SA: What are some recent projects conducted by the
Sports Science and Research of the British Olympic Association?
MC: We have recently completed few studies in different areas. In one
study we looked at the effectiveness of spinal manipulation on muscle
function and found some encouraging acute effects of lumbar spinal
manipulation on hamstrings flexibility as well as neural activity and
control of calf muscles. We have also completed a study on muscle
oxygenation in-vivo during short track speed skating to look at
physiological demands of short track as well as differences between the
lower limbs on metabolic demands with implications for training. Another
study almost completed is looking at various techniques to measure
Testosterone and Cortisol minimizing the amount of biological sample
collection and looking at techniques which are not too invasive such as
saliva collection and blood spots. Finally we have completed data
collection for a couple of studies on vibration and warm-up
strategies.
SA: What are some trends that you have identified in sports technology
with regards to athlete performance?
MC: There are a lot of tools out there developed to monitor training
in sport. I have to say that many of them have not been validated and
don't have clear evidence of their validity, precision and reliability,
so most of the times they produce data of dubious quality. However,
overall technology is improving and allowing coaches and sports
scientists to measure more things more frequently. There is definitively
a need of monitoring athletes, but this needs to take an holistic
approach requiring many different techniques and technologies to be used.
So there is still a lot of work to do on developing software and hardware
solutions to be able to display and analyze data coming from various
platforms in real time. Data mining is also another important aspect that
needs to be developed. In equipment-based sports of course the
development of light," intelligent" materials coupled with access to
aerodynamics and hydrodynamics expertise is of course producing better
competition gear which is really making a difference. There is still a
lot to do, but the future of sports science is definitively towards
moving the lab to the field.
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SA: Much has been documented about evaluating athlete performance in
real time. Through the use of heart rate monitors, the data collected can
provide valuable insight to the athlete's state during exercise. Although
much data can be extracted, how much room is there for inference? What
technologies can be employed, then, to further analyze the data collected
through the HRMs or any other 'real-time' data collection method?
MC: This is one of the biggest issues. There are not some tools to
collect some data in real time. Also there are too many proprietary
hardware and software solutions. So the difficulty for a practitioner is
the fact that in order to analyzed what happened in training you have to
use 3-4 different software for each data capture system you are using.
The ability to integrate data sources is crucial to be able to make
inferences. Also, not all the data needed can be collected, in particular
biochemical information. I can say that it is still very time consuming
to collect all data, then add them to spreadsheets or dedicated
statistical software and run some meaningful analysis. So practitioners
end up using various software solutions, spreadsheets and stats and
visualization software to get to understand what is happening. This of
course is a very time consuming activity and most of the times people
just give up because of time pressures.
I think there is a need to develop software to grab and visualize
various data formats to analyze them concurrently. Of course some ability
to run simulations and/or specific algorithms for prediction or decision
making are needed to help coaches and sports scientists.
*READ FULL ARTICLE AT: http://www.sportsactivated.com/Ask-the-Doctor-Series-Dr-Marco-
Cardinale
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dr-marco-cardinale-on-sports-technology-4677672.html