Influence of different verbal cue types on countermovement jump performance in youth female athletes

Although external (EXT) verbal cues have been shown to improve jump performance, limited research has been conducted in youth athletes. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate how different EXT verbal cue types influenced countermovement jump (CMJ) performance in youth athletes. Ten young trained female athletes (16.80 ± 0.60 years) performed the CMJ using four different EXT verbal cues including external-distal (DIST), external-proximal (PROX), analogy (ANA) and holistic (HOL) as well as a neutral cue (CON). Jump height, reactive strength index modified (RSIMOD), countermovement depth, jump time and force-time measures from eccentric and concentric CMJ subphases were measured. No significant differences between cue types were found for RSIMOD. ANA resulted in significantly higher jump height compared to CON (g = 0.37). PROX significantly increased jump time (g = 0.60), concentric time (g = 0.47) and braking time (g = 0.52), as well as significantly decreasing eccentric braking mean force (g = 0.43) and eccentric braking rate of force development (g = 0.59) compared to CON. Countermovement depth significantly increased when using PROX (g = 0.60), HOL (g = 0.46) and ANA (g = 0.51) compared to CON. These results suggest that compared to a neutral cue, EXT verbal cues result in similar CMJ performance in trained youth athletes. However, PROX verbal cues appear to result in reduced performance in many CMJ force-time measures.