Body Fat Differences Of Elite Greek Volleyball,basketball And Handball Female Athletes

Introduction
Body fat levels influence athletes’ top performance in many sports. The higher the competitive level is, the lower body
fat
percentages occur in athletes. That is the reason why the best athletes have less fat (2). The aim of the present study was
to investigate the body fat between elite female athletes from three different team sports.

Methods
The study sample involved 40 women athletes all members of the Greek National team of Volleyball (VB) (n=14),
Basketball (BB) (n=12) and Handball (HB) (n=14). The mean age was 24.1±3.1 years and training age 11.8±2.4 years.
Also, the mean mass was 70.8±8.2 kg and mean height 178.6±7.4 cm. Body fat percentage (%BF) was estimated by
using the four skinfold method, according to the equation of Jackson et al. (1980) (1). The one-way analysis of Variance
(ANOVA) was used to evaluate the body fat differences among the three team sports.

Results
According to the results the average %BF of all athletes was 18.9±4.9. HB athletes had less %BF (15.6±4.2), which
differed significantly (p<.05) compared to the VB (21.2±4.4) and BB (20.3±4.3). Body fat distribution of the elite
athletes per team sport is shown in figure 1.

Discussion/Conclusions
The findings of this study show that body fat ranged from 10-20% and 20-30% for the 58% and 42% of all Greek
female athletes respectively. Specifically, most VB, BB and HB athletes had 25-30%, 15-25% and 10-15% body fat
respectively. VB and BB top athletes presented significantly greater values in BF compared to the HB ones. Therefore,
elite Greek women athletes of VB and BB had relatively high %BF whereas the same did not occur for HB athletes, a
fact that does is not in accordance with the literature view (3,4). In conclusion, body fat levels of the Greek HB National
team were satisfactory, in contradiction to VB and BB teams where these levels should be decreased in order to
maximize top-level performance.

References
[1}Jackson A.S. et al. (1980). Med Sci Sports Exerc 12: 175-182
{2}Kovaleski J.E. et al. (1980). Physician and Sports Med, 8(2), 112-118
{3}Musaiger A.O. et al. (1994). British Sports Med, 28(3), 157-159
{4}Papadopoulou S.D. (2003). Kinanthropometry 7: 136-154

NOTA: O texto com a iconografia está no anexo

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