Comparison of static and dynamic balance in amateur male athletes

Since training adaptations follows specificity principle, balance may be different in various sports. The aim of this study was to investigate the balance specificity. The participants were 72 male collegiate that competed in Iranian Students Sport Olympiad. Subjects were selected from football, wrestling, gymnastics, martial arts and weightlifting sports. All subjects were ready for testing at 2 pm in various sports groups in six consecutive days. After 5-minute warm-up and doing stretching exercises, static and dynamic balance tests were done by ‘Balance Error Scoring System’ (SEBT) and ‘Y Balance test’ (YBT), respectively. The results of one-way ANOVA and Tukey TEST analyses showed that Gymnastics toped the groups in static balance scoring 7.87 ± 3.11, followed by martial arts (10.12 ± 1.62); soccer (14.16 ± 4.79); Wrestling (18.12 ± 6.20); Basketball (19.12 ± 2.34), and Weight lifting (20.25 ± 2.03). The differences between Basketball-Weight lifting; basketball-Wrestling; Soccer-Wrestling; Soccer-martial arts; Weight lifting-Wrestling; and martial arts-Gymnastics were not significant. The same analyses results for the dynamic balance ranked martial arts (352.10 ± 20.82); Wrestling (342.81 ± 15.28); Soccer (338.75 ± 19.55); Gymnastics (333.46 ± 18.45); Weight lifting (309.84 ± 4.89), and basketball (289.27 ± 10.76). The differences between Soccer-Wrestling; Soccer- martial arts; Soccer-Gymnastics; Wrestling- martial arts; Wrestling-Gymnastics, and martial arts-Gymnastics were not significant (α = 0/05). The present study showed that balance performance similar to lots of other exercise performances is specific to the sport type.