Actual aspects of studying athlete’s body composition

Abstract

The review of the literature presents the existing methods of the body composition estimation, including the area of their use and information they provide, the role of the body composition monitoring in athletes, as well as the main factors influencing the body composition, are outlined. Over time, in professional sports there is a trend of the significant improvement of the results, sophistication of the technical sporting programs, leading to tougher training and competition, resulting in morphological changes of the athletes’ body composition. Thus, the importance of the athletes’ body composition assessment increases. Athletes’ body composition monitoring allows to assess the athletes’ health and physical fitness, allowing to adjust the training. The development of the new methods, changes in basic principles and the possibilities of determining body composition, which today have become more accurate and reliable, is an important step towards the proper athlete’s health support and enhancing the performance. Currently, there are a lot of methods of tissue body composition assessment at different levels of organization (elemental, molecular, cellular, tissue and organ levels, whole body level). However, despite the variety of existing methods, each of them has a number of advantages and disadvantages for use in sports practice. Therefore, to choose the proper body composition assessment method, it is necessary to focus on research objectives, as well as the accessibility and availability of the research method. Introduction of new technologies and examination methods allows increasing the specificity and promptness of the body composition estimation, but the novel methods are high-cost, needs standardization and validation to be widely used in common practice.