Usefulness of the psychomotor tests for distinguishing the skill levels among older and younger judo athletes

Background & Study Aim: Cognitive functions of combat sports contestants, such as visual perception, information processing, divisibility of attention and eye-limb coordination play an important role in solving the problems related to tactic and strategy during a fight. The purpose of this study was to answer the question: whether performance level of the two various psycho-motor tests is linked to the sport levels among male judo athletes. Material & methods: The psychomotor studies involved four groups of male judo athletes. Two groups were composed of highly skilled senior members of the Judo National Team (HSS, n = 18, age 22.7 +/- 3.0) and junior members of the Judo National Team (HSJ, n = 24, age 17.8 +/- 0.9), who were more successful than the others and therefore were called up to the Polish National Team. Two other groups were less successful and possessed lower skills, i.e. seniors (LSS, n = 24, age 23.2 +/- 3.3) and juniors (LSJ, n = 26, age 18.8 +/- 0.6), who were not selected into the national teams. All groups were examined at rest state in the forenoon at the same period of the training season. Results: The older groups (HSS+ LSS) showed better performance of the psychomotor tests than the younger ones (HSJ+ LSJ). Likewise, the highly skilled groups (HSS+ HSJ) obtained better scores than the lower skilled ones (LSS+ LSJ). Only highly skilled groups and the entire group showed significant correlations between age or training experience and psychomotor skills. Conclusions: The psychomotor abilities were better among older athletes allowing to formulate two competing hypotheses suggesting that: (1) long-term judo training (assuming the similarity of the characteristics of all subjects before the start of the training) has a positive effect on the development of cognitive functions of a human, which translates both into high athletic performance and improvement of motor safety during daily physical activity; (2) high athletic performance in judo is conditioned by an optimal level of psychomotor abilities.