ABSTRACT
Despite the prevalence of research that has profiled the preparatory strategies of team sports players over the days, weeks and months preceding match-play, match day itself also provides a potential opportunity to employ acute interventions that seek to enhance subsequent performance. This chapter provides suggestions for additional and/or modified practices that are likely to be of benefit to the match day performances of team-sports players. Such strategies can broadly be categorised as those which are implemented: 1) more than three hours before commencing match-play (e.g., attenuating sleep loss, performing prior priming exercises), 2) less than three hours before competition starts (e.g., modified warm-up practices including post-activation potentiation and heat maintenance strategies, ischemic pre-conditioning and hormonal priming) and 3) during scheduled within-match breaks (e.g., half-time, heat maintenance strategies).
