With both the Men’s and Women’s NCAA Division I Basketball Championships in full swing March Madness is upon us. Although the Dexalytics site contains a number of blogs on a variety of issues pertaining to DXA, as well as specific topics regarding athletes and a number of sports, there are 3 blogs pertaining directly to basketball. Below I have provided the names and links to each of these blogs as well as a brief description of what is contained in these blogs.  

1.    Normative Data In Female Collegiate Basketball Athletes Using DXA
This blog is based on a paper in the International Journal of Sports Medicine (Raymond-Pope et al., 2020) on body composition measured in over 200 NCAA Division I collegiate male and female basketball players. In this blog, we examined the body composition using dual X-ray absorptiometry (DXA) in 122 NCAA Division I female basketball players. Currently, DXA is considered the ‘gold standard’ for measuring body composition. Given that over 100 female basketball players were examined in this study, we were able to classify the players by position. The basketball players were classified as point guards (n=34), shooting guards (n=27), small forwards (n=18), power forwards (n=27), and centers (n=16).  

2.    Normative Data in Male Collegiate Basketball Athletes Using DXA
This blog is a companion to the previous blog and is also based on data from the paper published in the International Journal of Sports Medicine (Raymond-Pope et al., 2020). In this blog, we examine body composition in 88 NCAA Division I male basketball players.  As with the blog on our female collegiate basketball players, we were able to classify these athletes by position. Basketball players were classified as point guards (n=27), shooting guards (n=18), small forwards (n=13), power forwards (n=21), and centers (n=9). These two blogs make the most complete dataset on NCAA Division 1 male and female basketball athletes to date.

3.    Scanning Basketball Players With DXA
Although the DXA scanner is considered the ‘gold standard’ for the assessment of body composition there is one weakness of DXA. For most DXA scanners, there is a height limit of 78 inches (6 feet 6 inches or 1.98 meters). However, even though a basketball team will have athletes that are taller than 78 inches that does not mean you cannot scan them.  It just means you need to consider a couple of things before scanning them. This blog describes the different possibilities of scanning these athletes and provides a video of how to scan an athlete that is taller than 78 inches.
As I indicated above, these blogs provide a great introduction to body composition and basketball. If you want to delve further into the science these blogs are based upon, a scientific paper referenced below. They will provide you with the science that went into these blogs as well as Dexalytics.

References

Raymond-Pope CJ, Solfest AL, Carbuhn A, Stanforth PR, Oliver J, Bach CW, Bosch T, Dengel DR: Total and regional body composition of NCAA division I collegiate basketball athletes. International Journal of Sports Medicine 41(4):242-247, 2020..
 

About the Author
Donald Dengel, Ph.D., is a Professor in the School of Kinesiology at the University of Minnesota and is a co-founder of Dexalytics. He serves as the Director of the Laboratory of Integrative Human Physiology, which provides clinical vascular, metabolic, exercise and body composition testing for researchers across the University of Minnesota.