31st ECSS Congress Lausanne · 7–10 July 2026
Paolo Tecchio wins the ECSS Young Investigator Award 2026
A major distinction for early-career research at the Faculty of Sport Science: Paolo Tecchio, a doctoral researcher in the Human Movement Science group, has received the Young Investigator Award at the 31st Annual Congress of the European College of Sport Science (ECSS) in Lausanne.
The ECSS congress is the world's largest sport-science meeting: from 7 to 10 July 2026 several thousand researchers gathered in Lausanne. The Young Investigator Award is among the field's most prestigious early-career honours, recognising the best young scientists against strict criteria for state-of-the-art research.
In his award-winning talk, Tecchio presented results from his doctoral work on morphological and mechanical adaptations of the muscle–tendon unit to eccentric and concentric training. At its core is the first randomized controlled trial to directly compare concentric (CON) and eccentric (ECC) training under — for the first time — comparable mechanical load.
The key finding is surprising: under comparable mechanical training load, CON and ECC produced comparable strength gains and similar adaptations of muscle architecture and the aponeurosis — an important connective-tissue structure for force transmission. This contradicts the prevailing assumption that eccentric training yields greater strength gains — contraction type alone does not appear to drive specific adaptations.
The work was conceived and conducted in the Human Movement Science group at the Faculty of Sport Science, together with Dr Brent James Raiteri and Prof Dr Daniel Hahn. It is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG, project number 565338450).
Further links:
ECSS Young Investigator Award
DFG project 565338450
