Resumen:
Many different factors can affect the performance of athletes in competitions and condition the analysis of technical and tactical performance. One of these factors is the so-called competition load of the set, understood as the difference in points at the end of the set. The main objective of the present study was to investigate the competition load of volleyball sets, to establish reference values that will allow classifying the sets as balanced
or unbalanced for the male and female categories. A total of 2368 sets were collected from the main international
volleyball team competitions in 2021, for a total of 1357 male sets, and 1011 female sets. A K-means clustering
analysis was performed, allowing the classification of the sets as balanced when the difference was ≤6 for the
male category, and ≤7 for the female one; and unbalanced when these values were higher. To study how the rest
of the variables analyzed affected the percentage of balanced and unbalances sets, a Pearson’s chi-square (x2)
analysis was performed, obtaining significant differences on the percentage of balanced and unbalanced sets as a
function of the number of sets in the game in both categories. In the female category...