QUT researchers will be conducting the first comprehensive study of netball players in a decade on the link between training workload and non-contact injury.
Exercise and Nutrition Science Faculty senior lecturer Dr Vince Kelly said the study would involve the players from the seven netball clubs that will be taking part in the inaugural HART Sapphire Series.
The Sapphire Series will be launched by Netball Queensland in June. The league will increase the opportunity for athletes to develop high performance training behaviours under the guidance of partnering universities such as QUT.
The high incidence of injury in women’s sport was recently highlighted by figures released by the AFL that showed that the women were 9.2 times more likely than men within the AFL system to sustain an injury.
Dr Kelly said the most common non-contact injuries for netball players were ankle injuries, followed by knee injuries.
“The level of professionalism and therefore training has increased in the past 10 years,” Dr Kelly said.
“With athletes now training more, we want to determine if this increase in training load will impact injury incidence.”
Dr Kelly said the study aimed to provide evidence-based recommendations to elite netball teams on daily practice routines that would help to prevent injuries.
The study will examine the training routine of all seven teams in the competition, including a detailed look at the exercise regime of the HART Sapphire Series team the QUT Wildcats which does its gym training at the Kelvin Grove campus.
“A large-scale, multi-team, multicentre study examining the relationship between training load and injury in netball will assist in understanding injury risk,” Dr Kelly said.
“The findings will enable the development of a simple-to-use method of monitoring workload in the practical elite netball setting in order to monitor injury risk in players.”
In another QUT research project involving the QUT Wildcats, Masters student Tandia Wood will be studying how the team’s players train, using accelerometers to track their movement and acceleration around the court.
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