ABSTRACT
Abrupt deceleration is a common practice in several sports, where sudden changes of direction are needed to perform at the highest level. Most of the high-level sports movements are related to accelerations, or decelerations of the body, in order to produce direction changes. The sheer magnitudes of the forces generated by the muscles and acting upon joints and ligaments during such tasks, while considering the amount of times an athlete needs to decelerate and change directions during the course of its career, are hard to fathom. To this end, joint contact forces were estimated via a musculoskeletal modelling approach. This study showed that the highest peak joint contact forces were found at the hip (111.1 ± 47.2 and 99.8 ± 48.7 N/Kg) and knee (122.2 ± 44.6 and 124.9 ± 34.4 N/Kg) joints, along the Anterior/Posterior direction.
