The role of deceleration on injury etiology and prevention continues to gather the attention of sports medicine practitioners. Understanding the deceleration demands of sport is essential in ensuring optimal prevention and rehabilitation of injuries. Helen Bayne uncovers the assessment of deceleration and provides practical tools for practitioners to improve the management of athletes.
Deceleration is the rate of change in velocity or, in other words, how quickly the athlete reduces their velocity with respect to time. This occurs any time an athlete decreases their running speed. A recent meta-analysis of 15 studies showed that high-intensity decelerations (defined as >2.5m/s2) occur more frequently than accelerations that exceed the same threshold in soccer, hockey, Australian football, and rugby (league, union, and sevens)(1). The ability to decelerate is an essential attribute of team sports athletes as they need to be able to evade opposition players, execute strategic plays, and cut or turn while sprinting.
When running forwards in a straight line, slowing down represents horizontal deceleration of the body’s center of mass. To decelerate, athletes must apply an external force in the opposite direction to the direction of travel – the horizontal component of the ground reaction force vector is known as the braking force. The biomechanical demands of sudden deceleration are greater than acceleration, as peak ground reaction force and loading rate are higher. Furthermore, the change in velocity occurs more rapidly(2). An athlete’s momentum (mass x velocity) decreases when decelerating. If the aim is to reduce speed in a short amount of time, a greater initial momentum will require greater braking forces to slow the athlete down. So, while attaining high running speed ability is emphasized in athlete preparation, if deceleration capacity is lacking, athletes will unlikely reach top-end speed during match play because they would intuitively avoid reaching speeds from which they cannot stop or change direction safely and effectively. Deceleration ability may therefore be a limiting factor in an athlete’s game speed potential.
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