INFLUENCE OF VERTICAL JUMP PERFORMANCE ON ACCELERATION, MAXIMAL SPEED AND CHANGE OF DIRECTION SPEED IN PROFESSIONAL SOCCER PLAYERS.

Abstract

In this study, we evaluated the efficacy of vertical jump performance on acceleration, maximal speed and change of direction speed in professional soccer players. A total of 18 football players, mean age: 24.6±2.7 years, mean height: 1.80±0.06 cm, mean weight: 75.4±5.75 kg and mean body fat percentage 11.8±1.38 %, in a 3rd Division Professional Soccer Team were voluntarily participated in this study. At the completion of the warm-up protocol, players completed assessments of countermovement jump (CMJ), speed (10-, and 30-m sprints) and change of direction speed (Pro Agility and T-test) tests. Spearman correlation analysis was used to identify the relationships between the CMJ and speed tests. Players displayed a significant negative moderate correlations between CMJ and 10-m (r= -0.59; p= 0.01), and CMJ and 30-m (r= -0.63; p= 0.00). Also it was found significant negative strong correlation between CMJ and T-test (r= -0.81; p= 0.00). However, no significant correlation was found between CMJ and Pro Agility Test (r= -0.22; p= 0.19). The results of this study show that there is a moderate-strong relationship between power and speed ability in soccer players.Soccer is perceived as an aerobic endurance sport (Pinasco and Carson, 2005) because the duration of a soccer game is long (about 90 minutes) and the athlete covers a distance of over 10 km during the game (Bangsbo et al., 2006). However, in recent years, football has become a very fast-paced game (Wallace et al., 2014) and the emphasis on changing low and high violent leaps, sprints, tactics, and many shifting movements (Hammami et al. 2017) has led to the examination of high-intensity activities in soccer for the last two decades (Carling et al., 2012). During the game, the players perform about 1300 changes of direction (Stølen et al., 2005; Vigne et al., 2010) involving 220 high-intensity movements at a speed of 2-4 seconds every 90 seconds (McFarland et al. 2016). A professional soccer player must have the ability to maintain these movements at high speed and high pace during the entire game (Little and Williams, 2005). In other words, agility/change of direction team sports such as soccer, rugby, American football and ice hockey (Lockie et al., 2003) and numerous linear sprints ranging from 1.5 to 150 meters are shown as essential qualities that determine performance (McFarland et al. 2016) Regarding these changes, training programs have also been directed at improving sprint, repeated sprint, change of direction, strength and power characteristics of aerobic adaptation (Bedoya, 2015; Enright et al. 2015; Ramirez-Campillo et al. 2015;