Whether you are playing a sport for fun, exercise or to impress others, sports bring people together. They inspire patriotism, sportsmanship and love for your country. In addition, professional athletes earn hundreds of millions of dollars in endorsements and advertising deals.
Most team sport research has focused on a small number of countries or regions. While these studies have provided valuable information on the acceleration/deceleration load of team sport athletes, they have not captured the perceptions of athletes. Similarly, these studies do not indicate why team sport athletes are using particular recovery strategies. In addition, no research has been conducted on the perceptions of different competition levels of team sport athletes.
The most common recovery techniques used by team sport athletes include active land-based recovery and pool-based recovery. The latter has been found to be widely used. Other common recovery techniques included stretching and cold water immersion. However, despite the use of land-based recovery, a recent survey on team sport recovery practices found that many athletes also use active water-based recovery methods.
The majority of acceleration variables used in team sport research were counts, which describe the number of actions occurring within a given time frame with respect to a given threshold. The count-based metrics are not surprising, as they are practical and advantageous to practitioners. In fact, 72% of the studies surveyed included counts in their analysis.
Count-based metrics are important to practitioners because they can quantify acceleration loads. However, they are not ideal for researchers because they lack specific filtering settings. Some researchers also note that there may be variability in the counts between individuals. Because of this, future team sport research should outline how acceleration/deceleration calculations are processed.
Another commonly-used acceleration variable is absolute acceleration, which measures the total acceleration load during a given time period. The resulting average is used to quantify acceleration load. Currently, there are a variety of methods for measuring acceleration load, including the use of GPS/GNSS devices. While GPS/GNSS has been a popular tracking technology since 2004, a large proportion of team sport research continues to use a count-based metric.
One of the largest team sports in the United States is basketball. In this sport, teams of five players aim to shoot the ball through a basket from the top of the court. In addition to shooting, the game includes passing, setting and spiking. Unlike other team sports, basketball is an Olympic sport and is often played by a specialized group of players.
Other popular team sports include association football (also known as soccer) and ice hockey. Both sports are fast-paced physical activities that are played on rectangular fields with goals in the center of each short end. The objectives of each team are to advance the ball into the other team’s end zone. The opposing team tries to stop this process by getting hitters out.
Baseball is a popular individual sport. In this sport, the goal is to strike the ball with a bat. The diamond-shaped pitch contains nine players on each side, with only one player having the ball at the bottom of the diamond.