Gender-specific issues for sport preparedness of elite female athletes in team sport games

Abstract

Purpose. The goal of this study was to identify gender-specific issues of sports training to assist in the planning of training and competition loads of female elite athletes in team sport games. Material and methods. Bibliometric techniques were applied in this study to gather highly cited papers in sport sciences published during 2005-2022. The method of expert evaluations was used to determine the modern problems of female elite sports. To determine the model characteristics of the optimal psychophysiological state and balance function of elite male versus female athletes during physical exercises, two independent groups 17 women and 24 men were compared, elite athletes from such sport games, as: basketball (women, n=10 and men, n=14), handball (women, n=3 and men, n=5) and volleyball (women, n=4 and men, n=5). Mathematical and statistical processing and data analysis were carried out using the computing and graphic capabilities of the computer programs "Statistica" and Microsoft Excel 2010. Results. The analysis of sports scientific literature regarding gender-specific issues and the experts' analytical notes allowed us to obtain information about the main problems, such as: using male models of physical preparation at the training process for women. We determined that the psychophysiological functions for men and women have very particular gender-specific characteristics. For men, it is a predominance of attention, and for women, mobility and strength of nervous processes, respectively. As for the ratio of the quality of the equilibrium function of elite athletes without and with visual control, significantly higher indicators are observed for women (0,98 ± 0,02, p<0,05) compared to the group of men (0,78 ± 0,06, p<0,05). Conclusions. The research results obtained by us when comparing the psychophysiological and biomechanical indicators of elite athletes of different gender groups provide reliable information about the need to build different approaches in planning special physical loads for female and male athletes in sport games.