The benefit of continuous data analysis to analyze countermovement jump performance

While discrete point analysis (DPA; e.g. peak power) is by far the most common method of analyzing movement data, it has significant limitations because it ignores the vast majority of a signal’s data. In response, functional principal component analysis (fPCA) has been proposed, which allows an investigation of the underlying structure of the continuous signal. However, a limitation to fPCA is that it may mask key phases of differences between subjects, and hence we propose a modified fPCA (modfPCA). We report on the direct comparison between DPA, fPCA and modfPCA in identifying performance determining factors (PDF) from vertical ground reaction force (vGRF) data for counter movement jumps (CMJ)