Heuvelmans, P. (Pieter) (2020) The effect of task and athlete-constraints on coordination of youth elite football players: A constraints-led approach to a football-specific drill. thesis, Sport Sciences.
Full text available on request.Abstract
Background: Non-contact anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury commonly occurs in playing situations with rapidly changing variables related to the athlete, the task, and the environment; i.e. constraints. This combination of constraints provides the context for the self-organisation of the athlete’s movements. Adopting a constraints-led approach allows injury prevention research to understand the coordination of sport-specific movements, and thus the underlying mechanisms of non-contact ACL injury. Objective: This study utilizes a constraints-led approach to investigate differences in hip-knee coordination during a football-specific agility drill between conditions with different task and athlete constraints. Methods: Lower extremity kinematics were collected on seventeen male elite youth football players (age: 13.87±0.29 yrs, mass: 50.88±7.43 kg, height: 1.64±0.09 m). Coordination was quantified for the sagittal and frontal planes using a modified vector coding technique and it was classified into patterns with anti or in-phase coordination and with proximal (hip) or distal (knee) dominancy. Knee dominance (KD) was defined as the prevalence of coordination patterns with knee dominancy. Results: Analysis at the group-level did not show many differences, while analysis at the individual-level revealed that a wide range of coordination strategies were adopted in response to changes in constraints. Interestingly, some players showed a concurrent decrease in sagittal KD and an increase in frontal KD, which resembles knee kinematics typically observed in non-contact ACL injury. Conclusion: These findings validate that sport-specific movements should be studied using a constraints-led approach to allow understanding of the underlying coordination strategies. The results further call for detailed investigations of the combinations of constraints that elicit injury-linked coordination strategies.
| Item Type: | Thesis (UNSPECIFIED) |
|---|---|
| Supervisor name: | Benjaminse, dr. A. and Gokeler, dr. A. |
| Faculty: | Medical Sciences |
| Date Deposited: | 18 May 2022 10:09 |
| Last Modified: | 18 May 2022 10:10 |
| URI: | https://umcg.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/id/eprint/3355 |
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