Assessment of physical capacity level in recreational athletes

Introduction: In the majority of the available source materials, research on the level of physical capacity of athletes concerns members of sports clubs and national teams, in a word, professional athletes. Does this mean that such research should not be conducted on recreational athletes? Of course not. The main aim of this article was to assess physical capacity (based on VO2max) in recreationally active people from the Podkarpackie region of Poland. The authors intended to determine whether practicing recreational sports without adequate technical facilities and staff influenced the course of their training and achievements.Material and Methods: The study involved 413 participants (body height 174.5 9.5 cm; body weight 73.4 20.3 kg) aged 18-60 years. Each participant followed the same treadmill test protocol and completed a questionnaire survey related to the number of injuries sustained. To determine the level of fitness, AT (VT1), RCP (VT2), VO2peak, and HRmax were determined during the study.Results: Based on the Powers and Howley classification, almost 50% of the participants were classified in the subgroup with the highest possible peak oxygen uptake (41.4%). More than one in four participants had a peak oxygen uptake at a very good level (28.3%), nearly one in five at good (18.9%), while more than one in ten reached an average (9.4%), low (1.5%), or very low (0.5%) levels. Individuals with multiple injuries achieved significantly higher scores on average in contrast to those without injuries (p=0.004).Conclusions: Physically active people have a high above-normal level of physical capacity, despite the recreational form of their sport. The study showed the importance of research on physically active people not only in the context of fitness. This group includes outstanding individuals achieving high performance similar to professional athletes.