Relations of Biomotor Structures and Performance of Technical Elements of Alpine Skiing in Croatian Ski Instructors

With the aim of identifying the factors of alpine skiers’ biomotor status in predicting their specific skills, three variable sets were used, comprised of the total of 24 measures (9 variables for assessing anthropometric characteristics, 8 variables for assessing motor abilities and 7 variables for assessing specific ski skills of alpine skiing), on a sample of 79 ski instructor candidates. After preliminary analysis procedures which included descriptive operations and factorization of each separate space, relations between the obtained latent dimensions were established by correlation analysis. The extracted varimax factors were defined as follows – three factors in the morphology space: V1 – Voluminosity and transverse dimensionality of the skeleton, V2 – Longitudinal dimensionality of the skeleton, V3 – Subcutaneous fat tissue; 2 factors in the space of motor abilities: V1 – Agility and explosive power, V2 – Static strength and balance; while a general factor of Specific motor skills of alpine skiing was isolated in the space of motor skills. Statistically significant positive correlation was found between agility and explosive power and general factor of skiing skills, which means that agility and explosive power are the basis for quality performance of advanced and competitive techniques in alpine skiing. Namely, in realization of advanced and competitive techniques of alpine skiing, which imply a high level of skiing skills acquisition and full automatization of performance, all actions are performed by fast and explosive movement direction changes