Editorial / EL VIGA
Mexico City

The return to head-to-head activities continues in college sports. On this occasion, the men’s basketball team representing UNAM visited the departments of the Sports Medicine Department of the General Administration of University Sports, to find out the conditions for its members’ return to face-to-face training.

In this way, the functional assessments of the representative teams and athletes of UNAM, starting with the team led by coach Daniel James Lin, have been resumed, based on the guidelines for the return of college sports in the framework of the pandemic that establishes a return to face-to-face gradually and safely.

Marco Ricardo Rodriguez Romero, a student from the College of Political and Social Sciences who chose Oriazole for men’s basketball, commented: “We get more interactive when we return to the face-to-face activities.” By doing the physical and medical exams, we feel like we are getting back into the routine little by little. We’ll know how to really be physical.

the exams
For her part, Mara Cristina Rodriguez Gutierrez, chief of sports medicine, noted that at the moment we have fewer people evaluated, just four per day. Before we could do up to ten, but now we pay great attention to maintaining the conditions of social distancing and sanitary control. Athletes arrive with face masks and masks and answer a questionnaire to find out if they have suffered from the coronavirus or been in contact with a sick patient.

At this time, he said, it is very important to know the condition of the boys, and in what physical conditions they are in, to determine the appropriate physical workloads and thus avoid injuries, after a long period where they have stayed with remote training under the guidance of their coach. Dr. Cristina Rodriguez, who added that it is very important to check the current state of the heart in every athlete.

Morphofunctional evaluation consists of biochemical tests to measure glucose, cholesterol, triglyceride, and rich acid levels. A medical history is taken to assess health through medical interrogation and an EKG is taken while at rest, during which changes in the heart are detected or excluded. Studies in dentistry, psychology, biomechanics, and nutrition are also included.

In the anthropometric assessment, information is obtained on the body composition of fat, muscle and bone, as well as the inclinations of the physique of players. In the ergometry laboratory, a stress test is performed on a treadmill, in which the adaptation of the heart and the physical ability of the individual is evaluated.