Introduction and Objective: One of the strategies that athletes can use to temporarily increase strength and muscle power is post-activation potentiation (PAP) during warm-up. However, the effect of this phenomenon on kinematics of special movement has not been determined. Therefore, the aim of this study is to investigate the acute effect of PAP during warm-up on lower extremity kinematic characteristics during heading in soccer players.

Methodology: The study sample consisted of 24 semi-professional youth soccer players with an average age of 18.67±1.11 years, height 182.32±7.12 cm, mass 74.17±7.46 kg. who performed four different warm-up methods, including PAP-take-off, PAP-landing, combined-PAP, and general warm-up, derived from the stages of soccer heading. Knee and hip angular velocities during the take-off phase, maximum knee flexion angle, and duration of knee joint pause during the landing phase were recorded using a three-dimensional motion analysis device (vicon peak ltd, oxford, vicon UK) with four T20 cameras with a frequency of 1000 Hz. Finally, analysis of variance with repeated measurements and post hoc Bonferroni test were used at a significance level of P<0.05.

Results: There was a significant increase in knee and hip angular velocities following combined-PAP and then PAP-take-off compared to other warm-up programs. Moreover, there was a significant increase in knee flexion angle after PAP-landing compared to other warm-up programs. Additionally, there was a significant increase in the duration of knee joint pause after general warm-up compared to other warm-up programs.

Discussion and Conclusion: PAP-take-off improves jumping performance, while PAP-landing improves landing performance. The combination of these two methods, i.e., combined-PAP, will yield better results overall.