The Committee for Mountain Biking and BMX at the Cycling Association of Slovenia wanted to increase the emphasis on the development of cycling skills of young mountain bikers. That's why, as part of the Slovenian Cup in cross-country with mountain bikes, they started running a technical training ground for younger age categories. We compared the obtained results of two technical polygons, which were held at the competitions of the Slovenian Cross Country Cup. We wanted to find out whether training to improve cycling skills has an effect on improving the result on the technical training ground and to find out the impact of training to improve cycling skills in different age categories.
In the research participated 30 cyclists. The experimental group included 15 subjects from the club Strahci bike team. The control group of 15 subjects made up from other clubs in Slovenia. Test subjects in the experimental group regularly attended the training process of mountain biking, which took place twice a week for 90 minutes.
Assessment findings show statistically significantly improvement of cycling skills between the first and second measurements in the experimental group (20 points difference), while in the control group there was only a minor improvement between the first and second set of measurements (4 points difference). Final measurements showed greater progress in cycling skills in the older age categories, U11 and U13, while a smaller progress was found in the younger age categories, U7 and U9. Both in the experimental and control groups.
The purpose of the master's thesis was to prove the importance of learning cycling skills and developing motor skills on the bike through various exercises on the bike for children up to 13 years old. We wanted to show in what ways mountain biker trainers can upgrade the training of young mountain bikers to develop mastery of riding a bike.
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