The other day I was on a field watching a bunch of kids practicing soccer it reminded me that soccer season is now starting to ramp up with pre-season training.\u00a0 It made me think of the research article I just read in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning regarding static stretching and the effects it has on soccer players during a match.<\/p>\n
With so many different training methods out there for soccer players one that is still used by many coaches is static stretching…yes the kind where we ask the athlete to sit on their butts and stretch their hamstrings or stand on one leg and pull their leg back to stretch their quadriceps muscles!<\/p>\n
The article by Sayer, et al looked at the sprint performance of soccer players after static stretching.\u00a0 Data was collected on 20 elite female soccer players from a soccer team that participates in the Women\u2019s Professional soccer league.\u00a0 The impact of static stretching on sprinting for soccer players is important as sprints occur approximately every 90 seconds during a match.<\/p>\n
What did they find in this study?\u00a0 Well, any type of static stretching had a negative effect on sprint times for soccer players.\u00a0 Sayer, et al discovered that there was a significant difference in the acceleration phase between the stretch and non-stretch groups.\u00a0 What is the acceleration phase?\u2026 it\u2019s the part of a sprint when a player goes from a standing start to full speed \u2013 somewhere around 20 meters.\u00a0 The study found that static stretching diminishes maximal velocity as well.\u00a0 It was discovered that an athlete could lose up to .39 seconds after static stretching and with sprints lasting only 4-5 seconds to complete, this is Significant!<\/strong>\u00a0 This may be the difference between one player getting to the ball before another and recovering defensively to avoid a potential goal-scoring opportunity.\u00a0 In elite soccer, the ability for each player to be at their best may be the difference between winning and losing!<\/p>\n Wow, that means that not stretching has more of a profound positive effect on sprinting for soccer players than stretching does. This is an important article for all coaches, player\u2019s educators, and other administrators who are involved with soccer players.<\/p>\n So what do you do?\u00a0 Stop wasting your time pre-practice or pre-game with static stretching and get into dynamic stretching.<\/p>\n I will look into the benefits of dynamic stretching for soccer players in part two of our series.\u00a0 As well, in the upcoming weeks, we will be showcasing videos on our website for all soccer players to view!<\/p>\n For more information regarding our soccer speed camps please contact us at sst@sstcanada.com<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The other day I was on a field watching a bunch of kids practicing soccer it reminded me that soccer season is now starting to ramp up with pre-season training.\u00a0 It made me think of the research article I just read in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning regarding static stretching and the effects it … Continue reading “Soccer and Stretching \u2013 Increase speed or not?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":2769,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","wprm-recipe-roundup-name":"","wprm-recipe-roundup-description":"","wpupg_custom_link":[],"wpupg_custom_link_behaviour":[],"wpupg_custom_link_nofollow":[],"wpupg_custom_image":[],"wpupg_custom_image_id":[],"footnotes":"","tve_updated_post":"","tve_custom_css":"","tve_user_custom_css":"","tve_globals":{},"tcb2_ready":0,"tcb_editor_enabled":0,"tve_landing_page":"","_tve_header":"","_tve_footer":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2637","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sst.training\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2637","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sst.training\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sst.training\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sst.training\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sst.training\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2637"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.sst.training\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2637\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6695,"href":"https:\/\/www.sst.training\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2637\/revisions\/6695"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sst.training\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2769"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sst.training\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2637"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sst.training\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2637"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sst.training\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2637"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}