Supporting the paralympic athlete: focus on wheeled sports

The complexity of wheelchair sports provides the scientist with a unique challenge. There are two major components that contribute towards 'wheeled sports' performance: the athlete and the chair. It is the interaction of these two components that enable wheelchair propulsion and the sporting movements required within a given sport. This article will describe three discrete case studies on how sport scientists have worked with Great Britain coaches and practitioners to help optimise training leading to a major competition through evidence base practise. A fourth area will describe on-going work designed to address the optimisation of wheelchair configurations for wheelchair court sports. It will focus on four sports: wheelchair racing, wheelchair tennis, wheelchair basketball and wheelchair rugby. The first topic will discuss the concept of pushing economy and mechanical efficiency of wheelchair propulsion. The second topic will show how technology assists the coaching process. The third topic will illustrate the concept of sports classification, and show how training volume 'in terms of basketball shooting' may need to be individually assigned and finally future research within wheelchair team sports and chair configurations will be examined.