?Bahrain Olympic Committee’s (BOC) Sports Training and Development Centre director Nabeel Taha asserted the importance of physical tests to upgrade sports performance of national athletes, promote their abilities and prevent possible injuries in the future.
This was announced at the introductory seminar on the importance of laboratorial tests and its positive influence in the field of sports.
The seminar, hosted by the National Stadium’s Conference Hall in Riffa, aimed to spread awareness and knowledge on the latest techniques of medical and physical tests on Bahrain’s national teams athletes.
It was conducted by Cuba’s Dr Francisco Chapman and Dr Vladimir Suarez Felipe, who talked about the VO2 Max, a measure of the maximum volume of oxygen that an athlete can use.
“Any training programme which doesn’t have physical tests is a big fail,” said Taha at the seminar. “Development in performance should be made through a well-planned process in order to obtain detailed data base to discover the true abilities of every athlete”.
On his part, Dr Chapman stressed the significance of these test, which measure physical development of the athlete, either before, during physical preparation.
“We will be distributing special performance tests forms to get information of the athletes such as the height, weight, health record to know whether the athlete has genetic disease or not,” said Chapman.
“We also measure the periodic respiratory system strength, muscular and digestive systems, heart muscles and blood tests, as well as monitoring the performance of the heart during physical exertion to overcome any problem the players may have in the future”.
Dr Chapman has been working in the field of sports medicine and sports injuries since 1992. He served for several years in India, Ethiopia and Algeria before coming to Bahrain.
Dr Felipe, who is a sports performance laboratory specialist, said that whenever the physical performance of the player is developed, his technical level would be doubled while his focus percentage is significantly increased, which would have a positive impact on his psychological health.
Dr Felipe holds a first grade certificate in general medicine and masters of underwater and hyperbaric medicine. He has a vast experience in sports medicine and has worked at the National Institute of Sports in Venezuela.
The seminar ended with a speech by BOC general secretary Abdulrahman Askar, who urged the technical teams to benefit from sports performance laboratory and the medical team expertise to boost their athletes’ performance.