Faster, Higher, Stronger : The New Science of Creating Superathletes, and How You Can Train Like Them (McClusky, 2014) is an excellent update on where the sports science field is at right now. He reviews current attempts to “hack” the athlete to achieve optimum performance. Throughout the book the author does a good job of simply communicating complex research.
The book details how innovations in technology—including motion trackers and biometric data—are being used to enhance training. A big part of the puzzle is how athletes training has become ever more personalized—or sport specific—to their given activity. When athletes training is tailored to their distinct tasks (for example a golfer may focus on his torso rotational strength) more efficient gains are made.
Physical therapy wise this book has a lot of good information on how at the high end of performance everything matters. Biomechanics and analytics become of utmost importance when trying to maximize your abilities. Quantifying limb symmetry, power and functional movement are paramount to maximize the athlete. It takes higher level analysis and (often) advanced technological equipment to identify any weaknesses or wasted movement that the naked eye can't see, but there are simple gains out there for all athletes.
While this book is geared towards the elite of the elite athletes there is a lot of practical advice that can improve performance at any level. For instance, what’s easier than sleeping, drinking, and eating?
Faster, Higher Stronger details how sleeping more than 8 hours/day has consistently been shown to confer performance benefits. It has also long been known that caffeine can aid performance—it even used to show up on some lists of banned substances because of its benefits. About 2 cups of coffee is all most people need—more than that does not give additional performance improvement. A unique property of caffeine is that it has benefits for all types of activities—aerobic and anaerobic or running and strength training. There is also a good analysis of the value of the supplement Creatine which has long been known to benefit strength training.
If anything, in my experience, novice to intermediate athletes can experience even greater benefits by refining movement patterns and addressing deficits simply because they have easier corrections to make and more room to make gains.
Sport Science offers an advanced return to sport motion analysis of the required movements (such as cutting and jumping) needed to perform almost all sports. It’s a great starting point if you are serious about improving your athletic performance or preventing injury.