Research Paper Title

External Responsiveness and Intrasession Reliability of the Rope-Climbing Test.

Background

Although the rope-climbing test (RCT) has been validated for upper-body power assessment of Commando soldiers, the external responsiveness and intrasession reliability of the RCT have not been reported.

Methods

To examine RCT external responsiveness and intrasession reliability, this study consisted of 2 separate phases. Forty male soldiers belonging to the special units of the National Guard, selected on the basis of their training and specialty operations levels, participated in the first phase of the study to identify the discriminant ability of RCT. This group was then divided into anti-terrorism Commandos (21 soldiers) and Intervention-Brigade (19 soldiers). Only the anti-terrorism Commandos participated in the intrasession reliability study.

Results

The Commandos were significantly better than the Intervention-Brigade soldiers on:

• Execution time (ET);
• Absolute power output (APO); and
• Relative power output (RPO; p < 0.001).

The areas under the receiver operator characteristics curves were all higher than 0.70: 0.91, 0.85, and 0.90 for ET, APO, and RPO, respectively.

The RCT provided good external responsiveness; thus, RCT was considered to indicate “good” discriminative ability. No significant difference was found between groups in posttest rating of perceived exertion.

The intrasession reliability coefficients were excellent for ET, APO, and RPO (intraclass correlation coefficient [3,1] > 0.90). The standard errors of measurement values for the ET, APO, and RPO were all less than 5% (range: 1.29-1.47%).

Conclusions

The main findings of this study suggest that RCT is a tool with both high sensitivity and intrasession reliability, allowing the consistent detection of differences in upper-limb power performance between the 2 military groups of different operational capacity levels.

Reference

Dhahbi, W., Chamari, K., Chèze, L., Behm, D.G. & Chaouachi, A. (2016) External Responsiveness and Intrasession Reliability of the Rope-Climbing Test. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. 30(10), pp.2952-8. doi: 10.1519/JSC.0000000000001367.