Sensory Feedback and the Elite Athlete: Harnessing Sensation through Sports Apparel to Influence Priming in Elite Basketball Athletes

117 pagesHarder, better, faster, stronger. As the demands of elite athletes continue to escalate, the field of sports performance optimization is tasked with devising strategies that allow athletes to train longer, compete harder, and recover faster. Over the years, the bulk of performance optimization has focused on building athletes’ strength, speed, and resilience through aerobic and anaerobic training methodologies, supplemented with proper nutrition and sport-specific coaching. This framework, integrated into all aspects of elite sport, places emphasis on the direct correlations of physiology and biomechanics to athletic performance. In recent years, the field of performance optimization has shifted its focus to other aspects of sports science such as recovery, in order to facilitate performance improvements when an athlete is not competing or training. Consequently, the sports recovery product market has since exploded, growing from a global market value of $6.4 billion in 2018 to $8.7 billion in 2020, with a CAGR of 8.2% through 2027 (Grand View Research, 2020). While the sports recovery market has become widely successful and saturated in a short amount of time, the majority of products in this sector are designed for direct, physical recovery from intense exercise. These products focus on reducing muscle soreness, decreasing acute inflammation, and cushioning tired feet. While research supports these types of recovery modalities as a means of reducing the symptoms of physical fatigue, they only scratch the surface of opportunity given emerging understandings of both recovery and performance