New Delhi, August 11: Remember Sachin
Tendulkar’s tennis elbow, Messi’s back injury, Roger Federer’s knee injury?
Forget it. Injuries could be a thing of past in competitive sports. GSP
technology can actually be used to predict football injuries! True, according to a new research, footballers’
injuries may be predicted by looking at players’ workloads during training and
competition.
The University of Birmingham and Southampton Football Club joined
hands to analyze the performance of players and find links between training and
injury. The findings have been published in the British Journal of Sports
Medicine and are being acclaimed.
Researchers have discovered that the
greatest injury risks occurred when players accumulated a very high number of
short bursts of speed during training over a three-week period.
The findings now provide a set of
initial guidelines for helping to reduce the occurrence of injuries in elite
youth football. They show that GPS technology and accelerometers can be used to
predict the risk of both contact and non-contact injuries.
The Birmingham University study is the
first such research on injury risk using GPS technology, which is generally
used in football to track players’ speed and acceleration - both in training
and competition.
“Our research has huge practical and
scientific application. It expands a recent body of literature in rugby league
and cricket, which has proposed that the prescription of workloads may be more
indicative of injury than the load itself,” said lead researcher Laura Bowen.
According to the study, players
generally don’t keep track of their training or actual workload on field. They
don’t follow a particular pattern of training or executing the plan on the
field. The GPS can keep track of all that and help analyze the weaknesses of
body. A careful and structured training and sporting regime could be hence
developed reducing the injury worry to the lowest.
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