Skip to main content
Sports Medicine - Open

Table 1 Characteristics of athletes from traditional and complex system-based approaches. Adapted from Pol et al. [23], with permission

From: Integrative Proposals of Sports Monitoring: Subjective Outperforms Objective Monitoring

Approach

Traditional

Complex system-based

Concept of organism

Machine

CAS

Control

Internal/external programmes

Synergies1

Organization

Centrally regulated

Self-organized2

Interaction with the environment

Multifactorial additive, decontextualized

Non-additive, transactional

Relations

Linear and static

Nonlinear3, dynamic and path-dependent4

  1. 1Synergy: spontaneous formation of structural and functional couplings among reciprocally compensating components to achieve task goals [39, 41, 42]
  2. 2Self-organization: spontaneous order process where some form of overall order arises from local or global interactions between parts of a system, without internal or external programme [43, 44]
  3. 3Nonlinear means non-proportional: although many CAS' behaviours may for long periods perform in a linear regime (A as independent variable provokes a proportional effect on B over time, i.e., small ΔA = small ΔB or big ΔA = big ΔB), for a certain small change of constraints their dynamics can also become non-proportional (small ΔA = big ΔB)
  4. 4Path-dependent: CAS’ behaviours are influenced by their past (i.e., history)
Back to article page