Soccer for Psychosocial health

Soccer for Psychosocial Health
By Rick Nauert PhD Senior News Editor
Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on April 7, 2010

While we would all expect a study of soccer to reveal improvements in physical conditioning, a new extensive soccer research project finds that men worry less when playing soccer than when running. Women’s soccer creates we-stories and helps women stay active.

The 3-year project involving more than 50 researchers from seven countries suggests soccer can be used as a treatment for lifestyle-related illness.

Investigators covered several intervention studies involving men, women and children, who were divided into soccer, running and control groups.

Researchers found the results of the studies so remarkable that the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports is publishing a special edition issue entitled “Football for Health” containing 14 scientific articles from the soccer project.

Study leader Peter Krustrup concludes “Soccer is a very popular team sport that contains positive motivational and social factors that may facilitate compliance and contribute to the maintenance of a physically active lifestyle.
“The studies presented have demonstrated that soccer training for two-three hours per week causes significant cardiovascular, metabolic and musculoskeletal adaptations, independent on gender, age or lack of experience with soccer.”
“In a number of aspects, soccer training appears to be superior to running training. Soccer training can also be used to treat hypertension and it was clearly superior to a standard treatment strategy of physician-guided traditional recommendations.”

“Future studies are needed to understand what is causing the beneficial effects of football, how well football can be used to improve heart health in early childhood and how other patient groups such as those with type II diabetes or cancer can benefit from playing soccer.”



Men worry less when playing soccer than when running

Another study examined the exertion experienced during training for untrained adults and their experience of “worries” and “flow.”

This study, based on six groups of untrained men and women, showed that all groups experienced an overall high level of flow during the intervention, which underlines that the participants felt motivated, happy and involved to the point where they forgot time and fatigue.

There was no difference in the level of worry for the female soccer players and runners, but the running men seemed to worry quite a lot more than their soccer playing counterparts.

“The men that played soccer elicited lower levels of worry than during running, 2.8 vs 4.0 on a 0-6 scale, and although they are training at the same average heart rate they do not feel the exertion as strongly as during running” says associate professor Anne-Marie Elbe.

“Further research is needed to examine why men and women experience playing soccer differently but it could be that the men just have had more experience with football in earlier years than the women.”

Source: University of Copenhagen

Happy & Healthy Footy days! 

I worry when playing football.

But only about losing.