Abstract:The Australian Institute of Sport Sports Supplement Program, launched in 2000, promotes evidence-based, safe, and legal supplement use in Australian high-performance sports. It has evolved into a comprehensive framework in response to regulatory changes, rapid growth in supplement products, and widespread access to both information and misinformation. Founded on a "food first" philosophy, it recognises circumstances where supplements may offer unique advantages, including addressing nutrient deficiencies, providing support pre-, during and post-exercise, and supporting performance. Its principles were shaped to counter fragmented regulation, aggressive marketing, and athletes' reliance on non-expert information sources. Central to the framework is a dynamic ABCD classification system, categorising supplements according to the strength of scientific evidence for their effectiveness, safety, and anti-doping risk. Key initiatives include web-based education resources, strategic supplement provision, applied research, and robust governance-especially batch testing and integrity processes-to reduce anti-doping rule violations. The framework now serves as a benchmark for national and international sporting bodies and has driven a cultural shift that places sports dietitians at the forefront of supplement guidance and enhances collaboration across performance support and medicine staff. Future priorities include deeper digital integration, adequate resourcing to remain contemporary, and broader athlete and stakeholder engagement to maintain rigorous, evidence-informed standards.
Historically, sport science and medicine researchers have had difficulty obtaining adequate sample sizes, limiting their ability to make accurate generalizations to populations of athletes. To move towards better and more generalizable research, sport could look to other fields of research, and draw upon collaborative approaches for performing science. These include concepts such as big teams approaches for conducting experimental research, developing data repositories centred on a holistic inter-disciplinary view of the athlete and exploring privacy preserving meta-analytic inspired concepts such as federated analyses or pooled synthetic data. These approaches have enormous potential but do come with their own difficulties and risks. There are challenges surrounding the collection, ownership and perception of data, particularly in high-performance sport contexts. This conceptual review is a step towards presenting possible solutions, which could be tested, documented and sculpted to fit the high-performance and professional sport environment, with the aim of improving the processes underpinning scientific enquiry in sport.
Purpose: To investigate the training, performance, and physiological characteristics of a sprint kayak Olympian throughout her preconception, pregnancy, and successful return to high-performance sport postpartum (June 2020 to September 2023). Methods: A longitudinal observational case study. Results: Through a deliberate training strategy during pregnancy, aerobic fitness was maintained and muscular strength improved. The athlete engaged in 1683 training sessions totaling 101,426 minutes of training, exceeding >150 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity during 82% of the study weeks. She continued engaging in high-intensity (>90% maximum heart rate) aerobic and strength-training sessions until trimester 3 of her pregnancy, accumulating a total tonnage of 1,101,716 kg lifted across pregnancy. The athlete delivered a healthy baby girl at 39 weeks gestation. At 10 weeks postpartum, the athlete returned to national-squad training and qualified for her third Olympics at 35 weeks postpartum. While the athlete did not experience any exercise-related injuries or complications during or following pregnancy, obstetric intervention was required 6 weeks postpartum, and the combination of hematological assessments, presentation of clinical symptoms, and training load warranted an iron transfusion at 33 weeks postpartum. Conclusions: This study demonstrates the potential for pregnant athletes to continue training and successfully return to sport at the highest level. Highly trained athletes can maintain and/or improve certain fitness traits and performance throughout the perinatal period with strategic and deliberate programming and a multidisciplinary support team who are pivotal in supporting pregnant athletes in high-performance environments. Moreover, pregnancy provides opportunity to prioritize certain aspects of training otherwise not possible during normal training and/or competition schedules.
Introduction Running is a popular recreational activity worldwide, with women’s participation growing rapidly over the past decade. Compared with men, women runners are more likely to sustain a running-related injury, such as bone stress and knee injuries. Following a serious knee injury and subsequent surgery, women also experience worse knee and health-related outcomes than men. However, little is known about the intersection of female-specific health, physical, psychological and social-gendered factors with knee health in women runners with and without a history of knee surgery.Methods and analysis Building on the established ‘TRAjectory of knee heaLth in runners’ (TRAIL) prospective cohort study and designed with patient and content-expert partners, the nested TRAIL-W study will comprehensively explore the associations of multiple factors (ie, female-specific health, physical, psychological and social gendered) with knee health (symptoms and structural features), device-measured running load and running-related pain in women runners. Where appropriate, we will explore sex and/or gender differences. Alongside their scheduled TRAIL 6-monthly data collection, all active TRAIL female and male participants will be invited to complete a once-off ‘TRAIL-W survey’ and attend an additional laboratory-based assessment. The survey will include questionnaires measuring psychological, social gendered and, for women only, female-specific health factors. The laboratory assessment will measure body composition, bone mineral density and blood biomarkers. A subset of women will be invited to participate in qualitative interviews to understand women runners’ experiences of female-specific health factors and their association with running behaviour.Ethics and dissemination Findings from TRAIL-W, approved by the La Trobe University Human Ethics Committee, will address critical research gaps by describing and exploring the diverse factors that may influence women runners’ knee health.
