About this Research Topic
That Research Topic could allow to create new insights that helps to clarify the best strategies to determine sports performance through biomechanical, physiological and/or neuromuscular variables. This Research Topic intends to accept articles that address team sports or individual endurance performance as a multifactorial phenomenon. Physiologically, endurance performance depends on high maximal oxygen uptake, anaerobic threshold, movement economy, and related mechanistic factors such as mitochondrial amount, muscle oxygenation, and several other factors which are still unclear. In terms of biomechanics, this high economy stems from executing ideal mechanical patterns that involve the application of forces with the appropriate magnitude, direction, and timing, while avoiding non-productive movements. Besides that, biomechanical factors such as muscle size (physiological or anatomical cross-sectional area, muscle volume), muscle architecture (fascicle length, pennation angle) and quality (echo intensity), or tendon mechanical properties, can also help to determine the long-term sports endurance performance. Another possibility of understanding endurance sports performance can be given by muscle recruitment (e. g. muscle activation, or neuromuscular economy) during a specific motor task to perform in that sport. Anthropometric factors such as height, body mass, percentage of lean mass, length of the upper or lower limbs can also prove to be crucial for understanding which variables can significantly determine endurance sports performance.
However, despite all the aforementioned possibilities, there are still several other anthropometric, biomechanical, neuromuscular, and physiological variables that can be found in the literature as an attempt to understand endurance sports performance. Therefore, expanding research in this area will further elucidate the anthropometric, biomechanical, physiological, and neuromuscular variables related to successful performance. The present Research Topic will clarify the best strategies to determine endurance sports performance through anthropometric, biomechanical, physiological, and/or neuromuscular variables.
For this Research Topic, we welcome researchers to submit manuscripts in the form of original studies, meta-analysis, meta-regression, and brief research reports; addressing the following topics:
• Structural adaptation anthropometric, biomechanical, neuromuscular, or physiological determinants of endurance performance
• Mechanistic adaptation (e.g. technique, strategy) determinants of endurance performance
• Integrative anthropometric, biomechanical, neuromuscular, and physiological determinants of endurance performance
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers in Physiology reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.
Keywords: determinants, predictors, endurance sports performance, anthropometric, biomechanical, neuromuscular, physiological
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.