Relationship Between Resting Heart Rate And Yo-Yo Intermittent Recovery Test Performance In Elite Badminton Players

Abstract

Monitoring daily changes in resting heart rate is widely recognized by athletes as an objective measure to estimate physical condition. It has not been well examined, however, whether changes in athletes' resting heart rate indeed associate with changes in their physical condition test performance. In the Japanese national badminton team, Yo-Yo intermittent recovery (YYIR) test has been continuously used to evaluate the players' basic physical condition essential for performing competitive badminton. In this study, we examined a relationship between changes in resting heart rate and changes in YYIR test performance in elite Japanese badminton players. PURPOSE: To examine whether changes in resting heart rate associate with changes in Yo-Yo intermittent recovery test performance in international-class badminton players. METHODS: Fifteen Japanese national badminton team players (23.3+3.1 yrs) volunteered to participate in the study. The subjects performed YYIR test twice in three months during the national team training camps. In each test, total running distances were recorded. In addition, resting heart rate (HR-rest) were collected in the morning before each YYIR test. The subjects were also asked to fill in a questionnaire in which they estimated their subjective feeling of fatigue on a visual analog scale. HR-rest and the scorings of subjective feeling of fatigue were respectively compared between the higher and the lower performed YYIR tests. RESULTS: First, in the morning of the higher performed YYIR test, HR-rest were significantly lower than those in the morning of the lower performed YYIR test (54.3+1.6 vs. 57.7+1.3 beats/min, p<0.01). Moreover, differences in HR-rest between the higher and the lower performed YYIR tests correlated negatively with differences in total running distance between the higher and the lower performed YYIR tests (r=-0.79, p<0.001). In contrast, no significant difference were observed in the scorings of subjectively perceived fatigue between the higher and the lower performed YYIR tests (58.1+5.2 vs. 62.2+4.2 mm, p=0.25). CONCLUSION: Measuring daily changes in resting heart rate might be efficient for elite badminton players to objectively monitor physical condition that underlie their sport performance.