Physiological, Anthropometric, and Motor Characteristics of Elite Chinese Youth Athletes From Six Different Sports

Conclusion The results of this study reveal that in Under-15 and Under-16 male athletes from a Chinese elite sport school in Shanghai, the between-sports differences in a battery of generic anthropometric, motor, and physiological tests allow one to distinguish more than two out of three young athletes’ talents according to their individual sport provenience, independent from the classification method (DA: 71.3%; MLP: 71.0%) used. Furthermore, the overall accuracy of the talent classification in the Chinese elite youth athletes corresponds to the level found in European studies. To allow for such kind of between-sports comparisons, it is necessary that talent identification programs consist of a multidisciplinary mixture of anthropometric, motor, psychological, or physiological testing methods of low specificity. The linear and nonlinear statistical methods that were used in parallel to identify the most relevant talent characteristics of each of the six sports by means of the leave-one-out procedure reversely confirmed the quality of the results. In regard to the relevance of the different sports-specific talent characteristics for talent identification campaigns in the practical fields of the six sports, the applied talent classification strategies underlined the importance of superior stature measures solely in volleyball. Besides longer Achilles tendons in swimmers and volleyball players, a more pronounced chest circumference was found in swimmers and judo athlete...
Source: Frontiers in Physiology - Category: Physiology Source Type: research