Everybody – especially players – can appreciate that football asks a lot from your body.
It is a very taxing sport and can be a traumatic experience for your muscles, joints and energy systems. Both training and match day alike requires your body to produce vast amounts of energy to cope with explosive movements such as sprinting, changing direction, jumping and tackling. Add in the physicality of shoulder barges, flailing elbows, crunching tackles and shepherding, and by the end of it all you can come off feeling depleted and sore.
Getting back onto the pitch or following up at training can be challenging. For optimum performance, getting your recovery right is the key. All professional football teams have a recovery program in place to keep their players firing on all cylinders. For a long time, recovery programs were reserved for full time players and held very close to coaches and sports scientists so that the competition wouldn’t catch them. These days, such information is accessible and should be applied to all footballers, regardless of their playing level.
Recovery can be broadly split into two categories: Pre-match and post-match.
Pre-match preparation
Pre-match preparation should begin and make up a large part of pre-season training. Just like homework, leaving it to the night before doesn’t always give you the best results. This category can be broken down into three major aspects – hydration, nutrition and sleep.
Hydration
Water is the most essential and required ingredient in the production of energy and repair of tissues. It makes up approximately 70% of the entire human body and 77-80% of the brain and is found in every cell, tissue and organ. Alarmingly, a majority of the population does not drink enough water to maintain optimal levels of hydration and this is even more important for athletes.
Depending on the level of activity and conditions, some footballers may need to drink up to seven litres per day to maintain optimal hydration. Electrolytes and minerals are also required for recovery and are commonly referred to as the essential salts, including sodium, potassium, calcium and magnesium.
Nutrition
It goes without saying that a healthy diet is required for optimal growth and repair when it comes to athletic performance. Essential components of day to day meals should include protein, carbohydrates and fatty acids. Sources include red and white meats for protein; both starchy carbohydrates such as sweet potato, corn, pumpkin and non-starchy carbohydrates such as green vegetables; and fatty acids from oils, nuts and vegetables such as avocado. Where food is insufficient or inaccessible, supplements can be used to top up on these essential components although they should not replace food all together.
Sleep
Sleep plays the largest and most important role in athletic recovery and is most commonly the most undervalued aspect of any program. It is during sleep that the human body grows and repairs damaged tissues, expels and metabolises toxins and prepares us for the following day.
Recent studies into professional football performance and sleep patterns has revealed that performance varied up to 26% depending on the amount and quality of sleep the athletes achieved. Sleep is best obtained in a dark room that is not too warm. Distractions such as phones and televisions emit light which can affect your brain’s sleep-wake cycle and therefore impact on sleep quality.
Dr Emilio Kardaris is a Sports Chiropractor practising out of Instinctive Chiropractic in Albert Park. A self confessed football tragic, he has worked with Bentleigh Greens for the past four years and is passionate about keeping athletes performing at their best.