The Brazilian volleyball teams have obtained great performances at international level. Recently Brazil won The Junior World Championship for Male Volleyball held in Morocco. The athletes follow and very strong program of training for this competition. During this period and according to the macrocycle, a battery of test is applied in order to verify the level of training-induced adaptations on variables important to perform this game. The main objective of this study was to verify how the athletes adapted after 8 weeks of training developed before the world championship. Methods: The sample was composed of 10 male athletes (Age: 19.4±0.6 years; Height: 1.97±0.9 m; Weight: 93.9±1.4 kg). The study was approved by the university human ethics committee and all subjects signed an informed consent document. The battery of tests was applied 8 weeks apart (Test 1 and Test 2) and included Anthropometric measures, medicine-ball Throw, shuttle-run test, squat jump, contermovement jump and two specific tests for height of spike and block reach. The data was analyzed by descriptive statistics and a Paired t test was used to compare all the group of means. The significance level was set at p≤0.05. Results: The results showed that SJ (T1: 41.1±3.8 cm-T2: 36.7±3.4 cm - p=0.00) and CMJ (T1: 44.2±4.0-T2: 40.8±3.9 cm - p=0.02) presented means that were statistically significant but with a decrease of performance. On the hand, the medicine-ball throw (T1: 7.09±0.8 m-T2: 7.09±0.6 m - p=.993), the shuttle-run test (T1: 6.77±0.28 s-T2: 6.90±0.13 s - p=.159), the height of spike reach (T1: 3.37±0.20 m-T2: 3.35±0.20 m - p=.132) and the height of block reach (T1: 3.13±0.17 m-T2: 3.12±0.16 m - p=.435) did not present any statistical significance. Discussion: The importance on testing elite athletes is that the results not always are according to those verified in the literature. The way human body adapts to the training loads requires frequent studies. Particularly, these results may infer that 8 weeks of training did not influence the performance of the athletes. But some aspects must be considered: First: the moment that the battery of test was applied (one day before departure to Morocco) when some athletes performed the tests with excessive care trying to prevent any injury and Second: The week before the test 8 athletes of the team was under a strong cold which probably have affected their performance during the test. Thus, when evaluating athletes there are some aspects that can not be controlled by the researcher such as health and psychological status that affects them at specific moments of the macrocycle.
© Copyright 2009 14th annual Congress of the European College of Sport Science, Oslo/Norway, June 24-27, 2009, Book of Abstracts. Veröffentlicht von The Norwegian School of Sport Sciences. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.