Effects of Plyometric Exercises on Neuromuscular Coordination among Young Male Basketball Players

Abstract

The purpose of this quasi-experimental study was to compare the effects of plyometric exercises on neuromuscular coordination in adolescent male basketball players before, after week 4, and after week 8. The 16 samples were collected after determining the sample size and using systematic random sampling to estimate the mean population once the population size was known. The experimental instrument was a plyometric exercise program performed 3 days per week for 8 weeks, as determined by the index of consistency (IOC) of 1.00. The tools used for data collection were standard: the eye-hand coordination test and the SEMO test; the Pearson simple correlation coefficients were 0.892 and 0.795, respectively. Descriptive statistics were percentage, mean and standard deviation, and inferential statistics, including one-way analysis of variance with repeated measures, and the Friedman test. Statistical significance was set at the 0.05 level. The results found that one-way analysis of the variance of change of direction and eye-hand coordination during pretraining showed that after the 4th week and after the 8th week, the differences were statistically significant. When the paired averages were compared, it was discovered that both the direction change speed and the eye-hand coordination were significantly increased prior to training, after the fourth week of training, and after the eighth week of training.