Preface

Sport is made by people and is for people, as it is a multidisciplinary process involving athletes, coaches, clinical staff, families, managers, and other institutional supporters, such as academia and industry.

We have been working in sport for almost 40 years and the opportunity to be in daily contact with athletes and coaches has given us the will to study them harder in order to promote the athlete's health and performance and to ensure the best training regimes.

Fortunately, the increasing number of scientific disciplines surrounding sport, namely sports medicine, physiology, neurophysiology, psychology, sports health, nutrition, biomechanics (among others) are driving sport and athletes into safer and later sport experiences, which is in fact the added value of this book.

This book presents a diversity of themes related to sports medicine and health varying from clinical issues, such as sports injuries to specific neuropsychological aspects of the athletes' behaviour regulation and parathletes' motivation for sport practice.

The book is structured in six chapters, which combine research and clinical/ exercise applications that we would like to highlight. Chapter 1 involves the study of the volitional (arbitrary) regulation of behaviour and its connections with the individual features of interhemispheric asymmetries in sports activities practice. Chapter 2 addresses the role of one important professional in sport, which is the Sport and Exercise Medicine physician, and his specific training, skills, and abilities from recreational sports to elite level and as a healthy lifestyle promoter. Chapter 3 discusses the pathophysiology of a mild traumatic brain injury or sport-related concussion sustained during sports participation and presents the scientific evidence-based acute screening and detection methods available and general guidelines for recovery and active rehabilitation. Chapter 4 is focused on the pathophysiology of the knee-dislocation and strategies to increase strength and endurance training in rehabilitation. Chapter 5 is practice-oriented to the adaptive responses inherent to exercise training on cardiac remodelling. Chapter 6 reports results on the motivation of Russian highly qualified parathletes from three different regions.

This comprehensive volume is very appealing, which will be also recognised by sports and health professionals, who need further support in their daily work with

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athletes and coaches, in particular. It is also attractive to researchers and students interested in sport and health related areas.
