Elite athletes endeavour to train and compete even when ill or injured. Their motivation may be intrinsic or due to coach and team pressures. The sports medicine physician plays an important role to risk-manage the health of the competing athlete in partnership with the coach and other members of the support team. The sports medicine physician needs to strike the right ethical and operational b...

W hen an injury forces an athlete out of training and/or competition, the return-to-play (RTP) decision-making process may be simple or multidimensional. When analyzing these situations, an important factor to consider is why the injury occurred in the first place. Was the injury a result of an unavoidable trauma, such as a hit to the knee in a contact sport, or the result of fatigue or poor co...

OBJECTIVE To demonstrate the response to a proprioceptive training model during a 1-week rehabilitation regime. The techniques were demonstrated on a college-aged female basketball player who had injured her anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) several weeks earlier. The athlete was tested, trained, and then retested during her semester break. BACKGROUND The ACL injury has become a fairly common ...

OBJECTIVE To analyze and compare the vertical component of ground reaction forces and isokinetic muscle parameters for plantar flexion and dorsiflexion of the ankle between long-distance runners, triathletes, and nonathletes. METHODS Seventy-five males with a mean age of 30.26 (±6.5) years were divided into three groups: a triathlete group (n=26), a long-distance runner group (n = 23), and a ...

Association studies, comparing elite athletes with sedentary controls, have reported a number of genes that may be related to athlete status. The present study reports the first genome wide linkage scan for athlete status. Subjects were 4488 adult female twins from the TwinsUK Adult Twin Registry (793 monozygotic [MZ] and 1000 dizygotic [DZ] complete twin pairs, and single twins). Athlete statu...

A prospective cohort study was used to quantify risk factors for sports concussions. Analysis was based on a stratified cluster sample of North Carolina high school athletes followed during 1996–1999. Clustering was by school and sport, and the sample included 15,802 athletes with 1–8 seasons of follow-up per athlete. Concussion rates were estimated for 12 sports, and risk factors were quantifi...

Guided by gender schema theory, the researchers explored gender stereotypes of female athletes through a 2x2 experimental design. Participants, 267 undergraduate students from a large southern university, read one of four versions of an online news article (a short news story with a photo) in which female athlete appearance (masculine/feminine) and the type of sport played (masculine/feminine) ...

Athlete-driven informal sport play represents an important context for athlete development. However, in contrast to coach-driven organized sport, little is known about the interpersonal processes driving development in this context. The present study was an exploratory descriptive analysis of the interactive peer behaviors occurring in an informal sport play setting and their relationship to at...

Athlete endorsement industry continues to expand fast. Reports argued country of origin could be a cue to explain the endorsement gap among athletes from different nations. With the growing marketing potential in athlete brand, it is imperative to take country of origin as a cue to predict endorsement value. The conceptual model from Arai et al (2013; 2014) on athlete brand equity is adopted in...