Athlete, performance monitoring

BACKGROUND: Monitoring elite athletes' body composition (BC) is vital for health and optimizing performance in sports emphasizing leanness, such as athletics. This study aims to investigate and compare sex- and event-specific off-to in-season BC changes in endurance and power event athletics competitors. METHODS: Elite male and female endurance athletes (> 800 m runners; n = 21) and power event athletes (sprinters, jumpers; n = 32) underwent dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA) scans for whole and regional lean mass (LM), fat mass (FM), bone mineral content (BMC), and density (BMD) during off-season (September-October) and in-season (April-May)...

In sports science, the use of wearable technology has facilitated the development of new approaches for tracking and assessing athletes' performance. This narrative review rigorously explores the evolution and contemporary state of wearable devices specifically engineered for continuously monitoring lactate levels in sweat, an essential biomarker for appraising endurance performance. Lactate threshold tests have traditionally been integral in tailoring training intensity for athletes, but these tests have relied on invasive blood tests that are impractical outside a laboratory setting...

BACKGROUND: Badminton is a sport demanding both high aerobic and anaerobic fitness levels, and fatigue can significantly impact game performance. However, relevant studies are limited, and none have employed a wearable inertial measurement unit (IMU) to investigate the effects of fatigue on athletic performance in the field. HYPOTHESIS: Overall performance and body acceleration in both time and frequency domains during the fundamental badminton skills of vertical jumping and changes of direction will be affected by fatigue...

BACKGROUND: For athletes, overcoming obstacles in challenging situations like pandemic home training is crucial. Strategies and approaches in this context are not well-documented. Our study aims to investigate such a scenario from a performance standpoint, based on a major global crisis: the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown. METHODS: This cross-sectional study surveyed athletes without disabilities using online questionnaires (35 languages) from May to July 2020. Questions included aspects of alternative routines, training monitoring, recovery, sleep patterns, injury occurrence/prevention based on structured answers, and an open-ended question on lockdown training experiences...

BACKGROUND: l-lactate detection is important for not only assessing exercise intensity, optimizing training regimens, and identifying the lactate threshold in athletes, but also for diagnosing conditions like L-lactateosis, monitoring tissue hypoxia, and guiding critical care decisions. Moreover, l-lactate has been utilized as a biomarker to represent the state of human health. However, the sensitivity of the present l-lactate detection technique is inadequate. RESULTS: Here, we reported a sensitive ratiometric fluorescent probe for l-lactate detection based on platinum octaethylporphyrin (PtOEP) doped semiconducting polymer dots (Pdots-Pt) with enzymatic cascade reaction...

OBJECTIVES: The study aims to (1) report the process of recruiting young adults into a secondary knee osteoarthritis prevention randomised controlled trial (RCT) after anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction (ACLR); (2) determine the number of individuals needed to be screened to include one participant (NNS) and (3) report baseline characteristics of randomised participants. METHODS: The SUpervised exercise-therapy and Patient Education Rehabilitation (SUPER)-Knee RCT compares SUPER and minimal intervention for young adults (aged 18-40 years) with ongoing symptoms (ie, mean score of <80/100 from four Knee injury and Osteoarthritis Outcome Score subscales (KOOS4 )) 9-36 months post-ACLR...

Dawson, L, McErlain-Naylor, SA, Devereux, G, and Beato, M. Practitioner usage, applications, and understanding of wearable GPS and accelerometer technology in team sports. J Strength Cond Res XX(X): 000-000, 2024-Monitoring training load is essential for optimizing the performance of athletes, allowing practitioners to assess training programs, monitor athlete progress, and minimize the risk of injury and overtraining. However, there is no universal method for training load monitoring, and the adoption of wearable global positioning system (GPS) and accelerometer technology in team sports has increased the volume of data and, therefore, the number of possible approaches...

As one of the fundamental volleyball skills, countermovement vertical jump (CMJ) has been commonly implemented in the applied sports setting as a non-invasive and time-efficient assessment of athletes' lower-body neuromuscular function. The purpose of the present study was to examine the differences in CMJ characteristics between starters and non-starters within a cohort of professional female volleyball players. Nineteen athletes competing in one of the top European leagues (i.e., SuperLeague) volunteered to participate in the present investigation...

The search for increased performance and physical performance are linked to the use of ergogenic resources. The vertical jump is one of the measures commonly used to evaluate the performance of lower limbs in athletes. Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a non-invasive, safe, economically viable technique that can modulate cortical excitability, which can influence the increase in the performance of athletes in general. This study aimed to investigate whether the use of tDCS on the primary motor cortex (M1) improves the performance of soccer players...

BACKGROUND: Sports have been a fundamental component of any culture and legacy for centuries. Athletes are widely regarded as a source of national pride, and their physical well-being is deemed to be of paramount significance. The attainment of optimal performance and injury prevention in athletes is contingent upon physical fitness. Technology integration has implemented Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) to augment the athletic training milieu. OBJECTIVE: The present study introduces an approach for assessing athlete physical fitness in training environments: the Internet of Things (IoT) and CPS-based Physical Fitness Evaluation Method (IoT-CPS-PFEM)...

OBJECTIVES: To enhance the daily training quality of athletes without inducing significant physiological fatigue, aiming to achieve a balance between training efficiency and load. DESIGN METHODS: Firstly, we developed an activity classification training model using the random forest algorithm and introduced the "effective training rate" (the ratio of effective activity time to total time) as a metric for assessing athlete training efficiency. Secondly, a method for rating athlete training load was established, involving qualitative and quantitative analyses of physiological fatigue through subjective fatigue scores and heart rate data...

Anxiety has been the primary focus of emotion research in sport psychology. Most of the existing anxiety measures focus on the competition related anxiety. Little is known about the way in which anxiety affects athletic outcomes in extreme sports. We contribute to the literature on anxiety in extreme sports by: (1) developing and providing a preliminary validation for a novel, theoretically anchored sport climbing inventory, Climbing Anxiety Scale (CAS-20), among an international sample of rock-climbers (N = 153); and (2) providing preliminary evidence on its factorial and criterion-related validity...

BACKGROUND: People with chronic pain might evade certain movements to prevent their experience of pain. Movement-evoked pain (MEP) might induce lower functionality during daily activities. HYPOTHESIS: (1) MEP after physical fitness tests would vary depending on the main musculature involved in the test; (2) physical and psychological factors would be associated with MEP in patients with NSCLBP. STUDY DESIGN: Cross-sectional design. LEVEL OF EVIDENCE: Level 3...

Marathon running significantly increases breathing volumes and, consequently, air pollution inhalation doses. This is of special concern for elite athletes who ventilate at very high rates. However, race organizers and sport governing bodies have little guidance to support events scheduling to protect runners. A key limitation is the lack of hyper-local, high temporal resolution air quality data representative of exposure along the racecourse. This work aimed to understand the air pollution exposures and dose inhaled by athletes, by means of a dynamic monitoring methodology designed for road races...

OBJECTIVES: To evaluate the independent associations of physical activity and physical fitness with self-rated health in adolescents. METHODS: Data from a 2-year observational study (2013-2015) were used (n=256, 58% girls, 13.7±0.3 years at baseline). Self-rated health was assessed with a questionnaire, physical activity by an accelerometer and a questionnaire, and physical fitness via the measurements included in the Finnish national Move! monitoring system for physical functional capacity and their z-score average (fitness index)...

An important performance determinant in wheelchair sports is the power exchanged between the athlete-wheelchair combination and the environment, in short, mechanical power. Inertial measurement units (IMUs) might be used to estimate the exchanged mechanical power during wheelchair sports practice. However, to validly apply IMUs for mechanical power assessment in wheelchair sports, a well-founded and unambiguous theoretical framework is required that follows the dynamics of manual wheelchair propulsion. Therefore, this research has two goals...

BACKGROUND: Ultra-trail running races pose appreciable physiological challenges, particularly for glucose metabolism. Previous studies that yielded divergent results only measured glycaemia at isolated times. OBJECTIVES: We aimed to explore the impact of an ultra-endurance race on continuously measured glycaemia and to understand potential physiological mechanisms, as well as the consequences for performance and behavioural alertness. METHODS: Fifty-five athletes (78% men, 43...

PURPOSE: To evaluate the effects of repeated use of cold-water immersion (CWI) during a training week on performance and perceptive outcomes in competitive adolescent swimmers. METHODS: This randomized-crossover study included 20 athletes, who received each intervention [CWI (14 ± 1 °C), thermoneutral water immersion (TWI) (27 ± 1 °C) as placebo, and passive recovery (PAS)] three times a week between the land-based resistance training and swim training...

INTRODUCTION: Gymnastics consists of several different disciplines, whereof TeamGym is one. TeamGym is a young discipline with sparse research. The aim of the study is to investigate the injury characteristics in Swedish elite gymnasts competing in TeamGym including training load and other physical and psychological factors associated with injury. METHODS AND ANALYSIS: The Swedish TeamGym Injury Cohort is a longitudinal prospective cohort study for 52 weeks that includes the junior (15-17 years) and senior (≥18 years) Swedish female and male national teams in TeamGym...

The aim of this study was to investigate the effects on running performance of a within-session placebo procedure consisting of a conditioning treatment plus verbal communications. Twenty-six subjects were assigned to PLACEBO and CONTROL groups. Participants performed three sessions: Session 1-Cooper Test, Session 2-Baseline session and Session 3-Experimental session. During Session 2, participants performed a sprint-interval-training (SIT)-until-exhaustion preceded by a general warm-up, while in Session3 the SIT was preceded by a conditioning treatment (FIFA11+ warm-up), known to be effective in preventing injuries but not improving performance...