Antagonist Static Stretching Between Sets Improves Leg Press Repetition Performance in Adolescent Female Volleyball Players: A Randomized Crossover Within-Subject Design

This study aimed to investigate the effect of antagonist static stretching applied between
sets during resistance training on the number of repetitions of leg press exercise in young
volleyball players. For this purpose, a total of 16 female active volleyball players (age
15.50 ± 0.52 years; height 167.25 ± 6.10; body mass 57.00 ± 5.98) participated voluntarily.
The athletes participating in the study visited the laboratory five times. In the first session,
anthropometric measurements were taken. In the second session, their 10 repetition
maximums (RTs) were recorded, and in the third session, 10 control RTs were recorded.
In the other two sessions, athletes were randomly assigned to two experimental protocol
treatments in accordance with the crossover experimental design. In the traditional application,
leg press exercise was performed as four sets with their own maximums and
2 min of passive rest between sets. In the experimental application, the participants performed
four sets of leg press exercise with ten repetitions of their own maximums until
concentric exhaustion, and static hamstring stretching was applied continuously for 30 s
over 2 min between sets. All participants participated in both application protocols in
different sessions. SPSS 20.0 package programed and GraphPad Prizm 8 graphics program
were used for the analysis of all data. Data were analyzed at 0.05 significance level. In the
findings obtained, Group* application interaction was found to be statistically significant
according to the application and groups (F = 4.198, p = 0.016, p
2 = 0.219). In the leg
press repetitions, statistical significance was found in favor of the experimental treatment
in the third and fourth sets. This study shows that antagonist static stretching applied
between sets positively affects resistance training performance by increasing the number of
repetitions in leg press exercise in young female volleyball players.