Jan Busta (CZE) and Matej Vajda (SVK) participated in the international scientific conference ISC Diagnostics in Sport organized by the Faculty of Sport of the University of Presov with two scientific posters: Morphology of canoe slalom and canoe sprint female competitors and Relationship between on and off-water tests and canoe slalom performance. Both outputs were produced within the Erasmus+ Sport SCCP project: Women in Canoe Sport.
The Presov conference brought many interesting suggestions for the future development of the project. Among the invited speakers was the only woman, Mari Leppänen from UKK Institute (Tampere Research Center of Sports Medicine) in Finland. Dr. Leppänen gave a talk on Prevention of physical activity-related injuries - where are we and where do we need to go? in the section Physical activity and health. She highlighted the increasing prevalence of injuries directly related to physical activity and the less-known fact that these acute injuries negatively affect not only the athlete's career itself, but also their lifelong physical activity and consequently their quality of life as a whole.
Dr. Leppänen also presented effective methods to prevent injuries in sport - neuromuscular training programs. Exercise-based prevention programmes reduce the prevalence of injuries by 39%. The head of research and development from Tambere is mainly involved in team sports, so the preventive exercise programmes are mainly focused on the lower limbs. However, the conclusions about the importance of preventive exercise programmes are equally valid in canoeing - particularly in slalom, where a large number of competing female athletes suffer acute and chronic shoulder injuries during their careers. Unfortunately, unlike football, basketball and other team sports, we lack such a simple, clear and specific prevention programme. Therefore, the Women in Canoe Sport project, in collaboration with physiotherapists, will attempt to create a similar practical prevention programme focusing on the trunk and upper limbs.
However, the fact that we will have such a programme does not mean much. "We have effective programs... which are rarely used," said Mari Leppänen in her lecture, adding that the creation of such programs does not automatically mean their successful implementation in practice. Successful implementation requires awareness among coaches and the athletes themselves. That is why we are planning to present the Preventive Neuromuscular Exercise Program at the conference organized by the Women in Canoe Sport project on November 4 in Prague on the occasion of the Czech Republic coach seminary with invited guests from Slovakia and Sweden.
