Research

The question that ties my research together is how we measure what exercise does to the body and what we can claim from what we have measured. Three research lines follow from it. They do not carry the same weight or belong to the same stage of my career.

Strength training and muscle mechanics

This is the active line I am building: how the body adapts to strength training, and whether describing exercise from the perspective of the muscle explains those adaptations better than joint motion alone.

I lead EXCURSE — Muscle Excursion Range in Strength Training: Implications for Performance and Injury Prevention (2025–2028), funded by INEFC under reference 2025 PINEF 00018 and co-led with Xavier Peirau Terès. We compare training across different regions of muscle excursion and study changes in muscle architecture, strength, neuromuscular activation, and mechanical properties.

The open questions are whether adaptations differ according to the region of muscle excursion used during training, and how much responses vary between people and over time.

The antecedent of this line is a meta-analysis of contralateral effects after unilateral strength training. More recent related work includes conventional resistance training compared with core exercise in road cyclists and pedalling muscle stiffness across cyclist performance levels.

I am recruiting doctoral researchers for this line. Read about the PhD opportunity.

Field-test validation and endurance performance

This is my most applied line: how we measure endurance performance outside the laboratory, and where a practical field test stops being an adequate substitute for a laboratory protocol.

My work has examined functional threshold power, prediction of VO₂max from a short maximal test, and the variability of time to exhaustion at an estimated threshold. Studies include comparisons of functional threshold power with lactate thresholds, a five-minute power-based test to predict VO₂max, and time to exhaustion at estimated functional threshold power.

The open questions are which field-test estimates remain valid at the level of the individual athlete, and how test error, performance level, and between-person variability should affect interpretation.

Main collaborators: Sebastian Sitko and Isaac López-Laval (Universidad de Zaragoza).

Cardiac biomarkers after exercise

This is my most established line, although it is now less central to my work: how the body responds acutely to exercise, particularly how cardiac troponin changes in children and adolescents.

I have focused on the time course of the response rather than a single post-exercise value. The work includes a systematic review and meta-analysis in healthy children and adolescents, a study of maturational status and cardiac troponin T in young swimmers, and a comparison of modelled cTnT and cTnI kinetics.

The open questions are how sampling time changes the interpretation of an observed value, and how maturation, exercise load, and between-person variability shape the response.

Main collaborators: Keith George (Liverpool John Moores University), Alejandro Legaz-Arrese (Universidad de Zaragoza), and Luis Enrique Carranza-García (Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León).

The method underneath

Applied biostatistics is not a fourth research line. It is the perspective from which I approach the other three.

I work with mixed-effects models, Bayesian regression, systematic reviews, and meta-analysis. For repeated biological measurements, I model observations within individuals and the shape of change over time rather than analyse each time point as if it were independent. I also conduct statistical analysis for the Clinical Neurosciences group at IRBLleida, including the REMOTE-CAT stroke trial.

Statistics begins before the data arrive: it helps formulate the question, design the study, and establish what the study will be able to support.