Andreas Konrad1,2 & Florian Kurt Paternoster2
1Institute of Human Movement Science, Sport and Health, Graz University, 8010 Graz, Austria
2Associate Professorship of Biomechanics in Sports, Technical University of Munich, 80992 Munich, Germany
This article belongs to the Special Issue Applied Biomechanics: Sport Performance and Injury Prevention II
While the main contributor for drop jump (DJ) performance is the calf muscle–tendon unit (MTU), for countermovement jump (CMJ) performance, it is the quadriceps MTU. However, to date, it is not clear if the muscle and/or tendon stiffness of the respective MTUs can be related to DJ or CMJ performance. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate the relationships between DJ and CMJ performance parameters and tissue stiffness (i.e., muscle stiffness, tendon stiffness) of the calf MTU and quadriceps MTU, respectively. Consequently, with 16 healthy volunteers, the tissue stiffness of the gastrocnemius medialis (GM), gastrocnemius lateralis (GL) Achilles tendon (AT), vastus medialis (VM), vastus lateralis (VL), rectus femoris (RF), and patellar tendon (PT) were recorded with a Myoton device. Moreover, DJ and CMJ performances were assessed with a force plate. The alpha level was set to 0.05. Pearson correlation coefficients revealed no significant association between DJ performance and GM, GL, or AT stiffness (−0.07 to 0.24; p > 0.05). Similarly, no association was found between CMJ performance parameters and VM, VL, RF, or PT stiffness (−0.13–0.36; p > 0.05). According to our results, other variables, such as jump technique, body weight, or strength, were likely play a more important role in DJ and CMJ performance.