Study design: Validation of a new wheelchair racing test.
Objective: To assess the reproducibility of test parameters at different, subjectively chosen, intensity levels in wheelchair racing athletes.
Setting: Swiss Paraplegic Centre, Nottwil, Switzerland.
Subjects: We tested 11 (eight male, three female) young competitive wheelchair racing athletes. Their age was 20.5+/-6.4 years, height 164.7+/-16.3 cm and weight 54.1+/-9.2 kg. Average weekly training time was 6.8+/-2.7 h. All had been engaged in regular training for over 3.9+/-2.8 years.
Methods: Within a period of 3+/-1 days, every athlete completed two identical tests in their own racing chair on a training roller. The tests consisted of five 1500 m bouts at routine training intensities of 1 (warm-up) up to 5 (race speed), with a rest of 2 min between each bout. The athletes were blinded to all the collected data during the whole of the test, except for indications of the 500, 1000 and 1500 m markers. We measured the overall time (for 1500 m), average speed, stroke frequency, heart rate, rate of perceived exertion (RPE) and the concentration of lactic acid for all five intensity bouts. In order to get a measure on how reproducible these intensity levels were, we compared the two tests of each athlete with each other, and calculated the root-mean-squared coefficients of variation (CV) for all measured parameters during every bout.
Results: CVs of the measured data show that the most reproducible values were found for bout 5 (2.6-7.9%); except for the lactic acid parameter. The heart rate (CV: 3.1-6.4%) and stroke frequency (CV: 6.5-7.9%) parameters reached rather constant values throughout all five bouts. Lactic acid concentrations showed very high CVs (16.8-29.7%).
Conclusion: We conclude that this test is, with the exception of the lactic acid measurements, well reproducible, and particularly suitable for young wheelchair athletes. We find it to be a helpful tool for improving awareness for the individual training intensities, and for pursuing the development of the training process, as particularly the high-intensity bouts are well reproducible.