1. The effect of sport specific tasks in hockey on planned and unplanned agility.
Philip McMorris
Introduction: The importance of agility in sport has been well documented and researched in many different sports such as netball, Aussie Rules Football and rugby league (Sheppard and Young, 2006). However hockey has not been looked at despite its popularity around the world, and little is known about the effect of game related equipment on agility. This study examined the effect of game related equipment when completing planned (prior knowledge of the path) and unplanned (reaction to stimuli) agility runs.
Aim: To assess the effect that sport specific tasks have on the planned and unplanned agility of hockey players. To find if there was a relationship between sport specific and non-sport specific agility. To see if there is a relationship between planned and unplanned agility.
Method: Eleven male amateur university level hockey players (20.5±1.3 years, 1.80±0.07 m, 71.3±12.9 kg) completed planned (PLAN) and unplanned (UNPLAN) agility runs with 3 conditions; run without a stick or ball, running with a hockey stick and run whilst dribbling the ball. Subjects ran a 15m course, through three sets of timing gates. The set up was adapted from the study conducted by Oliver and Meyers (2009) and is shown in Figure 1. For PLAN, participants ran a pre-determined path. For UNPLAN the direction of the turn was indicated by the third set of timing gates. Split times for the first 5 metres and second 10 metres and total time was recorded. A repeated measures ANOVA examined for differences, while Pearson’s correlation examined for associations between the tests with significance level set at P<0.05.
Figure 1. Diagram of the experimental set up used during the testing.
Results: Significant differences were found between PLAN and UNPLAN total times for each of the 3 conditions and the time taken to complete the 10m run. For the first 5m, no significant difference (P>0.05) was found between RUN and STICK. Significant differences were found between RUN and BALL (P=0.003), and STICK and BALL (P=0.003).
The players also had a longer completion time for BALL compared to both RUN (P=0.001) and STICK (P=0.001), but no significant difference was found between RUN and STICK.
Moderate correlations were found between planned RUN and STICK and unplanned RUN and BALL (r=0.664 and r=0.647, respectively). No other correlations were found.
Table 1. Correlation values for the total time taken
Conditions
Correlation Values
PR – PS Total
0.664
PR – PB Total
-0.100
PS – PB Total
0.364
PR – UnPR Total
0.155
PS – UnPS Total
0.464
PB – UnPB Total
0.945
UnPR – UnPS Total
0.218
UnPR – UnPB Total
0.647
UnPS – UnPB Total
0.213
Figure 2. Mean times taken to complete the whole 15 metres of the test for each condition.
Conclusion: These findings can help planning agility training sessions to accurately reflect match situations, and support the use of sport specific testing for more accurate performance prediction.
Discussion: The results show that players took longer to complete the agility run in UNPLAN compared to PLAN, for all conditions.
Only a moderate correlation was found between RUN and STICK for PLAN, as well as between RUN and BALL in UNPLAN. A strong correlation was found across PLAN and UNPLAN for the BALL condition.
The increase in the time taken to complete the trials were caused by both the sport specific task of dribbling the hockey ball and the reaction that takes place in the unplanned trial.
References: Oliver, J. and Meyers, R. (2009) ‘Reliability and Generality of Measures of Acceleration, Planned Agility, And Reactive Agility’, International journal of sports physiology
and performance., 4(3), pp. 345–54.
Sheppard, J.M., Young, W.B., Doyle, T.L.A., Sheppard, T.A. and Newton, R.U. (2006) ‘An Evaluation of a New Test of Reactive Agility and Its Relationship to Sprint Speed and Change of
Direction Speed’, Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport, 9(4), pp. 342–349.