Myself, Emily Cushion and Heyley Legg from St Mary’s University have recently published a paper on jump test asymmetries in elite trials riders. It’s open access in JPES for you to read in full, but here are some of the most important findings.
Trials has quite an interesting riding style. A lot of time is spent balancing, manoeuvring and jumping on the back wheel. Whilst doing these very technical skills the riders have a natural preference as to which foot is on the front pedal. This preference has led to a belief within the community that asymmetries and imbalances are responsible for a lot of the msk complaints we see. But trials isn’t entirely asymmetrical, in a lot of techniques the back foot provides the impulse to raise the front wheel. So is there any truth in the belief that the riding style causes asymmetrical adaptations between the front and back feet? We started by looking at jump testing because it’s a easy tool that’s very widely used in physical training.
The results came out in line with previous findings from other sports - asymmetries are task specific. One person can be perfectly balanced in a single leg CMJ & horribly imbalanced in a single leg hop. The overall group means showed no evidence of a bias towards the front foot.
Finally be careful with only looking at jump test scores. Even if there is a left/right/front/back symmetry there can be big differences in how the performances were achieved. Look at the kinematics/kinetics of the performance as well as the outcomes.
We were severely limited in the testing phase due to Covid, hence the small n and no anthropometrics, isokinetics etc. but massive thanks to the riders who did participate. The @bashguardian website also has a report looking at how the jump test scores correlate to bike jumps, you can read that HERE.