20/01/2023
Football athletes are defined as those who are competing within a football code. These typically include soccer, American football, Canadian football, Australian football, rugby union, rugby league, rugby sevens, Gaelic football, and futsal. Football code athletes should be proficient at sprinting both short (i.e., 5–20 m) and medium–long (> 20 m) distances [1,2,3,4,5]. Although less frequent, players also perform medium- (i.e., > 20 and ≤ 40 m) to long-distance sprints (e.g., > 40 m), enabling athletes to express maximum sprinting velocity (Vmax) capabilities, particularly from moving starts [4, 6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14]. Very large associations have been demonstrated between Vmax and sprint performance (0–36.6 m, r = 0.94; 18.3–36.6 m, r = 0.97) in football code athletes, whereas the relative rate of acceleration remained the same irrespective of sprinting performance, indicating that a higher Vmax enables a superior acceleration performance [8]. Given that most athletes accelerate in a similar manner relative to Vmax, it may be that Vmax serves as the upper threshold or limiting factor in the acceleration phase performance. Therefore, improving an athlete’s sprinting Vmax may indirectly improve acceleration [8]. Hence, the development of Vmax and medium–long sprint performance is a vital component of athletic performance within the football codes
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