HANDBALL RESEARCH STATE OF THE ART

Abstract

Team handball (handball) began as a game between two teams of eleven players and was played outdoors. It has evolved into an indoor sport with seven players on each team. Handball is a popular sport played at all levels from recreational to fully professional. The modern game's origins were in Scandinavia in the early 19th century. It is today played by around 19 million people (International Handball Federation, 2014), and has been an Olympic sport since 1972 for men and since 1976 for women. In handball, there are various actions such as throws, passes, jumps, hits, blocks, pushes, runs, and dribbling (Milanese et al., 2012) that make it a contact sport of intermittent high intensity (Gorostiaga et al., 2005). Given the sport's complexity, performance in handball depends on multiple factors: anthropometric features, coordination, strength, endurance, nutrition, cognition, tactics, social factors, and external influences (Wagner et al., 2014).