FROM MEASUREMENT TO MODELLING IN SPORT COLLISIONS

Understanding the factors and the mechanism causing injury is one of the fundamental stages of the “sequence of prevention” of injury in sport (van Mechelen et al., 1992). Sports activities typically impose high and repetitive biomechanical demands on the neuro-musculo-skeletal system (e.g. Dufek & Bates, 1991; Trewartha et al., 2015), which research can try to capture and characterise. However, despite the progress of technologies and experimental methods, it is often impossible to directly measure the effects of specific sport events on the anatomical structures of the human body. In particular, the analysis of injury mechanisms in sports involving impacts (e.g. scrummaging and tackling in rugby, landing after a jump, or kicking in martial arts) needs to face a number of interdependent challenges, for which conventional approaches are not always adequate.