Baseline Assessment High School Athlete: Normative Functional Movement Values

Abstract

A significant amount of research has aimed to understand ACL injuries, a common injury in high school athletes. It has yet to be determined how to best evaluate athletes’ injury risk. To accomplish this, we need functional movement and injury data for a cohort of athletes across time. PURPOSE: To determine functional movement quality in high school athletes and explore the impact of age, gender, single-sport participation on movement quality and changes over time. METHODS: 121 male (15.83±1.14 yo, 1.77±0.38m, 75.68±16.8kg) and 70 (15.95±1.19 yo, 1.63±0.08m, 59.04±8.78kg) female high school athletes were recruited to complete a Functional Movement Screen (FMS), a Landing Error Scoring (LESS) test, and a hop series including a single limb hop (SH) , triple hop (TH), crossover hop (CH) and a 6m timed hop. For the hop series, a limb symmetry index was calculated by: (Right/Left)*100%. SPSS was then used to determine if differences exist between the youngest 25% of athletes tested and the oldest 25%, sexes, or athletes of a single sport and athletes who participated in multiple high school sports using a t-test (α=0.05). Additionally, 42 athletes were re-tested 9.53±3.5 months after the first visit. A 2x2 repeated measures ANOVA (Gender: Male (n=25), Female (n=17); Time: Visit 1, Visit 2) to identify differences in the population over time (α=0.05). RESULTS: The males had higher symmetry on the single limb hop compared to the females. Additionally, the older students performed better on the LESS, SH, and CH. Between visits there was a significant increase in limb symmetry on the SH. CONCLUSION: Several differences exist between age groups, while only SH symmetry varied between genders and over time. This work provides a basic understanding of how high school athletes move and provides a data set to investigate injury risk.Single (SH), triple (TH), crossover (CH), interaction (I), sex (S), and visit (V) *p-value < 0.05. This study was funded by the National Federation of High School Sports.