Sugoi Uriarte earns Ph.D

JUDOTRAINING team wishes to congratulate Sugoi Uriarte on the recent successful defense of his thesis work.

Abstract
Judo is a complex sport where many multidisciplinary key variables, i.e. strength, power, speed, technical and tactical abilities, motivation or estrés management, which have a significant impact on the final result of combats have been identified. However, these studies have usually focused on either only one or a few variables from the same ambit instead of considering a full set of heterogeneous multidisciplinary variables at the same time, which are of different ambits such as physical, tactical-technical, psychological or lifestyle and, at the same time, assessing their impact over judokas’ performance. Additionally, once these multidisciplinary variables are identified, it is a complex process to determine which ones are directly linked with the capacity of the athlete for reaching his/her strategic objectives, which can be defined as the main medium-long term strategic goals (i.e. to get the classification for the Olympic Games) and which, therefore, condition the judoka ́s efforts and planning.
Then, this Doctoral PhD Thesis develops a methodological proposal for identifying, priorisiting and quantifying the impact of a set of multidisciplinary variables on the strategic performance of judokas, providing a more complete and global vision and, extensively, valuable additional information to make important decisions such as designing training plans or planning the competitions calendar. To this end, a Multi- Criteria Decision Technique, the Analytic Network Proces, is applied, which allows to jointly evaluate and quantify such a set of multidisciplinary variables, which are heterogeneous and which many of them lack of historical data and whose impact on the judoka’s performance is very difficult to determine. In this sense, it is also necessary to take into account the existence of other type of relationship, the inter-relationships between the multidisciplinary variables, which should also be assessed. Then the next relationships between variables are considered:
• Relationships between a set of multidisciplinary variables of judo that are affecting to the judoka’s performance.
• Inter-relationships between the judo multidisciplinary variables.
• Inter-relationships between the strategic objectives that represent the judoka’s
performance.
Therefore, this Doctoral PhD Thesis is structured as follows:
• In Chapter 1, the approach and structure are presented. • In Chapter 2, a literature review is carried out, justifying the research gap and identifying the main judo multidisciplinary variables.
• In Chapter 3, a practical study of the importance of the tactical-variables in judo is carried out, analysing all the judo ellite tournaments of 2019.
• Chapter 4 presents the methodological proposal, justifying initially the application of the Analytic Network Process and then the phases of the methodology.
• In Chapter 5, the methodological proposal is applied to the High Performance Judo Center of Valencia, where a judo expert group applies the phases of the methodology for the under 66 kgs category.
• In Chapter 6, the main conclusions as well as the future research lines are you for sharing your thesis with us.

Performance measurement in Judo: main KPIs, cluster categorization and causal relationships