The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of three different court dimensions on the internal and external load during small-sided handball games. Six male amateur handball players took part in this study and participated in three different 8-min 3vs3 (plus goalkeepers) small-sided handball games (each repeated twice). The three court dimensions were 12×24m, 30×15m and 32×16m. Through...

The recent point-counter-point exchange arising from the article by Mendez-Villanueva and Buchheit (Mendez-Villanueva A, & Buchheit M. (2013) Football-specific fitness testing: adding value or confirming the evidence? Journal of Sports Sciences, 31, 1503-1508) generated an interesting debate on the real world utility of fitness testing in professional association football (soccer). In the prese...

Systematic assessment of muscle strength of the lower extremities throughout the annual training cycle in athletes is crucial from a performance perspective for the optimization of the training process, as well as a health perspective with regard to injury prevention. The main aim of the present study was to determine isokinetic muscle strength of the knee flexors and extensors in female handba...

The Eysenck′s personality questionnaire for evaluating extroversion-introversion, neuroticism, psychoticism and dissimulation was applied on the sample of 72 junior handball players, aged 17-18 yrs, with the purpose of establishing the differences between efficient and less efficient players according to their personality traits. The evaluation of competition performance was done on the basis o...

This study examined the distance covered and physiological effects of altering the number of players during small-sided games (SSG) in team handball. Twelve professional female handball players [24.6±3.7 years, 172±6.2 cm, 68.2 ± 9.9kg, 22.7 ± 2 kg/m2] participated in this study. The SSG were played, first with five on each side (SSG 5), then four (SSG 4), then three (SSG 3). Each game was four...

The purpose of this study was to examine the injury incidence and pattern of injuries in youth female and male team handball players using two different prospective registration methods; match reports (90 teams, 1080 players) and coach reports (34 teams, 428 players). A total of 118 injuries were recorded by the coach report, of which 93 (79%) were acute injuries (incidence training: 0.9+/-0.16...

Many team sports include complex human movement, which can be observed at different levels of detail. Some aspects of the athlete's motion can be studied in detail using commercially available high-speed, high-accuracy biomechanical measurement systems. However, due to their limitations, these devices are not appropriate for studying large-scale motion during a game (for example, the motion of ...

We aimed to establish the main morphological characteristics of Slovenian junior and senior national handball team players. Morphological characteristics for various player subgroups (goalkeepers, wings, back players and pivots) were also determined so as to establish whether they had distinct profiles. The subjects were 78 handball players who were members of the Slovenian junior and senior na...