Managing fatigue is critical to minimising the risk of injury and over-training in sports. There are two main types of fatigue: metabolic, which takes up to 3 hours to recover from, and neuromuscular, which takes upwards of 48 hours to recover from.
Lower body dynamic performance and fatigue underpins many sports and the CounterMovement Jump (CMJ) is a direct way to measure this. Using modern statistical techniques including functional Principal Components Analysis (fPCA), we analysed the CMJ force profile at times before and up to 48 hours after sports training. This analysis identified the components that contributed the most to the variation in CMJ performance.
This allowed us to predict whether an athlete will experience metabolic or neuromuscular fatigue. In addition, we could use these signatures to develop athlete capability maps that show how they fatigue compared to others. Together, these tools enable coaches, athletes and individual who engage in sports to actively monitor their progress and pre-emptively manage fatigue onset in training.
- Read the full ACEMS Press Release on this research: https://acems.org.au/news/jump-test-tool-predict-athletic-performance
- Link to publication: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0219295
