Effects of recreational soccer on physical fitness and health indices in sedentary healthy and unhealthy subjects
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recreational soccer (RS) is becoming a popular alternative to the classical continuous exercise mode used for the improvement of cardiovascular and metabolic fitness in untrained people. The objective of this paper was to conduct a detailed systematic review of the literature, identifying the physiological responses to RS and the training effects of RS on aerobic fitness and health in untrained healthy individuals and clinical patients. PubMed, Google Scholar and ScienceDirect databases were searched using terms related to recreational soccer. Inclusion criteria were randomized controlled trials (RCT) that assessed acute physiological responses to RS or the training effects of RS on physical fitness and health in sedentary, untrained subjects of any age or health status. All studies were assessed for methodological quality using the PEDro scale. Thirty-five articles met the inclusion criteria; seven examined the acute response to RS, and 28 assessed training effects. Clear evidence was found that RS had positive effects on many health-related indices and variables, including VO2max (gains of 7-16%), blood pressure (reductions of 6-13 mmHg), body composition (decreased fat mass and improved indices of bone health), and metabolic and cardiac function. These positive effects were observed in both healthy individuals and clinical patients, irrespective of age or sex. Although this review provides clear evidence of the positive effects of RS on health, most studies had limitations of methodology (an average PEDro score < 6). Furthermore, many of the training studies were from a small number of research groups. Future studies should be extended to other countries and institutions to ensure generality of the results. Regular RS training leads to significant cardiovascular and muscular adaptations and gains of health both in sedentary individuals and clinical patients at all ages, suggesting that RS is a potentially highly motivational method to enhance population health.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".