Perceived Recovery and Muscle Fatigue in Professional Soccer Players During Preseason
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study aimed to examine weekly variations and within-subject relationships between internal training intensity (ITI), perceived recovery (TQR), neuromuscular performance (CMJ), and perceived muscle soreness (PMS) during a four-week preseason period in professional soccer players. Twenty-three soccer players (age 24.8 ± 4.4 years; height 182 ± 7 cm; body mass 74.6 ± 6.7 kg) classified as Tier 3 athletes from the Croatian Second Soccer League were monitored using session rating of perceived exertion, TQR scales, countermovement jump tests, and PMS questionnaires. A significant reduction in ITI and concurrent improvement in TQR scores were observed across the preseason, with the highest intensity in week 1 and the lowest recovery in week 2. CMJ height performance declined during peak fatigue but rebounded as training intensity tapered. Repeated-measures correlations revealed negative associations between weekly ITI and TQR of the following week (rrm = −0.72), and between ITI and CMJ (rrm = −0.55), indicating that greater training intensities may impair both perceptual and neuromuscular recovery. The training stimulus–recovery difference index was positively associated with next-day TQR, suggesting it may serve as a sensitive marker of session-level readiness. These findings highlight the interplay between intensity, recovery, and fatigue, emphasizing the utility of low-cost subjective and objective tools for monitoring preseason responses and guiding individualized training strategies in elite soccer settings.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".