A study of female tennis players: Speedcourt training is effective on improving agility and change-of-direction

TL;DR

Speedcourt training improves agility and change-of-direction in female tennis players, with random sequence training showing better results.

Contribution

This study is among the first to investigate Speedcourt training effects on agility and unilateral explosive power in female athletes.

Findings

Speedcourt training significantly improved agility and change-of-direction in female tennis players.

Random sequence training led to greater improvements in reactive agility compared to fixed sequence training.

Agility tests showed moderate to strong correlations with lower limb unilateral explosive power.

Abstract

The aim of the present paper was to determine the impact of Speedcourt training on agility and change-of-direction (COD) in female tennis players, and to research the relevance between agility and lower limbs unilateral explosive power (UEP). Despite extensive research on agility training, limited studies have explored these effects specifically in female athletes and the number of exercises such as Speedcourt is also small, necessitating this investigation.

Twenty-two female tennis players underwent SpeedCourt training for 6 weeks, respectively executed random sequence shuttle run training (RS group, N = 11, age: 22.36 ±  1.21 years) and fixed sequence shuttle run training (FS group, N = 11, age: 22.27 ± 1.27 years). The spider run, T-drill, reactive agility (RA) and triple crossover hop (TCH) before and after intervention were measured. And the TCH tested the left and right legs separately to detect the subject’s UEP.

The two-way repeated measures analysis of variance showed significant improvements in spider run (p < 0.001, partial η2 = 0.95), T-drill (p < 0.001, partial η2 = 0.94) and RA (p < 0.001, partial η2 = 0.96). The RS group demonstrated significantly greater improvements in RA compared to the FS group, with statistical significance (p < 0.05, partial η2 = 0.184). And agility related tests showed moderate to strong correlations with unilateral explosive power.

Six-week Speedcourt training can effectively enhance the agility and change-of-direction of female tennis players. Incorporating lower limb explosive exercises into agility-specific training may further enhance agility improvements in female tennis players.

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