THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN HAMSTRING FLEXIBILITY AND PERFORMANCE OF ATHLETES IN SABARAGAMUWA UNIVERSITY OF SRI LANKA

Sports Exercise Sciences

Muscle tightness results from a decrease in the muscle's ability to deform, which in turn results in a restriction in the range of motion in the joint. The most frequent form of injury among athletes is a hamstring injury, which is caused by tight hamstring muscles. The aims of this study are to investigate if hamstring tightness is common in certain sports and whether body height, femoral length, and the duration of warm-up and cool-down periods are related to hamstring tightness. Eighty athletes underwent training before being tested and retested to see how tight their hamstring muscles were in both limbs. The left extremity's and the right extremity's reliability coefficients for test-and-retest measures were each. Stretch body stabilization techniques, a clearly defined end point of motion, and precise instrument positioning led to high dependability. Using the hip fixed at 90 ° flexion and the knee extended actively, the test measures the angle of knee flexion with a camera. The range for males is between left extremity knee flexion of 29.00° and right extremity knee flexion of 28.66°, and for women it is between left extremity knee flexion of 27.83° and right extremity knee flexion of 27.57°, according to the most recent statistics for both sexes. In this study 0.10299>0.05 for male athletes and 0.0950>0.05 for female athletes in P(T<=t) one-tail, P value higher than 0.05 is not statistically significant and indicates strong evidence for the null hypothesis. When taking the relationship between their sports performance and hamstring muscle tightness, it shows 0.9198 for female athletes and 0.8596 for male athletes. It indicates that the masculine side performs at a somewhat lower level than the female side in terms of performance. Compared to other evaluated categories of sports in the research, athletes who participate in contact sports had considerably higher prevalence rates of hamstring tightness. It was shown that there is no relationship between hamstring tightness and body height, femoral length, or the duration of warm-up and cool-down periods within the confines of this study. Therefore, for athletes who participate in contact sports, adopting precautionary steps to avoid hamstring tightness should be a high concern.

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