Can pre-viewing sport specific video influence reactive agility response time?

The purpose of this study was to examine whether a video-based warm up could provide an acute performance benefit to response time for athletes within a sport specific agility task. Additionally, two learning strategies, explicit and implicit, were compared for their effectiveness in facilitating an improvement in sport-specific agility. Thirty male junior representative rugby union players (age range 14-16 years; mean age = 14.6 ± 1.09 years) were placed in three experimental groups (explicit, implicit and control) and completed two intervention sessions. Testing sessions included 'pre' intervention testing, completion of the video-based warm up intervention, and 'post' intervention testing. A 3D motion analysis system was used to assess response time within the testing battery. The athletes' response times of the pre- to post-intervention tests were compared to determine the effectiveness of the video-based warm up. Two-way general linear model with repeated measures analysis indicated that both the explicit (P = 0.030, d = 0.28) and implicit (P = 0.049, d = 0.33) groups significantly improved their response time by the intervention, compared to the control group (P = 0.367, d = 0.08). The mean post-intervention response time for the explicit group improved by 19.1% (from 0.246 s pre to 0.199 s post) and implicit group improved by 15.7% (from 0.268 s to 0.226 s). Findings suggest that a video-based warm up may provide an acute benefit to sport-specific agility performance for junior athletes.