Tuesday, May 24, 2011

EFFECTIVENESS OF COMPRESSION GARMENTS AS A RECOVERY STRATEGY

Several teams and individual players use compression garments as a means of speeding up recovery after training and/or match. There are at least 4 papers in the literature investigating the effectiveness of wearing compression garments on recovery rate in football and team sports players (Gill et al., 2006, Duffield et al., 2008, Duffield et al., 2010, Jakeman et al., 2010). They all agree that players feel less muscle soreness when wearing garments during recovery following training. However, the majority of them (3 out of 4) agree that the effect of compression garments on performance the days after training/match was minimal or that there was no effect.

Moreover, wearing compression garments is as effective as contrast water therapy and low intensity exercise after the match in speeding up recovery.

Despite the lack of improvement in performance or recovery, there is evidence that wearing whole body compression garments might increase high-intensity intermittent exercise performance (Sear et al., 2010). This study, however, refers to wearing the whole body compression garments. More information is needed on the effect of lower-body or lower-legs compression garments which are more practical approaches in football.

No comments: