A preliminary study of stability in elite and novice 10 meter air pistol shooters

Abstract

Numerous processes are involved in 10 meter air pis-tol performance such as physiological (Tremayne andBarry2001), sensorimotor (Cheng et al.2017), or psy-chological (Baeck et al.2012). From a biomechanicalpoint of view, the posture stability has been investi-gated through the athlete’s center of pressure (CoP)(Ko et al.2017) as well as the upper-limb motion(Kevin et al.2003). A high stability, reflected by a lowCoP excursion and velocity, has been related to ahigh performance (Ko et al.2017). To understandhow to maximize the shooter’s stability, several pos-tural features have been discussed. For instance,(Hawkins and Sefton2011) pointed out that thehigher the stance width, the higher the CoP excursionand velocity, and the poorer the shoot performance.Under this framework, a detailed description of theCoP/Posture relationship may be noteworthy tounderstand shoot performance. For this purpose,although most studies focused on the whole-bodyCoP, we hypothesize that getting more insight intothe CoP evolution under each foot may be valuable toimprove performance. The objective of the presentstudy is therefore to compare the CoP under eachfoot for elite and novice shooters.