The association between physical fitness level and number and severity of injury and illness in youth elite athletes

Abstract

Youth elite athletes often double their training and competition load after enrollment into specialized sport academy high school programs. The least fit athletes may be exposed to an excessive and too rapid increase in training load, with negative adaptations such as injury and illness as a consequence. In this study, our aim was to determine whether these least fit athletes were at greater risk of injury or illness during their first school year. Participants were 166 youth elite athletes (72% boys) from a variety of team, technical, and endurance sports newly enrolled into specialized sport academy high schools. The Oslo Sports Trauma Research Center Questionnaire on Health Problems was used to self‐report injuries and illnesses weekly for 26 weeks. Athletes completed the Ironman Jr physical fitness test battery at baseline, evaluating endurance, strength, agility, and speed properties. We ranked the athletes based on their combined test scores and identified the least fit quartile. The main outcome was the number and severity of health problems, comparing the least fit quartile of athletes to the rest of the cohort. Overall, the least fit quartile of athletes did not report more health problems (mean 3.7, 95% CI 3.0‐4.4) compared with the rest of the cohort (3.6, 3.2‐3.9). In conclusion, we demonstrated no association between low physical fitness level and number and severity of injury and illness in youth elite athletes after enrollment into a specialized sport academy high school program.

Engaging with uncertainty in athlete development – orchestrating talent development through incremental leadership

“…This lack of coherence between stakeholders can be detrimental to long-term athlete development . For example, recent studies have shown how problems related to (im)properly managing training and competition loads arise in the interplay between different practice and competition settings (Moseid et al, 2019). Clearly, successful talent development requires coaches to not act as individual agents who strive solely to achieve their team's best performance .…”

Japanese translation and validation of web-based questionnaires on overuse injuries and health problems

“…The questionnaire has since become part of the daily monitoring system for Olympic and Paralympic athletes and is used in the Olympic and Paralympic programs of several countries [12]. It is now used not only by top level athletes, but by amateurs [15,16] and youth athletes as well [17].…”

Intraday reliability, sensitivity, and minimum detectable change of national physical fitness measurement for preschool children in China

“…Evaluation of physical fitness level is vital for recognizing health conditions and predicting the risk of chronic diseases for populations [1][2][3]. Therefore, many countries have developed and adopted a battery of national fitness tests with health-related fitness components, such as muscular strength, flexibility, cardiorespiratory endurance, and body composition [4][5][6].…”