Discussion
Our study evaluated the effects of stroboscopic intervention on visual, visuomotor and reactive agility in youth volleyball players. The results indicated that stroboscopic training were more effective than regular training, with the stroboscopic group showing significant short and long-term improvements in simple motor reaction time and saccade velocity, as well as larger gains in complex reaction speed and reactive agility (in the short-term). Additionally, gender differences in response to the stroboscopic intervention were identified in two out of six variables.Our findings add further support to the suggestions (It appears that stroboscopic protocols may have specific effects on certain types of tasks, as demonstrated in our study, where it improved simple motor time (the speed of a simple reaction involving hand movement) in the stroboscopic group but not in the non-stroboscopic group. The adaptation to stroboscopic training used in sport-specific exercises, by better processing and integrating visual information for efficient movement execution, led to improved coordination and an increase in movement speed. This aligns with previous studies, which have found that stroboscopic protocols are effective in enhancing eye-hand coordination in dynamic and complex coordination tasks (This study gives partly supporting evidence to the claim that stroboscopic protocols improve the speed of cognitive and information processes created by the action of multiple stimuli on the player sensory system. We observed a significant effect of the ‘TIME’ factor in the complex reaction speed, which suggests that both groups improved their reaction speed in complex tasks, with more pronounced gains in the stroboscopic group. The main focus of the protocols (especially protocol 2) was to perform specific volleyball exercises that involved complex reaction tasks (To our best knowledge, this is the first study where the positive impact of stroboscopic training on saccadic dynamics was reported. In stroboscopic conditions, a player is forced to utilize the limited visual samples, which may cause increased efficiency in the oculomotor system. In consequence, the temporal integration of information during stroboscopic protocols becomes more efficient (Reactive agility improvements in the post (stroboscopic group) and retention test (non-stroboscopic group) were further observed in the field test; however, final training effects did not differ between groups. While both groups showed improvement in reactive agility, the study results indicate a clear positive impact of stroboscopic intervention on reactive agility. However, it is important to note that reactive agility is also closely associated with motor and biomechanical components, such as running speed and technique, balance, strength and muscle power of the lower limbs (We found significant gender differences in relation to test result variability only for two of the six analyzed parameters, The present study provides novel insights into the relationship between stroboscopic training and visual and visuomotor performance in young volleyball players. However, this study is not free of limitations. First, in our study, there is a lack of specific volleyball skill tests that should be designed to transfer standardized laboratory tasks (near transfer) to more sport-specific conditions (far transfer). Achieving far transfer after different kinds of perceptual and cognitive training is so far poorly investigated in research studies (