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Global Positioning System and Sport-Specific Testing

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Abstract

Most physiological testing of athletes is performed in well-controlled situations in the laboratory. Multiple factors that are hard to control for have limited the use of sport-specific field testing. Recently, the technique of the differential global positioning system (dGPS) has been put forward as a way to monitor the position and speed of an athlete during outdoor activities with acceptable precision, thus controlling the two most important factors of performance in endurance athletics, i.e. inclination and speed. A detailed analysis of performance has been shown to be possible in combination with metabolic gas measurements. The combination of accelerometry and dGPS has also been shown to improve physiological field testing. The technique of dGPS could probably also be combined with other bio-measurements (e.g. electromyography and cycling cadence and power) and may enable other studies of exercise physiology in the field, otherwise restricted to the laboratory environment. This technique may also be of use in general exercise physiology where monitoring of patients with, for example, cardiovascular and pulmonary diseases, could be of interest for the future.

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Acknowledgements

The author wishes to express his sincere gratitude to his former tutor Professor Karin Henriksson-Larsén, and coworkers Lennart Burlin and Erkki Jakobsson, without whom the studies with the combination of dGPS and metabolic gas measurements would not have been possible to complete. Funding was received from the Swedish Sports Research Council for the preparation of this manuscript. The manuscript was further prepared without influence or funding from any company and with no other commercial interest. The author has no conflicts of interest that are directly relevant to the content of this manuscript.

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  1. Department of Surgical and Perioperative Sciences, Sports Medicine Unit, 901 87, Umeå, Sweden

    Peter Larsson

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Correspondence to Peter Larsson.

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Larsson, P. Global Positioning System and Sport-Specific Testing. Sports Med 33, 1093–1101 (2003). https://doi.org/10.2165/00007256-200333150-00002

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