Evaluation of the effect of fatigue and caffeine supplementation on balance and some physical and skill fitness characteristics of young football players

Caffeine is a widely used physiological stimulant worldwide that athletes use to increase strength and delay fatigue, which is currently available in the form of energy drinks and dietary supplements. Therefore, the present study was conducted to investigate the effect of fatigue and caffeine supplementation on balance and some physical and skill fitness characteristics of young football players in Sarayan city.

In this way, 24 football players with an age range of 18 to 25 years, at least four to five years of continuous activity were purposefully selected and randomly divided into experimental and control groups. All participants firstly performed the dynamic balance, explosive power (Sargent jump test), agility (Illinois test), and Moore–Christian shooting & passing performance test. Further, the experimental group received caffeine capsules (six mg/kg/day) and the control group received starch capsules (six mg/kg/day). Moreover, the Bangsbo protocol was performed with 42 of two-minute cycles to create simulated fatigue in football players. After the implementation of the fatigue protocol and similar to the pre-test, all the tests were repeated. The results were extracted using independent and dependent t-test at the significant level of p≤0.05.

Muscle fatigue significantly decreasing effect on dynamic balance (p=0.001), vertical jump (p=0.001), shooting skill (p=0.001), but no significantly changes were observed on agility (p=0.39) and passing skill (p=0.11), while caffeine had no effect on these changes.

Consumption of six mg per kg of body weight caffeine may not have been effective and therefore, it seems that football players can improve their physical fitness characteristics from higher doses of caffeine instead of lower doses to be more effective. Further studies are needed to reach a definitive conclusion.