Rate of force development: reliability, improvements and influence on performance. A review.

Abstract

Explosive muscular contractions are fundamental to sports activities such as sprinting, jumping or throwing. In these types of contractions the rate at which force is developed has been suggested to be the most important physical capacity. Therefore, the aims of these review was: to review the reliability of rate of force development (RFD) measures; to show the relationships between RFD and performance in specific sports movements; and to provide information about the response of RFD variables to different training interventions. From a total of 655 articles, after the exclusion criteria 60 articles were read. RFD has shown high to very high reliability in most of the studies, independently of the device used or the specific variable measured. The RFD at early time intervals has shown the higher correlations with performance in several sports movements. In addition, RFD at early time intervals has been shown sensitive to most training interventions, therefore, it seems to be the key point among RFD variables.