Video Biomechanical Analysis of Shoulder Impact Kinematics in Tai-Otoshi and Morote-Seoi-Nage Judo Throws: A Cross-Sectional Study
, Wiesław Błach 3, Łukasz Rydzik 4,*, Tadeusz Ambroży 4, Manuela Angioi 1 and Nikos Malliaropoulos 1,5,6
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The manuscript is well written in all sections. The introduction is well written and the necessity of the study is correctly stated according to the objectives of the study. However, the authors need to add the study hypothesis as well.
In the method section, it should be mentioned exactly whether this study has complied with the ethical standards of the Declaration of Helsinki for humans or not.
I recommend drawing a shape like a CONSORT flow chart to recruit participants and other steps of selecting and removing participants.
The graphs presented in the results section need to be changed and presented better. Authors can use the Prism - GraphPad software to draw appropriate graphs.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
Thank you very much for your time and valuable comments, which all have been considered and incorporated. The detailed list of responses is given below. We hope that the modifications and explanation will be acceptable for you.
Yours sincerely,
Kabir Singh Lota, Wieslaw Błach, Łukasz Rydzik, Tadeusz Ambroży, Manuela Angioi, Nikos Malliaropoulos
Point: “However, the authors need to add the study hypothesis as well.”
Answer: thank you for raising this point. We acknowledge this, and have included the null and research hypotheses at the end of the introduction.
Point: “In the method section, it should be mentioned exactly whether this study has complied with the ethical standards of the Declaration of Helsinki for humans or not.”
Answer: thank you for raising this point. The study complied with the ethical standards of the Declaration of Helsinki, and this has been made clear in the methodology.
Point: “I recommend drawing a shape like a CONSORT flow chart to recruit participants and other steps of selecting and removing participants.”
Answer: thank you for raising this point. We have added a figure in the manuscript depicting the key aspects of participant recruitment. Considering the non-randomised nature of our study, we are not able to describe the process in great depth. Nevertheless, we hope that this flowchart is a useful addition to the manuscript. We hope that this is acceptable to the Reviewer and thank the Reviewer for this suggestion.
Point: “The graphs presented in the results section need to be changed and presented better. Authors can use the Prism - GraphPad software to draw appropriate graphs.”
Answer: thank you for raising this point. We thank the Reviewer for their suggesting the Prism – GraphPad software and have used this software develop new graphs which we hope are clear and professional. We hope that this is acceptable to the Reviewer.
Reviewer 2 Report
Dear authors, first of all, I want to congratulate you for the potential importance that the manuscript you submit may have for the topic of study.
Here are some specific comments that I believe can help improve the quality of the work.
I believe that the introduction can and should be significantly improved so that the study problem can emerge more clearly. I believe that the manuscript could benefit from the inclusion of a few more bibliographic references that will probably help to solve the problem previously reported.
This is in fact the only point I consider to be necessary to improve since in general the manuscript is very well structured.
Best Regards
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
Thank you very much for your time and valuable comments, which all have been considered and incorporated. The detailed list of responses is given below. We hope that the modifications and explanation will be acceptable for you.
Yours sincerely,
Kabir Singh Lota, Wieslaw Błach, Łukasz Rydzik, Tadeusz Ambroży, Manuela Angioi, Nikos Malliaropoulos
Point: “I believe that the introduction can and should be significantly improved so that the study problem can emerge more clearly.”
Answer: thank you for raising this point. We have amended and improved the introduction by discussing previous research regarding head injuries in judo in greater depth. We hope that, in doing so, we have highlighted the shoulder injury problem more clearly.
Point: “I believe that the manuscript could benefit from the inclusion of a few more bibliographic references that will probably help to solve the problem previously reported.”
Answer: thank you for raising this point. We have added additional bibliographic references in order to address the above, as the Reviewer themselves also suggested.
Reviewer 3 Report
Thank you for the opportunity to review this publication. The submitted study aims to investigate the shoulder kinematics of impact in elite adult judoka when performing tai-otoshi (body drop) and morote-seoi-nage (two-handed 58 shoulder throw). The question of the study is definitely interesting, however, the methodology and analysis carried out is perhaps too simple to draw such specific conclusions.
According to studies shoulder is consistently recognized as a frequently injured site and biomechanical analyzes can help to understand these injuries more deeply. Kinematic parameters such as velocity and acceleration can be used in impact force estimates that quantify the risk of injury associated with certain throws, however, they do not make these estimates in research or other factors that may affect the injury such as angulation or technique of fall. Only with the factors analyzed can it be concluded that there is a greater or lesser risk of injury? These are very ambitious conclusions without being able to observe the effect they have on the athlete.
Other comments to take into account if the authors carry out a more detailed analysis:
Title and keywords:
- The title is too long and ambitious compared to what is actually analyzed. Also, all the keywords appear in the title and they shouldn't.
Summary:
- Target does not appear.
- The characteristics of the participants appear in the result instead of in the methodology.
- Both in the abstract and throughout the entire manuscript, only one decimal should appear. In this type of study, two decimals are not necessary and throughout it they sometimes use one decimal and sometimes two.
Introduction:
- The authors make a correct introduction for a brief report. However, for an original article it is insufficient. The first part is correct, but when they explain the biomechanics of judo techniques, they must make much more detailed explanations of both the other techniques and those analyzed in this study.
Materials and Methods:
- Ethical approval must go at the end of the participants section.
- Please comment on the sample size, participants are very few, perform a power analysis to determine the sample size for comparing two means.
Results:
- The characteristics of the subjects should not go here but in participants.
- Remember the decimals explained above, in addition, data cannot appear without a subsequent unit of measure (always).
- When talking about the size of the effect, d = ... should always appear.
- The values of p and d must be in italics.
- Values of p and d always with the same decimals (2-3).
- Redundant information in tables and figures, there is no additional information.
Discussion and conclusions:
- Throughout the discussion, the authors expose the shortcomings of the study (which should also detail its limitations). A very incomplete discussion is not presented, but it is convoluted because they assume too many justifications for reasons that you have not studied in the manuscript.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
Thank you very much for your time and valuable comments, which all have been considered and incorporated. The detailed list of responses is given below. We hope that the modifications and explanation will be acceptable for you.
Yours sincerely,
Kabir Singh Lota, Wieslaw Błach, Łukasz Rydzik, Tadeusz Ambroży, Manuela Angioi, Nikos Malliaropoulos
Point: “The question of the study is definitely interesting, however, the methodology and analysis carried out is perhaps too simple to draw such specific conclusions.”
Answer: thank you for raising this point. We are in agreement, and acknowledge, the limitations and simplicity of our methodology, and have been extra careful with our choice of wording when making any conclusive statements. We have added into our Discussion some points about the care that must be taken in attempting to do this and hope that this is clearer to the reader. We thank the Reviewer for kindly pointing this out and we hope that refined wording improves the readability of our article.
Point: “Kinematic parameters such as velocity and acceleration can be used in impact force estimates that quantify the risk of injury associated with certain throws, however, they do not make these estimates in research or other factors that may affect the injury such as angulation or technique of fall.”
Answer: thank you for raising this point. We have introduced the role of other factors (angulation, technique of fall) in our Discussion/Limitations and we thank the Reviewer for this suggestion. However, we respectfully point out that this was beyond the scope of the study, in part due to the study methodology. We hope that future studies will address these issues, thus allowing even stronger and more realistic recommendations to be formulated on the basis of more comprehensive research.
Point: “Only with the factors analyzed can it be concluded that there is a greater or lesser risk of injury? These are very ambitious conclusions without being able to observe the effect they have on the athlete.”
Answer: thank you for raising this point. We acknowledge the comment of the Reviewer and agree that it is difficult to say confidently that there is an increased risk of injury with the analysis performed. We have rephrased any conclusive statements to highlight the difficulty in doing this, whilst highlighting that loading at the joint, for instance, may be increased. We acknowledge that we did not observe the effect of throws on athletes (regarding injury risk), although the study design meant we could not do this. We have highlighted the familiarity of these training conditions (repetitive throwing) to our elite sample and have spoken about this in our Discussion.
Point: “The title is too long and ambitious compared to what is actually analyzed.”
Answer: thank you for raising this point. We have shortened the title and hope that this is more readable and acceptable to the Reviewer. We feel that the title is a fair reflection of the analysis performed and hope that the Reviewer agrees with us on this point.
Point: “Also, all the keywords appear in the title and they shouldn't.”
Answer: thank you for raising this point. We have changed the keywords so that this is no longer the case.
Point: “Target does not appear. The characteristics of the participants appear in the result instead of in the methodology.”
Answer: thank you for raising this point. We hope that the target is made clear in the background. We have restructured and amended the above so that the participant characteristics appear in the methodology.
Point: “Both in the abstract and throughout the entire manuscript, only one decimal should appear. In this type of study, two decimals are not necessary and throughout it they sometimes use one decimal and sometimes two.”
Answer: thank you for raising this point. We have changed this so that only one decimal place appears, both in the abstract and in the rest of the manuscript. We have, however, left more than one decimal place when presenting computed values (significance, reliability, effect size) and hope that this is acceptable to the Reviewer.
Point: “…but when they explain the biomechanics of judo techniques, they must make much more detailed explanations of both the other techniques and those analyzed in this study.”
Answer: thank you for raising this point. We have included our explanation of the two throws analysed in this study (tai-otoshi and morote-seoi-nage) in the introduction, as well as an explanation of the two other throws referenced (osoto-gari, ouchi-gari). We hope that this is useful to the reader and acceptable to the Reviewer.
Point: “Ethical approval must go at the end of the participants section.”
Answer: thank you for raising this point. We have changed this so that this is at the end of the participant recruitment section.
Point: “Please comment on the sample size, participants are very few, perform a power analysis to determine the sample size for comparing two means.”
Answer: thank you for raising this point. We acknowledge our sample size is relatively small, although have added in our analysis which we hope confirms adequacy.
Point: “The characteristics of the subjects should not go here but in participants.”
Answer: thank you for raising this point. We have changed this so that this is in the participant recruitment section.
Point: “Remember the decimals explained above, in addition, data cannot appear without a subsequent unit of measure (always).”
Answer: thank you for raising this point. We have taken care to account for the above.
Point: “When talking about the size of the effect, d = ... should always appear.”
Answer: thank you for raising this point. We have taken care to account for the above.
Point: “The values of p and d must be in italics.”
Answer: thank you for raising this point. We have taken care to account for the above.
Point: “Values of p and d always with the same decimals (2-3).”
Answer: thank you for raising this point. We have taken care to account for the above and have used three decimal places throughout.
Point: “Redundant information in tables and figures, there is no additional information.”
Answer: thank you for raising this point. We acknowledge the point of the Reviewer in that there is no additional information in the table and/or figure. We have, therefore, chosen to remove the table from the results section, however, have chosen to leave in a figure representing the results visually. We hope that this approach encounters the favour of the Reviewer.
Point: “Throughout the discussion, the authors expose the shortcomings of the study (which should also detail its limitations). A very incomplete discussion is not presented, but it is convoluted because they assume too many justifications for reasons that you have not studied in the manuscript.”
Answer: thank you for raising this point. We greatly appreciate this comment. Appropriate areas of the discussion have been enhanced to discuss our methodological limitations and shortcomings. Notably, this includes an awareness of the arguably unrealistic assumptions that would be made in any impact force estimate. We have changed, and taken great care, with our choice of wording in the discussion, to avoid making too many justifications we know may not necessarily be true (particularly concerning impact forces, loading, and risk of injury). We thank the Reviewer for this comment: it undoubtedly improves the readability of the Discussion.
We hope that the changes implemented have improved the manuscript, and that it has now reached the standard necessary for formal acceptance in Applied Sciences.
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
Dear authors, thank you for your prompt reply.
After the changes made, the manuscript became considerably more appealing and structured.
In this way and taking into account that all the requested changes have been made, I do not have any reservations. I therefore suggest accepting the manuscript for publication in its present form.
Keep up the good work.
Best Regards
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
Thank you for reviewing our manuscript
Your Sincerly,
Kabir Singh Lota, Wieslaw Błach, Łukasz Rydzik, Tadeusz Ambroży, Manuela Angioi, Nikos Malliaropoulos
Reviewer 3 Report
Thank the authors for making the requested changes. You only point out some aspects to be corrected:
L108: Remove: Impact force calculations were, however, beyond the scope of this study.
L193: Include Kinovea business data as in MATLAB.
Results: I am not sure that the figure used is the most suitable visually for the results. Include (*) where there are significant differences, replace it with a table where the mean value appears with the standard deviation, the IC, the p value and the d value... I think it would be more accurate.
Kind regards.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
Thank you very much for your time and valuable comments, which all have been considered and incorporated. The detailed list of responses is given below. We hope that the modifications and explanation will be acceptable for you.
Yours sincerely,
Kabir Singh Lota, Wieslaw Błach, Łukasz Rydzik, Tadeusz Ambroży, Manuela Angioi, Nikos Malliaropoulos
Point: “Remove: Impact force calculations were, however, beyond the scope of this study.”
Answer: thank you for raising this point. We have removed this from the manuscript.
Point: “Include Kinovea business data as in MATLAB.”
Answer: thank you for raising this point. We have included Kinovea business details in the manuscript.
Point: “Results: I am not sure that the figure used is the most suitable visually for the results. Include (*) where there are significant differences, replace it with a table where the mean value appears with the standard deviation, the IC, the p value and the d value... I think it would be more accurate.”
Answer: thank you for raising this point. We have replaced the graph with a table that depicts the above. We hope that the presentation of this information is more accurate and acceptable to the Reviewer.
We hope that the changes implemented have improved the manuscript, and that it has now reached the standard necessary for formal acceptance in Applied Sciences.
