My Five Favorite Dexalytics Football Blog Posts
This is one of my favorite times of the year in regard to football. The college football playoff has concluded, a new champion has been crowned, and new recruits are being signed. In the NFL, the Super Bowl has been played and a new Super Bowl Champion has been crowned. All attention now turns to the NFL Combine and the upcoming NFL Draft. As with the past NFL Combines, body composition will be assessed using dual X-ray absorptiometry (DXA). Players will be scanned and at the end of each day all of the scans are analyzed and reports are generated by position for each of the 32 teams. Pundits predict what players each team will draft.
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 no less than 20 blogs pertaining directly to football. If you are interested in body composition and football, be it college or professional, I suggest you check out these blogs. Since 20 blogs may be a lot for you to read, I have compiled a list of my 5 favorite blogs on Dexalytics. These blogs provide a great starting point to learn a little about body composition and football.
The blog was based on two scientific papers examining body composition in 467 NCAA Division 1 collegiate football players and 342 NFL football players. This blog compares body composition between collegiate and professional offensive players. It is the only place that really compares collegiate and NFL players by offensive positions.
This is a companion to the previous blog, but instead of looking at offensive players, this blog focuses on defensive players. This is a great blog if you are interested in the defensive aspect of collegiate and professional football athletes and the only place where you can compare these two groups of football players directly.
This blog examined data from over 700 NCAA Division 1 collegiate football players, who were scanned over the course of their collegiate football careers. A total of over 2,500 scans were used in this analysis. This blog reported that over the span of 4 years, the percent body fat increased in players from years 18-19 years of age, but after that remained relatively constant. Lean muscle mass on the other hand tended to increase each year.
This is the first of a two-part blog that examines fat and lean muscle mass ratios in college and professional football players. The blog focuses on defensive players. These ratios such as total Upper to Lean Legs Ratio (TULLR) or Lean Upper to Lean Legs Mass Ratio (LULLR) are unique to Dexalytics software and can be used to evaluate players individually or by position groups. The blog also explores these ratios in both NCAA Division I collegiate football players and NFL defensive players.
This is a companion blog to the one above and looks at fat and lean muscle ratios in college and professional football offensive players. Again, using special ratios in the Dexalytics software it provides an additional way to evaluate defensive players by position.
As I indicated above, these blogs provide a great introduction to body composition and football. If you want to delve father into the science these blogs are based upon, the scientific papers are referenced below. They will provide you with the science that went into these blogs as well as Dexalytics.
References
Wichmann TK, Wolfson J, Roelofs EJ, Bosch TA, Bach CW, Oliver JM, Carbuhn A, Stanforth PR, Dengel DR: Longitudinal assessment of NCAA division I football body composition by season and player age. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research 36(6):1682-1690, 2022.
Bosch TA, Carbuhn A, Stanforth PR, Oliver JM, Keller KA, Dengel DR: Body composition and bone mineral density of division 1 collegiate football players: a consortium of college athlete research study. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research 33(5):1339-1346, 2019.
Bosch TA, Burruss TP, Weir NL, Fielding KA, Engel BE, Weston TD, Dengel DR: Abdominal body composition difference in NFL football players. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research 28(12):3313-3319, 2014.
Dengel DR, Bosch TA, Burruss TP, Fielding KA, Engel BE, Weir NL, Weston TD: Body composition of National Football League players. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research 28(1):1-6, 2014.
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.