Citation

Meyer T. J. Sci. Med. Sport 2024; 27(4): e213.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2024, Sports Medicine Australia, Publisher Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.jsams.2024.03.009

PMID

38609282

Abstract

This issue´s main editorial has been written by two of our distinguished Associate Editors who are both highly involved in the clinical care and research of head injuries, Claus Reinsberger and Andrew J. Gardner. Together with the virtual special issue which has already been produced for the SMA Conference 2023, it illustrates how important JSAMS considers this topic. In many countries, among them Australia with a set of popular collision sports, there is currently a heated debate around proper management of head injuries by medical practitioners and sport organisations/associations. Our aim is to feed this debate with solid scientific information from well conducted studies and to be an arrowhead of unbiased support for clinicians and decision makers in the field. This means that we will give even more emphasis to head injury research in the future and take care as far as possible that clinically relevant facts are included instead of solely counting/measuring head impacts.

Our third highlighted paper of this issue comes from Italy1 and deals with the influence of music on reaction times in Taekwondo athletes. Like in other scientific fields, there is a preponderance of studies evaluating endurance and resistance training when it comes to assessing the performance-related effects of music. The obvious reason for that is good measurability of performance in these areas of physical capacity, e. g. power output (cycling) or number of repetitions (weight lifting). However, athletes from other disciplines value music in the preparation for training and competition similarly high. Consequently, in the present investigation Taekwondo-specific tasks were conducted after three different warm-ups (two different types of music and a control condition) in 20 young elite Taekwondo athletes. Coloured lights indicated to the participants that they had to carry out different sport-specific techniques immediately. Measurements of the reaction time revealed that the use of music led to quicker responses to the visual stimuli and also to favourable affections. However, it did not matter if the music was chosen by the athletes or selected by the research team. The study indicates that there is some potential for the use of music to enhance performance in combat sports and in all other sports involving quick reaction. It will be interesting to see if certain types of music - unlike in this study´s task - might be more effective than others and how long such an effect lasts into training and competition.

Language: en