Abstract
As the popularity of competitive youth sports has increased, so has the sports performance training industry. There is a growing need to understand and quantify responses to sports performance training in the youth populations, yet little research is available on this topic. PURPOSE: To determine the amount of change that occurs in youth athletes in jumping and agility sports performance tests following a period of sports performance training. We further attempted to determine whether an athlete's initial values for these sports performance tests can be used to predict the amount of change associated with a period of sports performance training. METHODS: A retrospective study of sports performance training records of 199 youth athletes between the ages 9 and 17 (mean age 14.03 years). Subjects participated in a variety of sports including football, basketball, baseball, and volleyball. All subjects underwent initial testing consisting of vertical jump (VJ), broad jump (BJ), shuttle run (SR), and t-test (TT) sports performance measures. After a period of individualized performance training over approximately an 8-week period, all subjects underwent the same testing again. Scores were analyzed using paired t-tests (alpha= 0.05) and regression analysis. RESULTS: There was a statistically significant improvement in the mean scores on all tests (p<0.001). The mean increase in jumping tests was 3.6 cm (9.35%) for the VJ and 11.2 cm (6.84%) for the BJ. Agility tests revealed an improvement of 0.207 seconds (3.78%) for SR, and an improvement of 0.684 seconds (5.61%) for TT. Regression analysis revealed that 24.2% of the variance in VJ improvement and 12.3% of BJ improvement was explained by pretraining values, with lower initial values resulting in more improvement. For the agility tests, pretraining values explained 10.1% of SR and 18% TT respectively. CONCLUSIONS: VJ, BJ, SR, and TT performance increased in youth athletes following a period of sports performance training. Youth athletes less skilled in jumping and running agility tend to benefit more from sports performance training.
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