Study of the effect of suspension training on the balance ability of surfers without relying on vision

Abstract

Surfing is an emerging Olympic sport that requires athletes to have excellent balance without relying on vision. This study introduces TRX suspension training (TRX) into the balance training of surfing programs to investigate its effectiveness on the surfers' balance ability without relying on vision. Thirty-two surfers from the National Surfing Team were randomly divided into a TRX group and a traditional balance training (TB) group, and the two groups were given intervention training for about 30 minutes three times a week for eight weeks. Eye-closed one-leg stand and linear travel deviation tests were performed at different experiment stages to examine static and dynamic balance changes without visualization. After eight weeks of intervention training, both TRX and TB were very effective in improving surfers' static balance without relying on vision (p < 0.01), and there was no significant difference in the effectiveness of the two training methods in improving surfers' static balance without relying on vision (pLeft=0.142 > 0.05, pRight=0.084 > 0.05). Additionally, the eight weeks of suspension and TB effectively improved the surfers' dynamic balance without relying on vision, and highly significant improvements were seen in each monitoring phase (p < 0.01). The effect of the two training methods on the improvement of surfers' dynamic balance without relying on vision began to show a significant difference after week five of training (p = 0.021 < 0.05) and a very significant difference after week eight (p = 0.000 < 0.01). The results demonstrated that TRX was more effective than TB in improving the athletes' balance ability. Therefore, both TRX and TB improved the surfers' non-vision-dependent balance ability very well. However, TRX was more effective in improving dynamic balance in that situation. TB and TRX can be used to improve the static balance ability and dynamic balance ability for the first five weeks, and TRX can be applied to the balance training of surfers after five weeks.