Basketball needs more work

The mechanisms of hormonal action are of great importance for the regulation of homeostatic equilibria and the activation of adaptive devices. In the exercise, the different hormones execute specific steps in the mobilization of the energetic deposits and synthesis of new proteins. These changes have been studied by many researchers who analyze elite sport, but basketball needs more work to understand the complexity of hormonal action in response to training and competition, and the few articles published in this sport they have controversies that make it impossible to establish concrete guidelines.

The first approaches to basketball competition conclude that aldosterone has high values, which causes changes at the cardiovascular level. About training, there are also some jobs that do not see changes in testosterone, luteinizing hormone, thyroid hormones, triodoptiroidine, and free thyroxine after a month of intensive training with elite players. In the same study, cortisol (CR) underwent modifications between the first week of practice and the fourth.

Other works with elite players describe the physiological behavior of the CR and the adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) during the sports season, noting that as it passed the CR fell significantly, and not so the ACTH, which increased dramatically in the final phase it's from the season. The hormonal response based on different types of training has also been analyzed. Buyukyazi et al. compared the fluctuation of growth hormone (GH) and CR in junior players who performed two kinds of training for two months: group A (continuous work) and group B (interval work).

The GH increased in both groups after the cycle; despite this, the CR was only modified significantly in the working group at intervals. The authors state that with work at intervals there is a significant increase of both hormones in the serum. Even so, we consider that to date there is not enough scientific information in basketball to establish considerations.

Enzymes have also been variables commonly used to analyze the impact of internal load and its possible effects on the recovery of athletes. The most studied have been: creatine kinase (CPK), lactate dehydrogenase (LDH), enolase (NSE) and phosphofructokinase. For several years now, Alpert et al. and Thorstensson et al. extracted the first approximations about how CPK significantly increased after an anaerobic training.

However, Jacobs et al. and Cadefau et al. did not observe these changes. The sensitivity of CPK to anaerobic exercise is not clarified at this time. In the field of basketball, there have been few studies to assess the enzymatic activity of the CPK, possibly the one published with the Israeli team was the most serious one; in him curiously no significant changes were appreciated after a month of training.

In more recent investigations contradictory conclusions are observed. In a study in which they used a group of 48 volunteer subjects who did not play basketball regularly, at the end of a match, the CPK values increased significantly (p <0.05) immediately after exercise and during the following four days after finishing it. Currently, we have little scientific evidence to assess the intensity of load from which enzymes change in basketball players, and even less with young athletes, since they have a low glycolytic capacity as a result of low enzyme activity, where observe low lactate concentrations.

The CPK (skeletal isoenzyme) is an enzyme linked to the phenomenon of muscle destruction, as well as being a possible marker of overtraining. CPK is a protein that has been studied in the scientific literature given the high correlation observed with a muscle injury and its variation in plasma content. The data obtained guides us on the nature of the effort in basketball, where the muscle contraction models used during the game are performed in actions with a large eccentric component.

In a new investigation, the changes of NSE during a basketball game were evaluated; the authors concluded that there were no significant differences in the values of NSE before and immediately after it. Despite this, they observed a relationship between the values of NSE and the actions of the jump: those players who had higher NSE values were the ones with the highest number of drops per game.

Other specific enzymes, such as LDH in blood, have also been studied. LDH presents increases after a short duration and high-intensity workouts. In junior international players, a significant increase in LDH was observed from the pre-match values to immediately after the end (781.80 ± 3.032.94 vs. 1.248.26 ± 779.73, r = 0.460, p <0.05 ), there are no significant differences between the start data at 48 hours after the match. Similar results have been found in elite American colleague players.