Agility performance variation from morning to evening: dynamic stretching warm-up impacts performance and its diurnal amplitude

ABSTRACT

This study aimed to assess the effects of different types of stretching on the diurnal variations of the agility performance. Twenty elite young soccer players (age: 17.40 ± 0.94 years) completed the T-test agility, either after static stretching (SS), dynamic stretching (DS), and no-stretching (NS) protocols at two times of the day (morning: 07:00 h-8:30 and evening: 17:00–18:30h), with a minimum of 2 days between testing sessions. The DS group produced significantly faster times on the agility test (9.65 ± 0.05s) in comparison to both the SS group (9.88 ± 0.042s, p< 0.01) and NS group (9.80±0.046s, p<0.01), in the morning. In addition, differences between groups revealed significant difference in the evening with a better result produced after DS (9.37 ± 0.052s in comparison to both SS group(9.70 ± 0.49s (p<0.01) and NS group (9.69 ± 0.43s, p < 0.010).The improvement of performance after (DS) compared to (NS) was significantly faster in the evening than the morning with a greater improvement at 17:00 h compared to 7:00 h (4.26 ± 2.81%vs1.78 ± 0.65%; p<0.01). Results support the use of DS affects the typical diurnal variations of agility performance either in the morning or in the evening and helps to counteract the physiological decrease in morning value.

KEYWORDS:

• Soccer
• warm up
• diurnal variation
• chronobiology
• time of day

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to express their sincere gratitude to all the participants for their maximal effort and cooperation. This study was financially supported by the Higher Institute of Sport and Physical Education of Ksar Said, Tunis, Tunisia.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.