Editorial: Optimizing performance and injury prevention in combat sports and martial arts: methodologies for control and monitoring

indexed in major international databases such as Web of Science, reflecting the consolidation of this domain as a distinct field of research within sport sciences (Gonçalves et al., 2025). Scientific recognition of this field has also been strengthened through the institutional endorsement of leading international organizations in sport and exercise science. The National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA) has established a Combat Sports Special Interest Group, the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) increasingly incorporates combat sport research within its scientific agenda, and the European College of Sport Science (ECSS) has recently created its own group dedicated to combat sports (Franchini, 2023). The emergence of these initiatives reflects the growing institutionalization of combat sport science within the international academic community and facilitates collaboration among researchers, practitioners, and performance specialists interested in athlete performance, health, and development.Together, the convergence of competitive expansion, institutional recognition, and scientific development has positioned martial arts and particularly combat sports as a differentiated interdisciplinary domain within sport and exercise sciences. This field integrates physiological, biomechanical, cognitive, psychological, and technical-tactical dimensions that interact dynamically during athletic performance. From an applied perspective, combat sports are characterized by intermittent high-intensity efforts, rapid perceptual-decision processes, and complex technical-tactical interactions performed under conditions of constant uncertainty and direct confrontation with an opponent (Apollaro et al., 2025;Ojeda-Aravena et al., 2023). In such contexts, performance emerges from the integration of neuromuscular efficiency, physiological preparedness, cognitive flexibility, and emotional regulation within highly constrained temporal windows, generating an inherently multidimensional performance environment.Beyond their competitive dimension, martial arts and combat sports also embody educational, ethical, and psychosocial values that support their application in health promotion, physical education, and long-term athlete development contexts (da Silva Athayde et al., 2025;Moronta et al., 2025). Their potential to contribute to physical, psychological, and social well-being has led to their increasing integration into educational programmes and sport development initiatives. Consequently, performance optimization and injury prevention in these disciplines cannot be adequately addressed through fragmented approaches, but require integrative frameworks capable of capturing the adaptive complexity of athletes in ecological performance environments.Within this context, this research topic was conceived to promote methodological advancement in combat sport science by encouraging approaches that integrate scientific knowledge into daily training practice and enable evidence-