Performance in Team Handball (TH) includes many fast high-intensity activities (e.g. sprinting, jumping, shooting, blocking) taxing mainly the anaerobic ...
SPRINT PERFORMANCE AND ANAEROBIC POWER IN ADOLESCENT FEMALE TEAM HANDBALL PLAYERS Povoas SC1, & Nikolaidis PT2 1
Research Centre in Sports, Health and Human Development, Maia, Portugal; 2Department of Sports Medicine & Biology of Exercise, Faculty of Physical Education and Sport, University of Athens, Greece Performance in Team Handball (TH) includes many fast high-intensity activities (e.g. sprinting, jumping, shooting, blocking) taxing mainly the anaerobic metabolic energy transfer system, which can be assessed either in laboratory or in a field setting. The aim of this study was to examine the relationship between widely used assessment methods in exercise testing: 5 m, 10 m and 20 m sprint test (Brower Timing Systems, Utah, USA), countermovement jump (CMJ), 30 s Bosco test (Microgate Engineering, Bolzano, Italy) and Wingate anaerobic test (WAnT; Ergomedics 874 Monark, Varberg, Sweden). Eleven adolescent female TH players (age 13.8±1.1 years, weight 56.5±7.3 kg, height 159.9±4.0 cm, body fat percentage 24.7±4.4%) performed the abovementioned anaerobic tests. The correlations of 5 m, 10 m and 20 m sprint with peak power of WAnT were -0.44 (p=0.171), -0.63 (p=0.036) and -0.82 (p=0.002), respectively; with CMJ -0.68 (p=0.022), -0.73 (p=0.011) and -0.42 (p=0.202); and with Bosco test -0.66 (p=0.028), -0.78 (p=0.005) and -0.59 (p=0.054). Despite the small sample of participants in this study, the correlations between sprint tests and most of the anaerobic power tests were moderate to very large, suggesting the further use of laboratory methods in TH. In addition, we observed that the magnitude of these correlations was dependent on the sprint distance, i.e. the highest correlations of jumping tests were noticed in 5 m and 10 m sprints, while the highest correlation of peak power of WAnT was in 20 m. Based on these findings, it was concluded that laboratory methods can be informative about a TH player’s sprint ability; however, this relationship varies according to sprint distance.
