Body composition in athletes
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Body composition assessment in professional athletes and match officials
IRAS ID
360412
Contact name
Mark Hearris
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Manchester Metropolitan University
Duration of Study in the UK
10 years, 0 months, 1 days
Research summary
The measurement of body composition (i.e. the amount of fat and fat-free mass) is now a fundamental component of medical support in professional sport and is commonly undertaken to assess the individual’s suitability for competition and to monitor changes that occur throughout a competitive season. Despite this, the optimal body composition for professional athletes and match officials is unknown and thought to vary widely depending on the individual’s role (i.e. athlete or match official), sport, playing position and style, gender and age. Upon this basis, the use of dual x-ray absorptiometry (DXA) is becoming increasingly popular in elite sport and is used by both practitioners and researchers given its high level of accuracy when compared with alternate methods such as skinfold or bioelectrical impedance analysis measures.
Although the concept of assessing body composition is now common practice within sports medicine support, there are little data to guide best practice guidelines and professional standards amongst professional athletes and match officials. Most available data investigating the body composition of athletes tend to focus on individual sports or genders with little data available to provide comparisons between sports or longitudinal changes throughout the course of a competitive season. To this end, the purpose of this work is to describe longitudinal changes in DXA-measured body composition in professional athletes and match officials. The results from this study will provide large-scale normative data to support the development of best-practice guidelines and body composition standards for these populations.
To achieve this, the present study will perform longitudinal tracking of body composition (via DXA) amongst a large cohort of athletic populations.
REC name
North West - Liverpool Central Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
25/NW/0331
Date of REC Opinion
12 Nov 2025
REC opinion
Unfavourable Opinion