A volleyball season is long and tiring for the female and male players. For most of the volleyball players, after the club season then continue with obligations in their national teams. The players are overwhelmed throughout the whole year and need to take extra care of themselves to stay healthy and avoid injuries. Volleyball players, except the libero, are exposed to numerous jumps when serving, blocking, setting or attacking.
Various studies on this specific topic were already carried out but none with the same database and methods of measuring. The master thesis focuses on the areas of injuries, the jump load for each playing position during training sessions and matches and correlation between jumps and injuries. Our study involves twenty-two players of the Japanese volleyball team JT Thunders: two setters, two opposites, nine receivers and nine middle blockers. During each training session, all players used a MyVert device, which allowed us to obtain the exact number and frequency of jumps. By monitoring the injuries and absences of players during the season, we were able to determine the relationship between injuries and jumps.
The analysis has shown that the overall injury incidence in the club is low and that the injury incidence during the training sessions is higher comparing to matches. We have concluded that most of the injuries are located in the pelvis and coccyx area, a few in the collarbone area, some in the knee, elbow, ankle and thigh areas and the least neck and sternum areas. The players with biggest number of jumps during training sessions are setters, followed by middle blockers, receivers and opposites. During the matches, setters made biggest number of jumps followed by opposites, middle blockers and receivers. We determined the relationship between jumps and injuries with Spearman's correlation coefficient and the results showed that there is no real connection between jumps and injuries.
These findings can help coaches in the future to start using such devices also in Slovenia to get better view on volleyball loads and also carry out more studies on this topic in the future. Our study can help coaches for better planning of trainings and monitoring the load of each player for prevention of injuries help trainers to improve their training process and have an easier job in monitoring the workload of each player and to prevent injuries.
|
