EFFECT OF DYNAMIC BALANCE TRAINING ON AGILITY IN MALE BASKETBALL PLAYERS

Abstract

Background: Athletes focus their training on two major goals, i.e., avoidance of the injury and increasing the performance. Balance training has been widely used in competitive sports to improve the balance and thus reduce the risk of injury, for example, ligamentous sprains, which are very common in Basketball. On the other hand, various drills are being used to improve the performance parameters such as agility. Our effort is to find out an exercise program which focuses on balance training and see whether it has any effect on agility.
Methods: The study design was a Pretest-Posttest Control-Group Design. 30 healthy school level Male Basketball Players were selected from V-One Basketball Academy, Don Bosco Basketball Academy, Modern School Basketball Academy, New Delhi. They were randomly divided into two groups. Group A performed dynamic balance training 3 sessions per week for 4 weeks. Group B performed conventional exercises throughout the duration of the study. Outcome measure, i.e., T- test was measured pre and post 4 week period.
Results: Data analysis was done by Independent t test and Paired t test for between group analysis and within group analysis respectively. There was a significant reduction in T-test times in the experimental group as compared to the control group (‘p’ value <0.05) while there was no significant improvement in the control group.
Conclusion: Four weeks of dynamic balance training significantly improved agility as detected by T-test. Thus it can be concluded that the used protocol can be incorporated in the training regimes to reduce the risk of injury as well as improve the performance.