An Essential Guide to Sports Performance (Sports and Athletics Preparation, Performance, and Psychology)

This book analyzes several hot topics in scientific literature about individual and team sports performance. To optimize the athletes' performance is necessary to understand several factors that could influence sportive success such as training and match loads encountered by players, individual physical performance, anthropometric characteristics and optimal recovery strategies after match-play. To better understand the training process, it is convenient to study the influence of contextual variables and initial players' level on the athletes' performances as well as the flexibility interventions and protocols. This knowledge allows coach staffs and physical trainers of players to establish an appropriate distribution of the training loads throughout each macrocycle during the competitive season. Additionally, this book focuses on cycling, one the most practiced sports around the world. Two chapters are prepared to bring both the amateur and professional practioners towards novel sport perspectives. Therefore, one chapter is based on leisure cycling and women's participation in Scotland, and another chapter is developed to improve the saffle height configuration of cyclists to achieve better performance. This collection offers novel evidence-based approaches for coach staffs and practitioners in order to optimize the training process in individual and team sports. The findings provided within the book could allow coaches and physical trainers to apply some of these results to their training methodologies and strategies to enhance better athlete performance, and consequently, better sportive success.