A Comparison of Strength Dimensionality Across Senior and Pathway Field Sport Athletes

Abstract

Geneau, MC, Carey, DL, Gastin, PB, Robertson, S, and James, LP. A comparison of strength dimensionality across senior and pathway field sport athletes. J Strength Cond Res XX(X): 000–000, 2026—The aim of this study was to investigate the dimensionality and classification of lower-body strength metrics among senior and pathway male and female field sport athletes. One hundred and eighty trained Australian rules football, soccer, and field hockey athletes completed a series of drop jumps, squat jumps, countermovement jumps, countermovement jumps with 60% body mass, isometric squats, and isometric midthigh pulls. Principal component analysis (PCA) and sparse-PCA were used to reduce and classify the 215 force-time metrics from these tests into unique domains of strength. The dimensionality and classification results were then compared between athlete subgroups: senior male and senior female, and senior male and pathway male. To account for 70% of the variance in the data set, 8 principal components were required in the senior male data, 12 in the senior female data, and 9 in the pathway male data, indicating differences between variable relationships across populations. The orientation of the top 4 principal component vectors was consistent across athlete groups. Finally, metric selection identified 4 common strength domains in senior male and female athletes, with 2 also present in the pathway group. These findings highlight the importance of considering athlete developmental level when selecting strength tests and further supports the discovery of strength domains in senior field sport athletes. This study contributes to targeted and effective lower-body strength assessment for field sport athletes.