Can you remember what those Venn diagrams mean from your school days? Let’s try and make some sense of the figure. Hewit et al (2012) looked at the jump performance of a National Under 21 netball team. Some results from this study are detailed in the table, which shows the R2 or shared variance the tests have with each other. In layman’s terms the R2 is how much one test has in common with the other and all you do is square the correlation coefficient (r) to get the R2 value. The tests that had the least in common with each other were the vertical (V) and horizontal (H) jumps distance/height at 0.12 or 12% and the most shared variance, was found between H and lateral (L) single-leg countermovement (SLCM) jump. This makes sense as both jumps are jumping for distance rather than height. Nonetheless, they only have 46% in common and the other tests 12 and 13%, indicating that these tests have more that is uncommon and therefore are measuring relatively independent qualities of each other.

So what are the take home messages? Are asymmetries planar specific? Are the results similar across different sporting cohorts? What do individual results look like instead of averaged? Check this free resource (https://lnkd.in/gEY6AzRi) to find out more about multidirectional jumping asymmetry?