Nível de atividade física e estado nutricional de jogadores do futebol de cegos

Abstract

Introduction: Physical activity is an ally for the prevention of various diseases and acts directly in the fight against sedentary lifestyle, favoring health promotion and improvement in quality of life. Concomitantly, the nutritional status assists in the control of body weight and physiological functions of the body, helping in the physical and functional performance of individuals. Objective: To analyze the level of physical activity and nutritional status of visually impaired players of blind soccer. Materials and Methods: This is a field research, descriptive, quantitative and cross-sectional, with eighteen adult blind soccer players, with visual impairment, aged 18 to 53 years, with an average age of 33.72 years, all exclusive practitioners of the blind soccer modality, for at least 4 months and without another type of associated disability, being 88.9% with total blindness; 5.6% with low vision in both eyes and 5.6% with blindness in the right eye and low vision in the left eye. The participants were submitted to the application of the International Physical Activity Questionnaire, short version, and to the evaluation of body composition, with anthropometric measurements of body mass and height, to obtain the body mass index; and measurement of skinfolds, to measure the percentage of body fat. The study took place from September to November 2022, in the city of São Luís. The statistical treatment consisted of the Shapiro-Wilk normality test; chi-square association test; comparison t-test for independent samples; and Pearson's correlation test (r). A significance level of 5% was considered for all hypothesis tests. Data processing was performed using SPSS software, version 17.0. Results: 77.8% of the sample presented moderate level of physical activity and 22.2% high level; 44.4% of the players presented eutrophic BMI and 33.3% overweight, followed by 11.1% considered malnourished and the other 11.2% equally divided into obesity grades I (5.6%) and II (5.6%); 27.8% presented average %G, while 38.9% pointed out low %G and 33.4% high %G. No statistical significance was observed regarding the association between BMI categories and FNA, as well as in the comparison between %G and BMI and in the correlation between total MET (calculated via IPAQ) and body composition measures. Conclusion: Blind visually impaired soccer players showed moderate to high physical activity level, BMI with normal weight prevalence, within reference values and low fat percentage.