Relação entre desempenho no ybalance e side hop tests e amplitude de dorsiflexão de atletas cheerleaders

Abstract

Introducing: Cheerleading, a sport in great expansion among the young people, being used in this practice a high complexity signs of artistic gymnastics, as a result the risk of injuries has grown. Consequently, means (tools) like the functional tests and the assessment of range of motion are used to evaluate the risk of injuries, assisting in the prevention and treatment process. Objective: Verify cheerleaders athletes’ level of correlation between the performance of YBalance and Side Hop tests, and the range of motion of dorsiflexion. Methodology: 72 male and female cheerleading athletes were selected, whom must have practiced cheerleading at least for a year. The athletes were divided in two groups: Female group (n=38) and male group (n=34). All athletes were evaluated in terms of the performance in the functional tests, YBalance and Side Hop, and measuring the ankle dorsiflexion using the Weight-Bearing Lunge test by means of the iHand Level software. For the analysis was evaluated the dominant lower limb. For all tests were held three measures and computed the average for statistical analysis. The relation between the groups, female and male, was made using the t-Student test for independent sample, and the correlation given by the Pearson's correlation test (r), being considered as excellent r higher than 0.6. For both tests, p ≤ 0.05 was considered significance level. Results: In the comparison between the functional tests groups, female group presented the worse performance only in Side Hop Test. In relation to the correlation, for both groups were verified a correlation between dorsiflexion and all directions of YBalance (r between 0.35 and 0.67). Conclusion: The amplitude of dorsiflexion affects the cheerleaders’ performance of YBalance Test. Therefore, improve dorsiflexion’s amplitude could raise the performance of YBalance Test.