Document Type

Journal Article

Publication Title

Frontiers in Sports and Active Living

Volume

2

First Page

14

PubMed ID

33345009

Publisher

Frontiers

School

Exercise Medicine Research Institute / School of Medical and Health Sciences

RAS ID

45270

Comments

Piggott, B., Müller, S., Chivers, P., Cripps, A., & Hoyne, G. (2020). Interdisciplinary sport research can better predict competition performance, identify individual differences, and quantify task representation. Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, 2, 14. https://doi.org/10.3389/fspor.2020.00014

Abstract

Sport performance consists of interacting individual, task and environmental constraints, but research has used a monodisciplinary, rather than an interdisciplinary approach to understand performance. This study used Australian football (AF) as the exemplar sport to investigate the value of an interdisciplinary approach to understand sport performance. Through this, it was also possible to quantify individual differences and representative task design. Fifty-nine semi-professional Australian footballers participated. Based upon accessibility, combinations of these players completed physiological (3 × 1 km trial) and perceptual-cognitive-motor (small-sided game, SSG) tests, with coach rating of psychological skill (mental toughness coach, MTC). Univariate monodisciplinary models indicated that all tests predicted disposal efficiency; 3 × 1 km trial ( = 0.047), SSG ( = 0.001), and MTC ( = 0.035), but only the SSG predicted coaches' vote ( = 0.003). A multivariate interdisciplinary model indicated that SSG and MTC tests predicted disposal efficiency with a better model fit than the corresponding univariate model. The interdisciplinary model formulated an equation that could identify individual differences in disposal efficiency. In addition, the interdisciplinary model showed that the higher representative SSG test contributed a greater magnitude to the prediction of competition performance, than the lower representative MTC rating. Overall, this study demonstrates that a more comprehensive understanding of sport performance, individual differences, and representative tasks, can be obtained through an interdisciplinary approach.

DOI

10.3389/fspor.2020.00014

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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