PENGARUH COLD WATER IMMERSION TERHADAP PENURUNAN DENYUT NADI DAN RATING OF PERCEIVED EXERTION (RPE) PADA ATLET SPORT SCIENCE FOOTBALL CLUB

The recovery process after high-intensity physical activity has a crucial role for football athletes so that they can return to optimal physical condition in a relatively short time, both from the physiological aspect and from the perspective of fatigue that is felt subjectively. One of the recovery approaches that is often applied is cold water immersion (CWI), in the form of immersion of part of the body in low-temperature water to accelerate recovery after a training session. This study is intended to reveal the extent to which cold water immersion affects the decrease in pulse rate and Rating of Perceived Exertion (RPE) in athletes who are members of the Sport Science Football Club. The design applied is in the form of a one group pretest-posttest experiment. The novelty of this study lies in the simultaneous assessment of physiological indicators (pulse) and subjective perception indicators (RPE) as the impact of cold water immersion on non-elite football athletes in Indonesia. The study participants included 11 football players from clubs in the South Sulawesi region, selected using the purposive sampling technique. CWI treatment was applied by immersing the lower limbs up to the abdominal boundary in water at 15°C for a span of 15 minutes. Pulse measurement used palpation technique on the wrist artery in four 15-second intervals, while RPE was assessed on a Borg scale ranging from 6 to 20. Data processing included the Shapiro-Wilk normality test and the paired samples t-test with a significance threshold of 5%. The results showed that the average pulse decreased from 159.63±13.79 times/minute (pretest) to 79.63±15.94 times/minute (posttest), accompanied by a value of t = 27.080 and a significance of 0.000 (p < 0.05); The average RPE decreased from 14.09±2.43 (pretest) to 9.45±1.63 (posttest), with t = 5.873 and significance 0.000 (p < 0.05). In conclusion, cold water immersion has been proven to have a real effect on the reduction of pulse rate and RPE in football athletes so that it can be used as a choice of recovery strategies both after training and after matches.