Defense of Marc Guitart's PhD thesis on injury context and load monitoring in elite youth football
Last Thursday, October 22, Marc Guitart Trench defended his doctoral thesis entitled "The injury context in professional youth football: a longitudinal approach from pre-injury to competitive return".
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The thesis confirms the value of external load quantification in identifying risk contexts and optimizing return to performance in elite football.
The researcher from the PhD Program in Sports Sciences at UAB, Marc Guitart, analyzes in this thesis the relationship between external physical load patterns and non-contact injuries in elite youth football players. The work, supervised by Dr. Francesc Cos and Dr. Gil Rodas and tutored by Dr. Lluís Capdevila, provides objective and detailed information to optimize the balance between training, competition, and recovery, offering practical tools for daily decision-making by coaching and medical staffs.
The project analyzes performance and exposure data in real training and competition environments, applying the scientific method to transfer the generated knowledge to strength and conditioning and medical services in elite clubs.
To obtain the empirical data, the research analyzed a sample consisting of players belonging to FC Barcelona's youth academy teams, which allowed examining load behavior in a high-performance sports environment with a consolidated methodological model.
The doctoral research was structured as a compendium of publications, centered on analyzing scenarios related to non-contact injuries across three distinct contexts. In the study "Use of GPS to measure external load and estimate the incidence of muscle injuries in men’s football: A novel descriptive study", injury incidence was described across training and competition contexts in the last three youth stages of a professional football club, detailed by exposure hours and load across categories, positions, and session types. In the study "Does accumulated physical load in different time windows affect hamstring injuries in elite football players?", three consecutive seasons were analyzed to examine accumulated external load behaviors across three distinct time windows (7, 14, and 28 days) prior to hamstring muscle injuries. Finally, the paper "How do muscle injuries relate to return-to-performance metrics in male elite football players?" evaluates return-to-performance metrics, determining the time required for players to restore their pre-injury physical performance values.
This work was carried out within the framework of the PhD Program in Sports Sciences at UAB, as part of the research group recognized by the Generalitat de Catalunya (2021SGR-00806) and the R&D&I project (PID2019-107473RB-C21) funded by the Spanish Government (MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/FEDER, UE).