Background/Objectives: Anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury is common in interaction sports and has severe physical and psychological consequences. Recent research suggests that neurocognitive factors, such as proactive inhibitory control, may influence injury risk. The present work compares the proactive inhibitory performance ability of athletes with no ACL injury and ACL-rehabilitated athletes (ACLR). Methods: This study involved 60 athletes from interaction sports (30 with no history of ACL injury and 30 ACL rehabilitated athletes). During the experimental session, participants performed an executive go–no-go task to assess proactive inhibitory control. Results: The ACLR group exhibited higher adjusted-precision response times (p = 0.011), higher inhibitory failures response times (p < 0.001), poorer accuracy (p = 0.003), and higher commission error rate (p = 0.026) than the group of athletes with no history of ACL injury. Conclusions: Athletes rehabilitated from an ACL injury show inferior performance in proactive inhibitory control, evidenced by lower accuracy and higher reaction times than athletes without a history of injury. Consequently, physiotherapists and exercise professionals should consider cognition during ACL injury rehabilitation and physical retraining before returning to sporting activity.

Basketball shooting performance is crucial for match outcomes, often influenced by environmental pressure and anxiety. This study investigates how increased task demands and outcome consequences affect anxiety, mental workload, and shooting performance in multitasking basketball contexts. Additionally, it examines the moderating role of inhibitory control (IC) on these effects. Thirty-nine youth basketball athletes (26 males and 13 females; age 14.9 ± 1.3 years) participated in two experimental sessions with varying levels of environmental manipulation: Low Environmental Manipulation (LEM) and High Environmental Manipulation (HEM), differing in the cognitive-motor complexity of the task and the consequences associated with performance outcomes. An intrasubject, repeated measures design was used, where participants performed multitasking activities involving dribbling and shooting under different rules and scoring systems. Anxiety, mental workload, and shooting performance were measured, along with participants' baseline IC. The HEM condition significantly increased anxiety (p < 0.001) and mental workload (p < 0.001) compared to the LEM condition, leading to a notable decrease in shooting performance (p < 0.001). Participants with higher IC exhibited better performance (p = 0.007 for LEM, p = 0.046 for HEM) and lower mental workload. Regression analyses indicated that cognitive-motor performance accuracy (p = 0.016) and mental activity (p = 0.004) were significant predictors of shooting performance and state anxiety (p < 0.001). Environmental pressure, through increased task demands and outcome consequences, elevates anxiety and mental workload, negatively impacting basketball shooting performance. Higher IC moderates these effects, suggesting that athletes with better inhibitory abilities can maintain performance under pressure. These findings highlight the importance of designing training programs that simulate competitive pressure and develop athletes' cognitive control capacities.

Background: Attentional resource allocation during sports practice is associated with the players’ perceived mental load. However, few ecological studies address this problem by considering the players’ characteristics (e.g., practice experience, skill and cognition). Therefore, this study aimed to analyse the dose-response effect of two different types of practice, each with different learning objectives, on mental load and motor performance by using a linear mixed model analysis. Method: Forty-four university students (age 20.36 ± 3.13 years) participated in this study. Two sessions were conducted, one based on a standard rules 1 × 1 basketball situation (“practice to maintain”) and one with motor, temporal and spatial restrictions in 1 × 1 tasks (“practice to learn”). Results: “Practice to learn” produced a higher perceived mental load (NASA-TLX scale) and a worse performance than “practice to maintain”, but was moderated by experience and inhibition (p = 0.001). The same happens in the most demanding restriction (i.e., temporal, p < 0.0001). Conclusion: The results showed that increasing the difficulty of 1 × 1 situations through restrictions harmed the player’s performance and increased their perceived mental load. These effects were moderated by previous basketball experience and the player’s inhibition capacity, so the difficulty adjustment should be based on the athletes themselves.

The aim of the study was to determine whether ball reversal is a performance indicator in women’s basketball. Its influence on various in-game performance variables (shots, rebounds, opposition, etc.) was analysed. A total of 6007 ball possessions from 64 games in the 2020/2021 season of the Liga Femenina Endesa, organized by the Spanish Basketball Federation (FEB), were analysed. Observational methodology was employed for defining and recording variables, and data analysis was conducted using descriptive statistics, the Chi-Square test, and one-way ANOVA. The results revealed that ball reversal had a significant impact on possession outcomes (p < 0.001). Specifically, it was associated with a higher number of shot attempts and points scored, an increase in offensive rebounds, and a reduction in turnovers. Incorporating ball reversal during possessions enhances the probability of success, translating into a greater number of points per possession. These findings suggest that ball reversal can thus be considered a performance indicator in women's basketball.

Background: Cognitive load is an important factor influencing anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries. However, few studies have systematically manipulated and quantified cognitive load to examine its biomechanical and neurophysiological consequences. Purpose: This study aimed to investigate the impact of varying cognitive load levels on biomechanical variables associated with ACL injury risk. The study further explored whether individual cognitive performance was related to alterations in ACL injury risk indicators and examined prefrontal cortical activity as an objective marker of mental workload. Study Design: Controlled laboratory study. Methods: A total of 30 athletes engaged in team sports performed a single-leg drop vertical jump (SL-DVJ) under 5 cognitive conditions of varying complexity using a modified Go/No-Go task. Biomechanics, behavioral, and prefrontal hemodynamic data variables were recorded. Cognitive performance was assessed through a computerized Go/No-Go task. Results: Higher cognitive load significantly increased peak ground-reaction forces and altered joint kinematics, specifically reducing knee flexion and increasing knee abduction during landing, especially in conditions that required high cognitive demand ( P < .001). These changes were accompanied by increased prefrontal hemoglobin (OxyHb) concentrations, suggesting elevated cortical activation. Furthermore, lower cognitive performance, notably lower accuracy and higher precision-adjusted response time, was associated with more pronounced biomechanical patterns (such as greater ground-reaction forces) and an increase in the risk of ACL injury ( r = −0.471, P < .01; r = 0.650, P < .001, respectively). Conclusion: An increased cognitive load altered the biomechanics of movement during an SL-DVJ, leading to a potential for increased risk of ACL injury. Moreover, athletes with poorer cognitive control may have been more susceptible to these effects. Prefrontal cortex (PFC) activity increased under conditions of higher cognitive demand. The pattern of regional activation varied according to the type of stimulus (eg, higher OxyHb concentrations for the ventrolateral PFC were observed during the change goal-stimulus condition), suggesting a specific functional organization of the PFC according to the particular demands of executive control. Clinical Relevance: These findings highlight the importance of integrating cognitive challenges into injury prevention and rehabilitation strategies. The findings emphasize the need to consider cognitive load as a central variable in injury risk mitigation and to evaluate cognitive performance as a potential prognostic indicator.

Background: Rehabilitation programs following an anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury tend to focus on improving conditional aspects such as biomechanics. Recently, some studies have analyzed the relationship between cognition and ACL injury, but how cognitive performance evolves throughout the rehabilitation process has not yet been explored. This study assessed how cognitive performance evolves at three points in the ACL injury recovery process: preoperatively, postoperatively, and at the end of the rehabilitation process. It also aims to compare cognitive performance at the end of the rehabilitation process with athletes without a history of ACL injury.Methods: 30 open-skill sports athletes who had recently sustained an ACL injury and 30 open-skill sports athletes with no history of ACL injury were recruited. For the group of ACL-injured athletes, three experimental sessions were conducted at three different points in the ACL injury recovery process. For the control group a single experimental session was conducted. During the experimental sessions participants performed Flanker Task and Multiple Object Tracking to evaluate their cognitive performance.Results: For both Flanker and MOT task, ACL injury athletes show better cognitive performance postoperatively compared to the preoperative phase. For example, a higher mean reaction time in the Flanker task (BF₁₀ = 4.14) and lower accuracy in 3-ball tracking at 28.8 deg/s (BF₁₀ = 2.45). Nevertheless, no improvement was observed between the postoperative and follow-up phases. Finally, ACL injury athletes did not reach a cognitive performance comparable to healthy athletes, for example on mean reaction time in the Flanker Task (BF₁₀ = 60.64) and the 3-ball tracking at speeds of 19.9 and 28.8 deg/s (BF₁₀ = 16.30, BF₁₀ = 12.12, respectively).Conclusions: ACL injury athletes show improvements in cognitive performance post-surgery, but it stabilizes at the end of the rehabilitation and remains lower than that of athletes who did not suffer an ACL injury. Therefore, ACL rehabilitation programs fail to improve cognitive performance, increasing the risk of suffering a new ACL injury compared to those without a history of ACL injury.