Comparative Analysis of Motor Fitness Components Among School-Level Athletes Participating in Different Sports

Abstract

Motor fitness has various dimensions and sport participation during adolescence may have different performance profiles. This study examines six motor fitness components among school-level athletes participating in athletics, football, basketball, and volleyball. The research used a quantitative comparative cross-sectional design and a synthetic dataset. The dataset included 120 participants (aged between 14 and 17 years) with 30 participants in each sport. The dataset included 50-m sprint, 4 × 10-m shuttle run, standing broad jump, sit-ups, sit-and-reach, and 600-m run. The same participant-level dataset was used to perform analysis. Descriptive statistics, Shapiro–Wilk tests, Levene tests, one-way analysis of variance, Tukey HSD, and eta-squared were used for computing. Significant differences between sport types were noted for speed, agility, explosive-leg power, flexibility, and cardiovascular endurance, however, there were no significant differences for muscular endurance. Athletics dominated the 50-m sprint and the 600-m run, football showed the best agility, basketball and volleyball exhibited better explosive power, and volleyball showed best flexibility. The largest effect of sport was on explosive leg power. Post hoc analyses showed that most of these differences were between sports that had different demands on locomotor systems and jumping compared to all other comparisons. These findings demonstrate that school-level athletes have sport-specific motor fitness, and support multidimensional analysis of motor fitness when designing conditioning programs for talent development and physical education.