Search Results (1,341)

The rapid evolution of Padel in Saudi Arabia (SA) has positioned the sport as a popular recreational and social activity, mainly among young adults. However, limited research has examined how different forms of sport motivation are associated with mental health outcomes in this emerging context. Drawing on Self-Determination Theory (SDT), this study investigated the associations between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and depression, stress, and anxiety among Padel players in SA. A quantitative, cross-sectional online survey was conducted with a sample of 475 players, the majority of whom were aged 17–35 and held at least a bachelor’s degree. Data were analysed using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) to evaluate the relationships between multidimensional motivation factors and mental health symptoms. The findings revealed a nuanced, at times paradoxical, pattern of relationships. Intrinsic motivation to experience stimulation (engaging in an activity because of the positive sensations, excitement, enjoyment, or stimulation that the activity itself provides, rather than for external rewards or pressures) was consistently associated with lower levels of depression, stress, and anxiety, suggesting that enjoyment-driven involvement is associated with better mental health outcomes. In contrast, intrinsic motivation to accomplish was positively correlated with all three mental health indicators, indicating that achievement-oriented engagement might intensify emotional pressure. Among extrinsic motivations, external regulation was significantly associated with poorer mental health outcomes. In contrast, introjected regulation unexpectedly displayed a negative association with psychological distress, demonstrating a potentially adaptive role in this setting. Identified regulation, however, was not significantly associated with any mental health symptoms. These results underscore the “double-edged” nature of sport motivation, showing that not all internal or external motives yield uniformly positive consequences. The study contributed to the growing literature by providing a context-specific understanding of how motivational dynamics function within a rapidly growing sport in Saudi Arabia. In practice, the findings suggested that enjoyment-based involvement was associated with more favourable mental health outcomes, whereas performance-related pressures might be associated with less favourable outcomes. Full article

To investigate the influence of decision-making styles on college students’ sports and health consumption preferences and the underlying cognitive neural mechanisms, this study recruited 39 college students as participants, adopted a one-factor within-subjects design, and combined behavioral experiments with functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). It examined consumption preferences and brain activation characteristics in maximizers and satisficers under three conditions: no promotion, discount promotion, and public welfare promotion. In behavioral terms, college students demonstrated the highest inclination towards public welfare promotions, with discounts being the second most favored, while the no-promotion condition received the lowest preference. Maximizers preferred discount promotion, while satisficers prioritized public welfare promotion. In neural terms, public welfare promotion widely activated the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, whereas discount promotion only activated a local region of this cortex. Maximizers showed the strongest activation in the corresponding region under discount promotion, and satisficers exhibited more significant activation in the corresponding region under public welfare promotion. Decision-making styles shaped consumption preferences through depth of information processing and brain activation patterns: maximizers focused on rational calculation and benefit maximization, while satisficers relied on intuitive experience and value perception. These findings provide behavioral and neuroscientific evidence for precision marketing in the sport and health consumption market and the implementation of the national fitness program. Full article

Indoor badminton venues are common mass-fitness spaces in China, but their acoustic environment remains underexamined relative to lighting, thermal comfort, and functional facilities. This study uses grounded theory to examine how users perceive acoustic conditions within the broader experience of indoor badminton venues. A total of 4721 raw online reviews for seven purposively selected venues in five Chinese cities were collected, and 3937 valid reviews remained after preprocessing. A hybrid text-processing procedure combining DeepSeek-V3-assisted term pre-screening and Python (3.11) jieba segmentation identified 74 core high-frequency terms; all grounded theory coding was conducted manually in NVivo 15. Open, axial, and selective coding generated 32 initial categories, six main categories, and an Indoor Badminton Venue User Experience Perception Model. Acoustic-related categories were then extracted to construct an Acoustic Environment Perception Mechanism Sub-Model. The results show that noise level was directly mentioned in only 45 reviews but was indirectly embedded in sport atmosphere, time-based flow, and user experience, indicating a latent perceptual role. Moderate sound may be interpreted as a vibrant sport atmosphere, whereas crowd overload and reverberant spatial conditions may shift perception toward chaotic noise. The findings provide qualitative evidence for integrating user-centered acoustic considerations into the design and operation of mass-leisure sports venues. Full article

Background/Objectives: Despite the growing popularity of specialised training interventions aimed at developing motor abilities relevant to combat sports, scientific evidence regarding their effectiveness in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ) remains limited. This study aimed to estimate the effects of the experimental Grappler Quest (GQ) training program on the motor fitness profile of BJJ athletes and to explore whether training experience was associated with the magnitude of training-related changes. Methods: In this randomised trial, 44 competitive male BJJ athletes were allocated to an experimental group (EXP; n = 22) or a control group (CON; n = 22). Both groups followed an 8-week training protocol: the EXP group performed the structured GQ program, consisting of small circuit-based workouts, including resistance, plyometric, gymnastic, and BJJ-related exercises, whereas the CON group followed a standard BJJ training cycle. The motor profile was assessed before and after the intervention (pretest vs. posttest) using selected motor tests. The prespecified primary outcomes were strength-endurance performance in the bench press and squat performed with 50% body mass. Other motor-performance outcomes were treated as secondary or exploratory. Associations between training experience and intervention-related changes were analysed exploratorily. Results: ANCOVA of adjusted post-intervention means indicated between-group differences favouring the EXP group. Large effects were observed for the primary strength-endurance outcomes: bench press at 50% body mass (η² = 0.52) and squat at 50% body mass (η² = 0.40). Large effects were also observed for selected secondary outcomes, including pull-ups with a judogi (η² = 0.39), trunk flexibility (η² = 0.49), and maximal straddle sitting position (η² = 0.37) (all p < 0.001). After Benjamini–Hochberg false discovery rate adjustment, most between-group differences remained statistically significant, although secondary outcomes should be interpreted cautiously. In EXP, improvements were observed across multiple outcomes, including 1RM bench press (mean gain $\tilde{\mathrm{x}}$ = 5.23 kg), 1RM squat ($\tilde{\mathrm{x}}$ = 4.27 kg), pull-ups ($\tilde{\mathrm{x}}$ = 1.91 reps), judo-gi hangs (bent arms $\tilde{\mathrm{x}}$ = 3.91 s; straight arms $\tilde{\mathrm{x}}$ = 4.90 s), and flamingo balance ($\tilde{\mathrm{x}}$ = 4.59 s) (all p < 0.001). In the EXP group, exploratory correlations suggested that shorter training experience was generally associated with greater conditioning-related improvements, whereas flexibility and balance showed the opposite pattern. Conclusions: The GQ intervention package was associated with greater improvements in the motor fitness profile than standard BJJ training. The findings support the potential usefulness of structured circuit-based conditioning as an adjunct to standard BJJ practice, particularly for strength-endurance development. However, the study does not allow the isolated effect of the specific GQ exercise content to be separated from the effect of adding a structured conditioning block, and no direct conclusions can be drawn regarding injury prevention or return-to-play outcomes. Full article

As livestreaming e-commerce rapidly expands, impulsive buying has become increasingly prominent in online consumption. However, although prior studies have examined impulsive buying in general e-commerce contexts, little attention has been paid to impulsive buying in sports livestreaming e-commerce. Drawing on the stimulus-organism-response framework and Dual-System Theory, this study examined the associations among consumer herding tendency, perceived scarcity, hedonic benefits of sales promotion tools, pleasure emotion, trust in seller, and impulsive buying. A cross-sectional self-report survey was conducted with 775 university students in eastern China with prior purchase experience in sports livestreaming e-commerce, and the model was analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling. The results showed that consumer herding tendency, perceived scarcity, and hedonic benefits of sales promotion tools were positively associated with pleasure emotion and trust in seller. Perceived scarcity showed the strongest path coefficient with trust in seller. Trust in seller and pleasure emotion were positively associated with impulsive buying, whereas self-control was negatively associated with impulsive buying. Specific indirect associations through trust in seller were generally stronger than those through pleasure emotion. The moderating effect of self-control was not significant, and the gender-based multi-group analysis revealed no significant differences between male and female consumers. Given the cross-sectional self-report design, these findings should be interpreted as associations rather than causal effects. Full article

Background: Physical exercise is key to good health, but during the transition to university, levels of physical activity often decline. In this context, resilience and emotional intelligence are important psychological resources that may support sustained participation in sport, while exercise-related emotional processes, including affective experiences such as enjoyment, boredom, and anger, may also influence engagement in physical activity. Objective: to analyze the relationship between adherence to sports-related physical activity and psychosocial variables such as resilience and emotional processes among university students. Methods: This systematic review followed the PRISMA guidelines and was registered in PROSPERO (CRD42025641102). The search was conducted in January 2025 in PubMed, Web of Science and Scopus. Quantitative and qualitative studies evaluating sporting engagement related to resilience or emotional components among university students were selected. Risk of bias was assessed using the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool. Results: five studies with sample sizes ranging from 72 to over 48,000 participants were included. High levels of resilience were associated with more frequent participation in recreational activities and acted as a protective factor against academic stress. Enjoyment is the strongest predictor of behavioral and emotional commitment to sport. Conversely, boredom and negative emotions predict lower levels of future participation. Students with higher emotional responses coped better with psychological barriers and reported greater satisfaction with their performance, which ensures the habit is maintained. Conclusion: Resilience and emotional processes appear to be associated with physical activity engagement among university students. However, given the limited number of studies and their heterogeneity, these findings should be interpreted as preliminary and hypothesis-generating. The results suggest the potential relevance of fostering these psychological capacities as part of broader strategies aimed at reducing sedentary behavior and promoting mental wellbeing in university populations. Full article

Human pose detection is fundamental to quantitative sports training analysis in college general education courses, enabling an objective assessment of college students’ movement quality and the early identification of sports injury risks among non-professional athletes. At present, those detectors based on YOLO have encountered difficulties in capturing the continuous movement patterns of college athletes in routine training, maintaining the regression accuracy of different size posture targets, and maintaining the real-time calculation speed in the campus sports environment. Furthermore, most existing pose-estimation frameworks are optimized for general scenes and fail to address the unique challenges of college physical education settings, including non-standard student movements, diverse skill levels, and strict cost constraints for large-scale deployment. In order to solve these problems, we put forward PPLCNet-YOLOv11, which is a simplified human posture-estimation framework designed for college physical education. This model is optimized by three key improvements: (1) replacing the original backbone network with PPLCNet to enhance feature extraction, while strictly observing the strict FLOPs and parameter restrictions; (2) an enhanced Multi-Scale Attention Mechanism (MSAM) that combines adaptive scale perception, hierarchical channel attention, and pose-sensitive spatial attention to better represent elongated anatomical structures and multi-scale pose cues; and (3) an improved enhanced IoU loss function that incorporates scale-aware and aspect-ratio-aware penalty terms to refine the bounding box adjustment for atypical and sports-specific gestures. Experiments on both a dedicated college student sports pose dataset and two public benchmark datasets (COCO Keypoints 2017 and MPII Human Pose) demonstrate that PPLCNet-YOLOv11 achieves 77.8% mAP@0.5 and 37.09% mAP@0.95 based on the campus dataset, with 82.34% precision and 75.00% recall, while requiring only 2.62 M parameters and 6.38 GFLOPs. Extensive inference speed tests show that the model achieves 127 FPS on an NVIDIA RTX 4090 GPU, 38 FPS on an Intel i7-12700 CPU, and 16 FPS on a Jetson Nano edge device, meeting the real-time requirements of campus sports monitoring. Compared with mainstream lightweight YOLO variants and state-of-the-art specialized pose-estimation models, our proposed method improves mAP@0.5 by 4.93–12.6 percentage points based on the campus dataset. All experiments were repeated five times with different random seeds, and we report mean values with standard deviations and statistical significance tests to ensure result reliability. These results indicate that PPLCNet-YOLOv11 provides an accurate and resource-efficient solution for real-time pose evaluation in college physical training. Full article

Organized youth sport has considerable potential to promote young people’s physical health, well-being, and personal and social development. However, these positive outcomes are not guaranteed. When sport environments are poorly structured, excessively performance-oriented, or inadequately supervised, participation may also lead to exclusion, excessive pressure, and other harmful experiences. Creating genuinely youth-centered sport environments is therefore essential, both to foster positive developmental outcomes and to prevent transgressive behavior. Despite growing attention to these issues, the field of youth sport lacks an overarching framework for the development of pedagogically sound, development-oriented, and socially safe sport environments. This study aimed to develop an overarching framework that integrates the developmental, motivational, and safeguarding dimensions of youth sport into one coherent model for creating optimal learning environments. Through an iterative process, a practice-based framework was developed, theoretically grounded, and initially operationalized. Early versions of the framework were subsequently examined for conceptual alignment through expert opinions, focus groups, and group discussions with existing European youth sport initiatives. This process resulted in the development of the Youth Sport Compass (YSC), a coherent conceptual and practical framework designed to support youth-centered and socially safe sport environments. Experts from different countries and disciplines considered the framework highly relevant, conceptually robust, and broadly applicable in practice. The YSC provides a strong conceptual and practical foundation for coaches, sport organizations, and policymakers seeking to create pedagogically sound, youth-centered, and socially safe sport environments. Although the YSC is firmly grounded in theory and practice, it has yet to be empirically validated. Further research is needed to assess its validity and practical effectiveness. Full article

Background: Rink Hockey is a high-intensity contact sport with growing participation in Portugal, yet epidemiological data on injuries among senior and under-23 practitioners remain scarce. This study aimed to retrospectively describe self-reported injury occurrence, injury characteristics, and potential associations with demographic and sport-related variables among Portuguese Rink Hockey athletes. Methods: A retrospective, cross-sectional, self-reported e-survey was conducted among federated Portuguese Rink Hockey practitioners (under-23 and senior categories) during the 2024/2025 season. The questionnaire included 53 closed-ended items on sociodemographics, sport participation, equipment, training loads, and injury history. Injury prevalence, incidence rate, mean injuries per athlete, and associations were analyzed. Results: Among 181 respondents (68.5% male; age 22.3 ± 4.3 years; experience 15.8 ± 5.0 years), 89 (49.2%) reported at least one injury (mean 2.6 ± 2.7 injuries/athlete in the total sample; 3.3 ± 3.1 per injured athlete). Estimated incidence was 3.9 ± 5.9 injuries/1000 h (total sample) and 7.9 ± 6.2/1000 h (injured athletes). The knee (19.1%) was the most common injury localization, and muscular injuries (25.8%) were the most frequent type. Most injuries occurred during matches (46.0%), with contact with another player (27.0%) during offensive transition (40.4%) in areas surrounding the goal (57.3%) being the most frequently reported circumstances. Older and female athletes reported a higher injury prevalence than younger and males counterparts (66.7% vs. 33.3% [p = 0.042; ES = 0.174] and 61.4% vs. 43.5% [p = 0.026; ES = 0.166], respectively). Injury occurrence was positively associated with age (r = 0.262–0.158, p ≤ 0.05) and playing experience (r = 0.157, p ≤ 0.05). However, greater playing experience was associated with lower odds of joint injury (11–15 years: OR = 0.116, 95% CI [0.019; 0.695], p = 0.018; 16–19 years: OR = 0.116, 95% CI [0.019; 0.695], p = 0.018; and ≥20 years: OR = 0.056, 95% CI [0.006; 0.534], p = 0.012). Conclusions: Portuguese Rink Hockey practitioners exhibit a high injury burden, predominantly affecting the knee, with muscle injuries and contact/overuse mechanisms as major contributors. Age, sex, and experience were associated with injury occurrence. These findings may support the incorporation of targeted prevention strategies into multidisciplinary support teams. Full article

This systematic literature review synthesises existing knowledge on volunteer sport tourism—the intersection of volunteering, sport, and tourism—in order to clarify its evolution, theoretical foundations, and practical implications, and to address the fragmentation of the field across disciplines. Following PRISMA 2020 guidelines, peer-reviewed journal articles, books, and doctoral dissertations published in English between January 1974 and December 2025 were retrieved from Web of Science, Scopus, SportDiscus, and Google Scholar, complemented by citation tracking. Studies focused on volunteers travelling to sporting events were included; conference abstracts, editorials, and works addressing only local volunteering or general tourism were excluded. The methodological quality of 32 included studies was appraised narratively by two authors independently against three criteria, with disagreements resolved through discussion. Findings were integrated through a thematic narrative synthesis supported by analytical mapping tables. The review identifies five dominant themes: motivations, volunteer experiences and satisfaction, economic and social impacts, organisational and management perspectives, and destination and legacy dimensions. The synthesis contributes to theoretical development by proposing an integrated tripartite framework that connects volunteer antecedents, event experiences, and legacy outcomes, and offers practical recommendations for event organisers, policymakers, and destination stakeholders. The review was conducted without pre-registration. Full article

Choking in sport is both a highly researched phenomenon and a colloquial term for performance collapse, which has been at the centre of much debate. The past four decades of study continue to present challenges with its definition that have stifled progression with both research and applied intervention. This study adopted a functional contextual approach, with the aim of exploring how conceptualising choking through this lens might better serve practitioners and researchers, to build more impactful and meaningful processes for behaviour change. A purposive sample of 12 athletes, who identified as having experienced choking, took part in one of four focus groups. Thematic analysis provided four themes that explain choking from this functional contextual perspective, as a process of creating maladaptive personal narratives, responding to symbolic cues, rule-following, and strategies to alleviate the discomfort of challenging inner experiences associated with the experience. Findings provide preliminary support for functional contextualism as a worthwhile research lens for choking, with the suggestion that returning to observable definitions of choking may offer practitioners greater insight into relational processes underpinning choking. Full article

Background/Objectives: Sport retirement entails many adjustments for varsity student-athletes, including changes in identity and body-related experiences, potentially increasing their vulnerability to disordered eating (DE) and exercise addiction. This study aimed to (1) compare the severity of DE and exercise addiction symptoms between former varsity student-athletes and former non-athlete students, and (2) examine whether the associations between personality traits and these symptoms differ across groups. Methods: A total of 88 former varsity student-athletes and 69 former non-athlete students completed an online questionnaire between January and September 2025. Results: Former student-athletes reported more symptoms of exercise addiction (p = 0.025), a tendency to report lower DE associated with drive for muscularity (p = 0.074), and similar levels of DE associated with drive for thinness and symptoms of orthorexia (p = 0.273 and p = 0.376, respectively) compared to the control group. Furthermore, perfectionism was significantly associated with all dependent variables. Moderation analyses revealed significant interactions between perfectionism and group (p = 0.048 for drive for thinness and p = 0.044 for drive for muscularity), indicating that the association between perfectionism and DE associated with drive for thinness and drive for muscularity is significant in the control group but not in former student-athletes. Conclusions: These findings underscore the need to prevent and detect symptoms of exercise addiction as well as different forms of DE throughout an athletic career and during retirement. Interventions targeting perfectionism, such as fostering acceptance of body-related experiences, clarifying personal values, and developing greater body awareness, may help support student-athletes and reduce vulnerability to exercise addiction and DE. Full article

Introduction: Competitive sport angling is a specialized form of recreational fishing in which participants compete in tournaments throughout the year to obtain annual rankings. In Portugal, competitive anglers may exhibit high levels of engagement and expenditure, yet the economic relevance of this activity remains poorly documented. Objective: This study aimed to assess the economic value of inland competitive angling competitions in Portugal. Methodology: Data on anglers’ annual expenditures were collected through a web-based questionnaire distributed in April 2025 by the Portuguese Federation of Sport Angling to 1,230 registered federated anglers. A total of 193 valid responses were obtained, including information on socio-demographic characteristics, angling modalities, and fishing locations, as well as expenditures on fishing equipment, travel, meals, accommodation, and willingness to pay (WTP) to ensure fish availability during competitions. Results: Extrapolation of the results to the national federated inland angler population suggests an estimated annual direct expenditure of approximately €6.7 million, ranging from €4.2 million to €9.2 million. Fishing equipment (e.g., rods, reels, boats, kayaks, and paniers) accounted for the largest share of expenditures, followed by travel, meals, and accommodation. Expenditure patterns varied according to age, angling modality, years of competitive experience, and participation in both inland and marine competitions. Most respondents (62.7%) reported being unwilling to pay additional amounts to guarantee fish availability, arguing that this responsibility should fall on the state and competition organizers given the fees already paid. Conclusions: Inland competitive sport angling appears to make a relevant contribution to economic activity associated with tourism and leisure services in Portugal and should therefore be considered in the management of inland water resources. Full article

Sensor-based human activity recognition (HAR) plays a fundamental role in healthcare monitoring, sports analytics, and ambient-assisted living. Although deep learning has substantially advanced HAR performance, two practical issues still limit its real-world deployment: (i) the distribution shift caused by changes in users or sensor placements can degrade generalization, and (ii) the quadratic $\mathcal{O}\left(L^2\right)$ complexity of standard self-attention hinders efficient long-sequence modeling on resource-constrained wearable devices. To address these issues, we propose DSHformer, which is an accuracy-oriented HAR framework that combines compact channel–temporal encoding with locality-sensitive hashing (LSH)-based attention. Specifically, DSHformer (i) employs a low-parameter patch-based graph-attention encoder to jointly model latent relationships among sensor channel–temporal dynamics; (ii) introduces a trainable prototype pool together with a multi-layer decomposition network to improve intra-class compactness and inter-class separability via prototype alignment; and (iii) introduces a decomposition-stable LSH-based attention mechanism tailored for HAR, whose core design couples prototype-guided feature decomposition with locality-sensitive hashing to ensure that semantically related tokens remain consistently grouped in the same hash bucket even after decomposition-induced attenuation. The mechanism thereby operates at $\mathcal{O}(LlogL)$ attention complexity on longer sensor sequences. Extensive experiments on five public benchmarks (WISDM, UCI-HAR, PAMAP2, Opportunity, and UniMiB-SHAR) show that DSHformer achieves accuracies of 98.6%, 93.7%, 98.4%, 88.5%, and 96.6%, respectively, achieving competitive or superior performance compared with both Transformer variants and HAR-specific baselines under the adopted benchmark protocols. Ablation studies further confirm the complementary contribution of each component. Full article

Objectives: To examine disordered eating behaviors, orthorexic tendencies, binge-eating episodes, attitudes toward exercise, perceived hormone-related symptoms and body image perception among competitive bodybuilders across different levels of competitive experience. Methods: In this cross-sectional study, 60 competitive bodybuilders (29 men, 31 women) completed an anonymous online questionnaire. The survey evaluated demographic characteristics, coaching and training management, phase-specific symptoms (such as libido, sleep, eating behaviors, and menstrual alterations), orthorexic tendencies, exercise addiction, and body-image perception. Results: Both sexes reported reduced libido, increased hunger, and sleep disturbances, along with frequent weight monitoring and common binge-eating episodes. Moreover, females frequently reported menstrual irregularities. ORTO-15 scores indicated a potential risk of orthorexia nervosa, while EAI-3 scores suggested a risk of exercise addiction in novice females and advanced males, with differences in mood regulation and guilt across sex and experience. Males showed higher perceived and ideal muscle mass, whereas females reported higher perceived body fat and a preference for leaner physiques. Conclusions: Competitive bodybuilders of both sexes exhibit post-competition binge eating, mood- and appearance-driven exercise behaviors, and pronounced body-image concerns. Screening, education on energy availability, structured post-competition support, and health-focused coaching are recommended to prevent the progression from sport-specific practices to clinical pathology. Full article