The Effects Of A Heavy Resistance Warm-up On Sprint Speed

Sprint speed is a fundamental physical characteristic that is necessary for the successful participation in many sports. Post activation potentiation (PAP) is defined as an acute enhancement of muscle power output following an intense muscle conditioning activity. PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of a PAP conditioning activity on sprint speed with an emphasis on the role of specificity regarding the preparatory conditioning activity. It was hypothesized that a unilateral conditioning activity (barbell lunge) would provide a greater PAP effect on short sprint ability than a bilateral conditioning activity (barbell back squat). METHODS: Sixteen NCAA Track Athletes participated (7 male, 9 female) in the study. The experiment employed a repeated measures crossover design where, following a familiarization session, each subject completed a randomly assigned a separate warm-up (WU) on three different days with at least 48 hours between sessions. Following the randomly assigned WU, sprint speed was tested over a distance of 36.6 meters as well as quartiles. The WU’s were: a dynamic WU, a dynamic WU followed by a unilateral barbell lunge (BL) as the PAP conditioning activity, and a dynamic WU followed by a bilateral back squat (BS) as the PAP conditioning activity. The load of the BL and BS conditioning activities were both 6 repetitions of 80% 1-RM. A repeated measures ANOVA was utilized to determine if there were significant differences between sprint times for each WU strategy. RESULTS: There were no statistically significant differences in sprint times between WU conditions at 36.6 m (Dynamic WU: 5.22±0.48 secs, PAP WU SQ: 5.23±0.48 secs, PAP WU BL: 5.23±0.50 secs) or any quartile (p > 0.05). CONCLUSION: Within the parameters of this study, neither an intense bilateral or unilateral conditioning activity improved short sprint performance beyond that of a dynamic WU activity.