A GENERAL EVALUATION ON ATHLETIC PERFORMANCE AND YO-YO INTERMITTENT RECOVERY TESTS

The purpose of this study was to conduct a Yo-Yo intermittent recovery (Yo-Yo IR) test and give a general evaluation of it on athletic performance. To measure the physiological characteristics of players and physical demands of the game played, there are many research methods widely used by trainers and academics of sports sciences, and applied in both laboratory and field environment in accordance with the nature of the sport. While some of these methods involve continuous exercises, some are intermittent. Intermittent sports are defined as sports which implement different types of exercise such as sprinting, walking or stopping of athletes continuously whose intensity changes during a competition. For this reason, Yo-Yo IR tests were developed as an intermittent field tests to measure the sport-specific endurance capacities of athletes who compete in intermittent sports. In these tests, athletes perform shuttle runs in which running speed is determined via auditory signals in a 2X20 m area. Between every shuttle run, players have a short recovery period by slowly walking or jogging and this short recovery period is an example of the exercise in a intermittent sport. It is possible to obtain information about endurance capacities of athletes in a short period of time using Yo-Yo IR tests. In addition, when compared with some laboratory tests ,which cannot be categorized as one of the intermittent sport such as continuous running, it has a high performance validity during a competition. When literature is reviewed, it can be seen that there are many studies dealing with the performance level, positional variability and seasonal performance changes of both female and male athletes in different sports . As a result, it can be suggested that Yo Yo tests are valid and accurate to determine the performance levels and differences among the players playing in different positions in a game along with the differences in physical capacity according to the periodical and seasonal changes.