The Effect of an Eigh-Week Pada Training Program

This book attempts to provide scientific evidence for adopting pada, a traditional Zimbabwean game, in training the modern sport of the triple jump. It is expected that the results from the study will provide more data on the efficacy of using indigenous traditional games in coaching modern sports, data which is very scarce. The authors took an experimental cohort of students through pada training for 8 weeks and then determined their performance in the triple jump hop, step, and jump phases. They compared the performance of the experimental cohort to that of a control group that was not assigned any training. The experimental group's results indicated that the pada training improved only the hop and step, but not the jump, in the triple jump. The authors conclude that pada training has great potential in enhancing the triple jump and should therefore be used in triple jump training programs at the Secondary school level. The authors, however, caution that more tightly controlled studies need to be conducted on the effect of pada on triple jump performance.