2001 through 2005; of those 65 percent were in the 14- to 19-year old age group while 35 percent were in the 8- to 13-year-old age group. Approximately half of all the ED visits for concussions were sports-related, and an estimated 95,000 of those visits were for concussions that occurred from one of the top five organized team sports: football, basketball, baseball, soccer and ice hockey.

The researchers also note that in the period from 2001 through 2005, approximately four in 1,000 children aged 8 to 13 and six in 1,000 aged 14 to 19 had an ED visit for a sport-related concussion.
Lisa Bakhos, MD, is a recently graduated fellow who was practicing at Hasbro Children's Hospital at the time she led the study. Bakhos says, "Our data show that older children have an overall greater estimated number of ED visits for sport-related concussion compared to younger children. Younger children, however, represent a considerable portion of sport-related concussions, approximately 40 percent."

The researchers found that ED visits for organized team sport-related concussions doubled over the time period depicted and increased by over 200 percent in the 14- to 19-year old age group, while overall participation decreased by 13 percent in the same time period. Bakhos comments, "What was striking in our study is that the number of sport-related concussions has increased significantly over a 10-year period despite an overall decline in participation. Experts have hypothesized that this may be due to an increasing number of available sports activities, increasing competitiveness in youth sports, and increasing intensity of practice and play times. However, the increasing numbers may also be secondary to increased awareness and reporting."

James Linakis, MD, PhD, is a pediatric emergency medicine physician with Hasbro Children's Hospital and its Injury Prevention Center and is the senior author on the paper. He comments, "Our assessment highlights the need for further research and injury prevention strategies into sport-related concussion. This is especially true for the young athlete, with prevailing expert opinion suggesting that concussion in this age group can produce more severe neurologic after-effects, such as prolonged cognitive disturbances, disturbed skill acquisition, and other long-term effects."

Despite the apparent increase in concussions in youth athletes, there are no comprehensive return-to-play guidelines for young athletes. The researchers also note that there are no evidence-based management guidelines for the treatment of these injuries, while there is agreement that young children cannot be managed in the same way as older adolescents.

Linakis, who is also a physician with University Emergency Medicine Foundation and an associate professor at The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, says, "Children need not only physical, but cognitive rest, and a slow-graded return to play and school after such injuries. As a result of this study, it is clear that we need more conservative guidelines for the management of younger children who suffer concussions." Return-to-play assessments might include such strategies as neuropsychological testing, functional MRI, visual tracking technology and balance dysfunction tracking.

Bakhos concludes, "What this research tells us is that we need additional studies to provide guidance in management, prevention strategies and education for practitioners, coaches and athletes."


Source: Lifespan and Bakhos, Linakis, Lockhart, Myers, Linakis. Emergency Department Visits for Concussion in Young Child Athletes. Pediatrics, 8/30/2010 DOI: 10.1542/peds.2009-3101

See also: Body Checking Not The Main Cause Of Youth Hockey Injuries and Science Fair Project Leads To New Sports Concussion Test

Sports Energy Drinks Actually Help Kids

Consuming energy drinks during team sports could help young people perform better, a study suggests.  Sports scientists found that 12-14 year olds can play for longer in team games when they drink an isotonic sports drink before and during games.  Researchers at the University of Edinburgh measured the performance of 15 adolescents during exercise designed to simulate the physical demands of team games such as football, rugby and hockey.

They showed for the first time that sports drinks helped the young people continue high intensity, stop-start activity for up to 24 per cent longer -- compared with players who drank a non-carbohydrate placebo solution.

The study was conducted because there is increasing evidence of young people consuming commercially available energy drinks during team games and researchers wanted to assess their impact. The findings are published in the European Journal of Applied Physiology.

The findings showed that drinking a 6 per cent carbohydrate-electrolyte solution improved endurance capacity but did not make young people run faster during intermittent exercise in team sports.  The solution -- containing carbohydrate, sodium, potassium, magnesium and calcium -- enhances hydration, helps prevent dehydration and provides a supply of energy to the body, thereby contributing to improved endurance capacity.

The researchers say the findings help to identify the importance of regular hydration and energy intake with a carbohydrate-electrolyte solution during games to replace fluids and provide energy in adolescent games players.

Dr John Sproule, Head of the Institute of Sport, Physical Education and Health Sciences of the University of Edinburgh's Moray House School of Education who led the research, said: "The importance of hydration to improve performance during exercise for adults is well known. This research helps us further understand how adolescents respond to hydration and energy supply during exercise.  The consumption of a carbohydrate-electrolyte solution was found to significantly enhance endurance capacity during simulated games play, and this could contribute to improved performance in adolescents."

Researchers say that this is the first study to explore the effect of a 6 per cent carbohydrate-electrolyte solution, similar to the make-up of an isotonic sports drink, on the performance of young people in team games.

Source: University of Edinburgh

See also: How Should Cheating Be Defined In Sports? and Starbucks' Secret Sports Supplement

Body Checking Not The Main Cause Of Youth Hockey Injuries

Hockey fans likely would assume that body-checking -- intentionally slamming an opponent against the boards -- causes the most injuries in youth ice hockey. But they would be wrong.  Findings from a new study, the largest and most comprehensive analysis to date of young hockey players, show that 66 percent of overall injuries were caused by accidentally hitting the boards or goal posts, colliding with teammates or being hit by a puck.

Only 34 percent of the injuries were caused by checking. Moreover, the accidental injuries were more severe than those from body checks.

These results, which appeared in June issue of the British Journal of Sports Medicine, were a surprise to many, including the researchers at the University at Buffalo who conducted the five-year study.

"There is an image of body checking as a form of violence that is condoned by the game of hockey," says Barry Willer, PhD, UB professor of psychiatry and rehabilitation sciences and senior author on the study.  "However, this study found that body checking did not account for a large proportion of injuries. Perhaps as important, body checking did not lead to a rise in intentional injuries."


The youth ice hockey program in Burlington, Ontario, Canada was the base of the study. The researchers compared injury rates overall for the three levels of competition: "house leagues," where there is no body checking; "select," in which checking is allowed at age 11 and older; and "representative," for the most skilled players, which allows checking in all divisions at age nine and above.
 
They also examined injury rates as level of competition and players' age increased, and how injury rates varied in games versus practices. The data covered 3,000 boys ages four to 18 for a total of 13,292 player years. Only injuries that kept a player off the ice for at least 24 hours were included.
Their analysis of the data shows that there were three times more accidental injuries than body-checking injuries in the house leagues -- 92 versus 30. Willer says accidents at this level of competition primarily are caused by players watching the puck instead of what's in front of them, of not playing "heads-up," which coaches try to instill at all levels.

The "select" level tallied the least injuries (28) with more than half intentional, as players first experience checking. In the most experienced league, however, 59 percent of the 96 injuries were unintentional, but the number of intentional injuries (39) was the highest of all the categories, as competition level increases.

As the researchers predicted, as the level of competition and players' age increases, so did injuries. "Game injuries were much more frequent among the highly skilled players on rep teams," says Willer. Rates during practice were low across all age groups and divisions.  Willer notes that this study doesn't answer two important questions: at what age should body checking be allowed in youth hockey, or should it be allowed at all?

"The study does suggest," says Willer, "that, regardless of whether young players are allowed to body check, unintentional contact with the board, the ice or other players are important sources of serious unintended injury. To avoid these accidents, hockey coaches must teach players to keep their heads up, rather than looking down at the puck."

Sources: University at Buffalo and Darling et al. Intentional versus unintentional contact as a mechanism of injury in youth ice hockey. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 2010

See also: Science Fair Project Leads To New Sports Concussion Test and Lifting The Fog Of Sports Concussions

Hockey, Concussions and TBI

Photo by Yong Kim/Philly.com Staff Photographer

Dan's note: I am very pleased to publish this guest post from Chelsea Travers. She is an outreach representative for CareMeridian, a subacute care facility, with locations throughout the Western United States for patients suffering from traumatic brain injury, spinal cord injury or medical complexities, such as neuromuscular or congenital anomalies.

By Chelsea Travers

Hockey is arguably one of the most physical professional sports. Hockey players are constantly getting body checked, slammed into boards, falling to the ice, slapped by a stick, hit by a dense, speeding puck or getting punched during a fight. If that isn’t bad enough, hockey players take part in one of the longest regular seasons of any sport, effectively taking on harsher pain for a longer amount of time throughout the year.    

Risk of injury couldn’t be clearer as it is common to see hockey players missing their front two teeth. With all of the injuries that can occur, one of the most dangerous is a traumatic brain injury (TBI). A TBI is a silent injury that can cause harm to the mind and body of an individual. An injury to the head or brain can alter someone’s life and can even require long-term rehabilitation and care from a skilled nursing facility. These injuries are often far too common in the sport of hockey and if not properly treated can permanently leave a hockey player's life more challenging than the game they play.

TBI is an injury that Philadelphia Flyers player Ian Laperriere knows all too well. Last month, in an NHL playoff game with the New Jersey Devils, Laperriere took a slap shot to the face that immediately caused him to bleed excessively from the wound above his eye and lose sight. Laperriere was diagnosed with a brain contusion after having a MRI a few days later. While Laperriere may have originally thought that losing sight in one of his eyes was the worst of the two injuries, in reality the bigger concern could wind up being the long-term effects of the brain injury.

Concussions may sometimes be dismissed as minor injuries because the physical nature of most sports causes them to occur regularly. However, they are still head injuries where the brain is forced to move violently within the skull, possibly changing its function permanently. When the brain moves in such a manner, it can bruise, bleed, and even tear, which can cause irreversible damage to the victim. 

For a sport like hockey this type of injury is very common and unfortunately at times ignored. Many hockey players don't take into account the possible effects of the injury. As it might not seem like a serious problem exists at first, they keep on skating as if nothing occurred. Being unaware of the injury makes it much more dangerous because a mild brain injury can turn into a life threatening injury in a very short period of time without immediate medical treatment.

Studies by the National Academy of Neuropsychology's Sports Concussion Symposium in New York have shown that since 1997, 759 NHL players have been diagnosed with a concussion. Broken down, that averages out to 76 players per season and 31 concussions per 1,000 games of hockey. That is far too frequent of an occurrence for such a serious injury. It's a frightening statistic that should send up a red flag to hockey officials that actions need to be taken to further prevent this type of injury.

The best, and sometimes only, treatment for TBI is prevention. For the National Hockey League, new rules are being considered that preserve the game but also help protect the players. Rule changes concerning blindside hits, rink size (which effects players space from each other and their proximity to walls), and stronger helmet requirements all have been considered to help curb TBI and its effects. This demonstrates that the NHL is aware of the seriousness of the injury and is taking proactive steps to help prevent it from happening.

Hockey is one of the most popular sports in North America and has millions of people participating in it every year. Unfortunately, the sport comes with the risk of a TBI.  With the right awareness of the injury and the necessary precautions in place, the game should be able to continue with players excited to lace up their skates and enjoy it. 

See also: Lifting The Fog Of Sports Concussions and Hockey Hits Are Hurting More

Science Fair Project Leads To New Sports Concussion Test

A simple test of reaction time may help determine whether athletes have sustained a concussion (also known as mild traumatic brain injury) and when they are ready to play again, according to a study released February 15 that was presented at the American Academy of Neurology's 62nd Annual Meeting in Toronto last month.

According to a story by NPR; "The test is the idea of Ian Richardson, a Michigan high-school student. The teenager devised it as a quick and simple way to test reaction time for a science fair project.  Richardson's device looks like something out of a 19th-century medical text. It's a hockey puck, with a long rod embedded in the middle. The stick is marked off in centimeter increments.  Turns out Ian Richardson's father, James, is on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School. He thought Ian's idea might be a pretty cool on-the-spot way to screen for concussions among athletes"

Dr. Richardson forwarded the idea to James Eckner, MD, of the University of Michigan Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation in Ann Arbor.  Eckner and his colleagues developed a simple, inexpensive device to measure reaction time: a cylinder attached to a weighted disk. The examiner releases the device and the athlete catches it as soon as possible.


For the study, the researchers gave the test to 209 Division I college football, wrestling and women's soccer athletes during their preseason physicals. Then any athlete who had a concussion diagnosed by a physician during the season took the test again within three days of the concussion.

"Research has shown that reaction time is slower after a concussion -- even as long as several days after other symptoms are gone," said Eckner. "But the tests currently used to measure reaction time require computers and special software."

Eight athletes had concussions during the study. Of those, seven of the athletes had a prolonged reaction time after the concussion compared to the preseason time. Catching the object took about 15 percent longer.

"Because of its simplicity and low cost, this test may work well with youth athletes, where there is limited access to computerized testing of reaction time," Eckner said.

Source: American Academy of Neurology

See also: Lifting The Fog Of Sports Concussions and Hockey Hits Are Hurting More

Vancouver Olympians Prepared For High And Low Altitudes

Lindsey Vonn winning gold

For winter sports athletes, including Olympians competing in Vancouver this week, the altitude of the sports venue can have a significant impact on performance, requiring athletes in skill sports, such as skating, ski jumping and snowboarding, to retool highly technical moves to accommodate more or less air resistance.

When considering the challenges and benefits of training and performing at sea level verses altitude, people often think of the effect altitude can have on oxygen delivery to muscles -- at higher altitudes, the body initially delivers less oxygen to muscles, which can result in fatigue occurring sooner during exercise. Higher altitudes also have less air density -- about 3 percent reduction for every 1,000 feet -- which can result in faster speeds in ski and skating races due to less aerodynamic drag, but can also affect timing and other technical components in skill sports.

"Many athletes perform thousands upon thousands of moves so they get a certain motor pattern ingrained," said Robert Chapman, an expert in altitude training at Indiana University. "A different altitude will change the feedback they get from balance and proprieception. In an endurance sport such as cross country skiing or biathlon, for competition at altitude it takes about 10-14 days to adjust. For a skill sport, it's harder to judge how long it will take to acclimate to the reduced air density at altitude. Hopefully, these athletes have incorporated this into their training, maybe in the last year or for a period of time, not just the two weeks leading up to competition."

Chapman, an exercise physiologist in the Department of Kinesiology in IU's School of Health, Physical Education and Recreation, wrote about the topic in a special Winter Olympics issue of the journal Experimental Physiology.

The Winter Olympics are being held in Vancouver, British Columbia, which is practically at sea level. The ice events also are nearly at sea level, with other venues ranging from altitudes of around 2,600 feet for the sled events to around 5,000 feet for women's and men's downhill skiing.

Shaun White enjoying some altitude

Chapman said fans should expect few record times in speed skating events because of the low altitude and greater air resistance facing athletes. He and his co-authors note in their paper that current world records for men and women in every long-track speed skating event from the 500-meter to 10,000-meter races were set in Olympics held in either Calgary, at an altitude of 3,400 feet, or Salt Lake City, with an altitude of 4,300 feet. They note that every Olympic record for all individual event distances was set at the 2002 Olympic Games in Salt Lake City, with none topped in the 2006 Winter Olympics held in Turin, which lies at an altitude of 784 feet.

"The general thought is that altitude slows you down because you have less oxygen going to your muscles," Chapman said. "But at altitude, just as it is easier to hit a home run in the thin air of Denver, speed skaters in Calgary and Salt Lake City could skate faster, move through the air faster, because there was less drag. Eight years after Salt Lake City, we have natural improvements that you'd expect to see involving training, coaching and technology, but we won't see many records in Vancouver. It doesn't mean the athletes are worse, if anything they're probably better. It's the effects of altitude on athletes' times."

Air density can have a dramatic effect on ski jumping, he said, requiring athletes to change the angle of their lean depending on the altitude. Chapman said the women's and men's Olympic downhill skiing, freestyle skiing and snowboarding events take place at higher altitudes this month and could require technical adjustments by the athletes.

Chapman and his co-authors make the following recommendations concerning training and performing at altitude:

• Allow extra time and practice for athletes to adjust to changes in projectile motion. Athletes in sports such as hockey, shooting, skating and ski jumping may be particularly affected.
• Allow time for acclimatization for endurance sports: Three to five days if possible, especially for low altitude (1,640-6,562 feet); one to two weeks for moderate altitude (6,562-9,843 feet); and at least two weeks if possible for high altitude (more than 9,843 feet). Chapman said altitude affects breathing, too, with breathing initially being harder at higher altitudes.
• Increase exercise-recovery ratios as much as possible, with a 1:3 ratio probably optimal, and consider more frequent substitutions for sports where this is allowed, such as ice hockey. Recovery refers to the amount of time an athlete eases up during practice between harder bouts. If an athlete runs hard for one minute, following this with three minutes of slower running would be optimal before the next sprint. The recovery period gives athletes more time to clear lactic acid build up from their muscles.
• Consider the use of supplemental oxygen on the sidelines in ice hockey or in between heats in skating and Alpine skiing to help with recovery. Chapman said this helps calm breathing, which can be more difficult at altitude.
• Living at high altitudes while training at low altitudes can help athletes in endurance sports improve performance at lower altitudes.

See also: Wind Tunnel Is A Drag For Olympic Skeleton Riders and Aerobic Efficiency Is Key To Olympic Gold For Cross-Country Skiers

Source: Indiana University and Altitude training considerations for the winter sport athlete. Experimental Physiology

Month Of Birth Determines Success In Sports

The month of your birth influences your chances of becoming a professional sportsperson, an Australian researcher has found.  Senior research fellow Dr. Adrian Barnett from Queensland University of Technology's Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation studies the seasonal patterns of population health and found the month you were born in could influence your future health and fitness.

The results of the study are published in the book Analysing Seasonal Health Data, by Barnett, co-authored by researcher Professor Annette Dobson from the University of Queensland.
Barnett analysed the birthdays of professional Australian Football League (AFL) players and found a disproportionate number had their birthdays in the early months of the year, while many fewer were born in the later months, especially December.

The Australian school year begins in January. "Children who are taller have an obvious advantage when playing the football code of AFL," Dr. Barnett said. "If you were born in January, you have almost 12 months' growth ahead of your classmates born late in the year, so whether you were born on December 31st or January 1st could have a huge effect on your life."

Dr. Barnett found there were 33 percent more professional AFL players than expected with birthdays in January and 25 percent fewer in December. He said the results mirrored other international studies which found a link between being born near the start of school year and the chances of becoming a professional player in the sports of ice hockey, football, volleyball and basketball.

"Research in the UK shows those born at the start of the school year also do better academically and have more confidence," he said. "And with physical activity being so important, it could also mean smaller children get disheartened and play less sport. If smaller children are missing out on sporting activity then this has potentially serious consequences for their health in adulthood."

Dr. Barnett said this seasonal pattern could also result in wasted talent, with potential sports stars not being identified because they were competing against children who were much more physically advanced than them. He said a possible solution was for one of the sporting codes in Australia to change the team entry date from January 1st to July 1st.


Source: Springer and Analysing Seasonal Health Data.

The Cognitive Benefits Of Being A Sports Fan

When was the last time you listened to a sporting event on the radio? If given a choice between watching the game on a big screen HD or turning on the AM radio, most of us would probably choose the visual sensation of television.

But, for a moment, think about the active attention you need in order to listen to a radio broadcast and interpret the play-by-play announcer's descriptions. As you hear the words, your "mind's eye" paints the picture of the action so you can imagine the scene and situations. Your knowledge of the game, either from playing it or watching it for years helps you understand the narrative, the terms and the game's "lingo".

Now, imagine that you are listening to a broadcast about a sport you know nothing about. Hearing Bob Uecker say, "With two out in the ninth, the bases are loaded and the Brewers' RBI leader has two strikes. The infield is in as the pitcher delivers. Its a hard grounder to third that he takes on the short hop and fires a bullet to first for the final out." If you have no baseball-specific knowledge, those sentences are meaningless.

However, for those of us that have grown up with baseball, that description makes perfect sense and our mind's eye helped us picture the scene. That last sentence about the "hard grounder" and the thrown "bullet" may have even triggered some unconscious physical movements by you as your brain interpreted those action phrases. That sensorimotor reaction is at the base of what is called "embodied cognition".

Sian Beilock, associate professor of psychology and leader of the Human Performance Lab at the University of Chicago, defined the term this way: "In contrast to traditional views of the mind as an abstract information processor, recent work suggests that our representations of objects and events are grounded in action. That is, our knowledge is embodied, in the sense that it consists of sensorimotor information about potential interactions that objects or events may allow."

She cites a more complete definition of the concept in Six Views of Embodied Cognition by Margaret Wilson. Another terrific overview of the concept is provided by science writer Drake Bennet of the Boston Globe in his article, "Don't Just Stand There, Think".

In a recent study, "Sports Experience Changes the Neural Processing of Action Language", Dr. Beilock's team continued their research into the link between our learned motor skills and our language comprehension about those motor skills. Since embodied cognition connects the body with our cognition, the sports domain provides a logical domain to study it.
Their initial look at this concept was in a 2006 study where the team designed an experiment to compare the knowledge representation skill of experienced hockey players and novices. Each group first read sentences describing both hockey-related action and common, "every-day" action, (i.e. "the referee saw the hockey helmet on the bench" vs. "the child saw the balloon in the air"). They were then shown pictures of the object mentioned in the sentences and were asked if the picture matched the action in the sentence they read.

Both groups, the athletes and the novices, responded equally in terms of accuracy and response time to the everyday sentences and pictures, but the athletes responded significantly faster to the hockey-specific sentences and pictures. The conclusion is that those with the sensorimotor experience of sport give them an advantage of processing time over those that have not had that same experience.

This may seem pretty obvious that people who have played hockey will respond faster to sentence/picture relationships about hockey than non-hockey players. But the 2006 study set the groundwork for Beilock's team to take the next step with the question, "is there any evidence that the athletes are using different parts of their brain when processing these match or no match decisions?" The link between our physical skill memory and our language comprehension would be at the base of the embodied cognition theory. 

So, in the latest research, the HPL team kept the same basic experimental design, but now wanted to watch the participants' brain activity using fMRI scanning. This time, there were three groups, hockey players, avid fans of hockey and novices who had no playing or viewing experience with hockey at all. First, all groups passively listened to sentences about hockey actions and also sentences about everyday actions while being monitored by fMRI.  Second, outside of the fMRI scanner, they again listened to hockey-related and everyday-related action sentences and then were shown pictures of hockey or every day action and asked if there was a match or mis-match between the sentence and the picture.

This comprehension test showed similar results as in 2006, but now the team could try to match the relative skill in comprehension to the neural activity shown in the fMRI scans when listening. Both the players and the fans showed increased activity in the left dorsal premotor cortex, a region thought to support the selection of well-learned action plans and procedures. 

You might be surprised that the fans' brains showed activity in the same regions as the athletes. We saw this effect in a previous post, "Does Practice Make Perfect", where those that practiced a new dance routine and those that only watched it showed similar brain area activity. On the other side, the total novices showed activity in the bilateral primary sensory-motor cortex, an area typically known for carrying out step by step instructions for new or novel tasks. 

When playing or watching, we are actually calling on additional neural networks in our brains to help our normal language comprehension abilities. In other words, the memories of learned actions are linked and assist other cognitive tasks. That sounds pretty much like the definition of embodied cognition and Dr. Beilock's research has helped that theory take another step forward. Beilock added, "Experience playing and watching sports has enduring effects on language understanding by changing the neural networks that support comprehension to incorporate areas active in performing sports skills."

So, take pride in your own brain the next time you hear, "Kobe dribbles the ball to the top of the key, crosses over, drives the lane, and finger rolls over Duncan for two." If you can picture that play in your mind, your left dorsal premotor cortex just kicked into gear!

Why Pro Athletes Attract Trouble

From the "athletes behaving badly" department (in the past month, anyway):
•    NHL bad boy (Sean Avery) was suspended for six games for a crude remark.
•    Six NFL players were suspended for allegedly violating the league's drug policy.
•    Another NFL player (Adam "Pacman" Jones) returned to his team's roster after being suspended, again, for an off-field altercation.
•    Oh, and NFL receiver (Plaxico Burress) accidentally shot himself in a nightclub with a gun he was not licensed to carry. 

Despite the 24/7 media coverage of each of these incidents, sports fans have become accustomed to and somewhat complacent with hearing about athletes and their deviant acts.
In fact, new statistics reveal that bad behavior is clearly evident among high school athletes, particularly in high-contact sports.

It starts young
Besides the highly publicized stories, there are thousands more across the nation involving amateur athletes taking risks both on and off the field. From performance-enhancing supplements to referee/official abuse to fights, guns and recorded crimes, the image of sports as a positive influence on athletes may need a second look.

Granted, in a population of any size there will be a few bad apples. However, these actions have become so prevalent that academic researchers have created a branch of study called "deviance in sports" attached to the sports sociology tree. 

They are asking questions and challenging some assumptions about cause and effect. Is there a connection between sports participation and deviance? Does the intense competition and battle on the field shape a player's off-the-field lifestyle? Since success in sports brings attention and prestige to athletes, does the risk of losing that status cause a need to take risks to maintain their "top dog" positions?

In their new book, "Deviance and Social Control in Sport," researchers Michael Atkinson and Kevin Young emphasize the confusing environment surrounding athletes. They describe two types of deviance: wanted and unwanted.

Owners, players and fans may know that certain behaviors are literally against the rules but are at the same time appreciated as a sign of doing whatever it takes to win.  Performance-enhancing drugs are not allowed in most sports, but athletes assume they will improve their performance, which helps their team win and keeps fans happy. Fights in hockey will be, according to the rule book, penalized, but this deviance is assumed to be wanted by fans and teammates as a sign of loyalty.

However, related bad behavior can quickly turn on a player to being socially unwanted. 

Abuse of drugs that don't contribute to a win, (marijuana, cocaine, alcohol), will transform that same player into a villain with shock and outrage being reported in the media. In the Sean Avery example, a hockey player fighting to defend his teammates on the ice can then be suspended from the team and criticized by those same teammates for an off-color remark.

Real statistics
Most athletes who make it to the professional level have been involved in sports since youth. Sports sociologists and psychologists often look at the early development years of athletes to get a glimpse of patterns, social norms and influences that contribute to later behaviors.

In a recent American Sociological Review article, Derek Kreager, assistant professor of sociology at Penn State University, challenged the long-held belief that youth sports participation is exclusively beneficial to their moral character development. 

With the focus on teaching teamwork, fair play, and self esteem, sports are often cited as the antidote to delinquency. But Kreager notes that other studies have looked at the culture that surrounds high school and college athletes and identified patterns of clichés, privileges and attitudes of superiority. For some athletes, these patterns are used to justify deviant behavior.

In fact, his most recent research attempted to find a cause-and-effect link between deviant behavior and specific sports. Specifically, he asked if high-contact, physical sports like football and wrestling created athletes who were more prone to violent behavior off the field.

Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, more than 6,000 male students from across 120 schools were included. The data set included a wide collection of socioeconomic information, including school activities, risk behaviors and at-home influences. Kreager's study analyzed the effects of three team sports (football, basketball, and baseball) and two individual sports (wrestling and tennis) on the likelihood of violent off-field behavior, specifically, fighting.

To isolate the effect of each sport, the study included control groups of non-athletes and those that had a history of physical violence prior to playing sports. 

For team sports, football players were 40 percent more likely to be in a confrontation than non-athletes. In individual sports, wrestlers were in fights 45 percent more often, while tennis players were 35 percent less likely to be in an altercation. Basketball and baseball players showed no significant bias either way.

"Sports such as football, basketball, and baseball provide players with a certain status in society," Kreager said. "But football and wrestling are associated with violent behavior because both sports involve some physical domination of the opponent, which is rewarded by the fans, coaches and other players. Players are encouraged to be violent outside the sport because they are rewarded for being violent inside it."

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Hockey Hits Are Hurting More

One painful lesson every National Hockey League rookie learns is to keep your head up when skating through the neutral zone. If you don't, you will not see the 4700 joules of kinetic energy skating at you with bad intentions.

During an October 25th game, Brandon Sutter, rookie center for the Carolina Hurricanes, never saw Doug Weight, veteran center of the New York Islanders, sizing him up for a hit that resulted in a concussion and an overnight stay in the hospital.  Hockey purists will say that it was a "clean hit" and Weight was not penalized.

Six days before that incident, the Phoenix Coyotes' Kurt Sauer smashed Andrei Kostitsyn of the Montreal Canadiens into the sideboards. Kostitsyn had to be stretchered off of the ice and missed two weeks of games with his concussion. Sauer skated away unhurt and unpenalized. See video here.

Big hits have always been part of hockey, but the price paid in injuries is on the rise. According to data released last month at the National Academy of Neuropsychology's Sports Concussion Symposium in New York, 759 NHL players have been diagnosed with a concussion since 1997. For the ten seasons studied, that works out to about 76 players per season and 31 concussions per 1,000 hockey games. During the 2006-07 season, that resulted in 760 games missed by those injured players, an increase of 41% from 2005-06. Researchers have found two reasons for the jump in severity, the physics of motion and the ever-expanding hockey player.

In his book, The Physics of Hockey, Alain Haché, professor of physics at Canada's University of Moncton, aligns the concepts of energy, momentum and the force of impact to explain the power of mid-ice and board collisions.

As a player skates from a stop to full speed, his mass accelerates at an increasing velocity. The work his muscles contribute is transferred into kinetic energy which can and will be transferred or dissipated when the player stops, either through heat from the friction of his skates on the ice, or through a transfer of energy to whatever he collides with, either the boards or another player.

The formula for kinetic energy, K = (1/2)mass x velocity², represents the greater impact that a skater's speed (velocity) has on the energy produced. It is this speed that makes hockey a more dangerous sport than other contact sports, like football, where average player sizes are larger but they are moving at slower speeds (an average of 23 mph for hockey players in full stride compared to about 16 mph for an average running back in the open field).

So, when two players collide, where does all of that kinetic energy go? First, let's look at two billiard balls, with the exact same mass, shape and rigid structure. When two balls collide on the table, we can ignore the mass variable and just look at velocity. If the ball in motion hits another ball that is stationary, then the ball at rest will receive more kinetic energy from the moving ball so that the total energy is conserved. This will send the stationary ball rolling across the table while the first ball almost comes to a stop as it has transferred almost all of its stored energy.

Unfortunately, when human bodies collide, they don't just bounce off of each other. This "inelastic" collision results in the transfer of kinetic energy being absorbed by bones, tissues and organs. The player with the least stored energy will suffer the most damage from the hit, especially if that player has less "body cushion" to absorb the impact.

To calculate your own real world energy loss scenario, visit the Exploratorium's "Science of Hockey" calculator. For both Sutter and Kostitsyn, they received checks from players who outweighed them by 20 pounds and were skating faster.

The average mass and acceleration variables are also growing as today's NHL players are getting bigger and faster. In a study released in September, Art Quinney and colleagues at the University of Alberta tracked the physiological changes of a single NHL team over 26 years, representing 703 players. Not surprisingly, they found that defensemen are now taller and heavier with higher aerobic capacity while forwards were younger and faster. Goaltenders were actually smaller with less body mass but had better flexibility. However, the increase in physical size and fitness did not correspond with team success on the ice. But the checks sure hurt a lot more now. 

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