Book Description

Applied Sport Science and Medicine has become an integral part of the high-performance environment in recent years despite the relative youth of the discipline. Early work in sport science and sports medicine attempted to adopt approaches employed in the more general and established disciplines of science and medicine. There is a growing recognition that a multidisciplinary support team should act in an interdisciplinary manner to optimise their impact on health and performance. Athletes require information to be given in a user-friendly way and will tend to see issues in a holistic way, raising questions such as "what does this mean to me?" and "is my training going to produce the results when I want it to?"Although the terms multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary have become part of normal parlance in the support environment, very few teams provide a truly interdisciplinary approach. This is not criticism of professionals or an excessively bold claim but recognition of the fact that sport and exercise science and medicine has placed emphasis in its research and practice on developing subject-specific experts, such as sport psychologists, physiologists, and so on. Furthermore, the rapid expansion of multi-disciplinary support teams over the past 2 decades, combined with an ever increasing specialisation of individual sport science and medicine disciplines has resulted in confusion for practitioners regarding how best to work closely with their fellow support team members to optimise practice. In recognition of the need for a bespoke, individual tailored approach, this book examines examples of support from a case study perspective across the broad range of sport science and medicine disciplines written by recognised world leaders. This book provides 29 case studies covering physiology, psychology, biomechanics, motor control and performance analysis, nutrition, strength and conditioning and sports medicine. Each case study is presented in a structured format providing a vignette of the case with key information including the challenges faced. The vignette is followed by a contemporary review of the key literature in the field informing the decision-making process involved in the case study and related differential diagnoses and interventions. The case study is concluded by presenting the intervention and outcome. Each case study is followed by a commentary from another world leader drawing out salient points, expanding the discussion and giving personal insight. We divided the book into three sections. 1. The Reactive Model: Providing solutions for pre-existing problems2. The Predictive Model: Providing solutions for events that are predicted to occur3. The Proactive Model: Providing on-going support and developing interdisciplinary teamsThe book has been written by world-leading practitioners. The four editors have an accumulated experience of over 100 years in applied sport science and medicine and have been discussing the idea of producing a book that highlights the importance of an individualized, case-by-case approach to optimizing health and performance of athletes. The plan was to gain insight into best practice and provide information on elite athlete support from those with first-hand experience, and so we contacted the world's leading practitioners and researchers in sport science and medicine to see if they would like to contribute a chapter or comment on a chapter. Practitioners, athletes, students and anyone interested in sport should find the content of these case studies relevant and useful; they are diverse and capture the range of issues consultants face. Overall, Case Studies in Sport Science and Medicine offers a unique and valuable collection of case studies in a wide range of sport science and medicine disciplines written by world leaders in the field of high-performance sport for those working in the field of sports science and medicine.