Abstract:

Purpose: In this study, it was aimed to investigate the acute effects of different stretching methods on the speed, agility and bounce performances of handball players. Method: The study included 15 male handball players (age: 15.86 ± 1.06 years; height: 181.90 ± 6.26 cm; weight: 78.18 ± 15.10 kg; body mass index (BMI): 23.64 ± 4.39 kg.m-2; sports age: 7.33 ± 2.05 years) participated voluntarily. The players applied three different stretching protocols: control (no stretching), static and dynamic stretching on non-consecutive days. Handball players performed three stretching protocols for the lower extremities (control, dynamic and static) after 5 minutes of aerobic stretching. The protocols consisted of a 5-minute aerobic warm-up, a 20-second warm-up program for each muscle group for a total of 6 minutes, followed by speed, agility and vertical jump tests. The analysis of data was made using SPSS 18 analysis program. The Repeated Measures ANOVA test was used for the analysis of significance between different warm-up methods. Post-Hoc Bonferroni test was applied to find the difference between the groups. Results: As a result of the study, a statistically significant difference was found between the control and dynamic stretching groups compared to the static stretching group in terms of speed, agility and jump performance (p<0.05). Conclusion: In this study, it was found that among the different warm-up methods applied to handball players, static warm-up practices decreased the speed, agility and jumping performances of the athletes. It can be recommended to use dynamic warm-up methods to provide better performance before the studies on speed, agility and jumping characteristics including explosive movements to be applied to athletes.

Keywords: