The Journal of Sports Medicine and Physical Fitness 2021 Feb 22

DOI: 10.23736/S0022-4707.21.12084-5

Copyright © 2021 EDIZIONI MINERVA MEDICA

lingua: Inglese

Agility training in volleyball: a systematic review

Matteo BONATO ¹ ✉, Maria Chiara DE CAPITANI ², Giuseppe BANFI ^{1, 3}

¹ IRCCS Istituto Ortopedico Galeazzi, Milan, Italy; ² Department of Biomedical Sciences for Health, Università degli Studi di Milano, Milan, Italy; ³ Vita-Salute San Raffaele University, Milan, Italy

BACKGROUND: Volleyball is an intermittent, extremely dynamic and open-skill team sport in which players perform a variety of acyclic movements while constantly changing game situation. The purpose of this systematic review was to provide a summary of the research that has examined intervention strategies to improve agility performance in volleyball and to synthesise the tests used to evaluate agility in volleyball.
METHODS: A systematic review was performed in PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar with titles, abstracts, and full texts that were analysed according to predefined inclusion criteria to find relevant studies. Moreover, the methodological quality of the studies selected was assessed.
RESULTS: Twelve studies (n = 348 participants) were included. The selected studies had a methodological quality rated poor-to-moderate (average score of 3.9, range: 1 to 6). Results showed that of all the training interventions, plyometric-based training present the greatest improvement in agility (average of 7.7%). Moreover, the agility T-test was the most used test.
CONCLUSIONS: In light of the poor-to-moderate methodological quality, there is a need for developing specific
longitudinal and controlled studies with the aim of studying the effect of diversified training interventions on
the development of agility in volleyball players.

KEY WORDS: Training; Testing; Coaching; Performance; Musculoskeletal