Physical health is a top priority among athletes. Typically, if you’re physically healthy, you’ll perform well in the game. The opposite goes when you’re not in a good state. This is the reason why Dr. Ian McKeown, Head of High Performance at the Port Adelaide Football Club (PAFC), is “always on the lookout for research projects that might give his players an advantage, either now or down the track.” His passion for his team led him to a sports medicine conference years ago, where he met Professor Mark Hutchinson, who mentioned to him the blood biomarker research of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Nanoscale BioPhotonics (CNBP). A partnership between PAFC and CNBP would soon be formed for a study.
The results suggest that not only can these blood markers show how a player is currently performing, but they can also predict how players will perform, with nine markers taken pre-training correlating with cognitive performance tests done after the completion of training. “The morning sample we took was almost predictive of the day, which is almost like saying, ‘Am I going to have a good day or not today?’” Hutchinson says. “Milliseconds can be the difference between taking a mark, making the kick or making a good decision on a battlefield.”
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McKeown says the results were “pretty damn cool. It’s early in the process but it’s very exciting stuff.”
Learn more details about this potential game-changer over at Cosmos Magazine.
Cool!
(Image Credit: PAFC/ Cosmos Magazine)