Reactive Agility Tests for Team Contact Sports: A Systematic Review
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.37134/jsspj.vol13.2.3.2024Keywords:
reactive agility, agility, team sports, skilled players, less skilled playersAbstract
In team sports performance evaluation, reactive agility is one of the important factors that is able to discriminate the performance between elite and amateur athletes from their knowledge and expertise in the sports. Athletes in team sports should be able to adapt the real game situations and quickly plan their movement and action. In this sense, there is a growing number of interests in the factors influencing reactive agility performance due to training strategies and suitable training protocols. Therefore, this systematic literature review was carried out to summarize literature on reactive agility test (RAT) for team contact sports and offer sport coaches the best recommendations to develop and assess the agility quality of their athletes. An electronic database search was conducted to gather literature involving reactive agility tests used for discriminating skilled and less skilled athletes, irrespective of the design protocols. This is because, physical qualities are not the only factors that could differentiate an athlete’s skill level, but also cognitive qualities or decision-making ability. After filtration, only 12 articles from over the past decade were found to meet the inclusion criteria for valid RAT. From this study, three RAT designs, namely VRAT (a live-size video projection of an opponent), LSRAT (an in-situ live-size stimulus design), and LIRAT (a light stimulus design) were identified. All the three RAT designs were able to discriminate skilled and less skilled athletes and were more reliable in testing the athletes’ agility compared to pre-planned agility tests. Therefore, the athletes’ perception and response time could be improved using sport specific reactive agility testing. For future research, more complex and specific environments that challenge the athletes’ performance should be considered.
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Copyright (c) 2024 Fitry Azrul Bin Nor Saafri , Associate Professor Halijah Binti Ibrahim
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