Quantification of the competition load of the sets in high-level volleyball in the year 2021

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