Caracterização morfológica, físico/motora e maturacional de jovens atletas mirins feminino de atletismo

Abstract

Recently, there has been growing the interest in identifying and analyzing morphological, physical / motor and maturational characteristics, as well as its changes in children and adolescents placed in systematic training in various sports. The knowledge of these characteristics is important for coaches and researchers to have endpoints of the young athlete development during longterm training process. In the literature, there are no studies who performed extensive characterization of young female athletes from athletics belonging to the junior category (13 to 15 years old), with specific tests for the modality. Thus, were aims of the study to describe the profile and draw up a percentile table of morphological, physical/motor, maturational and junior athletics athletes' specific tests and verify the the effects of biological maturation and sporting potential in the analyzed variables. Were assessed 105 young athletics's athletes, from 9 teams, belonging to the junior category. The assessment protocol was developed on two consecutive days. In the first day, it was held the anamnesis, anthropometry (body weight, height, sitting height, wingspan and skin folds), anaerobic test Running-Based Anaerobic Sprint Test (RAST) and the tests of shot put, long jump, 800m racing and a questionnaire for the coach to evaluate the sporting potential of each athlete. In the second day, was assessed the flexibility (Sit and Reach) vertical jump (Jumping Against Movement and Squat Jump), medicine ball throw, speed (60m racing) and maximal aerobic speed (Léger-Boucher test). The biological maturation was assessed by the predicted stature percentile. Based on these results we were prepared 2 articles. Article 1 - Were developed two tables: one with a percentile result of all the athletes and another with mean and standard deviation divided by the results of tests group, in which its demonstrated that the slinger are different from other athletes. In physical/motor variables significant differences were observed between the groups only on flexibility and fatigue index and in the specific tests was observed significant difference 60m racing, long jump and 800m racing. Article 2 - When the athletes were divided by maturation stage, were found significant differences only in the anthropometric variables and in the shot put. The athletes with high potential had higher height, leg length and wingspan, and lower BMI and sum of skinfold thickness compared to athletes  with medium and low sporting potential. The maturational stage is not linked to the potential assessment done by the coach. It is concluded that the morphological and physical/motor characteristics seems to be important differentiators factors between the sports modalities. In athletics, the junior launchers are different from the other groups in some morphological variables and in the specific tests, being all these groups similar to each other. Maturation is a factor that interferes only in the anthropometric variables and shot put. There is no association between the performance potential of athletes, assessed by the coach with the maturational stage.