Interdisciplinary Research: A Promising Approach to Investigate Elite Performance in Sports

ABSTRACT

While the call for interdisciplinary studies has been loud and clear over the last decade or so, the number of interdisciplinary publications in sport sciences is rather limited. One of the reasons for this scarcity is the complexity of the research process itself. Still, the combination and integration of information from different scientific disciplines seems to be important to better explain how elite performance comes about. In this article, we focus on this issue and discuss the advantages of interdisciplinary research for understanding how elite athletes are able to achieve such high-proficiency levels. The first section provides an overview of the studies that investigated elite performance in sports. In the second section, we focus on the issue of interdisciplinarity and illustrate how the ecological–dynamical approach and the concept of dimensional reduction can be used to explain how elite performers cope with the complex nature of sport skills. In the last section, we present a research outline and some practical considerations that can be helpful for researchers who aim to study sport skills from an interdisciplinary perspective.

KEYWORDS:

• Dynamical systems
• ecological approach
• elite performance
• interdisciplinary research
• sport

Acknowledgment

This work has been carried out thanks to the support of the A*MIDEX project (no. ANR-11-IDEX-0001-02) funded by the “Investissements d’avenir” French Government Programme, managed by the French National Research Agency.

Notes

1. The term elite performance, and not expertise, is chosen as the lead term in this article as the latter term incorporates the process of becoming an elite athlete, while the former centers on the actual outcome or result of this process. The present research project aims at examining elite performance as such.

2. The term dimension is used throughout this article in an abstract manner and refers to all the components (e.g., body segments, environmental elements) that may play a role in the generation of movements. Consequently, the term multidimensional is used to describe phenomena with different dimensions.

3. A comprehensive discussion of these tools and their application within the context of a basketball free throw has been given by Ibáñez-Gijón et al. (2016). Moreover, for the interested reader, further details of these methods can be found in articles by Schöner and Scholz (2007); Scholz and Schöner (1999); and Daffertshofer, Lamoth, Meijer, and Beek (2004).

4. For an interesting discussion on a conceptual framework of interdisciplinarity and the different levels of disciplinarity, see Schary and Cardinal (2015).