Effect of Repeat Deceleration on Countermovement Jump and Kicking Performance in Male and Female Football Players
Journal of strength and conditioning research · 2026
Soccer players' deceleration fatigues far faster than their sprinting, but that fatigue didn't dent their jumping or kicking in this small study.
Part of: Training load and injury risk: what the evidence says · Female athlete health: the evidence base
The paper
Acute experimental repeated-measures study, n=33 (18 male, 15 female) high-level college soccer players.
What they found
Peak deceleration fatigued far more than sprint speed (fatigue index and decrement score both p<0.05, Cohen's d=3.18-3.32), but the repeated sprint-deceleration protocol caused no significant drop in CMJ or kicking performance (p>0.05, d=-0.06 to 0.23). There was a significant sex interaction on peak ball speed (p<0.05, ηp2=0.149), with women showing a greater decline than men, and moderate correlations (r=0.42-0.55) linked better deceleration capacity to smaller fatigue-related performance drops.
Study design
Single-arm, within-subject acute experimental study (no control condition) in 33 college-level soccer players (18M/15F), using a standardised 10x15m sprint-deceleration protocol with pre/post CMJ and kicking tests. This sits low on the hierarchy, it's a lab/field physiological experiment generating correlational and mechanistic data, not a treatment trial.
Methodology
The repeated-measures design lets players serve as their own controls, which is reasonable for acute fatigue work, but there is no comparison protocol (e.g., sprint-only vs deceleration-only) to isolate cause, and the female subgroup (n=15) is too small to power a sex interaction reliably. Multiple correlations (five reported, r=0.42-0.55) are not corrected for multiple comparisons, inflating the chance some are false positives. A clinician trying to verify the headline deceleration-fatigue effect would need to see the raw fatigue index time-series, not just the pooled d-value, since d>3 is an unusually large effect for a between-condition fatigue comparison and warrants scrutiny of how FI and Sdec were calculated.
The appraisal
The deceleration-fatigues-faster-than-sprinting finding is both statistically and plausibly meaningfully large, but the null result on CMJ and kicking performance (with small effect sizes) suggests the protocol's fatigue didn't translate to functional output, or the outcome measures were too coarse to detect it. The sex-by-condition interaction on kicking speed is statistically significant but drawn from only 15 women, so it's association, not a causal sex-based mechanism, and shouldn't be generalised yet. The correlations, while significant, explain roughly 18-30% of variance at best, so deceleration index alone is a weak clinical predictor.
The gap
There's no comparison arm isolating deceleration-specific fatigue from general repeated-sprint fatigue, and no replication in match-realistic conditions or larger sex-balanced samples, so the practical relevance (e.g., injury risk, in-game decision-making) is unproven.
Landmark context
This extends the repeated-sprint-ability literature and the more recent deceleration-profiling work (e.g., Harper and colleagues' work establishing deceleration as a distinct physical quality from sprinting) by testing whether deceleration-specific fatigue carries over into jump and kicking performance, an area that hadn't been directly tested before.
What to do Monday
Not a Monday-morning change yet. It's a reasonable prompt to track deceleration ability separately from sprint speed in fatigue monitoring, but there's no evidence here to justify altering return-to-play, conditioning prescriptions, or sex-specific programming based on kicking speed.
In practice
Applies to male and female field-sport athletes in repeated-sprint conditioning or in return-to-sport testing after lower-limb injury where braking demand is high (hamstring, groin, ACL). On the S&C floor, build deceleration-specific tracking into repeated-sprint-ability testing, logging deceleration time or index rep by rep rather than flying sprint speed alone, since braking capacity clearly fades faster than top speed in this cohort. In the rehab clinic, do not assume a normal post-fatigue CMJ or kicking test means deceleration control is intact; this study shows exactly that dissociation, so where braking mechanics matter for return-to-sport clearance, add a dedicated deceleration or change-of-direction check rather than leaning on CMJ alone. Treat this as a prompt to separate deceleration from sprint in fatigue monitoring, not as grounds to change conditioning volumes or sex-specific programming off one 33-player acute trial with a straight-line, enforced-braking task that may not transfer to unanticipated cutting.
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