ABSTRACT
It is well established that soccer players during a game perform intermittent exercise with changes in activity every 3-5 s and that soccer is physically demanding due to multiple brief intense actions involving jumps, turns, tackles, high-speed runs and sprints (Mayhew and Wenger, 1985; Bangsbo et al., 1991; Bangsbo, 1994). It has been observed that players experience fatigue both towards the end of a game and temporarily during a match (Krustrup et al., 2006a; Mohr et al., 2003). Soccer at high level is characterized by a significant amount of high-intensity exercise performed during a game. Thus, players at international elite level have been shown to perform 25 per cent more high-intensity running and 35 per cent more sprinting during competitive games than professional players at a moderate elite level (Mohr et al., 2002). However, it is unclear to what extent intense short term intermittent exercise affects a player’s technical skills.
