Auditory and visual single reaction span in surfers with different ability levels: comparison of professional, amateur athletes and surf practitioners

The reaction span RS (RTS) represents the level of neuromuscular coordination in which the visual, auditory or touch stimuli are decodified by the body through different physical-chemical and mechanical processes. The aim of this research was to identify the auditory and visual RTS in professional and amateur surfers as well as surf practitioners to verify whether there are statistical differences among the surfers groups as well as to correlate the reaction span with the athletes’ performance. 103 surfers participated in this study: 42 professional male athletes (Brazilian and foreign); 11 professional female athletes; 25 amateur college student athletes, and 25 surf practitioners. Data collection was conducted at the beaches where the following events took place: WQS (World Qualifying Series, world circuit phase); Supersurf (Professional Surfing Brazilian championship phase); CCSU (catarinense college surf circuit phase). The following instruments were used: a switch with a button of 0.8 (N) sensibility; a L.E.D. for visual stimulus; two loudspeakers with 315 (Hz) of frequency and 81 (db) of sound pressure for auditory stimulus, as well as an electronic device with the aim to generate the auditory, visual and synchronism signal. The data acquisition was performed with the use of the SAD software version 32. Statistically significant differences were found for the auditory and visual RTS between the professional (male) versus practitioners and professional (female) versus practitioners. Statistically significant differences were found between the amateurs versus practitioners only for the visual RTS, with lower RTS for the more experienced ones. A positive correlation was found for the visual RTS between the professional (female) athletes versus the ranking.