(Press-News.org) Brazilian researchers have published a systematic review of the scientific literature showing that some warm-up strategies such as dynamic stretching can effectively prepare soccer players to maintain kicking accuracy, whereas intense physical exercises have a negative effect on the velocity of the ball when kicked, and consumption of carbohydrate beverages during a match can enable players to maintain adequate kicking performance in the concluding moments of prolonged physical exercise such as a sudden-death playoff.
The review, published in the journal Sports Medicine in December 2020, analyzed 52 studies, ten of which examined the acute effects of warm-up exercises while 34 verified the overall impact of physical training and 21 explored recovery-related strategies.
Proficient kicking is essential in soccer, especially to score goals. The top three clubs in round 30 of the 2020 Brazilian Championship, for example, had taken 162, 132 and 169 shots at goal respectively in the matches played so far, scoring 50, 48 and 51 goals.
Individual player traits such as maturity, skill level and gender may influence performance, but training, and recovery interventions also help obtain better results.
The literature review was part of the doctoral research conducted by Luiz Henrique Palucci Vieira with support from FAPESP at the Human Movement Research Laboratory (MOVI-LAB) of São Paulo State University's School of Sciences (FC-UNESP) in Bauru.
Vieira's PhD thesis advisors are Fabio Augusto Barbieri, who heads MOVI-LAB, and Paulo Santiago, who also took part in the review. Vieira is doing his research at the University of São Paulo's Ribeirão Preto School of Physical Education and Sports (EEFERP-USP) with support from FAPESP via projects 2019/22262-3 and 2019/17729-0.
According to Vieira and his co-authors in the review, kick velocity is negatively affected by intense physical exercise protocols, such as intermittent endurance sprinting or graded efforts to exhaustion, while passive resting in the half-time break does not affect kick velocity. Kicking accuracy and ball velocity can be enhanced by warm-up routines that include dynamic stretching, while consumption of carbohydrate beverages can help maintain ball velocity following prolonged exercise.
The authors conclude that the review can help inform future research and practical interventions in an attempt to measure and optimize soccer kicking performance, although more studies are needed, especially involving young players.
The next steps in Vieira's project will include experiments designed to assess the effects of preparation and recovery techniques on players' kicking performance. Initially, the researchers are analyzing the impact of individual characteristics such as sleep quality and brain (especially cortical) activity during execution of mid-distance kicks.
"This is innovative research from the standpoint of applicability, aiming at different kinds of information, methods, and knowledge in neuromechanics to try to improve the performance of soccer players," Barbieri told Agência FAPESP. "An example is the monitoring of brain activity during kick preparation and execution. Few studies have done this anywhere in the world."
The second part of the project will include testing of post-activation potentiation (PAP) and cold water immersion, both widely used by soccer trainers, to find out how they affect movement mechanics and performance in young players.
Kicking by under-17s in a club in the interior of the state of São Paulo was filmed using slow-motion cameras in 2019 and 2020 to analyze leg movements, ball velocity, and kicking accuracy. "This year we'll continue the research to look for factors that influence kicking, complete our analysis of the data collected, and publish a paper," Vieira said.
Academics have little access to professional soccer clubs in Brazil for research and science partnerships, he noted. More openness and collaboration are needed if there are to be advances in science and in player performance since scientific journals in the field tend to publish only papers with practical applications.
Methodology
To arrive at the study universe used in the review, the researchers conducted a systematic search for certain keywords and descriptors in papers indexed until July 2020 by PubMed, Web of Science, SPORTDiscus, Scopus, and ProQuest. The search resulted in 10,780 studies. After removing duplicates and studies not directly relevant to sports performance, they were left with 52 studies considered suitable for systematic review. A total of 947 players were evaluated in these studies, all of them male. According to Vieira, very little scientific research is done on female athletes. "This is also one of the priorities we advocate," he said.
INFORMATION:
About São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP)
The São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) is a public institution with the mission of supporting scientific research in all fields of knowledge by awarding scholarships, fellowships and grants to investigators linked with higher education and research institutions in the State of São Paulo, Brazil. FAPESP is aware that the very best research can only be done by working with the best researchers internationally. Therefore, it has established partnerships with funding agencies, higher education, private companies, and research organizations in other countries known for the quality of their research and has been encouraging scientists funded by its grants to further develop their international collaboration. You can learn more about FAPESP at http://www.fapesp.br/en and visit FAPESP news agency at http://www.agencia.fapesp.br/en to keep updated with the latest scientific breakthroughs FAPESP helps achieve through its many programs, awards and research centers. You may also subscribe to FAPESP news agency at http://agencia.fapesp.br/subscribe.
COLUMBUS, Ohio - Electricity may slow - and in some cases, stop - the speed at which breast cancer cells spread through the body, a new study indicates.
The research also found that electromagnetic fields might hinder the amount of breast cancer cells that spread. The findings, published recently in the journal Bioelectricity, suggest that electromagnetic fields might be a useful tool in fighting cancers that are highly metastatic, which means they are likely to spread to other parts of the body, the authors said.
"We think we can hinder metastasis by applying these fields, but we also think it may be possible to even destroy tumors using this approach," said Vish Subramaniam, senior author of the paper and former professor of mechanical ...
PHILADELPHIA (March 17, 2021) - Stroke remains a leading cause of death worldwide and one of the most common reasons for disability. While a wide variety of factors influence stroke outcomes, data show that avoiding readmissions and long lengths of stay among ischemic stroke patients has benefits for patients and health care systems alike. Although reduced readmission rates among various medical patients have been associated with better nurse work environments, it is unknown how the work environment might influence readmissions and length of stay for ischemic stroke patients.
In a new study from the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing's (Penn Nursing) Center for Health Outcomes ...
The NASA-funded Seismometer to Investigate Ice and Ocean Structure (SIIOS) performed well in seismic experiments conducted in snowy summer Greenland, according to a new study by the SIIOS team led by the University of Arizona published this week in Seismological Research Letters.
SIIOS could be a part of proposed NASA spacecraft missions to the surface of Europa or Enceladus. These moons of Jupiter and Saturn are encrusted by an icy shell over subsurface liquid oceans, and seismic data could be used to better define the thickness and depth of these layers. Other seismic points of interest on these worlds could include ice volcanoes, drainage events below the ice shell and possibly even ...
East Hanover, NJ. March 17, 2021. Kessler Foundation researchers have identified several practical and technical barriers to the widespread use of surface electromyography (sEMG) in clinical neurorehabilitation. Based on their holistic analysis of these factors, the researchers suggest a collaborative, interdisciplinary, and unified approach to enable rehabilitation professionals to routinely use sEMG. The article, "Use of Surface EMG in Clinical Rehabilitation of Individuals With SCI: Barriers and Future Considerations" (doi: 10.3389/fneur.2020.578559), was published December 18, 2020, in Frontiers in Neurology. It is available open access at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7780850/
The authors are Rakesh ...
Autoimmune diseases are typically caused when the immune system, whose purpose is to deal with foreign threats to the body, incorrectly recognizes the body's own proteins and cells as threats and activates immune cells to attack them. In the case of rheumatoid arthritis, a well-known autoimmune disease, immune cells erroneously attack the body's own joint components and proteins, causing painful inflammation and even the destruction of bone! Scientists from Japan have now taken a massive step toward understanding and, potentially, treating rheumatoid arthritis better, with their discovery in a brand-new study. Read on to understand how!
The development of autoimmune diseases is an incredibly complex process, involving several key players ...
A sustainable, powerful micro-supercapacitor may be on the horizon, thanks to an international collaboration of researchers from Penn State and the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China. Until now, the high-capacity, fast-charging energy storage devices have been limited by the composition of their electrodes -- the connections responsible for managing the flow of electrons during charging and dispensing energy. Now, researchers have developed a better material to improve connectivity while maintaining recyclability and low cost.
They published their results on Feb. 8 in the Journal of Materials Chemistry A.
"The supercapacitor is a very powerful, energy-dense device with a fast-charging rate, in contrast to the typical battery ...
An international collaboration between Great Ormond Street Hospital, the UCL GOS Institute for Child Health and Harvard Medical School has shown that the beneficial effects of gene therapy can be seen decades after the transplanted blood stem cells has been cleared by the body.
The research team monitored five patients who were successfully cured of SCID-X1 using gene therapy at GOSH. For 3-18 years patients' blood was regularly analysed to detect which cell types and biomarker chemicals were present in their blood. The results showed that even though the stem cells transplanted as part of gene therapy had been cleared by the patients, the all-important corrected immune cells, called T-cells, were still forming.
Gene therapy works by first removing ...
In researching the causes and potential treatments for degenerative conditions such as Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease, neuroscientists frequently struggle to accurately identify cells needed to understand brain activity that gives rise to behavior changes such as declining memory or impaired balance and tremors.
A multidisciplinary team of Georgia Institute of Technology neuroscience researchers, borrowing from existing tools such as graphical models, have uncovered a better way to identify cells and understand the mechanisms of the diseases, potentially leading to better understanding, diagnosis, and treatment.
Their research findings were reported Feb. 24 in the journal eLife. The research was supported by the National Institutes of ...
Hydrogen is a pollution-free energy source when it's extracted from water using sunlight instead of fossil fuels. But current strategies for "splitting" or breaking apart water molecules with catalysts and light require the introduction of chemical additives to expedite the process. Now, researchers reporting in ACS ES&T Engineering have developed a catalyst that destroys medications and other compounds already present in wastewater to generate hydrogen fuel, getting rid of a contaminant while producing something useful.
Harnessing the sun's energy to split water to make hydrogen fuel is a promising renewable resource, but it is a slow process even when catalysts are used to speed it along. In some cases, alcohols or sugars are added to boost the rate of hydrogen production, ...
NEW YORK (March 17, 2021) -- High speed air dryers not only leave more contamination on poorly washed hands compared to paper towels, but during hand drying, they can also spread germs onto clothing, ultimately transferring more bacteria to other surfaces, according to a study published today in Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology, the journal of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America.
Past research has shown recommended handwashing practices for healthcare workers are often not followed with average adherence of 40%. To better understand the impact of hand drying in hand hygiene, researchers conducted an experiment to learn the role of different hand drying methods in spreading germs from poorly washed hands beyond the restroom.
For ...
