In the last couple of weeks, there have been at least two high profile footballers that have collapsed during a football match. Both cases were linked to heart problems. Sadly Sevilla player, 22 year old Puerta died after collapsing during a game.
In recent years this seems to have become alarmingly common amoung what we see as extremely fit sports men. All cases of deaths are treated as “Sudden Adult Death Syndrome”, I guess because the experts just can’t put their finger on what the causes actually are.
I have my own theory, generally based around my love of football. Over the past decade or more, the game of football has become a much more athletic type of game. The days of players coming out to play for their club after being out on the tear the night before are long gone.
It’s not good enough to just be a talented footballer, you now need to be very athletic and super fit to play with the rest of them. So obviously, the conditioning and training of players is a lot more intense than it used to be. There are cases of teams not letting their players play, or being classed as being unfit if they have a body fat percentage of over 12%.
Could this higher level of fittest actually max the capabillities of a persons heart? I think there could definitely be a link here.
There is of course the common use of supplements used by players that could also be a factor. Either way, I think it’s time for the fittest coaches to take a serious lok at their strategies and see if anything they are doing could be causing these unfortunate circumstances so that we can eradicate it from happening again in the future.
I think your theory is largely a load of b****** and you might want to do a bit of reading about the causes of these deaths before spouting off a load of crap which may only result in coaches having less fit and able players.
K Man, see this is thing for me, most of these so called sudden death cases, don’t have any causes. They are generally put down to natural causes, which could mean anything. So you point me in a direction of where I should read, because everything I have read is inconclusive.
I’m not asking coaches to have less fit players, I’m asking them to help find out a reason why this could be so common nowadays.
There is something different about how players train than they did in the past and it’s really naive of you to think that it has nothing to do with their fitness regime.
I’m just asking the question and trying to get people to sit up and look at what could possibly be the cause.