Functional asymmetries of the lower limbs of young soccer players in specific motor skills as well as in small side games

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Functional asymmetries are known as differences in control capacity between the right and left sides of the body.
OBJECTIVE: to evaluate the functional asymmetries of young soccer players when performing specific football skills in isolation, as in a context of small-sided games, and also to verify the relationship between specific skills and performance in the Small-Sided Game.
METHODS: Forty players aged 12 to 15 participated in the study (13.8±1.1 years; 40.9±8.1 kg; 1.52±0.1 m) belonging to a Mozambican soccer club in the city of Maputo, which competes locally in the youth categories. To evaluate functional asymmetries, the following were applied: tests of specific soccer motor skills and small-sided games. To identify lateral dominance, the protocol by Hoffman et al. (1988) was applied and self-report. For data analysis, descriptive statistics, the paired Student test, the Wilcoxon test (in cases of violation of normality assumptions) and Person's correlation coefficient were used.
RESULTS: The main results reveal that the players evaluated the evaluated players performed better with their dominant lower limb in dribbling, passing and game actions, with a significant negative relationship between dribbling ability with the dominant limb and the Small-Sided Game context.
CONCLUSION: Therefore, it can be concluded that participants are asymmetrical, supporting the hypothesis of the influence of environmental factors, which begin in the early years of life, with the cessation of the cephalocaudal law and the beginning of the proximal-distal law, as well as the amount of practice with the dominant limb, as is the case with soccer.