Cycling Interventions and Gait Speed in Older Adults: A Systematic Review of Exercise Prescription and Mobility Outcomes

Gait speed has become a key predictor in identifying individuals at risk for falls in both healthy and clinical populations.  Given the cost of falls on the healthcare system and the aging population, decreasing the prevalence for falls and improving gait speed has become an important area of research for reducing the financial burden on the healthcare system.  Cycling, in particular, has emerged as a promising modality to improve gait speed, with recent evidence suggesting that cycling cadence may be a key variable influencing this improvement.  This systematic review aims to identify the current state of the literature regarding cycling cadence and gait speed, with seventeen studies meeting the inclusion criteria for inclusion in this review.  Evidence generally supports the benefits of cycling interventions for improving gait speed, but also highlights inconsistencies in the reporting of cycling prescription variables including cadence, work rate, and intensity within the literature.  Furthermore, the studies identified do not provide insight into potential underlying adaptations that may be driving the reported improvements in gait speed.  Across the included studies, cycling interventions were generally associated with improvements in gait speed or related mobility outcomes across a range of older adult and clinical populations.  Future studies should more consistently report cycling prescription variables and incorporate mechanistic outcomes to better understand how cycling interventions improve gait performance

Perceived Sports Competence and Retrospective Physical Education Experiences in University Students: A Mixed-Methods Study

School physical education experiences may shape later exercise engagement, yet how such experiences are cognitively organized in relation to perceived sports competence remains insufficiently understood. This study examined the associations between perceived sports competence and retrospective physical education experiences among Japanese university students using a mixed-methods design. Participants (N = 276) completed a retrospective questionnaire assessing perceived sports competence (PSPP-J short-form Sports Competence subscale), elementary and junior high school physical education experiences, and current exercise-related outcomes. Exploratory factor analysis supported a single-factor structure (eigenvalue = 2.84, variance explained = 61.87%), with good internal consistency (Cronbach’s α = 0.86). Based on median scores, participants were classified into lower and higher competence groups. Quantitative analyses indicated that students with higher perceived competence reported more positive retrospective evaluations, greater comfort in physical education settings, and higher current exercise frequency. Qualitative text mining analyses further revealed systematic structural contrasts in narrative organization: higher competence narratives demonstrated greater integration of ability-related and affective elements, whereas lower competence narratives showed stronger clustering of evaluative and socially contextualized terms. Overall, the findings suggest that perceived sports competence is associated not only with exercise-related behaviors but also with differences in how physical education experiences are organized within retrospective accounts. These findings highlight the potential relevance of competence-supportive instructional contexts for understanding how physical education experiences may be remembered and interpreted later in life

Emotional Scaffolding Through Sport-Based Educational Games in Early Childhood Education: A Qualitative Study Using NVivo

Social–emotional learning (SEL) in early childhood is a foundational predictor of later wellbeing, learning engagement, and life outcomes. Movement- and game-based learning is frequently recommended for preschool settings, yet evidence remains limited on how teachers provide emotional scaffolding while children engage in sport-based educational games, particularly in Indonesian early childhood education and care (ECEC). This qualitative case study explored (1) how teachers scaffold children’s emotions during sport-based educational games, (2) how game structure elicits opportunities for emotion regulation and prosocial behavior, and (3) how SEL goals are integrated into planning and reflection. Data were collected through classroom observations of game sessions, semi-structured interviews with three ECEC teachers and five parents, and document review of lesson plans (RPPH/RPPM). Data were analyzed thematically with Nvivo 12 plus (open coding, categorization, and theme refinement), supported by a codebook and matrix-coding queries. Four themes emerged: teacher emotional scaffolding practices, game structure as a trigger for SEL, observed socio-emotional behavioral change, and integration into planning and reflective practice. The findings highlight the pedagogical value of sport-based educational games as a context for emotion coaching and co-regulation, and provide practical guidance for embedding SEL indicators into early childhood physical education activities

The Effects of Heart Rate Feedback and Extrinsic Reward on Students’ Activity Level in Elementary Physical Education

Due to reduced instructional time in Physical Education (PE), teachers are challenged to help students achieve at least 50% of class time in Moderate-to-Vigorous Physical Activity (MVPA). This study examined the effects of real-time heart rate (HR) feedback, extrinsic rewards, and grade level on students’ activity level in elementary PE. Results showed a significant main effect for grade level.  Second graders had a higher % MVPA than fifth graders. There was a significant screen  reward interaction. Participants in the screen condition had a higher % MVPA when extrinsic rewards were involved, but those in the no-screen condition had a higher % MVPA when no extrinsic reward was given. There was a significant grade level  reward interaction. Fifth graders had a higher % MVPA when tangible items were offered, but second graders had a higher % MVPA with oral recognition alone. The results suggested more teaching on the HR-related content and exploring different types of extrinsic rewards

Neuromuscular Adaptations to a 12-Week Periodized Speed, Agility, and Quickness Training Program in Female Collegiate Athletes

An athlete needs to perform well in his/her game, so motor skills like speed, agility, and explosive power are very essential fitness components. Although programs of training are frequently employed to enhance these aspects, and although structured training methods are frequently used to improve these attributes, there is still inadequate information on how well they work for female collegiate athletes. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of a training intervention program on selected motor skills linear speed, multidirectional agility, and lower body explosive power in female college athletes. Total thirty healthy female university students aged 20.4 ± 1.8 years participated in a single-group pre-post experimental study. Motor skill performance was measured using a 50 m sprint test (speed), Three Cones Test, Zig-zag Test, and the Illinois Agility Test (agility), and vertical jump tests such as the countermovement jump, the countermovement jump with arm swing, and squat jump (explosive power). Pre-post changes were analyzed using paired sample t-tests, and the effect size was calculated using Cohen’s d. The results showed significant improvements in sprint and agility performance (p = 0.003), with moderate to large effect sizes (d = 0.63-0.78). However, no significant improvements were found in vertical jump performance (p ≥ 0.05), indicating minimal changes in lower body explosive power. The organized training protocol improved female collegiate athletes' linear speed and multidirectional agility but had limited impact on increasing lower-body explosive power

IoT‑Enabled Multimodal Approach for Low‑Latency Prediction of Elite Athlete Performance Dynamics

The increasing deployment of wearable and neurophysiological sensing technologies in elite sports enables continuous monitoring of athletes’ cognitive, physiological, and biomechanical states; however, existing approaches often analyse unimodal data and fail to capture complex cross-modal interactions that govern performance dynamics. This research proposes a multimodal neurophysiological and kinematic data fusion framework for predictive modelling of elite athlete performance dynamics. Data collection was conducted using wearable EEG headsets, heart rate monitors for heart rate variability (HRV), and inertial measurement units (IMUs) to capture kinematic parameters during training and competition across multiple elite sports. The collected high-frequency time-series data were transmitted through an IoT infrastructure to an edge–cloud platform for real-time monitoring and analytics. Pre-processing included band-pass filtering used to signal denoising removal for EEG and physiological signals. The proposed method employs a hybrid deep learning architecture that integrates Temporal Variational Autoencoder with Vanilla Recurrent Neural Network (TVAE-Vanilla RNN) model to predict elite athlete performance. The Intelligent Biosensor Dataset used in this study was collected using wearable EEG headsets, heart rate monitors for HRV, and inertial measurement units (IMUs) to capture kinematic parameters during training and competition across multiple elite sports

Exploring the Impact of BMI on Foot Anthropometric Dimensions: A Pilot Study

Age, gender, and Body Mass Index (BMI) significantly influence foot dimensions. However, research on BMI's impact is limited, focusing primarily on implications for shoe design. This study aimed to collect foot anthropometric data from Indian adults and examine the impact of BMI on foot dimensions. A total of 270 volunteers participated, divided into Normal (n=135) and Overweight (n=135) groups based on BMI. The average age, height, and weight of the normal and overweight participants were 21.96 ± 4.174 years, 162.58 ± 8.925 cm, and 58.24 ± 8.593 kg, and 24.17 ± 7.476 years, 165.87 ± 9.205 cm, and 74.65 ± 9.662 kg, respectively. Foot anthropometric data were recorded using a 3D foot scanner and analyzed with SPSS v26. Spearman correlation indicated a significant positive relationship between BMI and foot dimensions, excluding arch height (p<0.01). The Mann-Whitney U test showed significant differences (p<0.05) between normal and overweight groups in all measured parameters, except for foot arch height. The findings of this study reveal that BMI significantly influences foot morphology in overweight participants, who exhibit broader and longer feet than those of normal-weight individuals. These variations highlight the need for BMI-specific footwear design to improve fit, comfort, and stability. However, further research with a larger sample size, considering age, sex, and ethnicity, is necessary to establish a comprehensive database

Tests of Walking Performance as Predictors of Physiological Work during Walking Football Tournament Match Play

Walking football (WF), the walking version of competitive football (i.e., soccer), is a team-based sport that is popular with middle-aged and older adults. While some research has focused on the potential health benefits of WF participation, little research has focused on evaluating walking fitness tests as correlates (i.e., predictors) of physical work during WF competitions. This study evaluated whether metrics of walking test performance could predict metrics of physiological work measured during match play. Methods: Men’s (n=16; Mean±SD: 49±10 yrs age) and women’s (n=20; Mean±SD: 55±14 yrs age) WF teams from England, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore, all of whom were competing in an international WF tournament in Singapore, were recruited for this study. Participants performed two walking tests: 10m Walk Test to determine maximal walking speed (WSMAX), and the 6-min Walk Test to measure maximal walking distance (6MWTD) in 6 mins. The 6MWTD was also transformed into a predicted maximal oxygen uptake (PVO2MAX). During the tournament the next day, participants wore a neoprene waist pack with an accelerometry-based activity monitor (AM) that was used to derive three metrics from a single competitive match: Total activity counts (ACTOT, counts/match), total steps (STEPSTOT, steps/match), and a sum of MET-minutes (MET-mins/match). Multiple regression procedures were then used to predict the physiological work values (ACTOT, STEPSTOT, MET-mins) from the walking test metrics (WSMAX, 6MWTD, PVO2MAX) (0.05 alpha). Results: Neither 6MWTD nor PVO2MAX were predictive of any physiological work variables (P=0.57-0.97), but WSMAX was highly predictive of all physiological work variables – R2=0.65 for ACTOT, R2=0.54 for STEPSTOT, R2=0.61 for MET-mins – with sex as a covariate. Conclusions: Walking test metrics related to cardiorespiratory fitness were not related to measures of physiological work during WF match play, but the metric of maximal walking speed (WSMAX) seemed to be highly predictive. These results suggest that aerobic walking fitness (i.e., as determined by 6MWTD performance) may be less important than anaerobic bursts of walking speed (i.e., WSMAX) to the needs of competitive WF match play

Personalized Training Optimization for Sports Athletes Using a Hybrid Machine Learning and Rule-Based Expert System Approach

The current research provides a basis for the personalization of athletic training optimization, but there are still many possibilities for the further extension and refinement of the hybrid intelligent system approach for future research. The current system includes each athlete assessment as an athletic snapshot in isolation and does not have information about the temporal aspects of training history and response to training. In the future this type of work should also include modelling approaches such as recurrent neural network or state space models that observe the evolution of performance over longer training cycles. Longitudinal data would allow the system to adapt learned individual adaptation rates, recognize the individual as a responder to or non-responder of particular training stimuli and enact adaptive programming, the means to adjust based on the results actually achieved rather than static predictions. The use of closed-loop feedback control using the frameworks of reinforcement learning is a very promising direction. The ability to discover nearly optimized training adjustment policies by allowing the system to see outcomes in many thousands of combinations of athlete and intervention opens the door to finding some of the subtler interaction effects between aspects of the athlete and the program variables that are difficult to encode as rules. This approach would make the system from prescriptive to truly adaptive, so that recommendations would improve as more and more athletes move through training cycles

Developing Responsibility through Action Research: Implementing Hellison’s Model as a Whole-School Approach in Primary Education

In the past few years, there has been a growing interest in the use of Hellison’s Teaching Personal and Social Responsibility (TPSR) model both in sports and Physical Education (PE) programs and in broader pedagogical interventions. TPSR helps individuals adopt habits and set behavioural goals, based on a culture of responsibility both within and outside of school contexts. The present study describes a TPSR participatory action research intervention conducted at a primary school in an urban area of Attica in Greece, as a whole-school approach that could help students develop responsible habits and attitudes. Ninety-one (91) students (boys=48, girls=43, aged 8 to 12 years) from grades 3-6 participated in the study, together with four generalist teachers, the PE teacher, and the school principal. Data was collected pre- and post with the Greek version of the Personal and Social Responsibility Questionnaire (PSRQ) (quantitative data), along with qualitative data, from teacher reflective journals, and classroom observations. A mixed methods ANOVA (time x grade) was used to evaluate the effect of the intervention on students’ personal and social responsibility, while qualitative data were analysed thematically based on the TPSR levels of responsibility. Results showed that there was a statistically significant main effect of time, with students exhibiting higher levels of personal and social responsibility at the end of the intervention. Qualitative data analyses revealed that teachers’ goal setting and ongoing reflection contributed to students’ responsibility and positive behavior development. The importance of action research as a proactive and reactive approach to educational transformation was mentioned by all participants. These findings highlight the need to prepare the ground for implementing TPSR as a whole-school approach that foregrounds the building of strong and trusting relationships as critical to reconnecting students with the broader school culture