Effect of four weeks of hard physical training on certain physiological and morphological parameters of basket-ball players

Abstract

The study was undertaken to see the effect of hard physical training on certain physiological and morphological parameters of the 15 national basketball players and also to locate the deviations from the normal progression if any during the training period. Training of 4 weeks of duration resulted in the appearance of established symptoms of overtraining in 5 subjects of this study who recorded a deterioration in aerobic power, weight, lean body mass, resting pulse and recovery with training. The rest of the 10 subjects benefitted well from the same training schedules. The observations of this study suggest that the intensive training should be accompanied by some periodic tests to locate any derangement in the body systems occuring as a result of training and thus emphasizes the individualisation of training schedules for the sportsmen. It was interesting to observe that the plateau in systolic blood pressure or its increase during recovery after a standard work occured in only those 5 individuals who were found to show the established symptoms of overtraining and thus implying thereby that Paparo's recovery test (1970) can also be used as a test to check the physiological state of the sportsmen.