SEMS 2026: Rehab, Readiness and Injury Prevention

Last week we attended SEMS 2026.

In the event's own words, "SEMS 2026 brings together global leading clinicians, researchers and practitioners in sport and exercise medicine for two days of evidence-based learning, practical discussion and valuable networking."

Interested in finding out more about Wattbike in Elite Sport? Contact us here.

Here is are our three key takeaways from SEMS 2026.

1. Women's Issues are Being Recognised

FIFA's investment into a study focused on ACL injuries in female footballers made mainstream headlines in 2025. The wider industry is catching up, with more focus on issues disproportionally impacting female athletes.

SEMS26 shed light on notable research being done in this field. Prof. Kay Crossley's work on the heightened risk of knee injuries in female players has been influential in this field. Her research estimates female players are up to 8 times more likely to pick up a serious injury in this area of the body. 

On top of this, we learnt other measures are being taken more seriously: heightened monitoring of menstrual cycles, nutritional intervention to prevent RED-S and regular screening to prevent Muscular Skeletal (MSK) injuries in the hip and pelvis region. 

As women's sport keeps growing, funding into this research will likely grow with it, helping more female athletes.

Where do we come in?

Wattbike allows athletes to obtain the aerobic benefits of running with a huge reduction in injury risk. Find out more about how this has benefited the British Army here.

Making use of off-feet conditioning is becoming more popular in Elite Sport: we are trusted by all 20 Premier League clubs alongside thousands of other athletes and teams around the world. How are we used? Find out more about specific Wattbike sessions used by Leeds United in this blog.

2. Predicting Injuries is still difficult

Accurate, reliable injury Prediction could revolutionise Elite Sport.

The idea is simple - track key metrics, feed them into a machine learning model, and spot the patterns that came before past injuries.

In practice however, it isn't that simple.

As Chris Leckey explained at SEMS26, and in this excellent study available here, the type of data and the volume of data we have to analyse is often a limiting factor.

Firstly, there's no agreed set of data to use for each specific injury. As Leckey's study sets out, there were 1,359 different variables used between 38 individual studies, ranging from 7 to 957 per study on a range of different injuries. These included MSK screening, body composition tests (e.g. DXA scans) and even data from wearables such as WHOOP.

The authors found that more variables didn't mean better predictions: one concussion model with 957 variables was beaten by a similar model using only 15. And it gets worse - Leckey's most recent work demonstrated only 1 correct prediction for every 77 fales ones.

Where do we come in?

It is accepted that a build up of fatigue is a key contributor to injuries, as another SEMS speaker, Markus Waldén has previously researched here. So whilst a Wattbike can't predict when a player will pick up an MSK injury, we can help determine neuromuscular fatigue via our 6-secondtest, documented in Wehbe et al.'s 2014 study.

By using the 6-second test around games, coaches can have a better understanding of how fatigued a player is, helping coaching and medical staff make smarter decisions on when to rest players, especially when fixtures are at their most congested.

3. AI won't be replacing coaches anytime soon

And finally, as expected, the topic of AI made an appearance. 

Despite initial worries that AI would soon replace human coaches, the reality is that it likely has made human data interpretation more valuable.

This 2016 review determined that an athlete's subjective self-reported fatigue monitoring was more accurate than any objective data point. Add Leckey's findings on injury prediction, and it's clear how hard fatigue monitoring, training decisions, load management and injury prevention really are.

What matters most is a strong coach-athlete relationship where coaches use the data to plan sessions, but aren't slaves to the numbers when an athlete says they need to rest.

Where do we come in?

The Wattbike Hub app now has a dedicated Wattbike Coaches section, exclusively available for coaches within Elite Sport. You can find out more about this by contacting us at uksales@wattbike.com.

Coaches can keep all their athletes' data in one place, review each athlete's past sessions and compare key metrics such as peak power, sprint fatigue and rate of force development.

Wattbike provides coaches with the relevant data, but ultimately allows them to make a decision based on their experience.

Interested in finding out more about Wattbike within Elite Sport? Contact us via this link.

All relevant studies have been linked to. For corrections or to discuss any of the above further please email jack.wong@wattbike.com.