Sport For The Older Adults. An Adaptation Proposal Through The Project In Common Sports

With aging physical capabilities experience substantial changes that increases the risk of injury while playing team sports. For this reason, the existing team sports rules maybe not appropriate for the aged population. To promote security, cooperation, collaboration and integration is possibilities to implement specific alterations in team sports rules, allowing basketball, indoor soccer, handball, and volleyball to be more suitable for elders. PURPOSE: To know the acceptance to the adaptation made on the rules of basketball, indoor soccer, handball, and volleyball, for people over 65 years old. METHODS: 244 participants (149-Portugal; 17-Bulgaria, 23-Italy, 25-Slovenia, 30-Spain) aged 69.75 ± 5.51 yrs, 74% female, were randomly selected to enroll the research. An ad-hoc self-administered questionnaire with 10 questions was tailored to assess the satisfaction with rules adaptations, through a Likert scale (1-5). A descriptive analysis was carried out through %, using SPSS V25-Mac. RESULTS: In basketball and indoor soccer, a good acceptance of the new proposed rules was not generally obtained (34.5% and 46.7% agree). In the volleyball and handball case, it was found a high acceptance (53.6% and 61.9% agree). However, the results obtained were depending on the country. In countries such as Bulgaria, Italy and Slovenia, all participants agree or strongly agree with the new rules. In Italy, for basketball was obtained an agreement of 100%, with only 9.1% strongly disagreeing with the new rules. On the contrary, the participants from Portugal do not agree with the new rules in any sport, with only 17.2% agreeing with the adapted rules from indoor soccer and 14.3% to volleyball. CONCLUSIONS: The tested team sports rules adaptations had a higher acceptance in all countries, except for Portugal. This finding may be mediated to the past team sports experience, the intrinsic motivation in competition and better physical function. Supported by IN COMMON SPORTS+ fit, food and fun for elderly! (622503-EPP-1-2020-1-PT-SPO-SCP)