Abstract des Autors

The functional evaluation of the athlete is a particular sector of science applied to sport which makes use of integrated studies of physiology and biomechanics and aims at helping the improvement of sports performances. This discipline has developed as the importance of sport in modern life increased and the equipment used improved more and more. As regards the physiologic aspect, increasingly specific adjustements in the organismus of top level athletes, which represent the assumption of the performance, have led to the development of an evaluation method which was able to point them out and to monitor their evolution in time. In this way, a very important role was played by: 1) the realisation of a classification of sports, based on the various requests of energy, the different location and quantity of the activated groups of muscles, as well as the different neurosensory effort; 2) the development of the specific ergometry, with the design of equipment able to enable each athlete to repeat in laboratory the technical and specific gesture and to stimulate physiologic capacities in the same extent and with the same method of the competition field. This evolution, to which Italian school contributed, made possible to realise a practical valid, reliable and repeatable method of longitudinal evaluation of the specific adjustements of an athlete. However, the considerable encumbrance of the equipment used to measure physiologic parameters, even of the most modern and sophisticated ones (for example, mass spectrometers), has long limited the functional evaluation to just laboratory researches. However, the laboratory does not always provide appropriate answers and it must be borne in mind that: 1) sometimes the ergometers used are only apparently specific; 2) among the athletes the response to the ergometer is always individual; 3) for many sports it has not yet been possible to design equipment enabling a simulation of the competition. Therefore, it has always seemed essential to carry out the measurement of energy costs in real conditions. Recently, it has been possible to develop miniaturised portable telemetric systems allowing the detection of oxygen consumption and production of carbon dioxide directly on the competition field, respecting the essential condition for this kind of measurement: do not alter the technical gesture of the athlete. These systems have enabled the assessment of the energy costs of numerous sports activities, among which the swimming ones, and offered, in parallel, the opportunity to provide information on the intervention of the different metabolic substrates in the energy production. Moreover, it is necessary to mention the development of simple and rapid field methods for the determination of the lactacidemia, and so of the involvement of the anaerobic metabolism in the performance. As regards the biomechanical aspect, it has pursued through the analysis of the specific gesture of each discipline and studies of aerodynamics the constant improvement in technique as well as in competition equipment. This improvement, together with the training methods one determined by physiologic studies, has decisively contributed to the evolution of sports performances which has taken place in the last fifty years. Verf.-Referat