Normative Hop Test Data

A battery of 4 single-leg hop tests are commonly used to evaluate readiness to return to training and sport in ACL injured athletes.

There are some published hop test data sets in healthy adults (Myer et al 2014), but there is very little published in healthy children & adolescents to allow us to make better return to training and sport decisions in our young ACLR athletes.

Until now...

531 healthy 9-15 year olds were invited to participate in this study and their hop performance was assessed for each leg on each of the 4 following hop tests – single leg hop, 6m timed hop, triple hop for distance and triple cross-over hop).

Absolute values, hop distance normalised to body height and limb symmetry index (LSI) values were recorded for each of the 4 hop tests.

You can see below to see the mean LSI for all hop tests and single leg hop normalised data for these young, healthy athletes but a big takeaway from this paper was that only 50% were able to achieve >90% LSI on the single leg hop test, 57% achieved >90% LSI on triple crossover hop and 65% achieved >90% on the 6m timed hop test and triple hop for distance.

Another key finding was that these kids were far from the benchmarks of a single leg hop distance being 90% of height for males and 80% for females.

Of course, these findings are presented as what the average kid can do, and we should always be striving for excellence, not average performance.

Nevertheless, this data can be very helpful when working with young athletes when we don't have pre-injury data to compare too.

What do you make of this research? Do you think using normative data is helpful when working with our ACL injured athletes?

If you’d like to dive a bit deeper into this research, click on the link here

If you're interested in learning more about ACL rehab in adolescent athletes, consider signing up to Learn.Physio Adolescent Knee Masterclass here