Abstract
Regularly assessing anaerobic power is important for athletes from sports with an explosive strength component. Understanding the differences and overlap between different assessment methods might help coaches or smaller-scale testing facilities maximize financial and temporal resources. Therefore, this study investigated the degree to which cycling sprint and vertical jump tests are interchangeable for determining peak mechanical leg power output in strength-trained athletes. Professional skiers (n = 19) performed unloaded squat jumps (SJ) and other jump forms on a force plate and a six-second cycling sprint (6sCS) test on an ergometer on six occasions over two years. Along with cross-sectional correlations between cycling and jumping power, correlations between longitudinal percent changes and agreement between magnitude-based inferences about individual changes were assessed. Among the tested jump forms, SJ reflected 6sCS best. However, despite extremely large cross-sectional correlation coefficients (0.92) between 6sCS and SJ, and moderate (Pearson’s r = 0.32 for 6sCS with SJ over one-year time spans) to large (r = 0.68 over shorter time spans) correlation coefficients on percent changes, magnitude-based inferences agreed in only around 50% of cases. Thus, for making qualitative assessments about the development of anaerobic power over time in athletes, cycling sprint and squat jump tests are not interchangeable. Rather, we recommend employing the test form that best reflects athletes’ strength and conditioning training.
Highlights
In various sports—certain track and field events and cycling disciplines, gymnastics, combat sports, and most game and snow sports—explosive actions, such as jumping, accelerating, changing direction, or launching an object or opponent, contribute crucially to performance [1,2,3,4,5,6]
Since the coupling of force and velocity implied here is well represented by mechanical power, and because the energy for muscle work during these short-duration actions is not generated aerobically, the ability can be referred to as muscular power [13] or anaerobic power [14]
Within the context of performance testing and the monitoring of athletic training, methods must be established for quantifying certain physical abilities considered to be relevant to a particular sports performance [15], to recognize changes in these over time induced by maturation, training, detraining, injury, and the like
Summary
In various sports—certain track and field events and cycling disciplines, gymnastics, combat sports, and most game and snow sports—explosive actions, such as jumping, accelerating, changing direction, or launching an object or opponent, contribute crucially to performance [1,2,3,4,5,6] Actions such as these depend heavily on the ability to generate muscle and external force at high velocities and within timespans ranging from several milliseconds to a few seconds [3,7,8,9,10,11]. The validity and reliability of both test forms are generally
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