Advantages of integration in sport science
Breaking the divide between research and practice While sport-related phenomena (e.g. success, exhaustion, injury, talent recognition and the advent of sports practice modalities) are known as complex, a review of the ECSS abstracts reveals that interdisciplinarity in sports science is dominantly instrumental (Hristovski et al., 2016). Focusing on one sub-discipline, usually originating from physiology, biomechanics or psychology, may provide important research findings, but may also provide contradictory functional details.
As Burwitz, Moore, and Wilkinson (1994) note, a biomechanist may advocate the use of head guards to prevent injury, whereas a physiologist might consider that such protection may hinder thermoregulation and increase the likelihood of injury, and a psychologist might argue that risk-taking may be increased by a false sense of safety resulting from security.
Clearly, sport scientists need to grasp the 8 N in order to give sufficient guidance. BalaguƩ et al. have a relationship between the variety of processes defined by various disciplines and the nested organization between different stages of organization and time scales. Only by creating a shared basis for knowledge athletics can scientists integrate and implement increasingly accessible specialized information into their recommendations.