Standing long jump compared to vertical jump as a field test for assessing leg power in firefighter trainees : A correlation study from a gender equality perspective

Sammanfattning: Background: Within the rescue service, a varied background is needed to increase the possibility of delivering equal service to the citizens. At present, there is a skewed gender distribution within the municipal rescue services, with only a couple of percent of the firefighters being women. Many women find it difficult to meet the physical limit values on recruitment tests. The standing long jump (SLJ) is used as a part of recruitment tests on many rescue services, to assess leg power. It is not clear though whether SLJ is the most appropriate field-test to assess leg power in firefighter trainees, with men and women mixed in the same group, as it has been argued that anthropometric factors, such as body height (BH), affects the result. Thereby we wanted to study the relationship between BH and SLJ, and compere SLJ with another field-test for measuring leg power, one that omits the variable BH. Aim: The aim was to study the strength of the relationship between body height and the jump length at standing long jump, for firefighter trainees. A second aim was to study the strength of the relationship between firefighter trainees' jump results of the two tests: standing long jump and vertical jump. Methods: The study was executed as an observational cross-sectional study. Three different measurements were carried out: BH, vertical jump (VJ) and SLJ. Correlation analyzes, with Pearson's correlation coefficient, were performed on BH in relation to SLJ, and VJ in relation to SLJ. Results: Fourteen (n = 14) firefighter trainees (women n = 5, men n = 9) met the inclusion criteria and participated in the study. Subjects' age, body mass index (BMI) and number of workouts per week were 29 ± 7 years old, 25 ± 2 kg/m2 and 4 ± 1 workouts (at least 30 minutes) per week. Results showed a significant moderate correlation between BH and SLJ (r = 0.572). Between the variables VJ and SLJ there were a significant strong correlation (r = 0.862). However, the results changed substantially when the analyzes were performed separately for men and women, with a very low correlation level (r = 0.106 respective r = 0.166) between BH and SLJ. For VJ and SLJ there were a moderate correlation level for men and low for women (r = 0.414 respective r = 0.387). Conclusion: The result from this study is in line with aforementioned work and supports the hypothesis that BH to some extent can affect the jump result at SLJ. Our study complements earlier work and indicates that these results are also applicable to firefighter trainees. The findings in this study indicates VJ could possibly be an alternative field test for SLJ, to assess leg power when recruiting new firefighters. Additional studies are required to investigate the correlation between SLJ and VJ with ad- ditional confounders, such as actual leg power, and also the correlation between VJ and fire- fighters heaviest among most common work tasks.