Abstract
Sport performance consists of interacting individual, task and environmental constraints, but research has used a monodisciplinary, rather than an interdisciplinary approach to understand performance. This study used Australian football (AF) as the exemplar sport to investigate the value of an interdisciplinary approach to understand sport performance. Through this, it was also possible to quantify individual differences and representative task design. Fifty-nine semi-professional Australian footballers participated. Based upon accessibility, combinations of these players completed physiological (3 × 1 km trial) and perceptual-cognitive-motor (small-sided game, SSG) tests, with coach rating of psychological skill (mental toughness coach, MTC). Univariate monodisciplinary models indicated that all tests predicted disposal efficiency; 3 × 1 km trial (p = 0.047), SSG (p = 0.001), and MTC (p = 0.035), but only the SSG predicted coaches' vote (p = 0.003). A multivariate interdisciplinary model indicated that SSG and MTC tests predicted disposal efficiency with a better model fit than the corresponding univariate model. The interdisciplinary model formulated an equation that could identify individual differences in disposal efficiency. In addition, the interdisciplinary model showed that the higher representative SSG test contributed a greater magnitude to the prediction of competition performance, than the lower representative MTC rating. Overall, this study demonstrates that a more comprehensive understanding of sport performance, individual differences, and representative tasks, can be obtained through an interdisciplinary approach.
Highlights
Sport performance has been frequently studied based upon physical or physiological components such as agility and aerobic capacity (Cardinale, 2017)
This study set out to address the call for interdisciplinary research that could provide a more comprehensive understanding of sport performance
We compared whether monodisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches related to individual constraints contribute to predict measures of match performance in terms of disposal efficiency and coaches’ vote
Summary
Sport performance has been frequently studied based upon physical or physiological components such as agility and aerobic capacity (Cardinale, 2017). Several recent books (e.g., Ericsson et al, 2018; Zaichkowsky and Peterson, 2018) and scientific publications (e.g., Glazier, 2015; Cardinale, 2017) have discussed the importance of psychological and perceptual-cognitive-motor components, which need to be considered with physiological components, to provide a more comprehensive understanding of sport performance This presents an opportunity to extend mechanistic (or theoretical) understanding of sport performance from an interdisciplinary perspective, which has applied implications in terms of identification of strengths and deficiencies of individual athletes for remediation. These authors mentioned the incentive for researchers to conduct interdisciplinary research, which is its capacity to provide a comprehensive understanding of athletic performance
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