logo
Enquire to Attend

Topics

1

Research Agendas and Infrastructure

Examining how organizations build, fund, deliver, and translate athlete health and performance research

Across professional sport, leagues, player associations, teams, and research organizations are investing in projects designed to better understand athlete health, performance, and support needs. The challenge is not only identifying the right research questions, but securing funding, building the right partnerships, creating the infrastructure to deliver the work, and translating findings back into practice.

This block will bring together research initiatives from across sport to explore how projects are developed, what organizations are learning, and how research can better inform athlete services, standards, facility design, advocacy, and long-term planning.

Key areas of focus include:

  1. How athlete health and performance research questions are identified
  2. How research projects are funded, structured, and delivered
  3. What leagues, player associations, teams, and research organizations are currently studying
  4. How external collaborators and cross-sport partnerships can strengthen research
  5. How findings should be translated back to athletes and applied in practice
  6. What infrastructure is needed to build sustainable athlete research programs

2

Biomechanics, Human Movement, and Return to Performance

Exploring how movement data can become more useful, understandable, and actionable for athletes

Movement assessment and biomechanics are becoming increasingly important across elite sport. Teams, leagues, clinical systems, training centers, and player associations are investing in new ways to understand how athletes move and how those insights can support health, readiness, training, rehabilitation, and return to performance.

This block will examine the NBA and NBPA standardized biomechanics program, the evolution of the field, the experience of teams and players participating in the program, and what needs to happen after testing for movement data to create meaningful value.

Key areas of focus include:

  1. How biomechanics has evolved across clinical and elite performance environments
  2. How the NBA and NBPA biomechanics program was developed and implemented
  3. What the first year of the program has shown
  4. How teams and practitioners are using and interpreting the information
  5. What athletes understand, receive, and act on after completing an assessment
  6. How athlete education, reporting, follow-up, and feedback should improve
  7. How the program should evolve over the next three to five years

3

What the Union Is Hearing About Athlete Health and Performance

Helping athletes navigate emerging treatments, testing, technologies, and performance claims with better information and responsible support

Players are increasingly hearing about new treatments, testing options, recovery products, and health technologies through teammates, trainers, outside clinics, physicians, podcasts, and social media. They may contact the Union before pursuing an option, after they have already started, or only when something goes wrong.

This block will examine some of the questions increasingly reaching the NBPA, including GLP-1s, peptides, blood biomarker testing, supplementation, recovery tools, and emerging health and performance services. The goal is to consider how player centered organizations can support athlete curiosity and autonomy without prematurely validating options that may be poorly understood, inappropriate, or risky.

Key areas of focus include:

  1. What is established, off-label, emerging, unsupported, or commonly overstated
  2. Why athletes are interested in GLP-1s, peptides, and comprehensive biomarker testing
  3. What safety, sourcing, medical oversight, and anti-doping considerations matter
  4. Which biomarkers may establish useful baselines or identify meaningful trends
  5. Why isolated results can be misleading without clinical interpretation and longitudinal context
  6. How results should be explained, protected, returned to athletes, and carried across providers and career transitions
  7. How these issues should be approached differently for youth and developing athletes
  8. How new testing, treatments, and technologies can be responsibly introduced into athlete health programs

4

Athlete Health Infrastructure, Staffing Models, and Offseason Support

Defining what modern team and athlete health and performance support should look like across the full calendar year

Elite athletes are surrounded by more support than ever before, but more people does not always mean better coordination. Players move between team staff, personal trainers, physios, skills coaches, medical providers, nutrition professionals, recovery specialists, facilities, and offseason environments throughout the year.

This block will examine how high-performance teams are built across sports, how medical and performance structures have evolved, how specialized roles should be integrated, and what athletes experience when support systems work well or break down. It will also explore how athletes structure their own offseason teams and what should be provided by teams, facilities, player associations, and trusted partner networks.

Key areas of focus include:

  1. What effective medical and high-performance team structures look like across sports
  2. Where care, communication, staffing, access, or trust commonly break down
  3. How medical, performance, sports science, nutrition, and mental performance roles should be structured and coordinated
  4. The role of registered dietitians within an integrated high-performance model
  5. What athletes value and what they believe is missing from traditional support systems
  6. How athletes should build and manage their personal offseason support teams
  7. How in-season and offseason planning should connect training, travel, rest, recovery, and time away
  8. What standards, services, reporting structures, and resources should define quality athlete support