The importance of anaerobic metabolism in soccer

Abstract

The soccer is an intermittent and acyclic sport modality, with constant alternations of intensity and actions. These modifications during a football match require the player to be able to overcome the resistance and withstand intense loads in the most efficient manner possible. In this way, it can be said that the player spends most of the game in low-intensity walking or trotting. In order to arrive at this finding, these investigations mostly used the following indicators: anaerobic threshold, maximum oxygen consumption, heart rate, exercise intensity, lactate concentrations, distance traveled, duration, sprints, intensity of actions performed and relation between time of activity and pause. However, these investigations also demonstrate that decisive actions in a football match, that is, those that define a ball contest or that often help to achieve or avoid a goal are anaerobic. Therefore, the footballer, given the varied demand of effort intensity in a match, has to privilege in his training characteristics as different as the development of explosive strength, speed, agility, flexibility, aerobic and anaerobic resistance, so harmonic and conjugated. In this way, the purpose of this investigation is to trace the physiological and physical capacity of the athletes during a match, and thus demonstrate the importance of the anaerobic metabolism in soccer.