Patients and methods: Between August 2013 and September 2013, a total of 20 professional football players (mean age, 25.3±4.3 years; height, 1.83±0.03 m; body mass, 79.1±4.1 kg; football experience, 11.1±2.2 years) completed three different warm-up sessions at 24-hour intervals. First, second and third warmup sessions were named as “aerobic running”, “aerobic running combined with static stretching” and “aerobic running combined with dynamic stretching”, respectively. After each session, the athletes were evaluated in terms of stand and reach flexibility, Illinois agility, and running-based anaerobic sprint tests, respectively.

Results: Analysis of variance indicated that “aerobic running combined with static stretching” increased agility (p≤0.05) and decreased relative average power, and relative maximum power (p≤0.05). However, no significant effect of static stretching on minimum power was detected (p>0.05). The fatigue index score was greater following “aerobic running” and “aerobic running combined with dynamic stretching” than following “aerobic running combined with static stretching”. We observed that aerobic running combined with static or dynamic stretching increased the flexibility more effectively than aerobic running alone (p≤0.05).

Conclusion: The results of this study demonstrated that football players could prevent possible decreases in anaerobic performance by removing static stretching exercises from warm-up routines used before training and/or competitions. On the other hand, static and/or dynamic stretching exercises can be applied in addition to aerobic running to enhance flexibility. Keywords : Agility; anaerobic performance; dynamic stretching; fatigue index; flexibility; football, static stretching