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Dr. Nerea Casal García is an athlete, private coach, and damage readaptation specialist who final 12 months accomplished a Ph.D. on observational evaluation in elite sports activities. Immediately, she is a professor on the Institut Nacional d’Educació Física de Catalunya of the College of Lleida, specializing in the idea and observe of coaching and efficiency optimization.
Casal García is the corresponding writer on a brand new research in Frontiers in Sports activities and Energetic Residing, which revealed a significant shift over the previous 5 years within the stride patterns of feminine elite athletes throughout 400-meter hurdle competitions—a change that went along with a marked enchancment in efficiency.
She solutions our questions on her analysis and profession as a sportswoman, coach, and scientist.
What impressed you to change into a researcher?
In my case, curiosity performed essentially the most important function. Throughout my years learning sports activities sciences, I always questioned how completely different coaching strategies may work or learn how to optimize the efficiency of the athletes I coached. Furthermore, I’ve at all times loved educating, so the chance to mix analysis and schooling led me to pursue a tutorial profession after finishing my grasp’s diploma.
Having at all times practiced athletics, I grew to become more and more conscious, by means of my expertise as a coach, of the gaps in coaching data that would profit each coaches and athletes. This realization in the end impressed me to deal with analysis on this area.
Are you able to inform us in regards to the analysis you are at the moment engaged on?
I’m at the moment persevering with my work in efficiency evaluation in athletics. Particularly, together with my analysis group, I conduct biomechanical analyses in high-level competitions.
On the similar time, I mix this with new tasks aimed toward learning the completely different athlete profiles and figuring out the important thing variables that decide efficiency in varied occasions. We hope that these tasks can present helpful insights into learn how to tailor athlete coaching primarily based on their particular person traits.
In your opinion, why is your analysis essential?
In sports activities, each athlete strives for optimum efficiency, dedicating numerous hours to reaching even the slightest enchancment. This is the reason coaches search methods to optimize efficiency inside the obtainable time and situations. To reinforce efficiency as effectively as attainable, it’s important to conduct research on completely different occasions to know which variables are key to efficiency and which strategies or methods could also be handiest.
On the similar time, such analysis permits us to elucidate particular person variability in athletes’ performances. I imagine that the analysis we conduct is essential for supporting coaches by offering helpful data and making certain they’ve entry to essentially the most related knowledge to reinforce their athletes’ efficiency.
Are there any frequent misconceptions about this space of analysis? How would you tackle them?
I imagine that outcomes obtained from very particular samples, equivalent to Olympic finalists, are generally overly generalized. Whereas having as a lot data as attainable is crucial, it’s equally essential to acknowledge that individualization is a elementary precept in sports activities coaching. On the similar time, I imagine this can be a area that requires a excessive diploma of applicability.
Due to this fact, it’s important to provide scientific data that’s clearly relevant to the real-world context of efficiency and is well comprehensible for coaches.
What are among the areas of analysis you’d wish to see tackled within the years forward?
I imagine that expertise is advancing quickly, and within the coming years, we can receive way more exact knowledge on inside load and biomechanical variables. This can permit us to take analysis to the subsequent degree. I hope we could have a wealth of real-time data on athletes’ efficiency within the close to future.
How has open science benefited the attain and influence of your analysis?
Many sports activities coaches will not be related to the educational world, making it troublesome for them to entry this data, which is commonly used solely by researchers. Nevertheless, open-access analysis permits all coaches to entry this data, bridging the hole between academia and sensible utility.
Extra data:
Modifications in stride sample of elite girls’s 400 metres hurdles from 2019 to 2022: an evaluation by efficiency degree, Frontiers in Sports activities and Energetic Residing (2025). DOI: 10.3389/fspor.2025.1515441
Quotation:
Q&A: How a sports activities scientist goals to maximise efficiency on the observe (2025, February 27)
retrieved 27 February 2025
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