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Category

Injury prevention

Document Type

Paper

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to determine the movement variability associated with a novel custom built horizontal eccentric towing (HET) device. HET involves the athlete trying to move forwards whilst being pulled backwards. The variables of interest were the impulse, peak (PHEF), and mean (MHEF) horizontal eccentric force. Ten elite female field hockey players were tested on four occasions, each of which were separated by seven days. During each session, participants were required to perform three isokinetic maximal effort trials at 0.8 m/s over a distance of 10 m. The data from the three trials was averaged and the change in mean (CM), coefficient of variation (CV), and intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) were quantified across the four testing occasions. There were large percent CMs for all three variables in initial testing (8.51% - 20.5%), this change reducing with latter testing (T4 - T3 = 1.41% - 8.47%), indicating a systematic learning effect. The between sessions CVs for all three variables ranged from 5.59% to 12.9%, the greatest variability associated with the first testing occasions (10.1% to 12.2%) and the least variability noted with the latter T4-T3 testing (5.59% to 8.49%). Only one ICC was less than 0.70 (T3-T2) and by the T4-T3 comparison all ICCs were greater than 0.85. This study concludes that two familiarisation sessions are required for the HET device in order to obtain reliable MHEF and impulse variables.

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