Physical Performance Tests in Male and Female Sitting Volleyball Players: Pilot Study of Brazilian National Team

Sitting volleyball is a Paralympic team sport in which players use their upper limbs and hands to move and slide across the playing court. The objective of this study was to determine the differences in physical performance tests between the men and women of Brazilian sitting volleyball national team players. Fifteen sitting volleyball national team players, (seven men, age = 33.7 ± 6.2 years; body mass = 88.4 ± 21.4 kg; body height = 1.74 ± 0.36 m) and (eight women, age = 29.6 ± 8.3 years; body mass = 75.9 ± 17.1 kg; body height = 1.73 ± 0.08 m) with similar time and volume of training, participated in this study. As a physical performance evaluation, five test trials were conducted for each player which included (1) modified agility t-test (MAT), (2) speed & agility test (SAT), (3) speed & endurance test (SET), (4) seated chest pass (SCP) and (5) handgrip (HG). Data were analyzed for normality, using Shapiro-Wilk’s test, and then a student t-test was used to examine the discrepancy of performance tests among the male and female players. Cohen’s effect size (d) was calculated for each result. There were statistically significant differences, between the men and women of the Brazilian sitting volleyball players with higher values for men in MAT (27 %, P = 0.001), SAT (22 %, P = 0.008), SET (23 %, P = 0.008) and SCP (19 %, P = 0.03) scores. Results showed that male players had higher scores in the five performance tests, but according to the effect size calculations there was no significant difference between male players and female players in HG performance.