SE Academic Review 2023

51 ACADEMIC REVIEW 2023

“ flexibility training may be done to

Research question: What is the effect of a stretching programme on performance in adolescent girl hockey players? This question is worthy of investigation because it is important to understand if a stretching programme does improve hockey performance significantly in young adolescent girl hockey players and to inform coaches of the findings. They can then decide if they want to incorporate a stretching programme into their team’s training programme. The methodology used to answer this question was to conduct my own experiment using a group of adolescent girl hockey players to discover whether a stretching programme does improve hockey performance affected my performance. Whilst my coach’s advice, elite performers’ behaviour and scientific research suggests that I should stretch regularly to improve performance as well as the IB Sports Science textbook note that ‘flexibility training may be done to increase flexibility in order to improve the performance of a sporting technique’ (Sproule, 2012). I feel as though it has not brought when you go through puberty as ‘little stretching can lead to muscle tears or strains and may also inhibit sports performance’ (Stanford Children’s Health, 2021). However, another study investigated the effects of stretching on performance indicators such as power and sprinting in adolescents, boys and girls, and found out that ‘static stretching significantly negates sprinting performance and explosive power in adolescents’ (Giorgos, et al., 2013). Therefore I wanted to specifically discover the effect of a stretching programme on sports performance in adolescents, and not adults, to see if stretching really does benefit young people significantly. I have had my own strength and conditioning programme which incorporates a stretching programme for general sport for a couple of years, for an hour, weekly. I was 13 - 15 years old, when I first did the strength and conditioning programme. I stopped for a year or two as I didn’t think there was a significant difference in my performance, however, I am not sure if this in turn negatively

about any significant change to my performance. This has inspired me to investigate the effect of a stretching programme in the long term rather than immediately before performance. Stretching is commonly seen as a way to prevent injury but not to improve performance by the muscles becoming more elastic. This is the reason I want to focus specifically on the impact on performance rather than injury prevention. This has led me to formulate the following research question. increase flexibility in order to improve the performance of a sporting technique ”

significantly, using agility, power and speed as the key performance indicators. I also used similar previous research such as that of Giorgos, et al., to help devise my own experiment.

My hypothesis is that the intervention of the stretching programme will increase hockey performance.

My null hypothesis is that the intervention of the stretching programme will have no change on hockey performance.