contribute minimally to the prediction of amateur
performance level. Specifically, looking at MO6, the
less important aspects are sports career, smoking
habits, and medical history. For instance, a previous
brilliant sporting career does not guarantee the
preservation of soccer performance: in fact, following
Mujika and Padilla (2000), a body that is not
constantly exposed to training stimuli, can easily
regress. The smoking habit may be a performance-
altering factor, but it is possibly necessary to
investigate the amount of tobacco consumed by the
athlete (Tetelepta et al, 2019). In fact, the proposed
questionnaire analyses simply if the individual is a
smoker or not, so it seems to not be sufficient as
discriminatory factor. Medical history possibly needs
to be more specific to be predictive. For example,
teenagers with diabetes can nowadays find
information on how to prepare themselves to
participate in different forms of physical activity and
sports, both amateur and professional, without
affecting their performance (Krzykała et al, 2021).
Conversely, not all the diseases are well known, or it
is difficult to assess if they can alter sport
performance. One of these cases is COVID-19, which
is still not known and its effects on physical status is
not yet identified (Sarto et al, 2020).
From Table 2 and 3, in both models, BMI, IPAQ
and age are the three main factors that may contribute
to the identification of the performance level of the
athlete, if used as predictors.
As a limitation, while the indices examined by the
questionnaire relate to the population of interest only,
genetic factors are here neglected, which might be
main contributors to sports performance (MacArthur
and North, 2005). Nonetheless, remaining at the in-
field assessment level, this preliminary study was
able to highlight how a subset of health status and
lifestyle indicators can approximate player’s
performance level, even if further investigations and
a wider dataset are needed to confirm the results.
As a future perspective, the implementation of an
app able to give accessibility to these tests and to
acquire data coming from amateurs can be a powerful
tool to collect a larger dataset, potentially including
both male and female players. The inclusion of
female amateurs will bring to adjustments due to
existing gender-related differences (e.g. BMI). Such
larger dataset is expected to lead to more reliable
regressions; thus, the definition of an overall
biometric index could be provided, based on a
minimal set of indicators to obtain a prediction of
functional capacity in amateurs. Prospectively, the
availability of a larger dataset could also open to the
application of other data mining techniques to find
possible interesting factors as the evaluation of a
common trend or the identification of the factors that
can be used to reliably classify players from a
physical performance point of view.
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