What if? It’s a question that many of the world’s top teams asked in the last year when faced with ill-timed injuries to key players. What if Derrick Rose of the Chicago Bulls, Robert Griffin III of the Redskins, Derek Jeter of the Yankees or Lionel Messi of Barcelona could have avoided their season ending injuries? Some are just the result of unlucky, violent contact but others have their origin from a combination of fatigue and overuse. What if athletic trainers and team physicians could find early clues and signals that an athlete was at risk of breaking down? Now, with the use of data analytics, that crystal ball may have finally arrived.
Stan Conte, VP of medical services for the Los Angeles Dodgers, declared last year, "in a post-Moneyball world, injury risk assessment is the final frontier." At this year’s Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, he presented some surprising data to reinforce the rising toll of injuries; just over 50% of all starting pitchers in the MLB had some type of injury during last season, lasting an average of 65 days on the disabled list. Across all MLB players in 2012, the salaries of injured players plus the players that replaced them cost their teams almost $600 million.
Even at the Olympics, the world’s premier athletic showcase, the impact of injuries is significant. Big names like Paula Radcliffe, Asafa Powell, and Rafael Nadal could not complete their gold medal quest. Lars Engebretsen, a physician and professor at the University of Oslo and chief physician of the Norwegian Olympic team, has been tracking injuries and illness at the Games for over a decade. His latest report, released this month on the 2012 London Olympics, recorded 1,361 injuries and 758 illnesses among the 10,568 athletes, which equates to injury and illness rates of 11% and 7%, respectively. Unfortunately, these percentages are similar with the last two Summer Olympics in Beijing and Athens, highlighting the lack of progress in reducing lost time in competition.
In this Scientific American graphic, Engebretsen’s data from the 2008 Summer Olympics and the 2010 Winter Olympics shows that overuse caused 22% of summer athletes' injuries while 54% of winter athletes were injured in training.
Like the Dodgers, teams across the globe are beginning to search for answers. As Big Data creeps into all aspects of athlete development, injury analytics is the new secret weapon. That is what pushed the Leicester Tigers rugby union club to dig into the details. Leicester, 9-time English champions, faces the challenge of tight budgets that requires keeping the best players on the field.
According to Andy Shelton, Leicester’s head of sports science, strength and conditioning, any competitive edge is worth the investment. "It gets more competitive every year and our focus must be on helping our players stay injury-free for longer," he told the BBC. "When we have our key players available against the top European sides, we can compete and we will win, so the question is how do we keep key players on the pitch?"
Metrifit Predictive Analytics
Factoring in variables like fatigue, stress, sleep and training intensity into a predictive algorithm can yield what may have been hidden trends and combinations that cause injuries. “Similarly we also collect data on previous injuries that they had and what they are doing in the gym, basically everything they do from when they walk in the door of the club in the morning and leave in the evening is collected,” Shelton added. “The aim is to be able to affect a player’s lifestyle through the week. For example, if they recorded a very good night’s sleep, then their risk of injury could go down from ‘predicted injured’ to ‘not-predicted injured.’”
Some coaches and trainers still feel that using predictive analytics to create an injury model based on volumes of underlying data seems a little over the top. But if your job is to develop healthy, productive athletes that win, then any tool that provides an edge is worth a look.
"Traditional baseball types tell me to just give up, that this is a waste of time because injuries are mostly bad luck,” Conte commented. "Twenty-five years ago no one listened to Bill James either."
Andy Shelton agrees, "There is no point in collecting stats unless you can know what to do with it. But by predicting things before they happen is where we can make gains, and considerably enhance performance."
For many elite team coaches, the greater challenge in developing top young athletes is not improving the ones on your team, but rather finding the talented kids that got away from the sport. Keeping the next Lionel Messi or Michael Phelps involved and motivated from age 7 to 17 is becoming more difficult. While over 35 million kids between 4 and 14 play organized sports in the U.S., over 70% will drop out by age 13. According to new research, that drastically reduced talent pool may be caused by the athlete’s own psychological profile and how a coach manages it.
According to a 2004 study by Michigan State’s Institute for the Study of Youth Sport, here are the top ten reasons why boys and girls quit organized sports:
Boys
I was no longer interested.
It was no longer fun.
The sport took too much time
The coach played favourites.
The coach was a poor teacher.
I was tired of playing.
There was too much emphasis on winning.
I wanted to participate in other non-sport activity.
I needed more time to study.
There was too much pressure.
Girls
I was no longer interested.
It was no longer fun.
I needed more time to study.
There was too much pressure
The coach was a poor teacher.
I wanted to participate in other non-sport activities.
The sport took too much time.
The coach played favourites.
I was tired of playing.
Games and practices were scheduled when I could not attend.
Comparing the lists, when a young athlete loses interest and does not have fun, (partly because the coach applied too much pressure or they were a poor teacher), it may be due to their internal mindset based on an educational psychology concept known as the Achievement Goal Theory (AGT).
Psychologists Carol Dweck and Thomas Nicholls, while they worked together at the University of Michigan, both studied students who failed to learn and their research resulted in parallel tracks, just with different terminology. For Dweck, she defined two styles of learning motivation as Mastery and Performance. Take for example, a young soccer player that spends hours in the backyard learning to juggle a ball. For a player with a Performance mindset, he is practicing because of a desire to be the best juggler on the team or maybe because he is embarrassed by his lack of skill compared to his teammates.
On the opposite end, a player with a Mastery mindset is motivated to learn simply by the challenge of the skill without any competitive instincts. Nicholls uses the terms Task to compare with Dweck's Mastery and substitutes Ego instead of Performance. Both Dweck and Nicholls agree that the player’s perceived ability and competence also affects their motivation to keep trying to learn the new skill. Here’s a great video overview of the concepts by Professor Jonathan Hilpert of Georgia Southern University.
In fact, in a study this year of 167 junior club soccer players in England, Andrew Hill, sports scientist at the University of Leeds, found that a quarter of the boys experienced symptoms of burnout.
"What we see among the athletes showing symptoms of burnout is emotional and physical exhaustion, a sense that they are not achieving and a sense of devaluation of the sport. Even though they might originally enjoy their sport and be emotionally invested in it, they eventually become disaffected. Participation can be very stressful," Dr. Hill said.
However, the results showed that those players who admitted being more afraid of making mistakes in front of others (a Performance/Ego mindset) were also much more likely to suffer from burnout versus those players that were driven by their own high standards (a Mastery/Task mindset).
"Perfectionism can be a potent energising force but can also carry significant costs for athletes when things don't go well,” Dr. Hill commented. “Perfectionists are stuck in a self-defeating cycle. They are overly dependent on personal accomplishment as a means of establishing a sense of self-esteem but are always dissatisfied with their efforts. Even success can be problematic because they simply become more demanding until they inevitably experience failure.”
A coach can have a significant impact on motivating learning by the type of environment they create, one that rewards players for self-improvement alone or one that rewards improvement compared to others. Last year, French researchers surveyed 309 young, elite handball players about four things, their perception of their coach’s motivational environment, their own perceived competence, their type of learning motivation and any symptoms of burnout.
They concluded that “young talented athletes perceiving an ego-involving climate had a higher risk of experiencing burnout symptoms at the season’s end. In contrast, players perceiving a high task-involving climate had lower burnout scores when the season concluded.”
Once again the coach-athlete relationship becomes critical to development of elite potential and performances. The more training data that can be captured and analyzed, the better the subtle hints of burnout can be detected.
Coaches invest hours devising training plans that will push their athletes just to the edge, but not over. Overtraining leads to burnout and injuries but going easy won’t get the right results. The challenge of walking this fine line is truly understanding the intensity and workload being placed on athletes, whether its real or perceived. Objective, wearable technology has helped in the form of heart rate and GPS monitors, but can be expensive and doesn’t capture a true sense of the player’s experience. As an alternative, sport scientists have recently found that a self-reported rate of perceived exertion (RPE) can accurately capture the workload experience.
Two sports that are learning to rely on RPE, soccer and swimming, represent two very different training styles. Soccer coaches spend considerable time on team drills and scrimmages while interspersing physical fitness into the sessions. Swimmers, while part of a team, primarily focus on individual times and skills. Despite the differences, researchers have found plenty of evidence that the athlete’s opinion of their workout difficulty is valid and reliable.
Back in the 1960s, Gunnar Borg, psychology professor at Stockholm University, created the RPE scale, now respectively called the Borg scale. The original version asked athletes to rate their level of exertion on a range of 6 to 20, with 6 being “very light” and 20 indicating “very difficult.” While the 6-20 range may seem an odd choice, it actually has some logic. Borg found that if the rating is multiplied by 10, there is a high correlation to the athlete’s heart rate at that moment (i.e. a rating of 12 typically corresponds with a HR of 120).
Borg also added a 10 point scale, known as the Category(C) Ratio(R) scale or CR-10. This produces ratings of 1-10 and is used not only in sports training but also in clinical settings to estimate levels of pain.
Last year, Spanish and Italian researchers compared the workout assessments of 28 semi-pro soccer players. For an objective measure, they captured heart rate history and tracked their distance travelled with GPS devices. Then, after each training session, they asked the players for their RPE using the Borg CR-10 scale. They found a very high correlation between the HR data, the distance travelled and the players’ RPE ratings.
“Being easy to perform and inexpensive compared with HR-based methods, sRPE should be regarded as a viable way to track internal load in training setup in soccer,” concluded David Casamichana, sport scientist at the University of the Basque Country and lead author of the study published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research.
But what if young athletes report a “less than truthful” RPE in an attempt to either impress or fool their coach? In the same way, what if the coach’s interpretation of a hard workout does not match with a player’s reaction to it?
Renato Barosso, of the School of Physical Education and Sport at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, gathered together 160 swimmers of different age-groups and different competitive swimming experience, and nine of their coaches. Looking at their training plan for the day, the coaches were asked to rate the workout using the CR-10 RPE scale, prior to the session. Then, 30 minutes after the training, the swimmers were asked for their RPE to see how well it matched the coaches’ estimates. Athletes were divided into three age groups, 11-12, 13-14 and 15-16, while the workouts were classified as easy (RPE less than 3), moderate (3-5) or difficult (greater than 5).
As might be expected, the agreement between coach and swimmer was higher for older swimmers and lower for younger swimmers. While the coach’s estimate of intensity was assumed correct, the researchers found that the swimmers aged 11-14 ratings differed across all three categories, easy-moderate-difficult. The oldest swimmers only disagreed with their coaches at the difficult level.
So, while RPE can be trusted for an accurate estimate of training difficulty, it would benefit both athlete and coach to gather all available data in one online training system for comparison and analysis. Being able to chart RPE over time against more objective measures like HR, repetitions or activities would enable better training plans.
It’s not getting any easier being a big league hitter. Consider that in 2003, only three pitchers lit up the radar gun at 95 mph or more on at least 700 of their pitches, according to the Wall Street Journal’s Matthew Futterman. Last season, 17 pitchers were able to bring that speed consistently. In 2003, only Billy Wagner threw at least 25 pitches at or above 100 mph compared to seven pitchers last year.
Has the added heat affected the hitters? You bet. Strikeouts in the MLB totalled 36,426 last season, an 18.3% increase over 2003. To see the rise over the last 100 seasons, look at this interactive NY Times graphic. "It's pretty simple," said Rick Peterson, director of pitching development for the Baltimore Orioles, in the WSJ article. "The harder you throw, the less time the batter has to swing and the harder it is to make contact.
Let’s crunch some numbers on the hitter’s dilemma. At 100 mph, the ball will leave the pitcher’s hand and travel the 60’ 6” to the plate in under a half second (.412 to be exact). For those facing a pitcher throwing “only” 80 mph, you get an additional 1/10 of a second. Now, factor in that it takes 100 milliseconds for the image of the ball hitting your eyes to be delivered to and acknowledged by your brain. Again at 100 mph, that lag means your brain is contemplating a ball’s location that has already travelled an additional 12.5 feet. How then are players able to get around on a pitch at that speed, let alone make contact? According to vision scientists at UC Berkeley, our brains make guesses. Using the perceived speed and path of the ball actually seen, our visual cortex fast forwards it to a future location. It is at that estimated point that we direct our muscles to make contact with the bat.
“For the first time, we can see this sophisticated prediction mechanism at work in the human brain,” said Gerrit Maus, postdoctoral psychology fellow and lead author of new research published this week in the journal, Neuron.
Maus and his fellow UC Berkeley researchers, Jason Fischer and David Whitney, were able to discover this prediction ability by actually fooling the brains of volunteers. They asked six volunteers to watch a computer screen showing an optical illusion while their brains were being watched by an fMRI machine, which records and displays brain activity.
Called the “flash-drag effect”, the illusion (see video below) flashes stationary objects on the screen against a moving background. The objects seem to move in the direction of the background motion, even though their location is fixed. “The brain interprets the flashes as part of the moving background, and therefore engages its prediction mechanism to compensate for processing delays,” Maus said.
From the fMRI images, they observed activity in the V5 region of the visual cortex, pinpointing where this prediction model gets built in our brain. “The image that hits the eye and then is processed by the brain is not in sync with the real world, but the brain is clever enough to compensate for that,” Maus said. “What we perceive doesn’t necessarily have that much to do with the real world, but it is what we need to know to interact with the real world.”
So, what can a hitter do to fine tune this predictive mechanism? In a talk at last year’s Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, Peter Fadde, professor at Southern Illinois University, presented what he calls the “sixth tool”, aka pitch recognition. By watching videos of a pitcher’s windup and release, but occluding the flight of the ball at different points in its path, a batter can exercise his or her visual cortex to make better models of ball flight and speed.
Strikeouts still matter at the next level. Keith Hernandez, the former MVP and batting champ, told the WSJ, "Guys don't seem to care about striking out anymore, but when you strike out, you're not putting the ball in play, and when you don't do that, nothing can happen."
After the San Antonio Spurs clinched their trip to the NBA Finals, Tim Duncan was asked to describe the contributions of his point guard, Tony Parker. “Every year he just gets better and better and better,” he commented to the press. “I told him I'm just riding his coattails.” High praise indeed from a four-time NBA champion and 14-time All-Star. Duncan’s remarks add to the growing opinion that Parker is thebest postseason point guardin NBA history. Whether its his scoring touch, 37 points in Game 4 against Memphis, or his vision on the court, a career best 18 assists in Game 2, Parker has the ability to see what is available in front of him to help his team. This specialized court vision is rare and originates from a specialized area of the brain, according to new research. As you watch the video below of Parker’s amazing performance in Game 2, notice the angles and speed with which he has to not only see teammates but then get the ball out his hands. Vision, reaction, decision and action all happen in a split second.
"Behind what seems to be automatic is a lot of sophisticated machinery in our brain," said Miguel Eckstein, professor in UC Santa Barbara's Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences. "A great part of our brain is dedicated to vision."
Eckstein’s research group recently explored how humans are able to pick out certain objects in a crowded scene (say, for example, Tim Duncan under the basket). They flashed (250 ms) 640 indoor and outdoor scenes on a screen for volunteer test observers, then asked them to find a certain object in the scene (i.e. a clock in a bedroom scene or a surfer in a beach scene). In half of the images, the target object was not there. While they searched the images for the targets, the volunteers’ eye movements were tracked as well as their brain’s electrical activity through the use of a functional MRI machine.
While the volunteers successfully found the target objects 80% of the time that they were in the scene, they were not aware that some of the scenes did not contain the object. By watching where they focused their gaze to find the object, the researchers discovered that the brain uses logical, contextual clues. If searching for a surfer, they would look on the water, not the beach; if searching for a truck in a street scene, they fixated on the street, not the sidewalk. In the image below, the yellow-orange dots show where the person fixed their gaze to find the target object (click for a larger image).
While this seems obvious to us, it is this contextual form of visual searching that computer algorithms still cannot accomplish due to the enormous amount of real world knowledge that we take for granted.
"So, if you're looking for a computer mouse on a cluttered desk, a machine would be looking for things shaped like a mouse. It might find it, but it might see other objects of similar shape, and classify that as a mouse," Eckstein said.
The fMRI images showed that an area of the brain called the lateral occipital complex (LOC) is most active during the test subjects’ scene search. It is this group of neurons that provides clues to us of the most likely place to look for certain objects. In the same way, by knowing the Spurs offense and through years of drills and practice, Parker’s LOC can suggest the most logical places to search for teammates and the difference between them and opponents.
“A large component of becoming an expert searcher is exploiting contextual relationships to search,” commented Eckstein. “Thus, understanding the neural basis of contextual guidance might allow us to gain a better understanding about what brain areas are critical to gain search expertise.”
Training an athlete’s visual search skill is critical to success on the court or the field. Only repetition will provide the LOC with the rich database of contextual scenes needed to spot a curveball, a blitzing linebacker or even Manu Ginóbili on a back door cut.
The 10,000 hour theory has become the American dream for developing athletes. Just work hard enough and your gold medal, Hall of Fame, championship ambitions can come true. It is achievable, measurable and finite. However, many athletes never quite cross the 10,000 hour finish line, and have used the scapegoat reason, “I just didn’t have enough time to commit to the sport.” Now, recent research suggests that while 10,000 hours of deliberate practice may be necessary to achieve world-class status, it may not be the only ingredient to success. Celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, a research paper by Florida State professor K. Anders Ericsson, The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance, has been cited in the scientific press over one thousand times earning its own HOF credentials. The gist of it is that Ericsson visited a West Berlin music academy and interviewed violin students and their teachers. First, he asked the students to estimate the number of structured practice hours they had endured up to age 20. Then, he asked their teachers to divide the class into good, better and best thirds. The correlation uncovered showed that the best students had accumulated, on average, over 10,000 hours of practice while the middle group was at about 8,000 hours and the bottom group had not reached 5,000 hours.
After checking this relationship within other groups of skilled experts, Ericsson found similar patterns of 10,000 hours of practice and concluded that innate talent or “what we’re born with” had little to do with becoming an expert in any field, even sports. With that declaration, the dream (and the practice odometer) was launched.
However, since that landmark 1993 paper, other researchers have been finding exceptions to the rule; some experts were crowned with only 3,000 hours of practice while others still had not reached the mountaintop even though they had doubled the 10,000 hour mark.
David Hambrick, associate professor of psychology at Michigan State, has been searching for the other necessary ingredients for several years. In 2011, he and his colleague Elizabeth J. Meinz found that deliberate practice among pianists did account for almost half of the variance between experts and novices. But in their quest to find out what else mattered to make up the other 50% of variance, they found that working memory capacity, the ability to remember a set of objects while engaged in another task, was also a significant determinant of success.
This month, Hambrick and his team released new research that looked at 14 different studies of chess and music students to find other clues to expertise. Again, they were convinced that deliberate practice alone was not enough.
“The evidence is quite clear,” he writes, “that some people do reach an elite level of performance without copious practice, while other people fail to do so despite copious practice.”
Across those chess and music studies, they found that practice explained about one third of the journey to being world class. One new factor that did emerge was starting at a young age. Logically, someone who started training at age 7 versus 12 would have five more years of practice, but Hambrick found that even when total hours of practice were comparable, the student that started at an earlier age became more accomplished. “This evidence suggests that there may be a critical period for acquiring complex skills just as there may be for acquiring language,” he concluded.
Also, overall intelligence did make a difference, at least for these chess and music students. Those students with a higher tested IQ, including working memory capacity, were also more likely to end up being experts.
Finally, grit, a determined attitude to succeed, also played a role in creating success. The term has been made famous by Paul Tough in his book How Children Succeed, based on the research of psychologist Angela Duckworth (see TED talk below). The desire and passion to get better drives the willingness to spend so many hours practicing a skill.
So, what does all of this mean for the aspiring superstar? That practice, as much as possible, is still a necessary evil to getting better at a sport. However, it also confirms that different athletes have different qualities and progress through their journey at different paces. They may need some guidance based on their individual strengths that will help them find the right sport.
“If people are given an accurate assessment of their abilities and the likelihood of achieving certain goals given those abilities,” Hambrick predicted, “they may gravitate toward domains in which they have a realistic chance of becoming an expert through deliberate practice.”
When you think of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, what storyline immediately comes to mind? For most people, it is Jesse Owens winning four gold medals including a dramatic victory in the 100 m sprint with Adolf Hitler viewing from the stands. However, Hitler also witnessed another stunning upset by an underdog American team, the 8 man rowing crew. Even though Germany won five of the seven men's rowing events, a gritty group of students from the University of Washington came from behind to steal the gold medal at the marquee event. Now, 77 years later, those oarsmen are finally getting their story told in a new book, The Boys in the Boat, by Daniel James Brown. I ran across this book doing some research on Olympic sports science and was instantly sucked into its underdog beats the villain plot. Brown has captured not only the historical set-up but the human battle and immense odds faced by the crew. Recently, I sat down with the author to find out more about these forgotten heroes.
Daniel, where did you first hear about the story of the 1936 US rowing team? Were you surprised that a book had not been written about their journey?
Daniel James Brown - The story literally walked into the living room, in the form of Judy Willman, my neighbor. She told me that she was reading one of my previous books to her dad, who was in hospice care, living out the last few weeks of his life at her house. He'd liked the earlier book and she wondered if I would come down to meet him. I went down to Judy's house a few days later and met her father, who turned out to be Joe Rantz, the number seven man in the 1936 US Olympic eight-oar crew.
As Joe began to tell me about that I was absolutely mesmerized by the tale. It wasn't just that he and his crew mates had beaten a German boat to win gold in front of Hitler. It was the whole scope of the story--the long hard saga these working class kids from the American West had undertaken to become, arguably, the greatest collegiate crew of all time. It involved enormous physical and psychological stress, moments of devastating set back, moments of great triumph. And it was all set against the backdrop of the Great Depression. Joe's personal story--his loss of his mother, his ill treatment at the hands of his stepmother, his abandonment by his family, his struggles to simply survive gave the story an added dimension of drama and heart. By the time that first conversation was over I knew I had stumbled across the kind of story all writers dream of finding.
Looking back at the 1936 Olympics, everyone knows the story of Jesse Owens vs. Hitler's men but few have heard the story of the men's eights crew. Why do you think that is?
DJB - The larger story has long been known to quite a few Seattlelites, at least those of a certain age. But that's not true nationally. For the most part I think the very existence of this crew and the remarkable sequence of events that led them to Berlin and the gold medal are still going to be news to most Americans. I think that's partly because the Jesse Owens story so dominated the popular imagination in the summer of 1936 that some of the other remarkable things that happened in Berlin--including the remarkable eight-oar crew race--went largely unreported, at least nationally.
Also, I think as Americans we tend to like to celebrate individual achievements, and certainly Jesse's Olympics fit the bill in that regard. They rightly have become part of the American mythos--they help define who we are and what we value--equality, fair play, equal opportunity. I actually think the story of the 1936 Olympic eight [man rowing team] does a similar thing, though it approaches the question from a different angle. No sport demands such an extreme degree of cooperation as crew. Every detail of every stroke has to be synchronized across eight oars, and it has to happen over and over again in rapid succession. Championship crews have to become one, single entity. Each individual oarsman or oarswoman has to subsume his or her individual ego to the common effort. And in that sense, I think the story of the 1936 crew illustrates what Americans can do when they join in a common effort, when they literally climb in a boat and pull together. Like the Jesse Owens story, it helps define who we are when we are at our best.
Today's Olympics world is dominated by sports science, full-time athletes and major government/private funding. Would Joe Rantz, the hero of the gold medal crew, be able to realize his dream today?
DJB - Boy, that's a tough one. I suspect he might not. Like all the other boys in the boat he was just a working class kid. A local farm boy, basically. When he wasn't rowing he was having to make his way in the world, cutting hay, digging ditches, and literally foraging in the woods for food at times. He wouldn't have had time to work out on erg machines, nor the nutrition to build up the kind of massive body strength of today's oarsmen. (Male oarsmen of his day and age tended to be skinny beanpoles, maybe 175 pounds and 6'2". Today the average is probably closer to 200 pounds).
He wouldn't have known what his VO2 max was. He didn't face competition from recruits from all over the world, nor even other American kids on full ride scholarships. There was no such thing as a rowing scholarship at Washington in 1933. But for character, for sheer guts and drive, I think he--and all the other boys in that boat--would have stood out as exceptional today.
Our blog is about the cognitive side of sports; how your brain enables you to compete. Are the mental aspects of rowing purely motivational or are there cognitive skills and strategies necessary to win?
DJB - There's a huge motivational component. It's a downright brutal sport, so you certainly have to be enormously tough mentally to undertake it on the level of an Olympic contender. But yes, there is also a huge array of cognitive skills that have to be mastered. The sport isn't one of simple brawn by any means; it has much more to do with fine tuning every movement you make to get the maximum amount of drive out of a given expenditure of energy. That means constant attention to very small details of technique, and the mental acuity to keep all those details in mind as you repeat the stroke at varying levels of intensity over and over again.
There is also the matter of meshing mentally with the other seven people wielding oars. That in itself requires a good deal of mental dexterity. I think one of the most interesting parts of the sport, though, is the kind of mental chess game that goes on among coxswains in a race. There is only so much muscle power, energy, and stamina in even the best boats. The coxswain always has the problem of how and more importantly when to use turn all that power loose. Do it too early and his crew will burn out before the finish line; do it too late and they will never catch up in time. So coxswains keep wary eyes on one another throughout a race trying to guess when the others are going to make their move. Getting that right, along with knowing your crew and knowing the capabilities of the crews in the other boats are absolutely key to winning crew races.
Every ounce of weight in a boat has to be justified by it's output, and a lot of coaches think the three pounds or so of gray matter in their coxswains' heads are the most important pounds in the boat.
Finally, what can you tell us about the upcoming movie adaptation directed by Kenneth Branagh?
DJB - Well it looks as if the project is on track, though it's always hard to predict what will come out of Hollywood and when. The Weinstein Company just recently went ahead and exercised their option to fully purchase the film rights, and they have been working with a scriptwriter for several months now. I met recently with the writer and he has some terrific ideas for how to develop the story on film, so I'm very optimistic that when the film arrives on the big screen it will do the boys and their story justice. it's hard to imagine a more compelling climax to a film than eight hearty young American men driving toward the finish line, rowing stroke for stroke with a Nazi crew with swastikas on their chests as Adolf Hitler watches from a nearby balcony and the crowd screams "Deutschland! Deutschland! Deutschland!" Thank you Daniel for your time and a great book!
Most parents and coaches have heard of the growing problem of overuse injuries in youth sports but few are probably aware of the startling statistics. In the U.S. alone, high school athletes account for an estimated 2 million sports-related injuries every year, while athletes under the age of 14 suffer 3.5 million sports injuries.
Unfortunately, the U.S. CDC estimates that almost half of these injuries are preventable and occur because of overuse of the same muscles or bones by kids who are specializing in a single sport. Now, an update to a long-term research study confirms the need to better monitor the type and amount of training for young athletes.
Dr. Neeru Jayanthi, associate professor and medical director at Loyola University, sees quite a few middle and high school athletes at the Loyola sports medicine clinics in Chicago. Back in 2010, he designed a long-term research program to monitor the types of athletes and injuries that the clinic was treating. Since then, Jayanthi and his colleagues have enrolled 1,206 athletes between the ages of 8 and 18 into the study and will be following each one for up to three years. In an April update, he reported that there had been 859 total injuries, of which 564 were diagnosed as overuse injuries with 139 of those being considered serious that kept the athlete sidelined for one to six months or longer.
Along with their health, the team also kept track of each athletes training schedule as reported by their parents. Combining this data with the injury report, an eye-catching statistic jumped out at them. Those young athletes who spent more hours per week training or competing than their age, in a single sport, were 70% more likely to pick up a serious overuse injury. So, for example, if a 14 year old soccer player spent more than 14 hours per week in just soccer, they suffered an injury rate over two thirds higher than those players who practiced less than their age.
"We should be cautious about intense specialization in one sport before and during adolescence,” Jayanthi said. “Among the recommendations we can make, based on our findings, is that young athletes should not spend more hours per week in organized sports than their ages.”
Not only is the amount of hours or practice vital but also the balance between organized, structured training versus just free play like pick-up games. The latest research showed that if this ratio of structured to unstructured time exceeded 2:1, the injury rate went up significantly.
The medical evidence has become so overwhelming that a group of leading medical authorities, including the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons and the National Athletic Trainers Association, have mounted a campaign called Stop Sports Injuries to make athletes, parents and coaches aware of the dangers of early sport specialization and overtraining (see video below).
“Kids often receive pressure from their parents or coaches to be the best in one given sport, when in reality participating in free play and a multitude of sports from an early age is the best strategy to create an outstanding athlete,” said William Levine, MD, Chair of the STOP Sports Injuries Advisory Committee.
Keeping track of an athlete’s training sessions is critical to prevent crossing the threshold to overuse. Using an online training diary system is strongly recommended to log not only the hours but also the type of activity, the body’s reaction and recovery and the progress of results over time. Coaches and clubs can also use the diary system to monitor entire teams and player populations enrolled in long-term athletic development plans.
This guest post comes to us from Dr. Andrea Corn, youth sports psychologist and Ethan Skolnick, a sportswriter for the Palm Beach Post covering the Miami Heat:
How does an athletic parent motivate their child? Frequently, with the same tactics that worked with them when they were young. In Raising Your Game: Over 100 Accomplished Athletes Help You Guide Your Girls and Boys Through Sports, Tim Hardaway Sr., acknowledges that, as a child, he took constructive criticism well. He turned others' doubts into the motivation, “to show you I could do it,” he says. His toughness in the face of adversity helped him survive and even thrive in a rough neighborhood on the south side of Chicago. While developing into an outstanding basketball player, he also developed thick skin. Those attributes propelled him through a long, successful NBA career, which recently earned him selection as a finalist for the Basketball Hall of Fame.
As his son, Tim Jr., became an emerging high school basketball standout, Tim Sr. took the same approach that others had taken with him. He ordered, complained, criticized and didn’t relent when his son seemed to falter. His son, however, didn’t have his dad's disposition. They argued frequently, and the stress affected the entire household.
One day the Warriors and Heat star decided to sit away from his family, far up in the bleachers for one of Tim Jr’s high school games. He saw the game and the ghost of his own behavior literally from a different perspective. Hardaway’s son lost, but the Hardaway family gained something: Tim Sr. chose a different approach. He apologized on the car ride home and promised more praise. That action proved to be as healthy for him as it was for his son.
More than a band aid that day, dad’s change of heart and the realization of their unique and independent temperaments proved to be more powerful than he first realized. Hardaway’s transformation and the space he gave his son brought them closer together.
This year at the NCAA Tournament, Tim Sr. wore Michigan maize and blue, and watched his son score 12 points en route to a loss in the Final Four to Louisville. But especially when the box score didn't offer much support, Hardaway Sr's change -- to building up rather than breaking down his son -- allowed his son to continue to know that somewhere inside lives a winner.
Hardaway Jr will enter the NBA draft this year. And he'll do it with a rebuilt relationship with his father.
Imagine if you were given the task to find the next John Terry, Andy Murray or Katie Taylor. You know that they’re out there somewhere kicking a ball, returning a serve or winning a bout among thousands of other kids their age. While some look like future champions at age 7, it’s unknown what they’ll be like at 17.
Finding a group with some genetic gifts and then developing them through years of physical and mental growth demands access to new tools with one secret ingredient, data. Just ask Ben Smith and Marco Cardinale. In a recent interview with the Big Data Insight Group, Ben Smith, Head of Development Performance Systems for Chelsea Football Club, commented, “The professionalisation of sport has been dramatic over recent years and it’s only going to continue. There’s a huge amount of money and drive within the industry today; the rewards are massive for those getting things right and they’re substantial for getting it wrong – data analytics helps us ensure we do the former and avoid the latter.” In this talent identification and development process, breaking down the data on hundreds of prospective youth players falls into two categories, quantitative and qualitative. The quant side measures and tracks objective data points from devices worn by the player or observed metrics like timed drills and strength workouts. Just as important, the qualitative data tracks the subjective opinions and observations of the player and coaches related to the perceived progress of their daily training.
Collecting gigabytes of data is only step one. Without a way to summarize and visualize the data in a format that is easy for coaches and players to understand, the effort is wasted. “Numbers are really, really dry and people from a coaching background, even the modern coaches, are not often data driven,” according to Smith. “If you can present the numbers in a way that means they quickly understand its direct relevance to the things they’re trying to achieve then they will appreciate the significance of what it’s telling them.”
While managing athlete development data for one sport is difficult, coordinating progress across multiple sports introduces an even greater challenge. That job falls to Dr. Marco Cardinale, Head of Sports Science and Research of the British Olympic Association. He recently described to the MIT-Sloan Management Review some of the complexity and hurdles Team Great Britain has to overcome to keep each sport’s program moving forward.
“The biggest problem we have in sport is the difficulty in collecting data,” said Cardinale. “The real analytics we are interested in is the ability to understand what athletes do on a daily basis to be able to affect their training programs, and that’s where the difficulties occur. It’s very sport specific.”
Like the Chelsea staff, Cardinale understands the need for athletes and coaches to track the ebb and flow of daily training. “In my view, the coach and the athlete are the main unit able to deliver success,” he commented. “I think the biggest edge will be if they understand themselves better. In too many sports, athletes train either too much or not too much, and it’s because they have to gauge what they do on a daily basis against their feelings or what the coach sees. I think if they have more data about themselves, they can have an edge because they can be smarter in the way they train.”
Improving performance with data analytics is not a quick-fix solution. Identifying patterns and trends related to training requires multiple data points over an extended period and a commitment to its long-term use. As Cardinale concludes, “It’s a long journey, which means a club or an institution really need to invest in a project for at least a good three to four years. The power of data resides in good longitudinal information rather than snapshots.”
For as much as we hear about the importance of vision on the football field, there are quite a few phrases emphasizing the sounds of the game, such as “he heard footsteps coming”, “listen for the audible at the line”, “play until you hear the whistle” and even the backhanded compliment to the ears, “he has eyes in the back of his head.”
Listening is a skill to be exploited for better anticipation, reactions and decision-making. Now, neuroscience researchers have filled in some missing details of how we actually use the sounds around us to instantly direct our muscles to take action. To appreciate the benefit of listening during a game, NFL Films mic'd up the Seahawks' QB Russell Wilson in week 17 last season. As you watch (and listen) to the video below, focus your ears on the verbal communications and noisy environment on the sidelines, in the huddle and at the line of scrimmage. A player's auditory processing must be just as active as his visual sense.
So, how do our brains take in all of those sound waves, separate the signal from the noise and then instantly make decisions on how our muscles should react? Neuroscientists have been working on the missing link in the middle. “We know that sound is coming into the ear; and we know what's coming out in the end -- a decision," said Anthony Zador, biology professor and program chair at Cold Springs Harbor Laboratory.
From past research, we know that sounds we hear travel through our ears to the auditory cortex part of our brain. Here they are translated into electrical impulses known as representations. From there, no one was sure how these representations mix with other input, knowledge and goals already in our brain to become specific reactive movements.
Last year, Zador and Dr. Petr Znamenskiy trained lab rats to listen to a sound and then make a decision to turn and run right if they heard a high pitch sound but to go left for a low pitch sound. By observing the neuron pattern of the rats, they discovered that the sequence from hearing to muscle movement takes a different path than expected.
"It turns out the information passes through a particular subset of neurons in the auditory cortex whose axons wind up in another part of the brain, called the striatum," said Zador. They found that only a few of the neurons send information to the striatum, known primarily for planning movement.
“The neurons registering 'high' and 'low' are represented by a specialized subset of neurons in their local area, which we might liken to members of Congress or the Electoral College,” commented Zador. “These in turn transmit the votes of the larger population to the place -- in this case the auditory striatum -- in which decisions are made and actions are taken."
Their research just appeared in the journal Nature.
Here’s Zador describing the overall process of turning hearing into action:
As much as players study film, there are opportunities to introduce the sounds of the game into their training. Both understanding verbal communications and sensing environmental sounds contribute to on-field success. It starts by closing the eyes and listening to the game.
What happened out there? You thought you were ready. You thought your training went well last week. You thought your pre-competition routine was the same as always. Now you’re wondering why you hit the wall early and just had an off day. Consistently performing at a high level depends on creating the right combination and pattern of training that yields the best outcome. Even a small change to that ideal routine can result in a poor performance. Finding that wrong turn requires retracing your steps through your recent training sessions.
Unfortunately, many athletes lack a system to capture not only the quantitative data but also the qualitative information about their mood, motivation and daily activities that may have affected their results. In all of the noise of today’s high-tech monitoring devices, the simplicity of a training diary often gets overlooked.
So, what exactly is a training diary? It can range from a paper notebook with an athlete’s thoughts about the day’s practice to a sophisticated, online app. For either version, the key ingredient is consistent and accurate data. Without an athlete or coach entering data, the diary is like staring at a map with no roads.
Recently, human performance researchers at Dublin City University (DCU) studied the effectiveness of using training diaries for young Gaelic footballers as a way to assess their overall training load. Without proper management of their time and activities, young athletes can suffer burnout from overtraining.
Siobhán O’Connor, a researcher and graduate student at DCU, and Professor Noel McCaffrey gathered 162 players from U14, U18 and adult teams to measure not only the response of players to using a diary, either paper-based or online, but also to validate that what the players self-reported was an accurate reflection of their actual training.
Previous research has shown that athletes prefer easy and efficient data entry for a diary to succeed. O’Connor designed a format that, on average, took the players just under 4 minutes per day to fill out. Initially, the paper and online versions received about the same participation rate but when e-mail or text reminders were sent out for the online version, the players use of the online version increased substantially.
Filling diaries with the right information is just as important as timeliness. As they say in the computer world, “garbage input produces garbage output.” To check this, a subset of the players also wore accelerometers and/or SenseCams to objectively capture data about the training sessions. When this data was compared with what the players actually recorded in their diaries, there was a 95% agreement, confirming that the players could accurately self-report their own data.
O’Connor is encouraged by the results, “This study will benefit Gaelic Footballers throughout Ireland and beyond by enabling them to quantify their training load in a quick and easy manner.”
Although training diaries were initially designed with amateur or semi-professional sports enthusiasts in mind, online diaries combined with communication portals are being utilized more and more by professional organizations and elite athletes.
Of course, the payoff for athletes to entering this information is being able to quickly review the data and ensure consistent performance improvement. That’s where online diaries shine, especially those that can analyze the data and identify cause and effect patterns. Being able to understand how your daily habits contribute to your results makes it all worthwhile.
When asked to describe Greg Maddux, the retired 4-time Cy Young award-winning pitcher, Wade Boggs, a Hall of Fame hitter with a .328 lifetime batting average, once said, “It seems like he's inside your mind with you. When he knows you're not going to swing, he throws a straight one. He sees into the future. It's like he has a crystal ball hidden inside his glove.”
So, what did Maddux know that other pitchers don’t? Neuro-engineers from Columbia University decided to actually look inside some hitters' brains to try to find out.
Maddux, who seems to be a lock for the 2014 Hall of Fame class, earned a reputation for knowing batters so well that he could think one step ahead of them. "When you think it's a ball, it's a strike,” confessed former Yankees manager Joe Torre. “When you swing at what you think is a strike, it's in the dirt. He was a remarkable pitcher." This lack of pitch recognition skill by hitters is what all good pitchers try to exploit. While hours of batting practice try to teach this through repetition, there have been surprisingly few attempts at finding out what’s really happening under the batting helmet.
Jason Sherwin, Jordan Muraskin and Paul Sajda, biomedical engineers at Columbia’sLaboratory for Intelligent Imaging and Neural Computing, specialize in motion perception and high speed decision making but are also baseball fans. Last year, they reported that they had been able to pinpoint the timing of pitch recognition within the brain. Fitted with electroencephalography (EEG) skull caps, test volunteers watched 12 sets of 50 different video pitches that were either a fastball, a curve or a slider. They were asked to immediately identify the pitch they just saw, before the pitch arrived over the plate, by pressing a certain computer key.
Comparing correct answers with the EEG data, the researchers were able to determine the exact millisecond when recognition happened in the brain, or when the hitter locks onto a pitch knowing what’s on the way. Fastballs were the fastest to be recognized with curve balls taking the longest. However, sliders had the highest average prediction accuracy at 91% while fastballs were only guessed correctly 72% of the time.
Mapping the response times with the trajectory of the ball, the recognition typically happened in the middle third, between 32 and 40 feet, of the ball’s path to the plate.
After discovering when pitch recognition happens in the brain, the team then wanted to see where it occurred. By combining the timing clues from EEG with the location-specific data of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), they could see a more complete model of decision making. This time they used college baseball players and showed them a combination of 468 fastballs, curves and sliders, while wearing EEG caps and lying inside an fMRI machine.
Figure 1
Cross-referencing the pitch’s trajectory, the “light bulb” recognition moment and the fMRI map of the player’s brain, they not only confirmed their earlier research of a pitch-guessing neural network but also a fascinating twist. For correct guesses, the brain logically lit up in its visual and motor cortex areas.
However, for the incorrect guesses, activity moved to the prefrontal cortex of the brain, known to be used for conflict resolution and higher level decision making. As can be seen in Figure 1, red areas indicate regions that have higher activations during correct pitch guesses, while blue areas indicate regions with higher activations for incorrect choices.
So, when the visual information isn’t enough for an automatic recognition, it appears that the problem gets escalated to add in other known facts or previous experiences.
So, what good would this baseball neuroscience be against today’s great pitchers? The authors ask us to imagine a new era of baseball training, where step one is to capture a baseline of each player’s neural recognition ability. Realizing when a hitter is able to make a correct prediction of a pitch and seeing first-hand their brain’s reaction time will identify specific training opportunities. Step two is to use a pitch simulation tool to see hundreds of pitches, measuring performance improvement in accuracy and speed.
“Knowing the neural circuits involved in the rapid decision-making that occurs in baseball opens up the possibility for players to train themselves using their own neural signatures,” concluded Sajda.
Tony Gwynn, another Hall of Famer known for studying video of opposing pitchers, would have appreciated this technology twenty years ago when facing Maddux. “He’s like a meticulous surgeon out there...he puts the ball where he wants to," remembered Gwynn. "You see a pitch inside and wonder, 'Is it the fastball or the cutter?' That's where he's got you.”
In soccer, like many sports, the goal scorers get the headlines. Yet, they will secretly admit that the final pass played to them is very often their key to unlock the defense. Without the vision of a teammate to pick them out of a crowd, their finishing skill is almost useless.
As players progress through the ranks of high school, college and beyond, not only do their opponents get quicker with their feet but also with their eyes and brains. Their time with the ball gets shorter forcing them to either make the correct pass or avoid the oncoming defender. The luxury of time to survey the field for targets after they receive the ball is now gone. The available options need to be gathered and assessed constantly so that when the ball arrives at their feet, the homework is already done.
So, what do top players do differently that makes their decisions consistently fast and correct? Geir Jordet, a professor at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences, specializes in perceptual expertise in soccer. At last month’s MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, he presented new research on what he describes as “the hidden foundation of field vision.” From previous studies, Jordet knew the importance of visual search strategies in soccer decision making. However, the typical methods used to test a player’s perception seemed artificial. Whether it be putting athletes in simulated field situations in a lab or merely relying on a computer joy stick movement, Jordet knew he needed to make the tests more realistic.
“These (lab-based) tasks do not simulate the functional links between perception and natural movements, which may be essential to capture, if the goal is to reveal knowledge about real-game visual perception,” he wrote.
So, he went back to just being a fan and admiring the sport’s best players. Using SkySport’s Player Cam broadcasts (now discontinued) of English Premier League games, he and his research team could watch isolations of a single player in one screen, while seeing the entire game context on another screen (see image below).
“Such video footage makes it possible to examine how players engage in visual exploratory behaviors by moving their bodies and heads to better perceive events taking place behind their backs,” said Jordet.
From 64 different games, they watched the habits of 118 of the world’s best players to detect the clues they leave on the field during 1,279 actual game situations. Jordet’s hypothesis was that those players who engaged in the most active search of their surroundings before they received the ball would produce the highest percentage of successful passes once they received possession. He defined an active search as the player turning their gaze and head away from the ball to prepare themselves by trying to pick-up as much information about the positions and movement of teammates and opponents.
Dividing the total exploratory events (turning the head) by the seconds of each scenario yields an average exploration frequency. Not surprisingly, the two EPL players, Frank Lampard and Steven Gerrard, with the highest frequency rates of .62 searches per second are two of the most successful midfielders currently playing in the league.
In this video clip, watch (and try to count) the number of times Lampard moves his head while waiting for the ball:
When the player received an incoming pass, it was noted if he was able to complete the next pass successfully, especially if it was a forward pass in the direction of his opponent’s goal. A better search should yield better information which should improve the completion percentage of the next pass.
Sure enough, Jordet found a direct correlation between higher exploration frequency and pass completion rates. Players with exploration frequency below .2 only completed 54% of their passes while those with more than .41 explorations per second had pass completion rates of 73% or higher.
As the research team notes, counting head turns still doesn’t tell us anything about what the player actually saw during those quick glimpses. It seems they are able to put pieces of the puzzle together with each glance, allowing their brain to assemble the big picture.
“The findings can have major implications for both what scouts look for in players and for how coaches work to improve players’ receiving and passing skills,” concluded Jordet.
In Gerrard's case, this search habit pays off in creating scoring chances, especially in the final attacking third of the field. The always useful website,EPL Index, just updated their analysis of the top EPL players this season, in these two categories. As expected, Gerrard appeared in the top five of each ranking (see charts).
As Xavi, Barcelona’s midfield maestro, explains, “Think quickly, look for spaces. That's what I do: look for spaces. All day. I'm always looking. All day, all day. Here? No. There? No. People who haven't played don't always realise how hard that is. Space, space, space. I think, the defender's here, play it there. I see the space and pass. That's what I do.”
As you may have noticed when visiting 80% Mental, there has always been a box over to the right of the main page connecting you to the Nothing But Nets program. Of all the many worthwhile causes out there, the simplicity of buying a insecticide-treated bed net for a child or family to keep them safe from malaria-carrying mosquitos always made sense to me.
With April 25th being World Malaria Day, could you please check out Rick Reilly's challenge below? He is matching all bed net donations through Thursday, up to 20,000. The bed nets are $10 each to purchase, deliver and set-up for a thankful family.
I really appreciate everyone who visits this site. Let's make Rick pry open his checkbook!
Thanks!
Dan
United Nations Foundation
Dear Dan,
I want to make sure every child in sub-Saharan Africa is sleeping safely at night under a life-saving, anti-malarial bed net. But I can't do it without you, Dan.
That's why I told you last week that I am going to match every dollar you donate to the United Nations Foundation's Nothing But Nets campaign by April 25th, World Malaria Day.
Our goal is to hang 20,000 more insecticide-treated bed nets in homes in Africa. And we're off to a great start! So many caring friends like you have stepped forward, donating 1,889 bed nets so far, which I've matched for a total of 3,778 nets.
That means 3,778 families and thousands of children will now be protected from this deadly disease.
I helped launch Nothing But Nets in 2006. I was sitting in a hotel room and I flipped on the television. I was stunned to hear that 3,000 children died every day from malaria, simply because they don't sleep under a bed net at night. How could it be, I wondered, that so many children were dying from such an easily preventable disease?
Then I had a thought—who better to provide families with insecticide-treated bed nets than sports fans? Sports fans love nets!
I wrote a column in Sports Illustrated asking each of my readers to donate $10 to Nothing But Nets. That first month, friends like you donated more than $1 million. Since then, we have raised more than $40 million, providing families across Africa more than 7 million nets to protect them from malaria.
We've made great progress. In areas where you’ve helped Nothing But Nets put bed nets in most homes, we've reduced transmission rates of malaria by up to 90%!
As a loyal supporter of Nothing But Nets, you know what a simple, long-lasting bed net can do. You know that it can keep a child safe, and allow them not only to survive, but to grow up healthy and strong—like every kid should.
It's so simple. Malaria kills. Nets save lives.
So will you help me provide 20,000 new nets by World Malaria Day, April 25th? Remember, it costs just $10 to put an anti-malaria net above a child's bed. But, because I am going to match your gift dollar for dollar, every $10 you give today will provide two life-saving nets.
Together, we can create a world in which no child or his mother or father ever has to fear this devastating disease.
Yours truly,
Rick Reilly
Columnist, ESPN.com
P.S.
Dan, every long-lasting bed net you send can save a child's life. The more nets we send, the more families and entire communities we can protect from malaria. Together, we can cover Africa. So please send as many nets as you can today, and I'll send an equal number. Then we both get to be life-savers!
Every time Steve Nash goes to the foul line, he shoots five or six free throws. Sure, there’s the two that really count, but the NBA’s all-time free throw percentage leader always takes several imaginary shots before getting the ball. He says it helps him not only visualize the ball going through the net but also gets his brain and body prepped for the upcoming motor skill. After almost 3,400 regular season attempts, his 90.4% success rate seems to work, even if Dwight Howard isn’t interested.
Actually, this “dry run” motor imagery is a well-used technique across several sports. Golfers always take the imaginary swing or putt before stepping up to the ball. Batters take their nervous hacks before the pitch. Football placekickers, the ultimate “hero or goat” athletes, focus on their warm-up kick before their team breaks the huddle. While mental imagery and visualization are common for athletes, there is growing evidence that including the actual physical motions, also known as dynamic imagery, creates the best results.
In a recent study, Aymeric Guillot, neuroscience professor at the University of Lyon, tested elite high jumpers to see if this action-oriented imagery would help them not only clear the bar but use better form. They performed a series of 10 jumps at 90% of their personal best. They were randomly asked to perform either a motionless mental imagery session or to use their whole body as much as they could to rehearse the jump, without actually executing it.
Guillot’s team found that basic mental imagery without motion did improve the success of the jumps and the form quality by 35%. However, those jumpers that included active, dynamic motor imagery increased their success rate and form by 45%.
"Our study on high jumpers suggests that dynamic imagery may provide a training edge to professional and amateur athletes,” commented Guillot. “This technique may also be of use to people in other disciplines where 'dry run' rehearsals are routinely used."
“A pre-performance routine accomplishes three main physical goals: 1. Stabilizes the motor pattern2. Adds consistency3. Establishes a rhythmWhen Nash attempts his practice shot, he uses the Imaging step. Rather than pure visualization, where a player may imagine a previous made shot, Nash adds the kinesthetic element. He imagines the ball going through the basket, but he also feels the shot.”
McCormick credits Nash’s pre-shot process, kept identical for every attempt:
“When Nash takes a pre-practice shot without the ball, he is accessing the motor pattern and moving it to the working memory. He stabilizes the motor pattern, so he can retrieve the pattern more quickly and effectively than someone who shoots cold. His routine also rhythmically prepares the movement. Most motor skills have a rhythm to them, and Nash feels the rhythm of his shot during the practice shot rather than shooting the real free throw cold.”
Given Nash's well-documented success, who better than the man himself to describe his mindset before each free throw? All players and coaches (wanting to be smarter than Dwight Howard) should watch this video:
Of course, Dwight could keep ignoring Nash's advice, giving us classic highlights like this: Join Axon Sports on Twitter and Facebook.
Think of Brazil, then think of a sport. Most of us would respond with soccer, or “futebol” in Portuguese, thanks to their five World Cup victories and national obsession with the sport.
However, over the last 12 years, Brazilian volleyball has dominated the world. The men’s national team is currently ranked first in the world and has won a gold and two silver medals in the last three Olympics. The women’s team has back to back Olympic gold medals, beating the U.S. in Beijing and London, and is currently ranked second in the world.
So, when University of Illinois psychology professor Arthur Kramer and his research team wanted to find out more about how elite athletes take in and process visual information, it wasn't surprising that he and his team visited the starting place for all aspiring Brazilian netters, the Center for the Development of Volleyball (CDV – Saquarema), in Rio de Janeiro.
Arthur Kramer
Heloisa Alves
There he and graduate student Heloisa Alves found 87 of the best men and women players, both adults and juniors, including some of those Olympic medalists, to test their visual and cognitive abilities. The adult players were in their early 20’s with an average of 10 years of volleyball training. With an average age of 16, the junior players had received about 5 years of formal training. For comparison, 67 non-athletes with similar ages and general education were used as a control group.
There are two competing schools of thought for studying the cognitive differences between athletes and non-athletes; the expert performance approach and the component skills approach. Research using the expert performance method tries to look at mental tasks using sport-specific domains. For example, to see if an elite volleyball player has better peripheral vision than an amateur, they might be asked to view a volleyball court with moving players while being tested on their reaction time to changes. Sport scientists feel this is a more relevant test of differences gained by years of training.
The component skills approach removes the sports context from the experiment and tries for a more general comparison of perceptual and cognitive tasks. This helps to find out if the athlete’s advantage is at a core, fundamental level, not influenced by a sports environment.
Kramer’s team, using a computer based set of tests, chose the component skills method with three main cognitive categories included; executive control, memory and visuo-spatial. First, in this context, executive control means being able to keep two different tasks and instructions in mind and switching back and forth between them, similar to being able to switch between an offensive and defensive mindset during a volleyball match. Also, the players were tested on being able to quickly stop a task when new information popped up. On the court, think of having a play or counterattack in mind, then having to instantly change that plan based on the other team’s actions.
Next, short term memory was tested by first showing a group of shapes, followed by just one shape. The test group had to quickly decide if that single shape was in the original group. Finally, their spatial awareness was put to the test by seeing a series of different, frequently changing scenes and being asked to quickly detect and track the changes.
As expected, the results showed that the elite players, both adult and juniors, were better than the control group on all but one of the tests. Their ability to switch between tasks, store objects in memory and track moving objects were significantly better than the non-athletes. While past research had shown signs of this superiority, Kramer’s experiment was important because it expanded the results to a larger test pool, including men and women and different age group/training levels.
In fact, the women athletes performed just as well as the men athletes, which is interesting since non-athlete men easily outperformed non-athlete women.
“We found that athletes were generally able to inhibit behavior, to stop quickly when they had to, which is very important in sport and in daily life, “ Kramer said. “They were also able to activate, to pick up information from a glance and to switch between tasks more quickly than nonathletes.”
Of course, the gold medal question is if athletes are better because of their training or because of some innate advantage they’ve had since birth? The Brazilian volleyball program hopes to answer this over time by taking baseline tests of kids in school before they are exposed to the years of structured training.
Kramer’s educated bet is on a combination. “Our understanding is imperfect because we don’t know whether these abilities in the athletes were ‘born’ or ‘made,’ ” he said. “Perhaps people gravitate to these sports because they’re good at both. Or perhaps it’s the training that enhances their cognitive abilities as well as their physical ones. My intuition is that it’s a little bit of both.”
With the 2016 Olympics on home court in Rio de Janeiro, the Brazilians are gearing up for what could be their best Games ever and a three-peat for the women.
Just ask the primary decision makers across different sports. Quarterbacks, point guards, or midfielders would agree that making the right choices during a game would be a whole lot easier if it weren’t for the constant distractions. Whether it be a blitzing linebacker or a 1v1 defender, staying focused on the next decision seems like an sequential process; something that can’t be dealt with until the current distraction is neutralized. However, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University have learned that our multitasking brains continue to mull impending decisions in the background while our conscious brain handles the noise in front of us.
Picture a quarterback walking to the line of scrimmage with the play he called in the huddle. Based on the defense he sees in front of him, he is processing his receiver options, searching for a correct decision. After the snap of the ball, that thought process is interrupted by two linebackers bursting through the line. First, deal with the distraction and avoid the sack. Second, reengage the prior decision tree to find the open receiver. To our QB, this seems like a serial event, but David Creswell, assistant professor of psychology at CMU, showed that it’s actually a parallel process in our brains.
Using neuroimaging tools, his team watched the brains of 27 adults while they were gathering information to make a decision. They noted that the visual and prefrontal cortices, areas of the brain known for decision making, were active when the volunteers were learning new information and considering options. Just before they were asked to make a decision, they were distracted with having to memorize sequences of numbers, which involves other areas of the brain.
What they found was that even during the distraction, the participants’ visual and prefrontal cortices remained active, still working unconsciously on the decision task. In fact, the group that endured the distractions did just as well at making the right decision as a control group that was not distracted.
In this video, Creswell and co-author James Bursely explain their experiment:
"This research begins to chip away at the mystery of our unconscious brains and decision-making," said Creswell. "It shows that brain regions important for decision-making remain active even while our brains may be simultaneously engaged in unrelated tasks. What's most intriguing about this finding is that participants did not have any awareness that their brains were still working on the decision problem while they were engaged in an unrelated task."
Now, the use of background processing by the brain should not be confused with intuition, made popular by Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Blink. More formally known as our adaptive unconscious, Gladwell focused on our perceived ability to make snap judgements without really understanding how we arrived at our conclusion.
When under fire during a game, athletes may well be making very quick decisions without the luxury of time to analyze all the information. Experience and practice helps build those automatic responses. Those players with a richer database of solutions should see more accurate knee jerk responses when needed.
Most likely, what helps elite athletes come through in a clutch is a combination of real-time, background processing and a honed intuition gained from experience.
Imagine an NCAA basketball coach trying to create a game plan for their first March Madness game with absolutely no video footage of their upcoming opponent. Sure, he has their roster with player names, height/weight and positions. He also has a set of specific stats that show the performance of each player and the team during the season. Yet, there is no opportunity to see the team play as a unit, how they move the ball, or their communication. The resulting game strategy would be full of educated guesses and assumptions based on just the macro picture of the roster and the micro world of data and statistics.
Welcome to the world of today’s neuroscientists. To study the brain, they have the 30,000 foot view from tools like functional MRI scans and the microscopic world of neurons and biochemistry. Everything in the middle, the constant communications between 100 billion neurons, is unable to be observed, leading to theories and best guesses at how we make decisions, free throws and no-look passes. Much like a library of game video or, better yet, a live stream of the action, researchers need a way to observe and measure our brain’s massive amount of electrical activity and connectivity. "We don't actually understand (how circuits of neurons) generate all these interesting behaviors we have, like speech and language and thoughts and memory," said John Donoghue, neuroscientist at Brown University, in a recent CNN interview.
Enter the Brain Activity Map (BAM) project. While there are many ongoing brain mapping research projects currently underway, President Obama alluded to a much more ambitious initiative in his State of the Union address last month. Since then, details have begun to emerge for a 10-year, $3 billion project to do for brain research what the Human Genome Project did for biology and genetics. An article published last week in Science hints at the “big rock” goals for BAM as defined by a cross functional team of 11 scientists, including not only neuroscientists but also experts in genetics, nanotechnology, and bioengineering.
Here's a quick (and energetic) intro to BAM:
“We need something large scale to try to build tools for the future,” Rafael Yuste, a neurobiologist at Columbia University, told MIT Technology Review. “We view ourselves as tool builders. I think we could provide to the scientific community the methods that could be used for the next stage in neuroscience.”
To be sure, a project of this size and cost is not being done to help a point guard know when to pass or shoot. Trying to solve brain disorders like Alzheimer’s or schizophrenia are much higher on the priority list.
Then again, think of the possibilities in just basketball:
- What is happening in a player’s head when he struggles at the foul line? We have theories of “choking” but to actually know the electrical patterns of skill versus stress could suggest new ways to deal with it.
- How is “court vision” represented in the brain and how can we identify and/or train it?
- Practice and repetition seem to teach a new play or skills to a team, but how can we accelerate the rate of learning?
Time will tell if this latest research initiative provides any of the benefits it promises. It certainly could fill in the gaps of how we understand athletes as living, thinking people. It might even help us fill out our March Madness brackets.
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."
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.
