What is it about?
Coaches and athletes are constantly looking for ways to improve their performance. Understanding the demands of a sport is key to being able to improve performance. With fencing being an ever present in the Olympic games it is surprising to see there is not much research out there around the demands of the sport. In our research we recreated a competition in order to determine how hard the athletes are working and how their body was responding to competition performance.
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Why is it important?
If the fencing athletes are able to understand the demands of their performance they can maximise their training to be fully ready to compete at competition. Our findings suggest: fencing athletes are working at near maximum heart rates during a 9-11 hour competition when fighting; their core temperature is also quite high so the athletes are not cooling down between fights; and fencing athletes are expending a lot of energy whilst competing so it is important they fuel correctly during a competition.
Perspectives
The study was excellent to conduct the co-authors had great input into the design and data collection. Furthermore, the athletes that took part were very friendly, and excellent to work with, so I would like to thank them for participating.
Luke Oates
University of Hertfordshire
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The physiological demands of elite epée fencers during competition, International Journal of Performance Analysis in Sport, January 2019, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/24748668.2018.1563858.
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