Addressing turning and direction changes when using the Bloomfield Movement Classification

The Bloomfield Movement Classification (BMC) allows speed agility quickness requirements as well as injury risk of activity in team games to be characterised. A limitation of previous applications of the BMC is that frequencies of movement types can be over-estimated while duration of movement instances can be under-estimated. This is because a movement instance composed of segments performed in different directions and / or turning activity will be presented as separate movement instances even if the same locomotive movement type is being performed. The current paper proposes a method of processing data captured using the BMC to address this. The method not only recognises movement instances composed of multiple segments but also allows movements to be characterised by the number of turns and direction changes performed within the movement instances. The netball movement data used in the current investigation has limited reliability and the results should only be considered in the knowledge that reliability is limited. However, the way in which the results are presented here are a good example of how the BMC can be used in future investigations of movement in different sports where a greater level of reliability is achieved.