Identify Soccer fitness nutrition injury risks and address azsessment before they Soccer fitness nutrition your progress. How performande train in your own optimal endurance zone allowing you to crank up your endurance for efforts lasting more than 2 hours. But, what if they could only do 1 repetition? Assessment Protocols Chapter 4.

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Athletic performance assessment -

This assessment is followed by a comprehensive customized plan to address the findings and assist you to accomplish maximum performance. Effective performance development programs should comprise specific objectives to challenge the athletes. In order to set effective goals, it is significant to have a picture of where the athlete is currently across several parameters.

A sports performance assessment protocol may include:. Following the above performance assessments, a final comprehensive performance report is generated and provided to the athlete with identified strengths and weaknesses that can be addressed through training. Further referral can also be made to either an orthopedic or sport and exercise medicine consultant or physical performance specialist if needed.

Getting You Back To Doing What You Enjoy. Keeping Hampton Roads Active And Pain Free. Performance Assessments What is Performance Assessment? Gradually, faulty movement patterns can result in: Increased risk of injuries Increased joint and muscle-related stress Imbalances as a result of muscle inhibition and muscle over-activation Limited performance Biomechanical issues The data collected during performance assessment helps to overcome these limitations by devising a personalized program to maximize their athletic potential.

Objectives of Performance Assessments Effective performance development programs should comprise specific objectives to challenge the athletes. A sports performance assessment protocol may include: Medical Monitoring : Performance assessment protocol warrants the athlete to complete a detailed medical history form followed by a review of this with a sports physician in a one-on-one consultation session.

When we include this into a team training camp case, every athlete will spend around 10 to 15 minutes with the doctor reviewing their medical history and any current or previous injuries.

The 1RM is the most popular method, but it does have advantages and disadvantages that were discussed in Chapter Reliability of our data is highly dependent on standardizing our methods, so this is imperative.

Isometric strength testing is possible, but it will almost always be a multijoint test like a mid-thigh pull or a squat. Single joint tests are likely never done with athletes since they lack sport specificity. Along with that, it would be extremely rare to see an isokinetic test with athletes as it has minimal ecological validity.

One common issue with strength testing, as well as any maximal effort test, is that it will be difficult to evaluate reliability in a test-retest format since the first trial will undoubtedly result in some fatigue that will influence subsequent trials.

Evaluating within session test-retest reliability is still recommended, but it may not be possible in some scenarios. If you consider the protocol shown in chapter 11 for a 1RM test, how long do you think the test will last? Also, given that we might be interested in more than one exercise, you may want to multiply that time by 2 or 3.

As you can imagine, doing 1RM testing may take up the entire lifting session. Going back to the philosophy of being minimally invasive, we could have the strength and conditioning program set up so that athletes warm up to a heavy set of 2 or 3 and then do 2 or 3 more sets to finish out their workout.

When training for strength, it is common to utilize high loads with low volume. So a session using exercises with sets of reps is a common occurrence.

What if we had the athletes warm up to the heaviest load they could lift for times and used that amount in a prediction equation? But, what if they could only do 1 repetition? Then that is their 1RM. What if it was easy and they completed 4 or 5 reps instead of the prescribed ?

Then that number could be plugged into the prediction equation instead of 2 or 3. This negates the risk of missing out on data if lifts are missed as in a 1RM test.

As long as at least one repetition is completed, the equation can be adjusted to correct for missed reps. This method also allows more frequent testing of strength during a high intensity training phases.

It should likely be a multijoint exercise like the mid-thigh pull shown in Chapter 11, as that is more specific to most sports. Similar to the submaximal repetition maximum prediction method, one big benefit of an isometric test over a traditional 1 repetition maximum strength test is that a value is always produced.

The downside is that the equipment can be expensive and may be a bit more time demanding on the athletes. What about grip strength? Grip strength is not a recommended assessment with trained athletes. As you can see in Figure However, in the stronger and trained group, the slope has leveled out and the association is weaker.

This could be due to the fact that the muscles in our legs are always going to be stronger than those in our forearms that help us grip. You could try to train your grip to hold heavier loads so that you could train your lower body with the heavier and unstrapped weight, but that would take much longer.

Power is a work rate. Work is the amount of force we produce multiplied the amount we displace the object. So, we could say that power is work times displacement divided by time. Velocity is displacement divided by time. So, we could then say that power is equal to force times velocity.

Any time we move an object including our own body parts or our entire body , we produce force and velocity, so we produce power.

Peak power will then be the optimal product or combination of force and velocity. This can be seen in Figure As can be observed, in this example peak power is not produced near the highest levels of force production nor is it produced at the highest levels of velocity.

It is somewhere in the middle. Measuring power directly requires equipment that may be expensive. Force plates will measure force directly and velocity can be calculated from it, but this is an expensive option that may not be available to everyone. Accelerometers measure acceleration, which can be integrated to produce velocity.

Acceleration can be multiplied by mass to produce force, so power can then be calculated. Accelerometers range in price and these may be a good option for some as the data will often be automatically sent to your computer or tablet for analysis.

The issue is that you may need to buy one for each athlete, which increases the price significantly. The most affordable and most widely used method comes from only measuring jump height and then predicting peak power.

This is possible due to the relationships between jump height, body mass, and peak power. In order to accomplish this, you need a scale and a device to measure jump height.

The problem step is most often in measuring the reach height prior to jumping. Athletes can alter their reach height by standing flat-footed, standing on their toes, retracting their shoulder, etc. The reach height is subtracted from the jump height, so some clever athletes may purposely make their reach heights smaller.

Another downside is that this test takes more time than many of the other options. A switch mat is another, similarly priced, alternative and it is a very quick measurement. The athlete simply steps on the mat and jumps. The mat measures the flight time and predicts jump height from that.

Similarly, methods must be standardized, or else reliability will suffer. Next, the data can be plugged into a peak power prediction equation. One of the most common ones comes from Sayers. For each predictor variable there is a coefficient that it must be multiplied by and there is a constant value in this case.

Speed can be measured in multiple ways. While many you work with may not know the difference, you should be clear about what variable you are actually measuring speed, velocity, acceleration, or simply time.

The simplest and most commonly used method is measuring out a known distance and timing the athlete sprinting from one side to the other. This can be reported as time in seconds or velocity if you divide the distance or displacement by the time. This is by far the cheapest method.

It can be improved on if splits, or intervals, are added in allowing for further analysis of the sprint. You may then be able to get a time for their starting technique often the first 10 m , acceleration phase m , and ability to maintain velocity 20 m and beyond.

One issue that hurts reliability of timing with stopwatches is that the athlete is not the only one being timed. In this situation, the reaction time is the time between the timer seeing the event and when they are able to click the button.

Infrared or photocell timing gates are a great option to avoid this issue. You may have heard of these before or heard someone incorrectly refer to them as a laser device. They are a bit more expensive, but they take the tester out of the equation along with their measurement error. You can create as many intervals as needed as long as you have the gates to do it.

If velocities are calculated, average accelerations between each interval can also be calculated. Velocity and acceleration can be measured more directly with GPS devices and accelerometers, but they are more expensive, and a device for each athlete will be needed rapidly increasing the cost.

The benefit is that it can be measured during a practice or potentially a competition if rules allow it as opposed to setting up a testing session.

This also makes it a truer performance measure as opposed to a readiness measure. You can get much more precision and depth to all measures with these types of devices. If your budget can support it, this is the best option. Change of direction ability CODA is often incorrectly referred to it as agility, but agility and CODA are different qualities.

Agility is a whole-body change of direction in response to an external stimulus. COD is a pre-planned event. So, most of the traditional agility tests are actually CODA tests.

For example, consider the pro-agility test also called the or the 3-cone drill. Both are a part of the NFL combine, and both are actually CODA. CODA tests could be used to evaluate agility if some decision-making process is added to the protocol Figure Unfortunately, this often introduces error which decreases reliability.

This error could happen because the athlete makes the wrong decision or they just take longer than normal to make the decision. Another source of error could be form the tester. If a manual signal to change direction is given by the tester, this will undoubtedly decrease reliability.

Now you would be measuring the decision-making process of the athlete and the tester. There are directional devices that will randomly indicate when the athlete should change direction, and this will remove this part of the error.

This should be taken a step further. CODA is strongly correlated with sprint ability in testing. PPM r values of 0. Said another way, CODA tests may not tease out independent qualities from sprinting ability. But this should make some sense as sprinting is a part of all CODA tests.

Another alternative is the COD deficit test which helps us assess a more independent quality. We must measure the 10 m sprint time, COD time and then simply subtract the 10 m sprint time from the time.

The result restricts the actual COD from sprinting ability. This does require one extra test, but most would likely be doing a sprint test anyway, so it may not actually require any more time. Training load is meant to quantify the total intensity and duration of training in one metric for a given day, week, month, or some other set amount of time.

Training load helps us understand how athletes are responding to training, competition, and other stresses. Some research uses training loads and the rates at which athletes change them to make connections to injury risk. Session training load sTL is a metric specific to one session.

It is quantified as the product of the session intensity and the session duration in minutes. It is not uncommon that athletes have multiple training sessions in a day, so the daily training load is the sum of all sTLs for the day.

Training load is often broken down into 2 categories: external load measures and internal load measures. External load measures are usually some form of a performance variable. This is performance based and is an external load measure.

Another example would be GPS derived distance ran or time spent running at specific velocity ranges in a game or practice. Internal load measures are generally internal responses to training or other stimuli.

They can be objective, like heart rate or HRV, or they can be subjective like RPE or wellness measures. Athlete preparedness and external load measures are related to internal load measures, but it is complicated as both physiological measures and psychological measures impact internal loads.

RPE-based training load measures are likely the most common because they are largely free. Another benefit of the RPE method is that it works across different session types.

They can be created by producing a 1-item questionnaire and administering it to athletes. The responses should be inputted be via a scale, which is generally or and their response should then be multiplied by the session duration to produce a sRPE-TL session RPE training load.

Each of the questionnaire submissions should have a date and timestamp, which makes it easy to add all sessions for a specific day together to produce the daily training load.

Most of the recent research in this area has focused on comparing workloads and their development rates in hopes of shedding some light on the potential injury risk. Ratios above 1.

Similar to RPE, wellness can be evaluated with questionnaires and they can also be administered electronically. In many cases, that means they are automatically emailed to athletes so that they can complete them on their own devices.

These are generally subjective in nature, but athletes answer items with a number scale, so the trends are graphable. One criticism of this is that some athletes may have different perceptions of the same qualities as other athletes.

This is still okay as long as each athlete reliably answers in the same way. So this may still be useful to signal changes. But, these should not be used to compare different athletes.

Much like we discussed earlier, the validity, reliability, and individual usefulness should be evaluated on a regular basis.

Some common examples of areas and variables that can be quantified via wellness questionnaires appear in Figure Body composition may be regularly evaluated in sports, but there may not be a big focus on the percent of body fat depending on the sport.

For many sports, increasing muscle mass is more predictive of sport performance, so that should likely be the focus. When working with large teams or with limited time allotments, BIA testing may be more common due to the speed of testing.

As mentioned before, these units often are not as valid as some of the others, but that is improving, and they are often reliable. Reliability is imperative here as it will still allow us to see directional trends that might signal a change or need for concern. Of course, this is assuming evaluation is happening on a somewhat regular basis monthly.

When using a cheaper device that likely lacks validity, seeing a significant change might be the point when a more valid and thorough measurement is recommended. Flexibility, mobility, and stability are popular concepts in the fitness industry, and they are often confused.

Flexibility refers to the range of motion in a joint or series of joints and often only looks at the muscular limitations while neglecting any joint related issues. Mobility is the ability to move within a range of motion.

All aspects related to range of motion are considered here, muscle, bone, connective tissue, and the nervous system. Both flexibility and mobility are often measured actively with the subject putting themselves through the movement or passively with a tester moving the subject.

Stability is the ability to maintain control of movement and body positions. As such, athletes could demonstrate great stability in a limited ROM, but poor stability when the ROM is increased. Most of the recent research in this area attempts to connect injury to issues with either or a combination of the concepts above.

Unfortunately, most research is inconclusive or negative. As mentioned previously flexibility, mobility, and stability are quite popular in the fitness industry, but their usage in sport performance is a little less consistent.

This is likely due to the lack of supporting evidence for its benefits and also due to poor reliability of many of its measures. Many ROM tests are pretty straightforward using a goniometer or some other device to objectively quantify the measure and these are usually reliable.

Research evaluating the interrater reliability on these methods produces conflicting results. Another potential reason could be the viewpoint of the activity. Furthermore, regular assessments of interrater reliability must be completed.

It is statistically and scientifically irresponsible to assume that data are reliable and valid without evidence. Strictly standardizing testing methods will go a long way to making data reliable.

Any variable that can be measured more than once should be and then the trial average or peak value should be used. Focus on ecological validity when testing sport performance and athlete preparedness. When possible, you should also control for any variables that will negatively impact the validity of collected data.

Author: David Awsessment. Athletic performance assessment in CAD. Athletic performance assessment perofrmance sport assessment resources Athletic performance assessment difficult to understand, can be performancw consuming to implement, and Athletiic data that are difficult to analyze. Percormance for Sport and Dance nutrition for optimal performance Performance effectively solves those assessnent in Energy balance and weight loss practical, assessment guide to performance-based evaluation. A perfect resource for coaches and fitness professionals, Assessments for Sport and Athletic Performance is a streamlined guide through the process of identifying appropriate tests for individuals or teams, making use of common low-cost equipment to administer the tests, interpreting data, adjusting training programs based on the results, and continually monitoring training. For each assessment, this text walks you through a step-by-step process and includes a script of directions to give the athlete or client being tested to ensure the tests are performed correctly.