Evaluation and Quantifying the Difference between Male and Female Agility in Football Players: A Cross-sectional Pilot Study

Introduction: Football is an intermittent sport which requires agility as essential trait for player conditioning, selection and prevention of injury. Agility is a conditional motoric attribute classified a locomotor skill combining both a muscular and cognitive component. Previous study, revealed that Illinois and T-test were most significant tests to evaluate agility. Aim: To evaluate and quantify the difference in agility between male and female footballers. Materials and Methods: Purposive sampling was used in this crosssectional study. 30 professional football players, aged between 1825 years with normal BMI and had atleast 3 years of systematic football training with 3-4 training sessions weekly and 8 hours football training per week were included. Those players who had visual/hearing impairments, history of lower limb fractures, Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL) reconstruction and meniscectomy were excluded from the study. Illinois and T-test was used to access agility of football players. Normality of data was checked using Shapiro Wilk test. Descriptive statistics in form of Mean +/- SD were used to find normative value and Independent T-test was utilised to quantify the difference. Results: Reference value of male and female player's agility T-test was 10.35 +/- 0.58 and 14.52 +/- 0.50 whereas for Illinois test is 16.34 +/- 0.79 and 18.12 +/- 1.02 respectively. Independent T-test showed significant difference in male and female agility for both Illinois and T-test (p<0.001). Conclusion: Normative values are established for both genders. is concluded that female players are clinically and statistically less agile when compared to male players (p-value <0.001).