Effects of outdoor volleyball exercise on cardiorespiratory function under a heavy haze environment

Abstract

Haze has been one of the originators of the impact on human health. It is noteworthy that all functions of the human body can decline or even fail in a heavy haze environment. In this paper, the environmental monitoring website was used to count the data of meteorological and other natural factors as well as socio-economic influencing factors in the target cities over the past year. On this basis, the spatial and temporal distribution patterns of heavy haze weather were analyzed and studied. For the 100 volunteers who had been exposed to heavy haze pollution for a long time, the physical activity time of volleyball was classified into four levels using the quadratic method. Apart from that, a mixed linear model with fixed and random effects was constructed to explore the effects on cardiorespiratory fitness after outdoor volleyball exercise under a heavy haze environment. According to the model analysis results, the outdoor volleyball exercise had a significant interaction effect on pulmonary ventilation function in men only. Moreover, volleyball could be beneficial to the target group when the physical activity had not yet reached the level of high-level volleyball physical activity. This resulted in an improvement of 0.2L, 0.04L, 1.19%, and 0.03L in their pulmonary ventilation function indexes, respectively. However, the negative effects of a heavy haze environment were heavier after reaching a high-level degree. In addition, the indicator kept decreasing, from 2.04L, 1.13L, 63.63%, 1.99L to 1.98L, 1.04L, 60.78%, and 1.83L, respectively.