Anthropometric characteristics, body composition, and sports performance in wheelchair rugby athletes

Abstract

Introduction: The wheelchair rugby (WR) is an adapted sport for people with tetraplegia or tetra equivalence. With the increasing number and technical quality of the players, the identification of variables that may be related to a better sports performance is important in order to optimize the training and selection of athletes to the sport. Objective: To explore the association between sports skills, functional classification (FC) and anthropometric variables in WR players with spinal cord injury (SCI). Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted involving 14 players WR (34.4 ± 6.8 years; 8.9 ± 4.1 years of SCI and 4.4 ± 2.9 years of practice RCR). The sports skills of WR were investigated with the application Beck Battery, which is of five tests: pass accuracy, long-distance pass, ball handling, blocking performance and speed of 20 meters. Anthropometric measurements were: lengths, perimeters and skin folds. From these measurements were calculated fat-free mass, fat mass, sum of skinfolds and arm muscle circumference (AMC). The normal distribution of the data was verified by applying the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test. Before the application of linear regression, collinearity analysis was performed, avoiding insert variables that had high correlation with each other. Then, stepwise linear regression was made for each of the Beck Battery test. Results: The athletes presented fat percentage of 19.37 ± 3.53%; AMC 29.15 ± 3.37 cm; pass accuracy test: 23.29 ± 7.94 points; long distance pass test: 12.14 ± 4.26 points; ball handling test: 9.86 ± 2.45 points; blocking test: 33.86 ± 7.31 seconds; 20m speed test: 7.49 ± 1.62 seconds; among others. After collinearity analysis of 42 variables, only 21 were retained. The models showed that the CF is the variable that best explains the performance in precision tests (R2 = 0.71, SE = 4.27), long distance (R2 = 0.57, SE = 2.66) AMC that best explained the performance of management tests (R2 = 0.42; SE = 1.52) and ball speed of 20m (R2 = 0.55; SE = 0.83) and the volume weekly workout explained test performance blocking performance (R2 = 0.49, SE = 4.65). Conclusion: The AMC was the only anthropometric measure that was positively associated with performance on tests of 20m and ball handling, while testing precision and long distance seem to have a greater influence of the functional classification.