The effect of six weeks of football specefic training and various recovery methods on the speed, vertical jump and muscle damage indices of football players

Exercising without proper recovery is likely to leave sports-related injuries or cause pain to the athletes. Therefore, the aim of present study was conducted to investigate the effect of six weeks of dedicated football training and various recovery methods on the speed, vertical jump and muscle damage of football players.

Thirty six young and elite football players of Birjand city were selected purposefully and randomly divided into 4 groups of passive recovery, active recovery, floating in cold water and massage. Subjects first took a 20-meter back and forth running session to the point of exhaustion and then participated in a 20-minute recovery procedure. After that, they practiced football for 6 weeks, and then they did a session of instrument making, and at the end they participated in one of the 20-minute recovery methods. The lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) and creatine kinase (CK) indices were measured by Elisa, velocity by the double-run Bangsbo velocity test, and anaerobic power by the Sargent jump test. The results were extracted using analysis of variance with repeated measures, dependent t-test, and tuky test at the p<0.05 level.

Inactive recovery and massage methods following 6 weeks of special football training reduced LDH enzyme (p=0.01 & p=0.04 respectively) and massage recovery method reduced CK enzyme (p=0.001) in participants. On the other hand, cold water recovery improved athletes’ speed (p=0.01), but cold water recovery and massage methods improved vertical jump (p=0.01).

The immersion in cold water and active recovery between training sessions accelerates the recovery of physical functions (speed and explosive power) and reduces the indicators of muscle damage (CK & LDH) of football players.