Core Strength Training For Men’s Taekwondo Athletes: An Experimental Study

There has been a growing interest in the core strength as an emerging issue incompetitive sports recently. The training of core strength has been addressed asfunctional training in some European and American countries. It has been revealed byexperts and scholars that the strength training methods that used originally in fitnessand physical rehabilitation were also applicable in competitive sports training. A richbody of literature has revealed that the core strength training could improve balance,stability, and the coordination of muscles, and protect athletes from getting hurt.Nowadays, the core strength training has been accepted by many of the competitivesports, exhibiting effectiveness in the training.Taekwondo is a fighting sport. Athletes need change positions from time to timein the fierce competition. Therefore, it is a must for athletes to have great strength inlegs, fast movement and response, high stability, and smooth body coordination. Thecurrent study aimed at examining the impact of core strength training in Taekwondotraining via introducing the core strength theory which elaborated the workingmechanisms of the core muscle and the scheme of core strength training.We investigated the influence of core strength training on the fast strength, thestrength stamina, the maximum strength and the stability during Taekwondo trainingwith literature method, expert interview, statistics and experimental method.16maleprofessional athletes of Taekwondo participated in the study, divided randomly andevenly in one experimental group and one control group. Subjects in the two groupsdid not differ in age, height and weight(p>0.05). In a16weeks training, theexperimental group took core strength training and the control group was giventraditional strength training. The results post-training are the following:1. In terms of stability, the experimental group having core strength training hadsignificant increase in the proportions of leg stretching length to the whole leg lengthin all eight directions in8-point Star Excursion Balance Test. There were also significant increase in the experimental group’s performance in single-leg standingwith eye closed test.In contrast, the control group did not exhibit great increase in both8-point StarExcursion Balance Test and the single-leg standing with eye closed test. This resultindicated that the core strength training was beneficial for the enhancement ofstability for Taekwondo athletes and the effect was better relative to the traditionaltraining.2. With respect to the fast strength, the experimental group obtained increasedperformance in both10-second flying kicking and10-second single leg frontalkicking. However, there were no clear increase for the control group, implying thatthe core strength training is helpful for increasing the fast strength in Taekwondo.3. Strength stamina was also more increased in the experimental group after corestrength training relative to the control group indexed by1-minute single legcontinuous kicking and1-minute high kicking. This result suggested that the corestrength training could increase the strength stamina in those core areas forTaekwondo athletes.4. The experimental group did not demonstrate significant increase in maximumstrength test, suggesting that core strength training could not increase the maximumstrength of Taekwondo athletes.