Effect of a 10-Week Sensomotor Exercise Program on Balance and Agility in Adolescent Football Players: A Randomised Control Trial
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The present study is of interest to evaluate the effects of a 10-week sensomotor exercise programme on body balance and agility in a group of adolescent athletes.
Despite the interesting work, I strongly suggest following the comments to improve the quality of the manuscript.
The manuscript is generally well written.
Abstract
1. I suggest adding more details in the results section (e.g., mean and 95% CI).
Materials and Methods
2. Authors should give more details on how exactly 10 participants were excluded for not meeting inclusion criteria.
3. L 71-72. "Sensomotor exercises were conducted twice weekly for 10 weeks in the 71 experimental group. " Please explain why by providing more details using valid references.
4. L 81-82. "b) no injury excluding them for more than a week from training units in the last four months prior to the study. " Please explain why by providing more details using valid references.
5. L84-85. "The exclusion criteria were a) a history of previous abdominal surgery and b) participation in any physiotherapy treatment within six months prior to the study. " Please explain why by providing more details using valid references.
6. Table 1. Authors should confirm descriptive data. For instance, it is a little "strange" how SD for age is 2.2 for the experimental group and 2.1 for the control group and the max value is 17 years old.
7. Authors should indicate % the missing cases and/or dropouts during all collection data.
8. Statistical procedures might need to be discussed using a within-subjects approach since repeated comparisons were performed.
- How was this comparison attempted? Did the authors pool data for the comparison at the group level? How many data points were paired?
- Can the non-parametric Mann–Whitney U and the Wilcoxon pairwise rank tests be used (or be appropriate) for such data set?
- Note if all your data did not present normal distribution, descriptive data should be presented as median and interquartile range.
- Given the high intra-individual variability, a within-subjects approach (i.e, Generalized linear mixed model [Glmm] analysis) might be appropriate (please see: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33981255/).
9. In addition, would be interesting to calculate magnitudes/effect sizes.
10. Authors should do an effort to present some figures, for instance, presenting some individual figures showing changes between the control and experimental conditions. In fact, if your data did not present normal distribution, it is because some of the participants, perhaps, did not present differences between conditions or vice-versa. So, it will be interesting to present and discuss some of these "individual cases".
11. I notice that authors did not consider age or sex (in fact this variable is not described in the text) as co-founders/co-variables. Please reflect on this, especially for your analyses.
12. Practical applications of the study should be better presented.
Author Response
The detailed respons to the reviewer`s comments is attached as a word file.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
The objective of this study is to evaluate the effects of a 10-week sensomotor exercise programme on body balance and agility in a group of adolescent athletes. These findings may be helpful to improve body balance and agility in adolescent football players.
However, the authors should address some concerns before we can make a decision.
1. Please use the full name when ‘COP’ appears for the first time .
2. In agility test, whether there is a rest time between each participant completing the two obstacle course can be further specified.
3. Another issue is the lack of explanation as whether all 90 athletes are male.
4. If possible, please add more references citing articles published in recent 5 years.
5. In my opinion, your paper needs a general introduction, which will show the relationship between balance stability and biomechanical characteristics of lower limbs.
See some publications:
Biomechanical balance response during induced falls under dual task conditions in people with knee osteoarthritis. DOI: 10.1016/j.gaitpost.2016.04.031.
Biomechanical Strengthening Design for Limb Articulation Based on Reconstructed Skeleton Kinesthetics. DOI: 10.1007/s40846-021-00645-9.
6. In the ' References ' section, please list the DOI of the reference [12].
Author Response
The detailed respons to the reviewer`s comments is attached as a word file.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
I am happy with the current version of the manuscript.
The authors did a good job on reviewing the manuscript and answering all the revisions maded.
However, and regarding the following answer to the question:
"- Given the high intra-individual variability, a within-subjects approach (i.e, Generalized linear mixed model [Glmm] analysis) might be appropriate (please see: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33981255/).
Response: Thank you for this comment. It is really interesting to use such an approach. However, one can see from the formulation of the model that the linear mixed model assumes that the outcome is normally distributed."
I would like to alert you, with all due respect, that Glmm model is appropriate for no normally distributed data. Please check this. Thank you.
Author Response
I am happy with the current version of the manuscript.
The authors did a good job on reviewing the manuscript and answering all the revisions maded.
Response: Thank you so much that our corrections were appropriate.
However, and regarding the following answer to the question:
"- Given the high intra-individual variability, a within-subjects approach (i.e, Generalized linear mixed model [Glmm] analysis) might be appropriate (please see: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33981255/).
Response: Thank you for this comment. It is really interesting to use such an approach. However, one can see from the formulation of the model that the linear mixed model assumes that the outcome is normally distributed."
I would like to alert you, with all due respect, that Glmm model is appropriate for no normally distributed data. Please check this. Thank you
Response: Frankly speaking we are not statistician experts and we did not perform such an analysis before. I thought that proposed statistic is for normally distributed data. I have read the paper you have suggested and now I see the option to use Glmm for our data. However, I would ask the reviewer to leave our statistic without any changes. We believe that the statistic used is appropriate for our data. Otherwise, we will need to ask professional statistician to perform Glmm. Then, the result section and discussion will need to be partially rewrite.
For sure this advice will be used during next studies – thank you so much for it !!!
Thank you also for time and effort to improve our paper.
Reviewer 2 Report
The authors have addressed my concerns, I have no more comments.
Author Response
The authors have addressed my concerns, I have no more comments.
Thank you so much that our corrections were appropriate.
Thank you also for time and effort to improve our paper.
