The Effects Of Different Stretching Protocols During Warmup On The Performance Of Beach Football Players

The purpose of this study was to find out the best stretching technique for beach football athletes. Beach football is an intermittent high intensity sport that requires athletes to repeatedly accelerate, sprint and change direction throughout practice and game.The’subjects were 15 athletes from the Beijing Sport University Beach football team. The stretching techniques included in this study are dynamic stretch (DS), static stretch (SS), and no stretch (NS). The whole study was conducted on the digital track in Sport Science Research Center, Strength and Conditioning lab in Beijing Sport University. On the day of testing, if the subjects arrived at the scene with fatigue or any kind of injury, the test on the day will be terminated. This study included four phases including general warm-up, the intervention (DS, SS and NS), the specific warm-up, and testing (0-10m acceleration test,10-20m max speed test,0-20m sprint test, pro agility test). Only four to six subjects were tested at once. Each session was no more than an hour. The study took three inconsecutive days with at least 48 hours apart. In order to avoid the results being influence by sequence effects, all 15 subjects were divided in three different groups with different stretching technique each time. Subjects were allowed two attempts on each test, and only the faster result was used. In order to avoid fatigue during the tests, subjects were allowed to rest for two to three minutes in between test runs.Under the circumstances and the design of this study, the DS group was significantly better than the NS group in 0-10m acceleration test. However there was no significant difference in any other test or between groups. Using dynamic stretching movements before 0-10m acceleration is better than not doing any stretches; there was no significant difference between DS and SS; and there was no significant difference between SS and NS in this study.Therefore this study suggests dynamic stretch is the better option to prepare beach football athletes before any acceleration test or practice. Further study should include more subjects in their research, include tests that require change of direction and combine different stretching protocols and techniques to find out which stretching protocols or methods is best suited for beach football players.